Plato's Politics
...no words are strong enough to condemn drama. Plato felt that all the world's evils derived from one source: a faulty understanding of reality. Miscommunication, confusion and ignorance were facets of a corrupted comprehension of what Plato always strived for - Truth. Plato is, above all, a moralist. His primary objective in the Republic is to come up with the most righteous, intelligent way to live one's life and to convince others to live this way. Everything else should conform in order to achieve this perfect State. Plato considers poetry useful only as a means of achieving this State, that is, only useful if it helps one to become a better person, and if it does not, it should be expelled from the community. Plato's question in Book X is the intellectual status of literature. He states that, "the good poet cannot compose well unless he knows his subject, and he who has not this knowledge can never be a poet"(Adams 33). Plato says of imitative poetry and Homer, "A man is not to be reverenced more than the truth" (Adams 31). Plato says this because he believes that Homer speaks of many things of which he has no knowledge, just as the painter who paints a picture of a bed does not necessarily know how to make a bed. His point is that in order to copy or imitate correctly, one must have knowledge of the original. Plato says that imitation is three degrees removed from the truth. Stories that are untrue have no value, as no untrue story should be told in the City. He states that nothing can be learned from imitative poetry. Plato's commentary on poetry in Republic is overwhelmingly negative. In books II and III Plato's main concern about poetry is that children's minds are too impressionable to be reading false tales and misrepresentations of the truth. As stated in book II, "For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thought" (Adams 19). He is essentially saying that children cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality and this compromises their ability to discern right from wrong. Thus, children should not be exposed to poetry so that later in life they will be able to seek the Truth without having a preconceived, or misrepresented, view of reality. Plato reasons that literature that portrays the gods as behaving in immoral ways should be kept away from children, so that they will not be influenced to act the same way. This view is perhaps the same many people's views on pornography. Those who disagree with Plato's views on censorship would not necessarily disagree had Plato been trying to keep pornography or violence away from children. An argument against pornography is that viewing pornography may influence people to commit violent, demeaning or anti-social acts. Another objection is that it is often viewed as portraying either male dominance or female exploitation....