Poetry and Music for Plato

When he wrote the "Republic", Plato realized that his ruler or "guardian" in Calipolis needed kindness and justice. He also realized that "imitation of young people became part of nature" (Plato, Republic, 395 d). With these two ideas in mind, Plato decided to review the poetry and the statement of parents' education. He believes that poets, playwrights, musicians, and storytellers will encourage imitating and adopting unfair and sneaky personality and customs when describing Gods and Heroes as slaves and injustices.

Plato also made several discussions on the standards of music and poetry in debate about education. Like other works, Plato criticizes the ethical content of poetry and the ethical knowledge of the poet (see, eg, Laws 719A - C, 811 B - E), thoroughly investigates poetry that is permitted to enter the city (See, for example, rules 657 B, 719 B - D, 796 E - 802 E. Plato also has an ambiguous debate about the legitimacy criteria of music that it must be judged by the happiness of good people It points out (Law 659 A), and music is imitated so the right music is similar to imitating beautiful music (Law 668 AB).

The Republic of Plato discussed a number of topics such as justice, music, poetry, politics etc. I felt that the discussion about music is controversial and interesting, but the argument about justice pulled my attention and brought me many thoughts. The first book of the Republic of Platte has reviewed the judiciary. The main idea of ​​the book is to remove the common but wrong idea of ​​justice and to clean up the air for the new theory. Socrates talked with Thrasymachus, Polemarchus and Cephalus and discussed the nature of justice. Throughout the discussion, you can easily see the traditional justice view Socrates wants to remove. Traditionally justice is regarded as a great virtue and everyone will be treated equally. Simply put, this is a set of rules for managing how good people should lead him or herself. However, as Socrates pointed out, we do not know why and how to benefit from this concept of justice.

The next step is to examine some aspects of Socrates' decision in the context of discussing the role of poetry as a general form of expression. I'm not only interested in Socrates (and Plato) 's reasons for discovering that poetry makes it so much corrode the structure of the culture, and why the popular expressions are alienated and why. Socrates did his best to relate the poetry to other forms of thinking and expression - as mayor he was forced to expel verses and poets for more profit I can do it. By understanding the discussion about Socrates' poetry, our argument is an intervention to various impulses of free expression review.