“Is All that We See or Seem but a Dream within a Dream?”
PPlato writes that art is the totality of graphic imitations of the empirical world by humans. Additionally, literature is the discursive record of humans’ attempts to represent not only actions in the empirical world but also thoughts about those actions and the world itself. In other words, art and literature are things in themselves, but their essence lies in their role as representations of other things.
In Plato’s metaphysics, the empirical world is a kind of representation of the Forms, which are the basic ontological components of the cosmos. These Forms constitute the truths that provide order in the cosmos, and the empirical world results from the Demiurge’s representations of the Forms using matter and energy. The artifacts we regard as art and literature are human representations of the matter and energy fashioned by the Demiurge, which are themselves representations of the Forms.
It is my belief that Plato learned from Socrates that truth is the most important component the cosmos. I believe further, though Plato never expresses it in this way, that truth is the content of the Form of the Good, which can be seen as the Form of the Forms.
If the explanation just attempted has any truth to it, then we can say that Plato’s view of the value of art and literature is that they are representations of things that are themselves representations of other things that participate in the truth of the Form of the Good. Since art and literature are two removes from the truth of the cosmos, they are not suitable objects of the inquiries of a philosopher.
