Art and Emotion

As I was reading Chapter One of our anthology, I thoroughly enjoyed Plato's ruminations on the subject and nature of art. Plato believed that art is a very emotional thing and that there is no real necessity for this emotion and art in the world and society.  When I say I enjoyed this rumination on art thoroughly, I meant that it made me think about art in a new and interesting way and I enjoyed this new light shone on the subject.  This thought that emotion is not valued or should not be valued in Plato’s Utopian society while reason and calculations were, is extremely interesting. The world without emotion would undoubtedly be very prosperous, technologically advanced, and ridiculously boring. Back then, things of art and emotion included literature, paintings, music, and plays and productions. Now it includes those along with television, films, music videos, fashion, photography, and the list goes on and on. Both then and now, art is incredibly distracting. These are the things we spend hours a day just fawning over, admiring, listening, reading, and watching. Plato saw this admiration of this industry as technically a waste of time and a danger to invest ourselves in this emotion-run industry. But without these “distractions”, what would we fill our days with? What would be our escapes from our lives and the chores that we must muddle through each day? Our lives would have no joy, no excitement, and basically no life. If each day we woke up to our jobs and our lives and the things we must get done to be productive and that is all, it would be an exceedingly depressing life. We take things and we devour them with our eyes and our hearts and we find joy, comfort, sadness, anger, excitement, or love in them and for some reason or another, we love that. Or we create pieces of work and thrust them out into the world and find joy, comfort, sadness, anger, excitement, or love in people’s reactions or in the simple act of creating something. Art makes us feel something and we take pleasure in that. Why would we want to rid the world of it?

As a philosopher, Plato believed emotion was not necessary in this world but do you think philosophy is an emotionless craft and how would you think Plato would reason philosophy being a productive and calculating craft?