The difference/similarity between the two seems to be a question that someone like me must have some answer to; it is at least a question that I should have asked myself, no matter if I have an answer or not.
Plato thinks the Poets should be evicted from the Republic. Why? Because they are not telling the truth, and all that they do is distracting and misleading people from the true.
Is that really so? Honestly I didn't read Plato well enough and can't tell if his description of the poets and his arguments against them are sound, but somehow I feel that philosophers and poets are really after very similar, or even the same things.
The intellectual drive to think demands philosophers to reflect on what's taken for granted and ponder upon what's neglected. Perhaps nothing should be taken for granted and be ignored. In the attempt to make things precise and clear, logic and arguments are employed to present thought and ideas in a well-organized manner.
Poets, on the other hand, are driven by a quite different force. It is the emotional urge to express oneself, not necessarily in a meticulous manner, that makes poets do what they do. Their subject matter is the human situation: as an individual and/or as a whole, joy and sorrow, blessings and predicatment. Poets do not argue, nor do they preach; they simply present people with a story, an aspect of life and a way the world could be/is/might be.
I think both philosophers and poets attempt to understand the world and make sense of it. For philosophers the ultimate goal is the quest for truth, and for poets it is the search for meaning. While philosophers have a specific method of persuaing, namely logic and arguments, there is no particular formula that a poet's work must follow.
2 comments:
How about Chinese philosophers?
Philosophers do not simply use reasoning or logic, but argue for and define what it is and ought to be. They create the rules of logic but they also question it. All of the sciences make assumptions about rationality, logic, and reason while philosophers are in the position to challenge current norms on such matters. Philosophers even question if our way of thinking is correct or if it is even possible for humans to observe the truth or even if there is an objective truth.
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