Why Plato Ruined Art and Aesthetics for Us

My theory:

Plato had dick envy for Socrates… and strove to super-seed him.

The Insecurity of Plato

I think Plato wanted to become the philosopher king, but didn’t have the wits, skills, or guts to do so. Therefore he became the new ultimate philosophical tyrant. It was essentially:

It is Plato’s way or the highway.

Forms?

Plato’s philosophy is very weird. Plato essentially believes that this world that we see isn’t the real world. It is just a ‘fake’ world, or a shadow world.. and somewhere… perhaps in the “beyond” there is some sort of authentic and “legitimate” world.

Is this because Plato couldn’t bear to endure reality?

The psychology of Plato is weird. Essentially after Socrates (even what we think we know of Socrates is essentially words being stuffed into the make of Socrates for Plato. Socrates as the sock-puppet for Plato). Better depiction of Socrates is from Xenophon; the military general-philosopher, who is far more reliable than Plato, who was probably some weird nerd who wanted revenge on everyone, and was probably dissatisfied with his own life.

Platonic ideals and forms

Plato imagined the universe to be made up of these perfect Euclid-shapes and forms. Like cubes, tetrahedrals, spheres, and weird stuff like that. But anyone who has studied human anatomy knows:

There is no perfect line or sphere or cube in the human body.

Reality is far more complex. Three dimensional.

What did Plato promise?

Kind of like the Matrix, Morpheus is a metaphor for Plato. Plato promised us:

Keanu Reeves … if you take the red pill, I shall show you the TRUE reality.

What is ‘true reality’ anyways?

Then comes the weird question:

What is TRUE reality vs FAKE reality?

In Plato’s mind:

Anything that is not of Plato is the non-true world.

Socrates taught virtue as being the road to happiness and human grandeur. Plato taught us that dispelling ‘false reality’ was the road to human grandeur.

In short, we are all slaves to the thinking of Socrates and Plato.

PHILOSOPHY BY KIM

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