ABSTRACT
This is the essence of Plato’s attack against poetry and, I believe, the essential idea behind a number of attacks against television today. Nothing in Plato’s time answered to our concept of the fine arts, especially to the idea that the arts are a province of a small and enlightened part of the population (which may or may not be interested in attracting the rest of the people to them), and Plato holds no views about them. His quarrel with poetry is not disturbing because anyone seriously believes that Plato could have been right about Homer’s pernicious influence. Plato’s view is disturbing because we are still agreed with him that representation is transparent-at least in the case of those media which, like television, have not yet acquired the status of art and whose own nature, as opposed to what they depict, has not yet become in serious terms a subject in its own right. And because of this view, we may indeed react to life, or think that we do, as we react to its representations: What is often necessary for a similarity between our reactions to life and our reactions to art is not so much the fact that the two are actually similar but only the view that they are. Many do in fact enjoy things on television which, as Plato wrote in regard to poetry, some at least would be ashamed, even horrified, to enjoy in life.
