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(Nietzsche, 1993: 73).
The Birth of Western Metaphysics
The central and ultimately quite simple error that is expressed by Plato’s
Socrates is that he fails to recognize the skill of the poet to move beyond and
before ‘reason’. Indeed, that the poet has no skills at all, in contrast to
cabinet makers, architects and physicians, is another way of presenting
Socrates argument (Plato, 1987). In this section I will try to give an account
of the skill of the poet.
What skill is expressed in poetry? This question could be put; what techne is
expressed in poiesis? This again, deploying widely accepted translations,
could be written as; what skill or art is expressed in making or production?
These series of questions, if we accept them as equivalent, suggest that there
is a relationship between poetry and production. It is this kind of
understanding that appears to inform the Ion dialogue. That is, the physician
produces health, the firelighter produces fire while the poet produces, well,
nothing but passionate deceptions. The poet simply does not have the skills
to produce anything ‘real’. If the poet claims to know what is right and good it
must be a deception as the poet does not have the specific skills to actually
produce anything. This understanding of the role of the poet is harmonious
with the account given by Plato in The Republic where what is produced by
God is the most real, followed by the thing produced by technites and, finally,
the ‘representation’ produced by the poets, as Plato writes,
So the tragic poet, if his art is representation, is by nature at third
removed from the throne of truth; and the same is true of all
other representative artists . . . The art of representation is
therefore a long way removed from truth, and it is able to
reproduce everything because it has little grasp of anything, and
that little is of a mere phenomenal appearance. For example, a
painter can paint a portrait of a shoemaker or a carpenter or any
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