Plato, for example, demoted his poets and his artists down to the sixth circle of reality because, he said, they deal only with appearances and not with reality itself. He was referring to art as decoration, a way of making life prettier, a dealing with semblances. But in his later, beautiful dialogue, the Symposium, he described what he called the true artists—namely, those who give birth to some new reality. These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness.
