Robinson, Jenefer - Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art

For thousands of years people have assumed that that there is some special deep connection between emotion and the arts. In the Republic Plato famously complained that one reason why poetry often has such a bad moral influence on people is that it appeals to their emotions rather than to their reason, the 'highest' part of the soul. The idea that the emotions are intimately connected to the arts was taken up by Aristotle and given a more sympathetic twist. Almost ever since, there has been a widespread conviction among Western thinkers that there is some special relationship between the arts and the emotions.¹