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Plato was wrong. Scholars have suggested on several occasions that Plato’s first ambition, as a youth, was to be a poet and a playwright. As his success was not forthcoming as a poet, his subsequent writings demonstrate hostility toward poets – a famous hostility. His fictions of good and evil (The Republic, Apology, Symposium) excluded the influence of the first makers of story, the poets. He exiled the poets from having influence in the public space. He could not contain their immense power and influence otherwise. His excuse was that the poets were unreliable and irrational. Guilty as charged. But if the poets are irrational it is only because the human condition is irrational. I never met a rational man.

Not only was Plato wrong about the importance – the necessity – of poets in the public form, subsequent Western thinkers have continued his fundamental error in the West. It is because of this error that poets have since been excluded from serious philosophy.

Aristotle, Plato’s student, was a mere commentator on other things: adverbs, nouns, ethics, customs, drama, and math - things. Aristotle was an incredible teacher, and I honor his intellect. But he created nothing; he just proved he remembered lots of things and made common sense from logic. Nothing was added to the human personality. Knowledge is sterile. The legend is true: the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. I do not criticize Aristotle directly. It was his students that wrote down his lectures. I will assume he did not mean to publish at all. He was a teacher, not a poet. Thus Aristotle’s works, like all subsequent Western philosophers, are nearly unreadable. Aristotle has no story to tell and his works merely contain a list of logical and thus irrelevant consequences in phenomenon. No story, no philosophy. In this way, I accuse all Western philosophers that have no story to tell.

The Hellenic compilers of Aristotle’s works at Alexandria were unaware that all human conceptualizing proceeded directly from story. The librarians at Alexandria copied all of the student lecture notes together into separate books and assumed they did a great service to philosophy. As Aristotle became the image of Western Philosophy, this destroyed any possibility for the future development of Western philosophy. Subsequently, future Western Philosophy was not connected to a story. Thinking by itself does not exist. Yet Aristotle compiled lists of knowledge as if they existed separately from story. Western Philosophy never recovered from this error. Notes do not qualify as story. Notes do not equal the achievement of story connected to the possibilities of the human personality. If there is no story, then there are no ethics, no manners. Without story there is no development of human personality. Thus Aristotle made no contribution to philosophy. He was a great teacher.

Plato did not make philosophy; he made a story of Socrates, and the love of Socrates for young men. In this sense, Plato performed the entire story-making magic of the poets in his own performance. He gave a magical prose poem of Socrates’ personality, the clear presentation of Socrates’ search for truth and justice. Thus, I honor Plato for his prose poetics. But he misled men by exiling the poets from his republic. Plato thereby destroyed all future philosophy, since future philosophers did not join their concepts to story.

After Plato there was never another story associated with “philosophy”, and this was a crucial moment in Western intellectual development. Plato’s presentation of knowing is a problem for modern thinkers since so much subsequent effort (beginning with Aristotle) has been directed to endlessly recreate the original Greek discussion of goodness, evil, justice or similar human constructs. These are the “things” of the Greek invention (drama, science, democracy, murder, professional lying). I will suggest that this fatal misdirection of inquiry has robbed the West of its intellectual and imaginative energy through the ages. Due to the lack of a proper philosophy of knowing (that is, a connection to story), we cannot know our own good or evil. Without a story, we cannot break out of our self-imposed limitation of personality, both of god’s personality and man’s. Roman Christianity limits our personality.

Each chapter in this narrative will address the role of poets in the public space. Each chapter will examine, but from different perspectives, the consequences from not including the poets in the public area of power, influence, and prestige. Each chapter will address a different result of Plato’s rejection of the poets in serious thought. I will insist that story is the most vital element in human personality. I will show that Plato’s prejudice has survived to our own day, diminishing the health of Western institutions. I do not want to diminish Plato’s brilliance. He is the competitive voice in my narrative. He has made me strong and clear.

I have proven in daily experience all the discoveries recounted in this narrative. Previous to this work, Western philosophy has been theoretical, not grounded in realities. My work insists that Western philosophy has the same weakness of modern poetry. Neither modern poetry nor modern philosophy proceeds from story, only from a kind of intellectualism, (a dithering, aimless, teasing of other people’s previous attempts at story). This is why so much of modern poetry seems pointless, and unreadable, even irrelevant. Modern philosophy is, likewise, unreadable and unread. Poetry and philosophy share the same malady: neither is able to transcend the writer’s own irrelevant personality. No one buys modern poetry or modern philosophy in bookshops. But the fiction section (story) has taken over all the shelves of every bookshop I have seen. Humans accept every form of story, even if we are told before hand they are all fictions. Humans demand more space and personality – these qualities are only found in story. Modern poetry fails to give personality more space and time in the current generation.

For this reason I address the larger civilization in my discourse. Western philosophy and poetry are intimately bound together with the same symptoms of misuse and misunderstanding. To address the condition of health of one is to address the condition of the other. I intend to address the entire spectrum of human perception, its source and its mechanism, which underlay Western conceptualizing.