From the numerous passages in Plato’s dialogues where aesthetic matters are broached we can guess that some of these matters were familiar topics of intellectual conversation among his contemporaries. Educated Athenians, not only the rhetoricians and rhapsodes, must often have engaged in lively disputes over the truthfulness and authority of Homer, over the sources of beauty in the sculpture of Phidias, perhaps over that thesis on which Socrates is found still discoursing to his two befuddled companions at the end of the Symposium—that “the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy” (223d; trans. Lamb). But some of the aesthetic questions that Plato raised he may well have been the first to formulate, and he certainly was the first to formulate so clearly and penetratingly.
In any case, Plato asked an extraordinary number of the right—the necessary and the illuminating—questions about beauty and the arts. Some of them he asked in language, and with presuppositions, deriving from his own metaphysical theories. Others owe little or nothing to his metaphysics, and must be faced by any aesthetician, whatever his metaphysical persuasion—but it must also be conceded that Plato’s metaphysics, whatever its ultimate truth or falsity, led him to open up important lines of inquiry that he might otherwise have missed.
Plato did more than ask good questions; he set forth some noteworthy answers, and he backed them up with some persuasive lines of argument. These trains of thought, the reasoning out of logical consequences that ensue from the adoption of certain initial positions, were an extremely valuable contribution to all later work. The commentators disagree about whether, or to what extent, they may be said to compose a system—a coherent philosophy of art. We must inquire into this below, but without insisting upon the unity of Plato’s thought to the point where we ignore important suggestions that he may not have succeeded in reconciling with his other views.
I do not propose to attempt a distinction between Plato’s theories and those that may be attributed to Socrates independently of Plato. Some of the Platonic doctrines set forth in the dialogues can with some confidence be said to have been taught by Socrates, but the situation is much less clear with the aesthetic theories, and scholars differ greatly. What we have to understand here is a body of ideas that were developed, perhaps in some part by Socrates, but certainly in large part by Plato himself. The principal dialogues in which these are set forth mostly fall into two groups: (1) the Ion, Symposium, and Republic, presumably written by Plato in his early period, between the death of Socrates and the founding of the Academy, roughly 399–387 B.C., and (2) the Sophist and Laws, written during the last fifteen years of his life (428/7–348/7), with the Phaedrus somewhere in between, but closer to the latter group. But there are important passages in other dialogues, as we shall see. Though authoritative opinion seems to be divided on the genuineness of the Greater Hippias, it, too, may safely be drawn on, for, if not actually Plato’s, it is nevertheless very Platonic.
ART AND IMITATION
Plato likes to let his key terms shift senses according to the movement of his dialectic, and while the shifts are usually quite traceable, this practice makes it extremely difficult to be sure about the consistency and coherence of his thought. If Socrates says, at one stage of a dialogue, that all the members of a set have a certain property, and, later, or in a different dialogue, that only some of them do, shall we say that Plato has contradicted himself, or has changed his mind, or has chosen to present a perfectly consistent pair of theses in a verbally puzzling way? This problem arises with regard to some of his most important terms. Another serious hazard in understanding Plato’s aesthetics is provided by the English words that now offer themselves most readily as translations of them.
The first and most fundamental of these terms is the one that is usually, and understandably, translated as “art” (technē), but is closer to “craft.” Technē is skill in doing something that takes an uncommon and specialized ability; it involves knowing how to achieve a certain end. In the Sophist, where Plato presents, by way of example, an elaborate definition by dichotomy of the craft of fishing, he divides crafts in general into “acquisitive” (such as money-making) and “productive,” or creative, which bring into existence what has not existed before. The productive crafts include a wide range of skills—for example, carpentry, flute-playing, “painting, weaving, embroidery, architecture, the making of furniture” (Republic 401a; trans. Cornford). Plato suggests several ways in which all these crafts might be subdivided—including, for example, a division into human and divine (Sophist 265b). He does not make the distinction most expected by a modern student of aesthetics—between “fine arts” and utilitarian crafts. Yet the momentous consequence of his thinking was the first theory to cover all of the former.
His own terms are not always decisive guides. “Music” (mousikē), for example, can mean music, or fine arts in general, or even something like general culture. Socrates notes in the Symposium (205c; trans. Lamb) that “of anything whatever that passes from not being into being the whole cause is composing or poetry;” though only “the business of music and meter” is usually called poetry. But he does not explicitly make a special category of the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), various forms of literature, and certain mixed musical arts—dance, song, and the “choral art” that combines both dance and song. It is, of course, to these that we would now usually confine the term “art.”
Plato seems implicitly to acknowledge a distinction between the arts in this narrower sense and the other crafts. They are, for one thing, the only crafts which the young guardians of the Republic are to have any traffic with; they have prestige. And this difference is echoed in a telling Platonic usage. The highest, noblest, and most all-encompassing craft, Plato says in the Laws and the Republic, is statecraft, the political or royal “art” (Republic 342c; cf. Euthydemus 291c): and when Plato wants to say most vividly and forcefully what task it is that faces the legislator who proposes to construct a social order worthy of man, and to set its institutions up in a way that will make them flourish and endure, he always seems to compare statecraft with one of the arts—composing a tragedy (Laws 817b), coloring sculpture (Republic 420c), painting (Laws 769 and Republic 484c). Moreover, it is the arts that present the hard philosophic problems. Not much, if anything, needs to be said by way of justification for making shoes and building shelters—though the architects of the Republic may at times be tempted into providing too many luxuries for their citizens. But drama, and music, and the adornments of buildings—these are extremely puzzling in many ways to Plato, for it is by no means plain why they should exist at all.
Certain things can be said about all the productive crafts. By means of them, something new emerges; to make it, material media must be manipulated in some way, assembled or transformed; there must be a relevant skill, or set of skills; and there must be a kind of knowledge—the musician, for example, is one who has “the art of recognizing the sounds that can or cannot be blended” (Sophist 253b; trans. Cornford). But intelligent productive work also has a goal and follows a plan, which guides the craftsman throughout. Therefore, in one very broad sense, all production is “imitation.”
Here we come to the second key term in Plato’s aesthetics—one that inevitably gives the interpreter much trouble, and one that Plato himself, despite occasional energetic attempts at clarification, leaves in a far from satisfactory state. As we shall see, it is important to Plato that the arts are imitative in some sense in which the other crafts are not; but to get our bearings on this important but elusive concept (or cluster of concepts), it is best to begin by considering the broadest use to which Plato puts it. For in this sense it is the heart of Plato’s whole philosophy. There is not only the term “mimesis,” but three others that are often used in something approaching synonymity with, and even in apposition with, “mimesis”: “methexis” (participation), “homoiosis” (likeness) and “paraplesia” (likeness). The relation marked by these terms—the relation between an image (eidolon) and its archetype—is noted everywhere. Not only are objects imitated by pictures of them, but the essences of things are imitated by names (Cratylus 423–24), reality by thoughts, eternity by time (Timaeus 38b). The musician imitates divine harmony, the good man imitates the virtues, the wise legislator imitates the Form of the Good in constructing his state, the god (or the demiourgos) imitates the Forms in making the world of the mixed. Theaetetus speaks judiciously, then, in the Sophist (234b; trans. Cornford), when he remarks that the term “covers a very large variety.”
In view of this diversity, any English word we might use to translate “mimesis” and its allied terms is bound to be misleading, for no English word that might serve has an equally unrestricted sense. “Representation” is possible, because it has several senses: the Senator represents his constituents, the picture represents the object, the trade-mark represents the product. “Mimesis” perhaps carries with it a stronger notion of copying, of being modeled upon; but this is present in “representation,” too—even the Senator, when truly representative, may be said to mirror in his vote the will of those who put him into office. I adopt the usual term, “imitation,” for Plato’s “mimesis,” but try to safeguard it against misunderstanding by saying that it is to be used in a way close to “representation,” in its multiple sense. And in the broadest sense, all productive craft, or making, involves representation. There is one curious passage in the last book of the Republic (597b; trans. Cornford), where Plato speaks of the Form of the bed as something “which exists in the nature of things and which, I imagine, we could only describe as a product of divine workmanship.” But the suggestion that the god made the Forms is hardly reconcilable with the rest of Plato’s metaphysics: for how then could they be eternal? And how could the making of them be an imitation unless there were super-Forms, or Forms of some other type, that the god could take as model?
The Form of an object, in this sense, is the essential nature of the object, which is its function, and also the ideal condition of the object if it were to fulfill that function perfectly (see Republic 595–97). Consider, for example, a household knife. The function it shares with all knives, or knives of the same class, has an ontological status (as ideal archetype) which, according to Plato, is quite independent of the existence, or nonexistence, or change, of the physical knife itself. The ideal Form of the knife, which is eternal, immutable, and complete, can never be embodied completely in the physical knife. But in so far as the knife-maker makes a knife that can perform its function at all, or well, he is guided by some conceptual grasp of that function, hence of the Form of the knife. In this sense, the actual knife imitates its archetype (which is the “real” knife); and in a similar sense, the painter who draws a sketch of a knife imitates that physical object. In other language, the physical knife may be said to be an image (eidolon) of the ideal knife, and the picture an image of the physical knife.
In the course of his most sustained attempt to get at the special craft of the Sophist, if there really is one, Plato undertakes (in the Sophist) further subdivisions of the various products of productive craft in general. The first of these introduces a narrower meaning of “imitation,” and comes closer to a theory of art. There is production (1) of actual objects—plants and elements by the god; houses and knives by men—and (2) of “images” (eidola)—reflections and dreams by the god; pictures by men (Sophist 266). The craft that produces images is the strictly “imitative craft.” In this sense, a house is not an imitation, though its photograph is: “And what of our human art? Must we not say that in building it produces an actual house, and in painting a house of a different sort, as it were a man-made dream for waking eyes?” (266c; Cornford). Let us take “imitation” henceforth in the sense in which not all, but only some, productions are imitations.
Now it is essential to the notion of an image, or imitation, that it fall short in some way of its original; if the image were perfect—“expressing in every point the entire reality” of its object—it “would no longer be an image,” but another example of the same thing (Cratylus 432; trans. Jowett). When one knife-maker copies a knife made by another, what he produces is not the image of a knife, but another knife; perhaps a little indirectly, but nevertheless genuinely, he is guided by the knife-Form. But a picture of a knife lacks the weight, the sharpness, the hardness of the actual knife, and it will not cut—it is an objet manqué. It is both true and untrue, has both being and nonbeing (Sophist 240c). Because it leaves out important properties, it is of a lower order of reality than its archetype. And this holds throughout Plato’s metaphysics; the actual knife is less real than the ideal knife; time is less real than eternity; the government of a historical city-state less real than ideal Justice.
Now the “imitative art” may give rise to two sorts of thing: (1) The imitator may reproduce as accurately as possible the actual properties of the model, its true measurements and proportions and colors; in that case he produces a genuine likeness (eikon) (Sophist 235d). (2) The imitator may copy the way the object looks, as seen from some point of view; in that case he produces an apparent likeness, or a semblance (phantasma) (Sophist 236b). These sometimes coincide, when things look as they actually are, but painters, sculptors, and architects have found that in many cases they do not: if the temple columns are really equal all the way up, they will not look equal; to look equal, they must be wider at the top. Some degree of deliberate distortion is usually part of the process of semblance-making. And this is true whether the imitator produces the semblance by physical instruments (like a carver) or by his own body (the Eleatic Stranger calls this mimicry).
We now have a still narrower sense of “imitation” available: the making of deceptive semblances. When poets are spoken of disparagingly in the Timaeus as “a tribe of imitators” (19d), it is no doubt this sense that is present. And the attack on the painter in Book X of the Republic seems to narrow the term in the same way: the painter imitates the carpenter’s bed not as it is but “as it appears” (597)—as it looks when seen from one point of view. Thus his painting is not as true as a blueprint or diagram that might be used to record and convey the actual structure of the bed, without regard to superficial similarity. Semblances are illusory, they are misrepresentations or false imitations, not only of reality, but even of actuality. That is why the painting of the house is “a man-made dream for waking eyes”—it belongs in the same class with actual dreams and perceptual illusions, which are all false appearances.
These reflections suggest another distinction important to Plato, which he makes sharp use of in other connections, when Socrates is battling the Sophists. The illusionist painter or architect has a purpose in making things look different from the way they actually are: he tries to make them look better, in order to please the beholder. He is in fact choosing between pleasure and truth. But in this respect he allies himself with certain others who make it precisely their business to deal with appearances rather than actualities. To make things seem better than they are is to flatter them. In the Gorgias, Plato distinguishes four pseudo crafts, or “arts of flattery,” and contrasts them with the genuine. Thus gymnastics produces health, cosmetics the illusion of health; medicine tells us what is good for us, cookery produces what merely tastes good; there is genuine legislation of justice, and there is sophistic, which is a pretense at it; there is the administration of justice, and there is rhetoric, its ersatz (Gorgias 463–65).
If the argument hangs together so far, certain conclusions are inevitable. No doubt the expert on cosmetics must have what Plato calls “true opinion”—that is, some empirical information—to be a success at his trade; but he does not have knowledge (epistemē), in Plato’s sense. At least, he doesn’t have the sort of knowledge that he might be taken to have by the uncritical, for he doesn’t really know how to produce health, but only the bloom of it. He does not have a craft, but a knack (tribē). Thus one criterion of a pseudo craft is that it is not based on knowledge, like the work of the carpenter or shipbuilder (Euthydemus 281). A second is closely connected with the first: the pseudo craftsman doesn’t himself have a very clear idea what he is doing; it is impossible to give a rational account of his method (Gorgias 465ab).
But then are not the musician, the painter, and the composer in exactly the same situation? The painter, at any rate, seems to go in for deceptive semblances; the musician is perhaps chiefly an accomplice of the poet, when he sets the latter’s words to music that will enable the singer to pretend to passions he doesn’t really feel. But the poet is by all odds the most guilty. In that terse but slashing indictment of the tragic poets (including Homer) toward the end of the Republic (598–601), Plato seems to deny them any claim to genuine knowledge (epistemē), though their dangerousness arises precisely because many people will think they do know what they are talking about. If they really knew how to build ships and command troops, they would do those useful things rather than write about people doing them; if they knew the nature of a good life or a good state, they would have had some influence on citizens and governments. Lacking any philosophic grasp, and motivated as he is by the desire to please the ignorant multitude and win their approval, the poet does not even have true opinions (doxa, 601). “We may conclude, then, that all poetry, from Homer onwards, consists in representing a semblance of its subject, whatever it may be, including any kind of human excellence, with no grasp of the reality” (600c). Hence their low status in the Phaedrus. When the newly arrived souls, having beheld true being, sink into various degrees of forgetfulness, and are placed on nine levels, Socrates says “to the sixth [class] that of a poet or other imitative artist shall be fittingly given” (Phaedrus 248e; trans. Hackforth).
The same conclusion may be drawn from a consideration of the way the poet works. For when he writes, he is “out of his senses” (Ion 534b; trans. Lamb)—and therefore “contradict[s] himself” by depicting all sorts of people (Laws 719c; trans. Bury). He works in a mad state, with the irrational part of his soul. Plato’s remarks about the mental condition of the poet are so often exaggerated and ironic, or hovering on the verge of irony (as in the reference to the poets as “our fathers, as it were, and conductors in wisdom,” [Lysis 214a; trans. Lamb]), that it is not easy to piece together his doctrine. When it suits his purpose, he attacks the nonrationality of the poet, who composes by a certain “genius and inspiration” and does not even know the meaning of what he has said (Apology 22; trans. Jowett); but as we shall see later, this same line of thought easily passes over into the suggestion that the nonrationality of the poet may not be beneath, but above, reason itself.
In any case, the conclusion of this present train of thought is the denial of truth to the arts in general. The rhapsode Ion, Socrates suggests (Ion 532c), can interpret Homer, but not other poets, because he interprets without “art or knowledge.” If he had some general principles or method, he could interpret Hesiod as well, but his interpretation consists in getting himself into a peculiarly aroused state in which he can declaim and emote most effectively, without having real knowledge of any of the things he talks about. Perhaps mimesis is not an art at all, but “a form of play, not to be taken seriously” (Republic 602b; trans. Cornford).
We have come, for the moment, to a rather paradoxical conclusion. For we began by trying to place the arts of music, painting, and poetry in a larger framework, to understand them as crafts of a special sort, with their own aims and methods. But now it appears that they may not be arts at all, but pseudo arts. This may be an overstatement; the painter (we might say) does not merely pretend to practice an art, but he practices an art that consists in pretending, in making things look like what they are not. Even so, the indictment is severe, as far as the cognitive aspect of art is concerned: art is, as Socrates says in the Republic, at one remove from actuality, and at a second remove from reality—the transcendental Forms that lie behind the actual (597, 602). In terms of Plato’s four levels of cognition, as represented by the divided line (509–11), art belongs on the lowest (eikasia).
BEAUTY
Let us now turn to another property possessed by many works of art, and also shared by them with other objects, including objects of nature (Republic 400–1). This is the quality of beauty (to kalon). Individual things—statues, people, horses—exhibit this quality in variable ways: some are more beautiful than others, some lose their beauty after a time, some appear beautiful to one person but not to another (Republic 479a). But besides the changing beauties of the many concrete things in the world, there must be one Beauty that appears in them all (Symposium 210b, Republic 476, 479, Phaedo 78de, Phaedrus 250b). This is the essential Form of Beauty, absolute Beauty, not seen with the eyes but grasped conceptually by the “mind alone” (Phaedo 65, 75d).
Plato’s reasons for believing that there must be a single transcendental Form of Beauty are the same as his reasons for believing in other Forms, such as Justice—though in the Phaedrus Beauty is said to be easier of access through sensuous images (249bc). If the same term may be applied to many individuals, there must be a universal which they share. If an object changes, this change is best understood as a loss or gain in abstract properties that themselves do not change. If different things can embody Beauty more or less fully, then we must be able to conceive of perfect or complete Beauty, the ideal limiting point, which cannot be found in any concrete object, under the conditions of this world. “Now if a man believes in the existence of beautiful things, but not of Beauty itself, and cannot follow a guide who would lead him to a knowledge of it, is he not living in a dream?” (Republic 476c; Cornford).
The guide who can lead us to the knowledge of true Beauty is really leading us back to a home we have forgotten. This is Plato’s (or Socrates’) doctrine of recollection (anamnesis). “Now beauty, as we said, shone bright amidst these visions, and in this world below we apprehend it through the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent” (Phaedrus 250d; Hackforth; cf. 251a). In the shock of birth, our souls, which beheld the Forms directly, repress this memory. But it can be recalled, and when recalled it constitutes true knowledge. The “beauty of this world” reminds us of “true beauty” (Phaedrus 249e). The question is: what is the role of the artist in this process of recollection?
Plato, in different dialogues, seems to think there are two ways back to the Forms. Perhaps they are complementary. Or perhaps we can usefully invoke Bertrand Russell’s distinction between “knowledge by description” and “knowledge by acquaintance.” By dialectical arguments, such as those sketched two paragraphs back, we can convince ourselves that the ideal Form of Beauty exists, or subsists, in a realm distinct from the empirical world, and has the same sort of Being as ethical ideals, like Justice, and mathematical entities, like numbers and perfect equality. But this conceptual knowledge is still abstract and detached. What we also want, and need, is a path that will bring us again into a direct apprehension of Beauty, in so far as this is possible while our souls are still in bodies; only in this way can the divine love (eros) within us be satisfied.
This is the theme of the Symposium, and especially the discourse of Diotima of Mantineia: we can progress from bodily beauty to beauty of mind, to beauty of institutions and laws and the sciences themselves (210–11)—finally, to “essential beauty entire, pure and unalloyed” (211e; trans. Lamb). We learn to love beauty, so to speak, in diluted form to start with—the physical beauty of man or woman—but having acquired the taste, or developed the perceptual skill to discern it clearly, we can go to higher and better beauties—with the promise, or at least the hope, that we may again behold Beauty in itself.
Strangely enough, Diotima and Socrates do not assign a role to the arts in this process of reawakening to Beauty, though it takes but a short step to do so, and this stopping on the verge has not prevented the Symposium from luring numerous readers, down to our own time, to press on. As long as we admit, as Plato clearly does, that melodies and paintings can be beautiful, some of them in a high degree, then, as part of the furniture of the earth, they embody, they participate in, and therefore they reveal, or exhibit, to some degree, the Form of Beauty. If we can become acquainted better with this Form by recourse to them, then to that extent they give us knowledge, or help us attain knowledge, of at least one of the Forms. Indeed, in the passage in the Sophist quoted earlier, where Plato is assigning the arts to the category of semblance-making, he says the artists, “leaving the truth to take care of itself, do in fact put into the images they make, not the real proportions, but those that will appear beautiful” (236a; Cornford)—when, for example, they distort the actual shapes of columns for visual effect. Is there a distinction between appearing beautiful and being beautiful? An artist who distorts shapes to make them “appear to be beautiful” might deserve from Plato a better treatment than he was given earlier: for he is working to embody to the highest degree the Form of Beauty in the things of sight (or sound). He is an imitator of the beautiful.
And from this point of view he could be said to belong with the greatest creator of all—the demiourgos who put the world together. In some of the more fanciful flights of rhetoric in the Symposium, extravagant things are said which we are not, perhaps, to take too seriously. Still, they may represent some of Plato’s thinking. Agathon, for example, says that it was love (eros) that invented the arts, including those that yield beauty (Symposium 197b), and indeed “the gods contrived the world from a love of wonderful things” (201a; trans. Lamb).
What is beauty, then, if art is capable of bringing it into this world? Here is a question that Plato does not deal with very fully. His two main attempts are in the Greater Hippias and Philebus, where he leaves many questions unanswered. In the former, he is chiefly concerned to analyze various attempts to define beauty, and show why they will not do. The question has arisen, says Socrates, because when he was “finding fault with some things in certain speeches as ugly and praising other things as beautiful,” someone—as though Socrates himself needed a Socrates!—asked, “How, if you please, do you know, Socrates, what sort of things are beautiful and ugly? . . . Could you tell me what the beautiful is?” (286cd; trans. Fowler). Socrates has (as often) a good deal of difficulty getting his interlocutor to understand that he does not want to know what is beautiful, but what the beautiful is. We must bear in mind, again, that to kalon can range more widely, in some contexts, than “beauty,” to what is fair or fitting—Xenophon, in his Memorabilia (III, viii), even has Socrates claiming that objects are beautiful if well made to perform their function. But in the Greater Hippias, and still more plainly in the Philebus, Socrates is examining beauty in a sense pretty close to what the modern aesthetician is interested in. The functional concept of beauty, which makes the well-made pot a beautiful pot, is rejected; after all, as Heraclitus said, the most beautiful ape is not as beautiful as a man. Various proposals for defining beauty are offered and rejected, and the dialogue is inconclusive, though some part of the truth may be found in the idea that the beautiful is what is beneficial, and in the idea that it is what pleases through hearing and sight; perhaps beauty is “beneficial pleasure” (303e; cf. Gorgias 474d).
In the Philebus, Plato is prepared to say what sorts of things are beautiful, that is, what essential properties beautiful things have in common, without which, he thinks, they could not be beautiful. He is sure these properties are closely associated with beauty, as the conditions under which it is possible for the Form to become embodied in concrete particulars—but he does not want to say that these properties define beauty, or constitute an analysis of it. And probably he means beauty itself to be a single simple property, not analyzable at all.
If we take typical examples of complex beautiful things, from people to temples, what do we find? They exhibit certain ideal proportions in the relation of part to part; and indeed, in the construction of the temple, precise mathematical measurements are taken to insure these proportions (cf. Timaeus 87cd; Politicus 284a). We find that part answers to part, in a balance or opposition that gives the whole a dynamic stillness and self-completeness. In short, we find that “the qualities of measure (metron) and proportion (symmetron) invariably . . . constitute beauty and excellence” (Philebus 64e; trans. Hackforth). And so, when the list of classes of goods is drawn up at the end of the Philebus, the beautiful is assigned a high place. In the first class Socrates places “what is measured or appropriate,” and in the second “what is proportioned and beautiful and what is perfect and satisfying” (66ab). The passage in which these distinctions are made is one of the most difficult and confusing in Plato’s ethical writings, and he seems, at the very least, to have taken little pains to clarify these distinctions and relationships. But it is clear that he thinks of measure and symmetry as closely associated with beauty, and as essential for beauty—at least in complex things (cf. Sophist 228, where deformity is lack of proportion).
But there is also beauty in simple things—that is, elementary qualities of sense experience. “Audible sounds which are smooth and clear, and deliver a single series of pure notes, are beautiful, not relatively to something else, but in themselves” (Philebus 51d); and similarly with colors: pure white, not a large expanse of it, is “the truest of all white things, and the fairest too” (53ab). Moreover, simple geometrical figures—“something straight, or round, and the surfaces and solids which a lathe, or a carpenter’s rule and square, produces from the straight and round” (51c)—are also absolutely and eternally beautiful.
What do all these have in common, then—the pure tone or hue, the straight line or regular polyhedron, the face and figure of Agathon or Alcibiades, the Greek krater or temple? They have unity, regularity, simplicity (whether or not imposed upon complexity)—something like the principle of “the same,” employed by the demiourgos of the Timaeus (35a). This is what gives them ideal character, allies them with the One rather than the Many, and either constitutes, or, more probably, supports and sustains, their beauty.
If we now reconsider the artist and his creative power from this new point of view, the irrationality that seemed so prominent in him considered as a fabricator of illusions may appear as a higher sort of wisdom, his madness as something approaching divine inspiration. The suggestions about this in the Ion are embedded in so ironic a context that we would not be sure from that dialogue alone whether Socrates is at all serious when he tells Ion that his undoubted gift is an “inspiration,” that he is moved by a “divine power” as a magnet moves the iron (533d; trans. Lamb). “For all the good epic poets utter all those fine poems not from art, but as inspired and possessed, and the good lyric poets likewise” (533e; cf. 536b). “A sort of genius and inspiration,” Socrates calls it in the Apology (22), and again it may be ironic. But the Phaedrus is more serious, and that is the classical location of the inspiration theory. The third kind of “possession or madness” (mania) distinguished by Socrates has its source in the Muses.
This seizes a tender, virgin soul, stimulates it to rapt passionate expression . . . But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity be brought to nought by the poetry of madness [245a; trans. Hackforth].
It may be difficult at times to distinguish the real craziness of the insane, and perhaps of the rhapsode, from the apparent wildness of one who is really inspired—like the philosopher who only seems mad because he is transported and reels at the sight of true beauty (249d). But Plato here seems to be assuring us that there is a difference; that the artist may have his own insight into the nature of ideal beauty, even though his effort to bring it to earth and establish it here may require an inspired state in which he does not fully know what he is up to, but is taken hold of and used, so to speak, by some creative forces poetically or conventionally called the Muses. So even if the poet (like the diviner) does not have knowledge of what he is doing (Meno 99c, Timaeus 71e–72a) he may have something valuable to say (cf. Laws 682a).
There is an interesting problem here, of reconciling these thoughts about inspiration with the thoughts about beauty. For the creation of order and symmetry by measure and proportion seems to be a cool and rational activity—the architect of the Parthenon certainly must know what he is doing every moment—and that is how it can plausibly be allied to virtue (especially if this is conceived as a mean in conduct, as Plato suggested before Aristotle). But the poet’s creative frenzy seems to be of a very different nature. There are two ways of trying to fit these views together, though neither may succeed completely. The more radical one would be to say that implicit in all of Plato’s writings about the arts there may be a fundamental distinction between two types of art. Beauty and measure are generally discussed in connection with visual arts; when he talks about poetry, he introduces madness and inspiration. There may be a difference in Plato’s attitude here. Perhaps the second, and less far-reaching, suggestion is more plausible: though different arts (from, say, the architect’s to the rhapsode’s) may require more or less deliberate calculation, and though to analyze the beauties of a work once it is completed may require rational thought, still, wherever beauty is captured in sensuous form, some abandonment to the creative eros, some inspired access to ideal beauty, is involved.
This makes the artist an unreliable guide to the behavior of things in this world; he does not—or need not—have solidly based empirical opinions or productive skills, much less a rational grasp of basic logical and mathematical connections between the other Forms. But he does have knowledge, and of reality, in so far as he has access to beauty. And Plato at times gives him more. For in some kinds of art, beauty itself depends upon “correctness”; the composer, for example, cannot set the words to proper music unless he grasps their meanings and the Forms involved. Hence the third speech in the Phaedrus is the best—for it is based on truth. If we follow out this line of thought, we will have to say, not that all art is false or illusory, but that some works are true and some are not. Poetry by itself is not of great value (Phaedrus 277e), unless put to the test of dialectical argument (278), so a poet who really knows the truth is more than a poet—he is a philosopher. The problem in choosing materials for the early education of the guardians in the Republic (377) is that there is so little poetry that is true—not that it is impossible for poetry to tell the truth, but that the legislator must pick and choose.
Plato makes one further suggestion in the Laws—that art is to be judged by its correctness. Music, for example, he says, is “imitative and representative” (668b; trans. Bury), and so must correspond to something. (In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, III, viii, Socrates tells Aristippus that music can imitate the invisible character of the soul; cf. Republic 400–1b). Sometimes it is hard to be sure what the composer or sculptor intended to imitate (668e)—when modern composers, says the Athenian Stranger, separate words from music, and have the lyre or flute play alone, “it is almost impossible to understand what is intended by this wordless rhythm and harmony, or what noteworthy original it represents” (669e). This difficulty, so casually noted as the consequence of a coarse and tasteless procedure, was destined to set up very important aesthetic problems later, when music liberated itself more fully from words: if it is hard to tell what pure music imitates, and judge its success, that may be because it imitates nothing. But in most cases, at least, Plato thinks, there is a special task for the competent judge. He must have “first, a knowledge of the nature of the original; next, a knowledge of the correctness of the copy; and thirdly, a knowledge of the excellence with which the copy is executed” (669ab).
MORALITY
Though the arts may impinge upon the lives of all cultured men, and though they may be of special technical interest to those trained to practice them, it is the statesman, in his role of legislator and educator, who should be most deeply concerned about them. He who practices the supreme art of statecraft must ask what role the arts of music, and painting, and poetry are properly to play in the social scheme; he must inquire into their effects upon their audience, their true value to the whole culture that produces them, the ultimate justification of their right to exist. Here again, we find in Plato divergent lines of thought, both of which must, however, be traced, for both have proved illuminating and fruitful in the later history of aesthetics.
Let us begin with what seems to be the simplest and easiest question: what is the peculiar nature of aesthetic enjoyment? We may be imputing to Plato too distinct a notion of the aesthetic, too sharp a separation of this from other interests, but let us put the question in the terms suggested in the Philebus. There one of the important issues is over the nature of pleasure, and its relation to the good; and this discussion calls for distinctions between different sorts of pleasure. “True pleasures” are those given by beauty of color and form, by certain odors and sounds, and by those geometrical constructions that were spoken of above (51bc). You may be walking along the street, for example, and catch a sudden odor from a flowering shrub. It comes unbidden, that is, it is not preceded by a hunger or a thirst; and it leaves behind no unwanted after-effect. Unlike the pleasure of scratching an itch, it is an unmixed blessing, and that constitutes its purity, in the Benthamite sense.
When we think of aesthetic pleasure—meaning in this context the pleasure of hearing music and poetry or seeing beautiful forms—in this way, it would seem to rank among the higher and finer pleasures open to a good man and a good citizen. There is one qualification. It is too simple to say that “the value of music consists in its power of affording pleasure” if that is taken, in Benthamite fashion, to mean that the greater the quantity of pleasure the greater the music (Laws 655c; trans. Bury). Quantity of pleasure is no test unless it be pleasure of the right audience; we ought to praise “that music which pleases the best men and the highly educated” (658e–659).
Unfortunately that is not the whole story. For many works of art, especially tragic and epic poetry, are imitations of human lives and fortunes, and derive much of their enjoyableness from the representation of people in highly emotional states, expressing their emotions violently, in a way that excites the emotions of the audience, too. The representation of calm, wise, self-controlled people does not make for very exciting drama, yet the hates and fears, the jealous rages and pitiful sorrows of a Medea, for example, appeal, not to the highest part of the soul, but to an inferior one. Such a play “stimulates and strengthens an element which threatens to undermine the reason” (Republic 605b; trans. Cornford). There is thus an important effect upon character to be considered, Plato thinks: the tendency to make people more emotional, less self-controlled—whether they are giving way to tears or to immoderate laughter. Drama “waters the growth of passions which should be allowed to wither away and sets them up in control, although the goodness and happiness of our lives depend on their being held in subjection” (606d). This is the other half of Plato’s celebrated indictment of the arts, in Book X of the Republic (the first half being directed against their falsity). There is no question that dramatic poetry is enjoyable, but “we must take a lesson from the lover who renounces at any cost a passion which he finds is doing him no good,” for the love of poetry is equally destructive to character and we must learn to get along without it (607a).
What Plato has said here does not seem to apply to all works of art, but only to those whose content is of a certain sort—yet that includes dance and song as well as drama and poetry. And usually when Plato speaks of “music,” he is thinking of music combined with words or dance movement. Now, in this passage we see Plato introducing a new consideration, one we have not so far attended to: he is asking a moral question about the probable effects of art, that is, inquiring into its influence upon character and conduct.
A passage in the Laws makes this transition in a somewhat different way. There the Athenian Stranger concedes that certain “harmless pleasures,” such as moderate wine-drinking, which cannot be judged by any higher standards (since they have, by hypothesis, no significant consequences), may be approved on hedonistic grounds alone. “Then we shall rightly judge by the criterion of pleasure that object only which, in its effects, produces neither utility nor truth nor similarity, nor yet harm, and which exists solely for the sake of the concomitant element of charm” (Laws 667de; trans. Bury). Plato might have made a distinction here between two sorts of art, representational and non-representational in some narrow sense. But if all art is imitation, then no art can be judged purely by its pleasure (667e). All are to be judged by the standard of truth (667–668)—not only truth as correspondence to actuality, but moral truth.
There are in Plato’s dialogues, as we have seen, passages where he seems able to lay aside (or perhaps has not yet assumed) the role of the moralist, and can enjoy beauty for its own sake. But the dominant movement of Plato’s thought about art, taking it all in all, is strongly moralistic, in a broad sense. That is, it is not always moralistic in the sense of requiring (as he finds it necessary to do when outlining the curriculum of studies for the guardians in their tender and formative years) that stories avoid any suggestion of the permissibility of immoral conduct. But it insists that the final evaluation of any work of art, and the statesman’s decision whether it should be permitted to exist, must take into account the all-important ends and values of the whole society. To the common good, as Plato conceives it, private enjoyments will often have to yield—even the personal predilections of the guardians themselves (it is not for their benefit that we are constructing the state).
So it becomes very important to study carefully the effects, good and bad, that art may have upon the citizen. And in a characteristically paradoxical fashion, Plato manages to combine the severest criticism of art with the most extravagant claims for it. Yet here his approach is, in a way, more empirical than elsewhere, for he is not trying to derive some predictions of the inevitable effects of art from a general theory about it; he is trying to get hold of reliable psychological information about what works of art of different sorts may be expected to do to people.
It is fairly clear that we can distinguish between works of art with good tendencies and those with bad. Speaking in very general terms, “the postures and tunes which attach to goodness of soul or body, or to some image thereof, are universally good, while those which attach to badness are exactly the reverse” (Laws 655b). Note here the very important connection between imitating goodness and stimulating good behavior—to Plato these are inseparable. More specifically, when we consider dramatic poetry, we find that, unfortunately, nearly all existing works have an evil tendency, for by representing gods and heroes as immoral, they are bound to tempt the young into the imitation of vice (Republic 392–98). Allowing the young to take part in recitations has another deleterious side effect, for it habituates them to accept in themselves the traits of the miserable characters whose parts they have to play—railing, or sick, or boastful women, “men of a low type, behaving with cowardice,” etc. (395). The only answer to this is to give young people dramatic poetry that represents noble characters doing admirable works, heroes that act like heroes and gods that act like gods. If such works are not on hand, no doubt they can be commissioned; and poets who won’t write them must be escorted to the borders with polite firmness, and others found to do the job (398ab, 401bc).
When the art is right, its power to do good, to contribute to the health and order of society, is as great as its potential ill. The harmony of beautiful music imitates that virtue which is precisely the harmony of the soul (Laws 655a, Protagoras 326ab, Republic 432). How, then, could it fail to be a good influence on the character of the listener? There are dangers, for some of the modes, like the Lydian and Ionian, may induce certain weaknesses of character (398e), and too much exposure to the charms of music has a debilitating effect (411a). But music and poetry and dancing of the right sort are indispensable means of character education (Laws 653–54, 664, 672e). Music can make us better men (802cd, 812c; cf. 790e–791a).
If the arts are of such moment, then, in the life and education of the citizen, their regulation must be one of the important functions of the state. It seems inconceivable to Plato that people should be allowed freely to play with such dangerous things as tragic dramas and musical compositions (Laws 656c, Republic 377 ff). Art is too serious to be left to the artist. The legislator must supervise the composition of works of art, as he must supervise the making of fables and legends (Laws 664a), and Plato devotes two extended discussions to the nature of the regulations he would propose (Republic 376e–411, Laws 800–2). The poet must submit his works to censors and obtain their approval (Laws 801d). Moreover, once the proper rules are worked out, there is to be no innovation, on pain of severe punishment (Republic 423–24, Laws 798–99).
Few of Plato’s many ideas, I suppose, have been so strongly attacked and so shamefacedly defended as these proposals for authoritarian governmental control over the artistic products, and through them the very thoughts, of the citizens. “And were I a legislator,” says the Athenian Stranger (Laws 662bc; trans. Bury),
I should endeavor to compel the poets and all the citizens to speak in this sense; and I should impose all but the heaviest penalties on anyone in the land who should declare that any wicked men lead pleasant lives, or that things profitable and lucrative are different from things just.
One can point out, as a supposed reductio ad absurdum, that this would eliminate some of Plato’s best dialogues, including the Republic itself, since Thrasymachus and Glaucon and Adeimantus could not be allowed to speak their minds, even for the sake of being refuted. There is no point, I think, in trying to minimize the force of Plato’s position here, but it may leave a slightly unbalanced view of his whole aesthetics to have to make this the last word about him. So let us bear in mind that Plato’s main point here is that art has its social responsibilities, and like any other source of pleasure or of ill (like liquor and psychodelic drugs, we might say), must find its rational place in the whole scheme of the citizen’s life. And if Plato concludes that it must be censored and restricted, he (correctly or incorrectly) believes himself led to this position by rigorous logical inference from the nature of art and the nature of the good life.
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