Can you find any flaw, then, in an occupation like this, which in order to be competently practised requires the following inherent qualities in a person: a good memory, quickness at learning, broadness of vision, elegance, and love of and affiliation to truth, morality, courage, and self-discipline? (VI, 487a)
Hence there is space for the second interpretation that captured the European imagination and which went in a very different direction. This also took seriously material from other dialogues, this time Phaedrus and Symposium. It brings to the foreground something surprisingly absent in the central books of Republic, which is the importance of beauty and the related importance of love or eros in Plato’s metaphor of ascent. In Symposium, Socrates (on the face of it a much more attractive Socrates than his namesake in Republic) relates how he learned a story of ascent from a wise old priestess, Diotima. Her ascent of the soul begins from the experience of beauty, in the person of someone who is loved. It progresses, of course, from love of corporeal to spiritual beauty, or from beauty embodied in one person to that which is visible in many. But – and here is the difference from the religious interpretation – the initial beauty of the individual is never wholly left behind. Such beauty is itself divine bounty. It is always to be seen. It is not the beginning of an ascent to anything unseen, although it may be the beginning of an ascent to a different, better appreciation of what is seen. There is no lament here for what Coleridge, enamoured of the transcendental interpretation, denigrated as ‘the despotism of the eye’.1
This is the Plato that is most attractive to artists and creators. The idea is that to look on things with real love is already to discern immortal qualities in them – qualities of beauty, grace, truth or harmony, that can in principle be manifested anywhere in space or time and are in that sense timeless. The paradigm Platonic experience is not now otherworldly, but this-worldly, only this world appreciated as it should be, when the banquet of the senses is enlarged with imagination and insight. Frequently, the insight is supposed to have a moral dimension. In the works of the writer Iris Murdoch, for example, the connection with ethics is made because the experience of love takes the agent outside him or herself, making possible an appreciation of the beloved that is itself an ‘unselfing’, representing a displacement of the selfish ego from its usual throne in the centre of things.
This view has much to commend it. It makes excellent sense of the evident connection in Plato’s mind between beauty, goodness and truth. For us, perhaps, these three have little to do with each other. Beauty, if we talk about it at all, is relegated to the peripheral, and persons who harp on it are regarded with suspicion: airy-fairy aesthetes, weightless and unserious. Goodness is a matter of ethics, and while we ourselves may have principles which raise us above the Athenian envoys, we become nervous if it intrudes too far into people’s minds. ‘Do-gooder’ is a derogatory term. Meanwhile our paradigm of truth is probably scientific truth, which has nothing much to do with either beauty or goodness. As in the Humean model of motivation and action outlined above, we tend to think that knowledge is one thing, and how you choose to use it, for good or ill, to create beauty or destroy it, is another thing altogether. Indeed, Plato also recognizes that the lower forms of belief and perhaps knowledge are at the disposal of twisted ends just as much as higher ends (VII, 519a). The connection between knowledge or understanding and goodness is only forged, if it ever is, at the highest level.
Part of the charm of Plato is the sense of being in a world in which these fractures did not exist. Ours may be a world in which there is a division between fact on the one hand, and value on the other. But his world is, in the phrase of the godfather of modern sociology, Max Weber, an enchanted world, in which ideas like proportion and harmony efface any such division. Beauty makes both goodness and truth manifest, so its perception and the love it engenders together give us the first step out of the Cave. Beauty is the first erasure of the distinction between fact and value. It is borne in upon us, in erotic experience, like facts. But it is intrinsically or essentially connected with the values of pleasure and love. And just as it erases the fact-value distinction, so beauty erases the tyranny of the self. In loving something or someone for beauty’s sake we are, as Iris Murdoch says, ‘unselfed’. Selfish desire has no place in the pure aesthetic experience.
The poetic Plato is the prophet of courtly love, of pure, spiritual unity with the beloved, contrasted with the sweaty appetites of the unwashed. He is the Plato of the first part of John Donne’s ‘Ecstasy’:
Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string;
…
As, ’twixt two equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls, (which to advance their state,
Were gone out), hung ’twixt her, and me.
And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.
Notice that an afternoon gazing into the beloved’s eyes is not a substitution of the otherworldly for the specific here and now. On the contrary, it is an intense, almost microscopic appreciation of the here and now: one illuminated by the sun, as it were, rather than in the gloom. Donne himself is, however, an imperfect Platonist of this stamp, since while all this commingling of souls is fine enough, it becomes, dare one suppose, a little tedious, and Donne is content that the body should eventually have its say as well:
But O alas, so long, so far
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though they are not we, we are
The intelligences, they the sphere.
…
So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’ affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
Although this lapse may, after all, be a true rendering of Plato himself, to whom return to the Cave and to the world of the senses and their illusions is not entirely a fall, but a natural progress.
The distinction between the religious Plato and the poetic one is extremely apt to blur. In one respect the poetic Plato is actually nearer to one strand in Christianity. The poetic Plato’s beauty can be incarnated – that is its whole point – and similarly according to Christianity the good itself can be incarnated, and once was. Each philosophy needs to effect a bridge between something which is too rarefied, too abstract, too pure, to engage with human life, and something else which can find a seat in day-to-day living. For the poetic Platonist the soul is revivified by a renewed erotic perception of beauty; for the Christian by a renewed acquaintance with the personification of goodness in the incarnation of Christ.
For Christianity this is, however, just one element in a fundamentally otherworldly philosophy. Christ is himself just a signpost to the real consummation of eternal life, in the other world. For the poetic Platonist, the incarnation is everything.
The problem of the return to the Cave is not so severe for poetic Platonism as for religious Platonism. But it does not disappear entirely, either. It is not so much the rediscovery of the body that is a problem, as a rediscovery of pursuits and problems that have nothing much to do with beauty or love: problems of politics and morals, for instance. With respect to Iris Murdoch, we may yet doubt if the Melians would have been impressed if the Athenian envoys had come ashore while raptly admiring the line of beauty incarnated in a rose-leaf, or the beauty of their toy-boys’ profiles. The suggestion must be that so much immersion in beauty would free the Athenians from the ambition, fear or greed that prompted their brutal politics. But amongst human beings, this is not how it works. The aesthetic only forms a temporary respite from the moral and political. The Athenian envoys, however susceptible to beauty they might have been, would soon enough have cast aside their roseleaves and toy-boys, and got to work blackmailing the Melians, just as they in fact did. The lives of the artists are seldom all that edifying. And that in turn reminds us that while the themes of love and beauty are prominent, as we have said, in other dialogues, in Republic itself they are overshadowed by the eventual banishment of the artists, to which we shortly return. As the quotation at the head of this section shows, Plato seems to be pursuing themes other than contemplative immersion in beauty. An enjoyable afternoon lying on the river bank with a lover, or raptly engaging with the exhibits in a gallery, can scarcely be said to require each or any of ‘a good memory, quickness at learning, broadness of vision, elegance, and love of and affiliation to truth, morality, courage, and self-discipline’ which his philosopher-king must exhibit. So in spite of the enchantments of the poetic life, we still lack a satisfactory model for the ascent from the Cave.