The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics

Berys Gaut, Dominic Lopes, Berys Gaut, Dominic Lopes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415782869
• eBook ISBN: 9781136697135
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The third edition of the acclaimed Routledge Companion to Aesthetics contains over sixty chapters written by leading international scholars covering all aspects of aesthetics.

This companion opens with an historical overview of aesthetics including entries on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Goodman, and Wollheim. The second part covers the central concepts and theories of aesthetics, including the definitions of art, taste, the value of art, beauty, imagination, fiction, narrative, metaphor and pictorial representation. Part three is devoted to issues and challenges in aesthetics, including art and ethics, art and religion, creativity, environmental aesthetics and feminist aesthetics. The final part addresses the individual arts, including music, photography, film, videogames, literature, theater, dance, architecture and design.

With ten new entries, and revisions and updated suggestions for further reading throughout, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics is essential for anyone interested in aesthetics, art, literature, and visual studies.

Part I History of Aesthetics

DOI: 10.4324/9780203813034-1

1 Plato

Christopher Janaway

DOI: 10.4324/9780203813034-2

Plato's writings about the arts play a foundational role in the history of aesthetics, not simply because they are the earliest substantial contribution to the subject. The arts are a central, rather than a marginal topic for Plato, and for him the whole of culture must reflect and inculcate the values that concern him. His philosophy of art (as we would call it) is closely integrated with his metaphysics, ethics and politics. From a modern point of view two features are perhaps most striking. First, the arguments Plato gives to the characters in his dialogues contest the autonomous value that we might expect from what we call art, and in the most prominent cases refuse it such value altogether. For Plato the philosophical task is to uncover a metaphysical and ethical order to the world, and the arts can have true worth only if they correctly represent this order or help in aligning us with it. Yet at the same Plato the author often proceeds in an artistic manner: his language and imagery are frequently beautiful and expressive, he writes elaborate myths, and distances himself in sophisticated ways from the dramatic characters he portrays. Long ago Sir Philip Sidney called Plato “of all philosophers… the most poetical” (Sidney 1973: 107), to emphasize the urgency of understanding why he portrays poetry in such an antagonistic fashion. We shall examine in outline the major issues that a reading of Plato is likely to raise for modern aesthetics.

The arts in Republic 2 and 3

In the Republic Plato has his character Socrates construct a picture of the ideally just individual and the ideally just city state, in which he gives an account of the nature of knowledge and education, culminating in the proposal that the rulers of the ideal state would be philosophers, those uniquely in possession of methods for attaining knowledge of the eternally existing Forms that constitute absolute values in Plato's universe. Quite early in the discussion Socrates considers the role of the arts in education. The young, especially those who will be the Guardians responsible for the city's well-being, must receive an education that properly forms their characters. Since the young soul is impressionable and will be molded by any material that comes its way, the productive arts and crafts will be regulated so that they pursue “what is fine and graceful in their work, so that our young people will live in a healthy place and be benefited on all sides, and so that something of those fine works will strike their eyes and ears like a breeze that brings health from a good place, leading them unwittingly, from childhood on, to resemblance, friendship, and harmony with the beauty of reason” (Republic 401c–d).

Much of Books 2 and 3 concerns the scenes and characters poetry contains. Plato assumes that fictional tales and poetic representations will play a dominant role in education — a conventional assumption, as we see from remarks in the dialogue Protagoras: “they are given the works of good poets to read at their desks and have to learn them by heart, works that contain numerous exhortations, many passages describing in glowing terms good men of old, so that the child is inspired to imitate them and become like them” (Protagoras 325e–326a). But it is not sufficient that the young read the works of “good poets.” While Plato consistently praises Homer as a fine poet, in the Republic he proposes ruthless censorship of Homer's works. Gods and heroes must not be represented as cowardly, despairing, deceitful, ruled by their appetites, or committing crimes: hence the excision of many well-known scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey. A good fiction is one which (though false or invented) correctly represents reality and impresses a good character on its audience. Plato seems untroubled by the thought that an accurate representation of the way human beings behave in battle or in love could fail to impress the best character on its recipients. Is truthful representation or ethical effect the higher criterion? At one point Plato suggests it is the latter: some violent mythical tales are not true, and should not be told to the young even if they were (Republic 378a).

The other main topic for discussion is mimesis, which here should be taken as impersonation or dramatic characterization. There are two modes of poetic discourse: one where the poet “speaks in his own voice,” the other (mimesis) where he “hides himself,” “makes his language as like as possible to that of whatever person he has told us is about to speak,” and — at the beginning of the Iliad — “tries… to make us think that the speaker is not Homer, but the priest, an old man” (393a–c). Hiding oneself behind a pretend character is implicitly deceitful and dubious. But Plato's objection to mimesis here is more sophisticated. He claims that to enact a dramatic part by making oneself resemble some character (and perhaps even to be the composer of a drama in which diverse persons appear; see Burnyeat 1999: 270–72) causes one to become like such persons in real life. Given a prior argument that all members of the ideal community, and a fortiori its Guardians, should be specialists who exercise only one role, it follows that the city will produce better Guardians if it restricts the extent to which they indulge in dramatic art. Those whose dominant aim is the production of mimesis are ingenious and versatile individuals, but the ideal state will not tolerate them. The Guardians should use mimesis as little as possible, and be restricted to enacting the parts of noble, self-controlled and virtuous individuals, thus assimilating themselves to the kind of human being the state requires them to become.

The arts in Republic 10

Republic Book 10 contains Plato's most prominent criticisms of the arts. Mimesis is the chief topic, but now, arguably, we must understand this term in a different sense, as image-making: making something that is not a real thing, but merely an image of a thing. Both poets and visual artists are practitioners of mimesis in this sense, but the aim of this passage is to justify the banishment of mimetic poetry from the ideal city. The grounds are that mimesis is far removed from truth, though easy to mistake for the work of someone with knowledge, and that mimetic poetry appeals to an inferior part of the soul and thereby helps to subvert the rule of intellect and reason. While promising cognitive gain, poetry delivers only psychological and ethical damage to individual and community.

Socrates here invokes the theory of Forms to explain the nature of mimesis as such. Whereas an ordinary object, such as a bed, is an “imitation” of the single and ultimately real Form of Bed, a painted picture of a bed is an “imitation” merely of the way some bed would appear from a certain angle. The use of the theory of Forms here is in some respects anomalous. Plato has a god bring Forms into existence, though elsewhere they exist eternally and no one creates them. Earlier in the Republic it seemed that philosophers alone have knowledge of Forms; here the ordinary craftsman “looks to the Form” for guidance in constructing a physical bed.

Plato disparages mimesis in the visual arts by comparing it with holding up a mirror in which the world mechanically reproduces itself. The point of the comparison is arguably that the painter makes no real thing, only an image. His product, when compared with the bed and the Form of Bed, is thus at two moves from reality. To make such an image requires no genuine knowledge: no knowledge of the real things of which one makes an image. By a slightly strained analogy, Plato argues that a poet makes only images and is distant from knowledge: “all poetic imitators, beginning with Homer, imitate images of virtue and all the other things they write about and have no grasp of the truth” (600e). They produce only images of human life, and to do so requires no knowledge of the truth about what is good and bad in life. There is moreover no evidence, Plato suggests, of any good poet's manifesting ethical or political competence. Why does it matter that poetic image-making entails no genuine knowledge? Because there are people who hold the opposite view: “they say that if a good poet produces fine poetry, he must have knowledge of the things he writes about, or else he wouldn't be able to produce it at all,” on which grounds they claim “poets know all crafts, all human affairs concerned with virtue and vice, and all about the gods as well” (598d—e). Plato aims to refute these claims. Fine poetry consists of image-making, and as such is compatible with the poet's ignorance of truths about what is real.

Plato also undertakes to show which part of the human psyche mimetic poetry appeals to. The higher part of the soul uses reasoning in pursuit of its essential drive to understand the overall good. But the images of mimetic poetry are gratifying to a distinct “inferior” part, which is childish, unruly and emotional, and reacts in an unmeasured fashion to events in real life and in fiction. For example, when someone close to us dies, part of us considers what is for the best and desires restraint in feeling and outward behavior. At the same time another part tends towards indulgence in unbounded lamentation. There is a conflict of attitudes towards the same object, analogous to the phenomenon of visual illusion, where part of the mind calculates that a stick in water is straight, while another part persists in seeing it as bent. Poetry affects us emotionally below the level of rational desire and judgment. The kinds of event that provide the most successful content for mimetic poetry (and tragedy especially) involve extreme emotions and actions driven by emotion. So mimetic poetry naturally addresses and gratifies the inferior, lamenting part of us and fosters it at the expense of the rational and good-seeking part that should rule in a healthy soul.

Plato's “most serious charge” against mimetic poetry (605c) also concerns its effects on the psyche. It is that “with a few rare exceptions it is able to corrupt even decent people.” Plato imagines such a decent person being powerfully affected by the experience of “one of the heroes sorrowing and making a long lamenting speech or singing and beating his breast… we enjoy it, give ourselves up to following it, sympathize with the hero, take his sufferings seriously, and praise as a good poet the one who affects us most in this way.” The distancing provided by the artistic context insidiously lulls us into a positive evaluation of responses which we should avoid in real life. We relax our guard and allow the rule of the rational part of ourselves to lapse — “only a few are able to figure out that enjoyment of other people's sufferings is necessarily transferred to our own and that the pitying part, if it is nourished and strengthened on the sufferings of others, won't be easily held in check when we ourselves suffer” (606b). The positive evaluation of our sympathetic feelings for the hero's sufferings rests on the fact that to see them brings us pleasure. So instead of regarding as valuable that which we judge to be best, we begin to value responses that happen to please us, and, Plato argues, this habit can corrode our attachment to the rational and the good in real life.

Plato makes many assumptions here, but perhaps most notable is one that has featured in recent debates about the psychological effects of television and films (for the comparison see Nehamas 1988): that if we enjoy seeing the image of something enacted in a dramatic narrative, this causes in us an increased disposition to act or react similarly in real life. It is as if mimesis is transparent in a particular way: to enjoy or approve of a poetic image of X is not really different from enjoying or approving of X itself. Aristotle's remark in the Poetics that the enjoyment of mimesis is both natural for human beings and a source of learning (Aristotle 1987: 34) is the beginning of a reply to this assumption.

On the grounds that it falsely masquerades as knowledge and is detrimental to the human mind, Plato banishes poetry from his ideal city. We may wonder how much of poetry this affects. At the beginning of the discussion “poetry that is mimetic” is to be excluded, but by the end it appears that all poetry is meant, and the intervening argument seems to tell us that all poetry is indeed mimetic, although Homer and the tragic poets (seen as a single tradition) provide the most focused target. Plato proposes to retain some poetry, namely “hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people” (607a). Given the earlier comments about beauty and grace, these works need not be dull and worthy, but clearly Plato prefers them because they will present a correct ethical view of the world and be a means to instilling the right character in the citizens.

In his concluding remarks Plato mentions an “ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy” (607b). Poetry (of the kind excluded) aims at pleasure and mimesis, but if it can satisfy philosophy by producing an argument that it is beneficial to the community and to human life, then it can reclaim its place. If philosophers hear no such a justification, they will use the argument of Republic Book 10 “like an incantation so as to preserve ourselves from slipping back into that childish passion for poetry” (608a). It is like keeping oneself away from a person one is in love with but with whom an association is not beneficial. This image, and the accompanying invitation to poetry to defend itself, reveal Plato as less authoritarian than he often appears in the Republic. He recognizes the power of poetry over the human soul and intimates that he has full appreciation of its pleasures. It is not through insensitivity that Plato rejects pursuit of the pleasures of poetic image-making. It is because he has an argument that shows we should resist these pleasures unless poetry or its lovers perform on philosophy's home ground and present a good counterargument.

Beauty

According to Iris Murdoch, “Plato wants to cut art off from beauty, because he regards beauty as too serious a matter to be commandeered by art” (Murdoch 1977: 17). This may have been difficult for some modern aestheticians to grasp, given widespread assumptions about their discipline (such as Hegel's view that its subject matter is “artistic beauty” Hegel 1993: 3). Some commentators on Plato have thought, mistakenly, that a positive philosophy of art is implicit in Plato's inspirational passages on the love of beauty as an absolute value.

Plato's concept of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Part I History of aesthetics
• PART II Aesthetic theory
• Part III Issues and challenges
• Part IV The individual arts
• Index