Imagination

A Study in the History of Ideas

John Cocking, Penelope Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415058070
• eBook ISBN: 9781134932085
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The origins, nature, function and effects of imagination have engrossed writers, theologians, philosophers and practitioners of the arts across the ages; its influence on painting and music continues to be debated. It has been simultaneously feared as a dangerous, uncontrollable force and revered as the supreme visionary power. Cocking's Imagination is an exploration of the history of imagination from antiquity to the Renaissance. The book opens with a treatment of imagination in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Developments in the Middle Ages are traced, with particular attention to the parallel tradition in Islamic thought of the period and the book pursues the concept through the theories of Dante and the Neo-platonists to the High Renaissance. The manuscript was left unfinished on Professor Cocking's death in 1986 and has been edited by Penelope Murray, who adds an introductory essay. The book will be of particular value as a background to the explosion of interest in the imagination in the Romantic period.

1

The Greek Rationalists Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics

Writers and thinkers who have seen art as a way to truth with imagination as means have often claimed the authority of Plato. For art he can be made to provide some support; for imagination none.

That poets who linked their art with some praeternatural reality – Coleridge being the supreme example – should have seen themselves as Platonists is not surprising. The ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’ of Plato’s praeternatural realm – a world in the mind more ‘real’ to him than the world perceived by the senses – included moral and aesthetic values as well as logical relations. There is no ‘form’ of mud, Socrates confessed to Parmenides; human artefacts are sometimes allowed corresponding forms and sometimes not (Parmenides 130 c-d). But there are forms of everything that has ever exalted the soul or excited the mind of man, thought of as having their plenitude of being in another world than this. Plato has been not only the source of philosophical idealism and the touchstone for its critics, but an inspiration for those idealists in a less philosophical sense who, seeing certain things as good, dream dreams in which those same things are even better, projecting images towards some notion of perfection.

But contemplation of perfection – the ‘form’ of good that is also beauty and truth – is to be achieved, according to Plato, through philosophy, not through art; through intellect under the discipline of the ‘dialectic’ rather than through any kind of ‘inspiration’. The ‘inspired’ – poets, seers, rhetoricians – may have some approximate apprehension of the good, or of forms related to the good; but so may statesmen and ordinary citizens. Only the philosopher, thinking dialectically, can approach true knowledge. The ‘inspired’ may express ‘true opinion’ in their discourse, but what they utter needs to be interpreted; most truly by the philosopher who is in closer touch with truth. Visions, dreams, images of all kinds, even if they have their origin in some kind of truth, transmit their message through the lower reaches of the soul, where intellect can be confused by emotion and the carnal appetites. More trustworthy is the ‘true opinion’ of the statesman or the good citizen who has absorbed it through tradition and practical experience.

Yet Plato’s attitude to art – or to those activities that we now subsume under the notion of ‘art’ in a way which never occurred to him or to any thinker before the Renaissance – is neither simple nor obviously consistent. It is perhaps not so much ambiguous as ambivalent, which is why some Romantics could see him as the generator of their own myth of art and some scholars could point to the scandal of a great artist who excluded poets from his ideal state and poured contempt on painting.

A striking example of Plato misread in terms of post-Kantian notions of art is to be found in an article published in the Revue Philosophique as late as 1934 by Hugo Perls: ‘Mousa: a study of Plato’s aesthetics’.¹ Interpreters of Plato, Perls maintains, have been wrong to emphasize the association of art with techne (skill or technique) and to present the making of music, poetry and paintings mainly as a craft. Plato’s reference-point in the important passage about these arts is the Muse, says Perls; the arts have their own mode of access to beauty, independent of discursive thought. So far so good; it is true that for Plato poetry is a matter of inspiration, not of techne. But Perls interprets the many texts about the inspired poet with little regard for the context and none for the tone of Plato’s discourse. Where Plato, to the unprejudiced reader, appears to be separating inspiration from techne to the disadvantage of the former Perls takes him to be establishing the autonomy of art. Where Plato shows Socrates as ironical or teasing Perls takes his utterances literally and seriously. Where Plato uses sight as a metaphor – seeing the forms with the eyes of the soul – Perls interprets Plato’s text as praise of the sense of sight, so that the sensible world, always subordinated to the intelligible by Plato in the sphere of the dialectic, is said to be promoted to great importance in the sphere of the aesthetic: the Muse communicates through privileged sensations. The artist as maker, Perls makes Plato insist, relies less on craft as a set of describable principles than on stochastike – a skill like that of the javelin-thrower whose actions appear to be simply hit-or-miss but which succeed through a kind of judgement that is unanalysed and indeed unconscious. Plato, says Perls, sees stochastike as a divine gift and therefore, though it does not qualify as knowledge or as a means to knowledge, places it among the highest values.

These preconceptions lead Perls to read parts of Plato’s actual language very differently from translators with no axe to grind. From the Republic (403c) he quotes: ‘The Logos of art must have for us an end and an aim. Where it must end, there it does end. The end and aim of art must be the love of the beautiful’ (Perls 1934: 268). Paul Shorey renders this same passage: ‘Do you not agree, then, that our discourse on music has come to an end? It has certainly made a fitting end, for surely the end and consummation of culture is the love of the beautiful.’² Socrates has been talking about the part to be played by music and poetry in the education of the guardians who are to rule the ideal state and insisting that only the right kinds of music and poetry must be allowed.

Another awkward text in the Laws is disposed of in a similar way by Perls who virtually re-writes it. The Athenian who, in the absence of Socrates, is the leader of the discussion in the Laws, is talking of pleasure and following a line very close to Socrates’s conclusions about the psychology and ethics of pleasure in Philebus. Education, he says, should aim to make a child ‘feel’ pleasure and pain in the right way before he is old enough to make reasoned judgments; to prefer spontaneously the best kind of pleasures, conceived as Socrates defined them. The very best pleasure of all comes, of course, from the insights of the philosopher’s dialectic; but this is reserved for the age of reason. At 667d ‘the various arts of imitation’, and particularly music, come into the discussion; by what criterion are we to judge the goodness or badness of art, and therefore its goodness or badness as emotional training? Not by the pleasure it gives. The degree of pleasure is an appropriate standard of judgment only of a ‘performance which provides us with neither utility, nor truth, nor resemblance’. Clinias asks: ‘You refer only to harmless pleasure?’ ‘Yes,’ answers the Athenian, ‘and I also use the name play for it in cases where it does neither harm nor good worth taking into serious account.’ Art of the right kind, he goes on to make clear, is to be judged right not because it gives pleasure but because it properly fulfils its function of imitating what it should imitate and ‘retains its likeness to the model of the noble’. The implication here, as elsewhere in Plato, is that only the dialectic can approach true knowledge; but the artist is a good artist to the extent that his art somehow expresses ‘right opinion’ – the philosopher being the eventual judge of its rightness.

Perls however reads this passage in a quite other way. He makes Plato say that ‘disinterested pleasure’ – the pleasure unconcerned with utility, truth or resemblance – is of the essence of art. A.E. Taylor translates the Athenian’s conclusions (668a-b): ‘Consequently, when a man tells us that in music pleasure is the standard of judgment, we must refuse to accept his statement. It is not this type of music, if indeed there could be such a type, which we should make our serious object, but that other which retains its likeness to the model of the noble.’ Perls gives, for this same text: ‘If someone claims to judge mousike with reference to pleasure, the logos cannot in any case be used as a justification; so that mousike must not be scrutinized as a serious occupation, but only in so far as it shows a resemblance to something through imitation of the beautiful’ (1934: 271). Art is thus given its autonomy by Perls and rescued from the censorious judgments of the philosopher-critic.

Even the Greekless student, reading the various translations and interpretations of Plato, particularly those which give the Greek words for key concepts, becomes aware of the pitfalls of vocabulary. Only the context and the coherence of the argument can determine which of the possible Greek senses of a word is relevant; some of the key-words offer widely varying possibilities in general usage, and even when Plato has given his own meanings to some of them these seem to be not always precisely consistent. Logos can mean ‘rational principle’ or ‘discourse’, ‘utterance’. Mousike can mean music, poetry, or any activity influenced by the Muses. Perls takes Plato’s use of mousike to include painting, and reads it much as the nineteenth century understood ‘art’. But Perls’s interpretations simply do not fit in with the general tenor of Plato’s dialogues.

Few interpreters can have gone so far in distortion, but others have made Plato say what, from the point of view of Kantian or Romantic aesthetic, they think he should have meant. The emphasis on inspiration, on the ‘divine’ element in art, can at least help to save us from the opposite error of interpretation, summed up by Collingwood in the form of a syllogism: ‘imitation is bad; all art is imitative; therefore all art is bad’. Collingwood himself (1925) attributed this view to Plato at one time, but recanted in his Principles of Art (1938). The notion is still put forward by writers on aesthetics, and Collingwood is oftener cited as supporting than as refuting it, though his chapter in the Principles, written after his detailed scrutiny of the Greek text of the relevant section of the Republic, takes us further towards an understanding of Plato’s distinctions between good and bad art than most commentaries.

‘The facts are’, he wrote,

(i) that ‘Socrates’ in Plato’s Republic divides poetry into two kinds, one representative and the other not (392d); (ii) that he regards certain kinds of representative poetry as amusing … but for various reasons undesirable, and banishes these kinds only of representative poetry not merely from the schoolroom of his young guardians but from the entire city (398a); (iii) that later in the dialogue he expresses satisfaction with his original division (595a); (iv) reinforces his attack, this time extended to the entire field of representative poetry, with new arguments (595c-606d); (v) and banishes all representative poetry, but retains certain specified kinds of poetry as not representative (607a).

(1938: 46–7)

It is at 607a, of course, that Socrates ‘can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men’; tragedy and comedy are banned as ‘representative’ or ‘mimetic’; even Homer is too mimetic to be admissible.

This reading of the Republic’s treatment of poetry is precise and coherent and no doubt takes us very close to Plato’s meaning. But it takes no account of the corresponding passages in the Laws where the role of music and poetry in education is again discussed, particularly the Athenian’s statement at 668a-b, already quoted: music is one of the arts of imitation and is nevertheless to be used to educate the young. Imitation for the sake of pleasure is bad. The music we should make our serious object is that which ‘retains its likeness to the model of the noble’. The Laws, then, recognizes a kind of art that is both mimetic and acceptable.

Collingwood tried to make Plato’s distinctions clear by assimilating them, as far as possible, to his own. He had his own notion of ‘art proper’, derived through Croce from the Romantic tradition and centred on imagination. This he did not attempt to father on to Plato as some of the early Romantics did theirs. Besides ‘art proper’ Collingwood distinguished six pseudo-arts in which the artist’s gifts are used as a craft to bring about specific ends – ‘art proper’, for Collingwood as for Kant, has no end other than itself:

Let us give the six their right names. Where an emotion is aroused for its own sake, as an enjoyable experience, the craft of arousing it is amusement; where for the sake of its practical value, magic.… Where intellectual faculties are stimulated for the mere sake of their exercise, the work designed to stimulate them is a puzzle; where for the sake of knowing this or that thing, it is instruction. Where a certain practical activity is stimulated as expedient, that which stimulates it is advertisement or (in the current modern sense, not the old sense) propaganda; where it is stimulated as right, exhortation.

(1938: 32)

Art proper, says Collingwood, may do any of these things by the way, but doing them is not what makes it art. As for ‘magical’ art, this is explained later as the arousal of emotion not for the pleasure of experiencing it or the aim of discharging it but in order to canalize and direct it upon practical life; magical art works through representation of the socially appropriate emotions and becomes

a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence magic is a necessity for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society. A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance.

(1938: 69)

Plato, said Collingwood, wanted magical art for his Republic, but not amusement art; he identified amusement art with representation, and did not realize that magical art is also representative.

But Laws 668, with its acceptable music that ‘retains its likeness to the model of the noble’ suggests that socially useful art, whether we call it ‘magical’ or not, could be representative according to Plato. Perhaps the difficulty of getting to the heart of the matter arises from Plato’s use of mimesis for different kinds and degrees of ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’ which could usefully be distinguished by different names. No doubt the key to his meaning is to be found, as Collingwood maintained, in the distinction which sets off the discussion in the Republic at 392d. Poets, says Socrates, can tell a story by describing what happened from the outside or by getting inside the skins of their characters, making us feel their emotions through direct speech. Direct speech stands between pure narrative and dramatic impersonation. Homer uses a great deal of direct speech and is therefore the father of tragedy.

Now, when this distinction is considered together with what Plato says elsewhere about poetry and truth, and about music and emotion, what suggests itself is that Plato is not ruling out mimetic art because it is mimetic, as Collingwood put it, but because the more art aims at being mimetic, ‘naturalistic’, faithfully specific to situations as they might arise in real life, the lower it will sink in the sublunary realm of the sensible and the emotional. The sense of mimesis at Plato’s starting-point in the Republic is not so much ‘representative’ or ‘representational’ distinguished from ‘non-representational’ as ‘mimicry’, or ‘impersonation’ distinguished from ‘detached judgment’. For ‘pure narrative’, Plato implies, allows the attitudes and judgments of the narrator to come through directly; it moves us away from the dangers of extreme mimesis. Tragedy involves us in emotions of which the very violence may swamp our judgment, tempts us to give ourselves up to the thrill of the violent feeling itself and limits our judgment to admiration for the skill of the mimic – author or actor. This last ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Greek Rationalists: Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics
• 2 Imagination begins to be recognized: Literary theorists and Neopythagoreans in the early centuries AD
• 3 The Neoplatonists: Imagination as the ‘vehicle of the soul’
• 4 Neoplatonism in Christian guise: The mystic way as the affirmation and negation of images
• 5 Holy images
• 6 Imagination in Islam
• 7 The Western Middle Ages
• 8 Ficino
• 9 Ideas about poetry and painting in the Italian Renaissance
• 10 The French Renaissance and after
• Epilogue. The imagination as messenger: From Plato to Kristeva
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index