Art and Truth after Plato

Tom Rockmore

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226272634, 9780226040028
• eBook ISBN: 9780226040165
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Despite its foundational role in the history of philosophy, Plato's famous argument that art does not have access to truth or knowledge is now rarely examined, in part because recent philosophers have assumed that Plato's challenge was resolved long ago. In Art and Truth after Plato, Tom Rockmore argues that Plato has in fact never been satisfactorily answered—and to demonstrate that, he offers a comprehensive account of Plato's influence through nearly the whole history of Western aesthetics.

 

Rockmore offers a cogent reading of the post-Platonic aesthetic tradition as a series of responses to Plato's position, examining a stunning diversity of thinkers and ideas. He visits Aristotle's Poetics, the medieval Christians, Kant's Critique of Judgment, Hegel's phenomenology, Marxism, social realism, Heidegger, and many other works and thinkers, ending with a powerful synthesis that lands on four central aesthetic arguments that philosophers have debated. More than a mere history of aesthetics, Art and Truth after Plato presents a fresh look at an ancient question, bringing it into contemporary relief.

CHAPTER ONE

Plato and Platonism on Poetry, Art, and Truth

There is an enormous interest in Plato’s writings on art but a very wide divergence of opinion about their message. Many observers think Plato is attacking art in general. Others, such as R. G. Collingwood, believe Plato should be understood as attacking contemporary artists in ancient Greece.¹ In this chapter, I argue that Plato criticizes contemporary art not on aesthetic grounds but rather from the angle of vision of his own theory of knowledge, which in turn presupposes a nonstandard conception of philosophical art based on an intuitive grasp of the forms. In short, for Plato aesthetics presupposes epistemology.

The suggestion that Plato’s attack on art as imitation derives from the theory of forms presupposes that such a theory can be identified in his writings. Important texts, positions, and theories are often enshrouded in hermeneutical controversy. This factor is increased as concerns the so-called Platonic theory of forms. The theory of forms never reaches a final formulation in his writings. Plato’s view of this theory is unknown and cannot now be determined. The interpretation, the general contours, and even the existence of the theory of forms remain controversial.

We do not know and cannot now recover Plato’s position, if he had one. It is scarcely easier to recover his views of art and poetry in particular. It is a commonplace that Plato begins the Western aesthetic tradition through his conception and criticism of a mimetic conception of poetry and art in general. Plato’s theories of the forms as well as of poetry and art in general are specialized topics, which have been intensively studied in an enormous literature, which is probably now beyond the capacity of any single individual to survey.

Some observers think Socrates is already committed to a version of the theory of forms. Gail Fine points to a series of passages in claiming that he already makes an epistemological argument for the existence of forms.² If this is correct, and if Plato accepts the theory of forms in its Socratic version, then it is possible that he was already committed to some version of it even before he discusses art. Some think his position developed over time while others believe he continues to restate in different ways the same or roughly the same view.

The evolution of the theory of imitative art and of the theory of forms suggests that whether or not Plato has anything resembling a philosophical position, his thought develops. Hence, there is probably a time before he held any version of the theory of art as imitation or possibly even the theory of forms, a time when he began to hold the former and perhaps even the latter as well. Though the theories of art and the forms at least initially appear to arise independently, their fate is later joined, for instance in the Republic, especially in book 10, where the theory of forms, hence a specific approach to knowledge, is invoked to justify Plato’s harsh critique of art produced by poets and others lacking in knowledge. Hence, at least initially, it appears as if Plato’s twin concerns with the nature of art and the theory of knowledge developed separately but later come together with the framework of his overall position.

Mimesis, Imitation, Appearance, and Representation

Plato’s view of art is firmly linked to the word “mimesis.” This term (ancient Greek: mimesis [μίμησις], from mimeisthai [μιμɛîσθαι]), whose origin is uncertain, is usually translated as “imitation.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “mimesis” as “a figure of speech, whereby the supposed words or actions of another are imitated” and “the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change.” It further defines “mimicry” as “the action, practice, or art of mimicking or closely imitating . . . the manner, gesture, speech, or mode of actions and persons, or the superficial characteristics of a thing.” The precise meaning of “imitation” is unclear. Richard McKeon distinguishes five different meanings.³ According to Michelle Puetz, who may have Plato in mind, the two core meanings of “mimesis” are imitation and artistic representation.⁴ This suggests that art has a cognitive function in “correctly” representing an object, or reality.

This controversial thesis, which turns on the interpretation of “mimesis,” is contested by Plato but supported by a number of important post-Platonic figures. The term “mimesis” is discussed in various contexts by a long list of writers, too numerous to enumerate, where it is associated with a wide variety of themes running from aesthetics and literary criticism to feminism and anthropology. Mimesis is especially important in literary criticism. In one of the most important works in literary criticism of the twentieth century, under the heading of mimesis Eric Auerbach studies the representation of reality in Western literature from ancient times, starting with Homer and the Old Testament, up to Proust and Virginia Woolf.⁵ Edward Saïd ends his new foreword for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of this book in suggesting the Hegelian point that the representation of reality in Western literature is in fact the representation by Auerbach, writing out of his historical moment, of the way that central writers in the Western canon, writing out of their own historical moments, represent reality.

But the triumph of Mimesis, as well as its inevitable tragic flaw, is that the human mind studying literary representations of the historical world can only do so as all authors do—from the limited perspective of their own time and their own work. No more scientific a method or less subjective a gaze is possible, except that the great scholar can always buttress his vision with learning, dedication, and moral purpose. It is this combination, this mingling of styles out of which Mimesis emerges. And to my way of thinking, its humanistic example remains an unforgettable one, fifty years after its first appearance in English.⁶

Auerbach illustrates the complex transformation of “mimesis” from the time of ancient Greece until the present. In ancient Greece this term broadly designated such forms of “imitation” as the cross-dressing identified by Aristophanes in which men imitate women. It was also employed in an epistemological sense in classical Greek philosophy. “Mimesis” later takes on a very different series of connotations, such as Auerbach’s concern with the whole span of historically variable literary depictions of the real.

Auerbach’s historicist orientation toward the Western literary tradition differs from the ancient Greek philosophical usage of “mimesis” to designate the representation of reality, or again the mind-independent real world as it is beyond mere appearance. Plato, who has no technical vocabulary, or even a fixed philosophical language, uses the term “mimesis” loosely and in a pejorative sense in criticizing forms of artistic creation. He applies it, for instance, to painting and sculpture⁷ as well as to music and dance⁸ and in other contexts. Aristotle uses the same term in a different way to refer to an innate human tendency, which he relates to different kinds of poetry he analyzes in the Poetics. I come back to Aristotle’s view in the next chapter.

Plato does not begin aesthetics, which, depending on how one understands the term, originates in the West as early as the archaic period in the writings of Homer, Hesiod, and the early lyric poets.⁹ “Aesthetics” refers to theories of beauty, knowledge, and so on. Plato, like many later Western thinkers, approaches artistic creation mainly in terms of beauty. He considers beauty in detail in numerous places, including the Symposium, in which he praises it as the highest value; in the Hippias Major, in which he attempts to define the concept; and in lesser detail in the Phaedrus and the Philebus.

In the context of the theory of forms, Plato apparently takes “mimesis” to mean “copying.” The terms “representation and “copy” are related. To copy (something) is to represent it, and the most developed or highest form of representation is copying. A copy is intended to be an entirely faithful representation of something else. In the Platonic view of mimesis, we encounter one of the earliest and certainly one of the most widely known forms of the problem of epistemological representation as it arises within the general field of aesthetics. The general problem of the relation of artistic representation and cognition is a special case of the more general theory of knowledge in which representation has played an enduring role at least since early Greek philosophy.

Plato is apparently the first philosopher to discuss mimesis in the Greek tradition but not the first to mention it. When he intervened in the debate, mimesis had already taken root in the prior tradition long ago. Plato famously refers to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.¹⁰ Earlier ancient Greek philosophers criticize poetry for spreading false stories about the gods. Around 500 BC, Xenophanes attacked Homer and Hesiod for this reason,¹¹ and Heraclitus called for Homer to be excluded from competitions and thrashed.¹²

The transformation of the meaning of key terms is important. Scholars note that before Plato “mimesis” had a less precise meaning, neither specifically applying to a poetic process nor necessarily implying fraud and counterfeit—with one important exception. In his comedies, Aristophanes comments on the staging of tragedies in using the terms mimeisthai and mimêsis in consistently pejorative ways.¹³ This pejorative sense is amplified in Plato’s account, which ultimately derives from the theory of forms. There is reason to believe, as I will argue in the next chapter, that Aristotle’s rehabilitation of poetry and art in general crucially depends on reinterpreting the meaning of “mimesis.”

Platonic Mimesis and Representation

The core meaning of “mimesis,” or imitation, is “to represent.” “Representation,” which is understood in different ways, is often associated with resemblance. A number of observers, for instance Nelson Goodman, deny that representation can be based on resemblance. I come back to this point in chapter 7. At the limit, there are many cases in which there is not or even could not be a visual image. For instance, the term “sublime” is often used to designate what cannot be represented, or which lies beyond representation, as in the Kantian conception. Representation seems central to visual art but peripheral to music. Some representations refer to particular things and some do not. Sometimes “representation” is employed to claim direct, unmediated knowledge of the external world.

The term “representation” is currently used very widely to refer to such varied semantic situations as pictures, three-dimensional models, linguistic texts, mathematical formulae, diagrams, maps, graphs, and so on. In contemporary cognitive science it is widely assumed that cognitive processes concern representations. In representational theories of intentionality, believing is distinguished from desiring, and beliefs are distinguished from other beliefs, desires from other desires, and so on.

Representative realism, which is currently popular in analytic circles, is perhaps most famously associated with John Locke. Naïve or direct realists believe we directly perceive the world as it is without a representational interface. Representative realists hold we do not and cannot directly perceive the mind-independent world as it is beyond appearance. Rather, we directly perceive only our ideas. This theory is sometimes related to what is called act/object analysis of sensory experience. The key insight here is that sentences which rely on English terms such as “looks,” “seems,” and “feels” convey direct phenomenological acquaintance with something that has the relevant property. Locke holds that we do not directly perceive objects. We rather perceive primary or secondary ideas, which are constructed by us out of primary ideas. This view goes all the way back in the tradition until Aristotle, who, in De Anima, argues that ideas in the mind are images of things it thinks.

Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, who follows Louis Marin, distinguishes four views of representation.¹⁴ These views, which emerged in the debate after Plato, include (1) to re-present or to reflect; (2) presence and absence; (3) the substitution of one thing for another; (4) to outline or trace the contours of something in according it visual form. To represent by representing or reflecting something is the basis of the familiar reflection theory of knowledge, which probably originates in book 10 of the Republic at 596D, where Socrates talks about someone carrying around a mirror. This theory is usually credited to Francis Bacon, restated by Friedrich Engels, then adopted as the “official” Marxist view of truth by Lenin, restated again in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early work in the picture theory of language, and more recently refuted by Richard Rorty. Common to such theories is the idea that the original can successfully be made present or reflected, and that at the limit reflection is the functional equivalent of a mirror image. This form of representation is very close to imitation, hence to the view Plato criticizes.

Representation also assumes the distinction between presence and absence, between the re-presentation, which is present, and what it represents, or the represented, which is in fact absent, and present only in that and as it is represented. Among recent thinkers, this approach is most closely associated with Martin Heidegger’s theory of the metaphysics of presence. According to Heidegger, being in general is present under the mode of absence. Jacques Derrida, under Heidegger’s influence, formulates a theory of the so-called trace in such works as Writing and Difference and in Of Grammatology.¹⁵ One can re-present or make present what is not already present, but what is present can neither be made present nor re-presented.

Representation further assumes the form of substituting or standing in for, as when something takes the place of something else. Such a representation is a sign of something else, so that representation here loses the sense of copying or imitating its referent. C. S. Peirce famously invented a triadic theory of signs. “Namely, a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C.”¹⁶ Immanuel Kant formulates a sophisticated theory of representation he later abandons in favor of epistemological constructivism identified in the debate as the Copernican revolution in philosophy. He indicates in the Opus Postumum that to think is to represent, or “repraesentare per conceptus.”¹⁷

Finally, “representation” can mean to give form to something, as, for instance, integers or whole numbers can be represented, but so-called irrational numbers, such as the square root of 2 cannot. Thus for Kant the beautiful can be represented but the sublime cannot be represented. Louis Marin detects a basic turning point in the discussion in Descartes, who supposedly abandons imitation. For Descartes, to represent does not mean to copy¹⁸ but rather that the figural, or what can be reduced to a figure, or stated in the form of a sign, takes the place of images.¹⁹ It further means that what cannot be reduced to a finite figure, what is hence not finite but infinite, hence cannot be represented at all. Thus, for example, according to Marin, while the beautiful can be represented, the sublime cannot. On this basis, he regards Poussin as a theoretician of the problem of representation.²⁰

This fourfold classification is useful here to call attention to some of the ways “representation” is understood in Plato’s wake. Plato’s critique of mimesis counts as an attack on representation in all its forms. The later debate records a series of different ways in which after Plato—but not after Platonism, which continues to inform the discussion—art and representation have been linked.

In appealing to a mimetic theory of art, Plato chooses as his standard the strictest possible form of representation, which supposedly cannot be found within poetry or aesthetics in general, and can only be met with on the philosophical plane. Later theories of representation count as a series of efforts to meet Plato’s criticism in adopting different mimetic and non-mimetic views of aesthetic creation, hence different normative conceptions of art, with an eye to responding to Platonic criticism of aesthetics.

Pre-Platonic Mimesis and Aesthetics in General

Plato’s critique of artistic imitation focuses on poetry, particularly Homer, whom Plato attacks but Aristotle praises. Homer and Hesiod are the first great Greek poets whose work has survived. Homer is probably slightly earlier, though that is disputed. If he existed, he probably flourished as late as the end of the ninth century, according to Herodotus around 850 BC,²¹ or according to other ancient sources even earlier, closer to the time of the Trojan War that supposedly occurred 1194–84 BC.²² Hence the early flowering of Greek literature begins as early as the end of the ninth century BC and perhaps even several centuries earlier. Whether or not Homer existed, it is believed that the Iliad is the first great work of Western literatu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. Plato and Platonism on Poetry, Art, and Truth
• 2. Aristotle on the Theory of Forms, Imitative Poetry, and Art in General
• 3. Art and the Transcendent; or, Christian Platonic and Anti-Platonic Art
• 4. Kant and German Idealist Aesthetics
• 5. Hegel on Art and Spiritual Truth
• 6. Marx, Marxism, and Aesthetic Realism
• 7. On the Theory and Practice of Aesthetic Representation in the Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Index