Plato's Hostility to Mimesis

 

        What counts as mimesis?  Instinctively, we want to turn to realistic-naturalistic painting or Greek sculpture – the artist with his easel outside painting the landscape; the sculpture with a living model before him trying to reproduce the model in another medium.  Clearly, these art forms have an imitative aspect.  But to say that even they “copy” nature would be false; imagination is at work, transforming nature into a vision more than reproducing it. In the best Greek sculpture we see not only a photo-realistic copy of a specific individual, but something which might be described as a vision of human grace and beauty.  Well, Plato probably wouldn't have said that.  But in the presence of Alcibiades or Phaedrus, he has his Socrates perceive these “real” characters in much this way.

 We typically think of Plato's use of mimesis (μίμησίς) can be translated with “copy” or “imitation.” Sometimes it can, but not always, and even when it is, something of the original meaning gets lost.  Aristotle wrote in the Poetics: “Epic, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, most music on the flute and on the lyre – all these are, in principle, mimesis.”  In the Politics he even writes that music surpasses all other arts in its power of mimesis: this at a time when Greek sculpture did little else than attempt to get the details of the human body right.  Walter Kaufmann makes an obvious point: “Even if we were prepared to swallow the suggestion that epic, tragedy, and comedy 'imitate' something – what does dithyrambic poetry imitate?  And what does music on flute lyre imitate?” mimesis is thus not reducible to imitation or even representation. It involves an element of make believe or pretend – activities which imply imagination, in contrast to mere imitation. 

My little nephew plays with his logo blocks and tells me he that what he has built is a digger and a dump truck; the delight he has in pretending that diggers and dump trucks are rolling around on the living room floor is something more than making a crude copy of an original. Something like this is meant by art being mimesis.  It is nonsense to say that music is the most imitative art; it is plausible to say that music allows us most powerfully to make believe – for example, romantic passion or dreamy states or aggression.  Dithyrambic poetry can also involve us in make believe, even while its ability to copy something else may be weak. Mimēsis   for the Greeks was not an imitation of nature.  Again, Kaufmann is right:   “Mimēsis has been linked with Hamlet's 'hold the mirror up to nature,' which . . . was not at all what Aristotle meant; and the authority of a supreme philosopher was invoked for an elegant conceit that functions beautifully in a speech in Hamlet but helps us little in approaching Greek tragedy, which, whatever its aims may have been, was not intended to hold a mirror up to nature.” Mimēsis involves imagination. 

             Plato often speaks of art as mimesis in very derogatory terms, as a kind of sham. In English translations it sounds like it is a sham because its pretensions don't correspond to what it achieves: Plato's example is the banal case of a man painting a bed; the carpenter who made the bed is more to be admired because the making required knowledge: of measurement, materials, etc., all of which lead us beyond the particular, put in the road to understanding. The artist copies the bed – so it seems – without knowing how to make it.  This misleading analogy only partly fits what Plato thought about mimesis, which in fact influenced his thinking about the archetypes.  He was much more concerned with the artist’s power to transform reality into fantasies of the primitive, egoistic part of the soul – art as emotional fantasy.  Art was a prime distraction from the training of the mind through attention to reality.  It was the imaginative, not the imitative, aspect of art which disturbed Plato. His most profound attacks against art were directed at Homer and the dramatic poets, whom he obviously found quite appealing, not the sculptures of painters.    

   Plato's view that art was an emotional substitute for reality was given modern expression by Freud.  Freud's id is a (reductive) reinterpretation of Plato's Eros.  Art is a substitute for power, riches, and the love of women. Fantasy allows the ego to possess what reality denies it; the disguised fantasies of the author excite (subliminally) the reader's fantasies. The art work itself is merely a mediator between the two fantasies.  It is merely a stimulus: the hero (i .e. the author) may have his faults, but he is definitely special, not like the others, the mass; he either wins all his battles and gets the girl (or boy) he loves; or goes down tragically in a blaze of glory.  In any case, something special, admirable, love-able, above-average.  The powerful emotions released by art can be like a drug which is both hallucinatory (like LSD) and intensifying (like cocaine), being both addictive and illusory.

                The limit case or pure case is pornography:  the fantasy of artist and consumer become one, approaching omnipotence.  Art is too full of overflow from the unconscious mind, which for Plato is the enemy – which doesn't mean he wanted to exterminate it, but prevent it from entrapping the soul into the shadowy cave of its fantasies, including fantasies of self. Art is the danger, in other words, because through it the unconscious wins a too terrible power which engulfs the latent "higher" potential of the soul, which for all the talk of "reason" (as an inadequate translation of νους) is the part capable of recognizing distortion and perceiving reality – above all, moral reality, the Good. Normally, the private fantasies of others would repulse us; art disguises them; offers us a bribe, as it were. Freud: “Our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of emotions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer's enabling us henceforth to enjoy our daydreams without reproach or shame.” Our pleasure over art: “fore-pleasure” leading to the “end-pleasure” of full gratification.  Art – a stimulus to personal fantasy:  music videos, the essence of art.

            Another indication of this was Plato's perceptive remark that artists more readily take to portraying evil or disturbed characters.  Why? The good man seems boring to the primitive, egoistic parts of the soul.  These parts long for diversity, drama, eroticism, adventure; good people just doing their duty and living decently seem too dull for art. This fascination with the base or evil of course plays into the hands of fantasy.  Much television [the cave] – much of which is technically well-made – promotes the idea that the good is boring, the violent, the sex-addicted, or the rich and famous interesting.  This is not a catharsis of these emotions as Aristotle thought, but a fostering of vulgar impulses, a preventing of the growth of the soul.

           I hesitate to mention formalism, but the formalist suspicion of unified selves and the ability of symbols / signs to transcend the self seems very like what Plato was after. Plato too was distrustful of language; dialectic is a way of doing philosophy predicated on the mistrust of words; writing was a dangerous event for Plato, almost a crisis, since apart from a real person using language words tend to be used opportunistically or lose their meaning through loss of context.  Writing is related to art, and has its own magical tricks to produce artificial unities of self and author.  The poetics of genius and self-expression mask fantasies of omnipotence; art is about wish-fulfillment, offering debased pseudo-objects which give us license to leave reality behind and indulge in easy, pleasing fantasies.  One of the advantages of the best modern art is that it prevents us from doing this.    

             The painter painting the bed, to the extent that he merely copies, lacks imagination.  But even artists who are not dull copyists – especially these! – are dangerous.  The appeals to emotionalized fantasies mask the weakness of what is actually being communicated, which would be obvious if put forward in clear prose as a tentative thesis. Even if what the artist is communicating is profoundly true, art prevents the individuals from seeing it in a way which brings its truth home to the soul, like accidentally or intuitively arriving at the correct solution to an algebra problem, but not grasping the algebraic logic which reliably allows one to arrive at true solutions.  For example, Sophoclean drama, one could plausibly argue, communicates deeper truths which Plato doesn't want to see: that we are often in no-win situations, that conflicting parties may both have justice on their side, that life does destroy good people, that we can't control our fate. But even if these truths could be philosophically defended in argument – against Plato – the emotionalized presentation in tragedy slips past the critical mind, touches the person only at the level of fantasy such that we know the truths like we would know beds if we had only seen paintings of them; or worse – the ego instrumentalizes the feeling of being privileged to such deep truths to feel deep, superior, or otherwise “above average.”

            The truth cannot be had independently of the right epistemological path, according to Plato, which is not art by dialog.  The love of truth drives rational discourse; and rational discourse cultivates the qualities of mind able to pursue the truth and educate the feelings.  The pleasures and addictions of fantasy and emotion drive art, and living in fantasy and emotion uneducated by a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful prevent one from becoming what one should be, from becoming what one potentially is in reality – like a plant, whose blossoming an overexposure to the darkness has stunted.  Of course, for those who know nothing but fantasy and illusion, who unthinkingly take over the unexamined opinions of the majority who under the influence of fantasy-mongering artists as educators have never learned to use their higher spiritual faculties, no perspective other than that of (fantasizing) art will be available – they will think the shadows on the wall are real, and think the person who says they are shadows is crazy).  From the perspective inside the cave, the shadows seem real; only from outside can we see that what we thought was real was actually a shadow.

           This hostility to art – which Plato perhaps secretly loved – is only intelligible in the context of his picture of the soul and its progression from lower levels of fantasy to higher levels of development in which first contacts with reality become possible. 

          A Platonic (against Plato) affirmation of art thus involves the possibility of seeing the role of imagination (the purification of fantasy) and emotion in the constitution of reality itself, such that vision would not only involve what could be expressed in philosophic discourse but true artistic visions.  In other words, there are some truths that dialog must be blind to, which could only be grasped imaginatively in a true vision. I think Plato's own art – his mimēsis of Socrates – gives clues about this possibility of a deeper mimēsis.

       Plato notoriously excluded the artists from his ideal society; when you think that these artists were not of the caliber of our pop stars but included Homer, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, the temptation is to write Plato off as a crackpot, at least regarding art.  His views regarding art, however, are part of an extended argument, which itself was informed by the perversity of the execution of his friend and mentor, Socrates – “of all those we knew in our time, the bravest, and also the wisest and most just” – by the Athenian democracy for (among other charges) corrupting the youth. 

       The starting point of Plato's argument in the Republic is the vision of goodness / justice as sui generis: not reducible or explainable in terms of any possible worldly consequences: this is the sense of Glaucon's challenge at the beginning of Book II involving the good man who suffered Job-like in the world as compared to the utterly wicked who enjoyed every pleasure the world could offer, including the reputation for goodness – what loving justice for its own sake means.  (The image of Socrates' unjust execution is constantly in the background.)  It becomes apparent that only a certain kind of enlightened person can love justice for its own sake, while very many people only love it for its psychologically uplifting and practical advantages (and ignore it when it is to their disadvantage).  Plato's point is that advantages and disadvantages cannot be grasped independently of what is good and just; only by seeing another in the light of justice / goodness can a person know what is to his own or the other's advantage, where advantage is no longer  a matter of weighing costs and benefits.  To think of justice / goodness in terms of what advantages one can have from it – advantages which are conceptually independent of justice / goodness, which one could theoretically get in other ways (e. g. money, prestige) – is already to think and act in ignorance.

          This enlightenment is of course only possible through philosophical dialog for Plato; art, even when portraying that which intends to be real goodness, can present only a simulacrum of true insight.  But what if the art carefully depicts philosophical dialog and the amazingly particular Socrates, the meaning of whose life is so closely bound to it who bound to it?  Does Plato's critique of art – which is situated within a work of art – apply to the Plato's own art, his own mimēsis of Socrates and through him the life of philosophy?  Why didn't Plato simply write philosophical proofs? 

         Plato's views of art are only intelligible if one thoroughly understands the significance of his tripartite division of the soul and metaphysical archetypes in connection with his portrayals of Socrates.  Plato's picture of the soul as consisting of the appetitive (or biological), the desiring (or ego-driven), and the spiritual (not to be reduced to rationality in the modern sense) is used to explain why so many people are ignorant of justice,  unable to practice it because they are not just.  These people become prisoners of appetite and egoistic desire, their consciousness mind, their imagination being chained to these parts of the soul; the whole person should be formed by the spiritual part, the part able to bring order into the spiritual economy by recognizing reality as it is apart from egoistic, pleasure-driven fantasy, and harnessing the life energies of the psyche (especially eros) in the service of spiritual actualization through conforming with archetypal reality.  Ironically, those who accuse Plato of having contempt for the particular fail to see that as long as particular human beings have not liberated themselves from what amounts to a psychological software program of ego-centered fantasy, they are individuals not much different from other higher mammals: in Hannah Arendt's terms, one cannot yet clearly distinguish who we are from what we are until our words and actions engage with a reality beyond the mechanisms of our ego-consciousness.

        Here we are dealing with an image – a moral vision – not an independently verifiable “theory of reality,” to name the most common, quite simplistic misunderstanding of Plato. It was Socrates who embodied this moral vision; the reality is Socrates – the psychological and metaphysical pictures Plato uses, attempts to paint a understanding of what this primary reality (Socrates) points to. To try to understand Plato's psychology or metaphysics as a matter of pure speculation which can be in principle be known independently of the moral reality which Socrates' life authentically revealed – already “proved” in a way – is a cardinal sin against Plato (which he is sometimes perhaps guilty of himself).  This informs Plato's conception of philosophy, especially in philosophy's relation to art and writing.  This is what the form of the dialog (as opposed to the lecture or treatise) as the means to present philosophy proves.

        The ironic critique of art, the irony of the character of Socrates himself, imposes a necessary distance between reader and reality, in effect reminding readers not to confuse the picture with that which it depicts. A person who has not matured intellectually is highly susceptible to manipulation by appeals to uneducated, ego-centered emotion.  This is what propaganda does (think of appeals to the flag, to the battle of good versus evil, the “war on terrorism” etc.).  A person who cannot use their reason to think critically and independently, who cares little about the truth, will be radically unfree. Art – even great art, like that of Sophocles –  is an enemy of freedom because even if it points towards deep truths, through the magic of art and the stimulation of primitive emotions like fear, it obliterates the critical distance between portrayal and receiver.

         Plato's art, his portrayal of Socrates and its importance for understanding his philosophy, stands for a completely different relationship between portrayal and receiver, one which both makes the significant aspect of Socrates' reality present through the devices of art, and at the same time creates a space between portrayal and reality in which the higher part of the soul may begin to live, grow, question.  In other words, the authoritative presence of Socrates, shining through the dialogs like an archetype of beauty shines through particular beautiful existents, motivates the reader through love to continue the search beyond the charms of the Platonic work of art, touching not fears and desires, but evoking the kind of pure love (which is not abstract) which led Socrates out of the cave of ego fantasy into the light of the real.

            To love is to affirm the goodness of the beloved sui generis: wonderful that you exist!  We can describe the beloved in biological or psychological categories; list the benefits we have from them, etc. But our love is more like the light in which we see the beloved and place the significance of what the social and natural sciences may explain and describe. For Plato, to love is equivalent to seeing as "good" in the basic sense of an intrinsic, internal affirmation. It is to see the other as irreducibly other, as separate and strangely different from ourselves. This is not part of the reality the dissecting mind can grasp because it is not a thing among things in the physical world, not a little piece of nature. Plato's primary metaphor for archetypal "reality" is the light of the sun: it is the light in which one sees reality; lacking it, one is in the cave.  The theory of the forms is not a speculative thesis which can be verified independently of the love of the good in the world. 

            This brings me to Plato's famous thesis that art is mimēsis – a copy of a copy of reality. All art?  Plato does not turn all artists away from the ideal state – which is perhaps, as Julia Annas writes, more a metaphor for a mature spiritual economy than a political blueprint.  Socrates was just; but is justice was not a mere copy of the intelligible archetype of justice. Rather than picturing his life as a copy in the sense that a naturalistic painter copies a landscape – static, external – Socrates' justice to others shared a real affinity with the unseen original.  Better: His life made it visible. He gave it reality, in one sense of that word, by embodying it (from one perspective) in the world.  Socrates' life was for Plato a living image of justice; not in the way of a sign that merely stands for justice; not in the way a symbol indicates something other than itself.  On the contrary, as an image of justice he shares in the nature of the object – actually makes it manifest, as the drawing of a circle makes the geometrical ideal visible.  There is an actual presence of the one in the other, a physical fusion such that if we know the one we instantly also become aware of the other. 

        Socrates allows us to see other people – the world – in the light of justice and goodness.  It is significant that Plato used another concept other than mimēsis for picturing the relationship between the light of justice and Socrates' particular embodiment of it: metaxis, which is somewhat misleadingly translated as "participation." Mimetic art which is also metaxic is not a copy of a copy; it is a re-presenting (as make-believe) of a presence which imaginatively lives again in the representation; and in this it mirrors the structure of the way Socrates' life embodied and made present justice, which is to say was the source of a light which allowed others to experience it.  In the relationship of metaxis, the archetype does not exist as a blueprint which is copied in the person of Socrates, or by the person of Socrates in his life; what justice is was shown in Socrates' life, and while Socrates can no more be reduced to the archetype itself of justice than an existing physical model can be the archetype of beauty, at the same time the archetype of justice exists only in authoritative instantiations of it (i .e. in particular just people) in the world.

         No doubt, Plato had trouble making sense of the metaxic, dynamic character of the archetypes (as I and everyone else who tries to conceptualize this relational, participatory structure does: “and the word became flesh”, perhaps the most well-known attempt). The archetypes are an  attempt to picture reality through the mimetic metaxis – through a kind of imaginative re-presenting of a dynamic reality in which a particular manifests more than can be described or conceptualized, and allows us to see the world in a new light.  The attempt to re-present Socrates through a kind of mimetic-metaxic art is strictly opposed to both the simplistic copier of particular things (like the ridiculous painter of the bed in the Republic) and the mimetic seductions of art which excites fantasy. But why did Plato feel the need to speak of an archetype of justice, and not just portray Socrates?  And how does the idea of the archetypes relate to both his hostility to certain dominant art forms as well as his own art?  I must now make a short digression into Plato's archetypes in order to draw out their implications for art.

           Archetypal reality is an attempt to imaginatively picture goodness. Since Socrates' goodness cannot be explained in terms of worldly benefits, but is sui generis, unconditional, absolute, a mind tuned only to mere physical and psychological pleasure and power, reducing all goods to their utility in achieving them, will be utterly blind to it.  This is because they experience the world and other people through their appetites and ego-centered desires (aided by the various conscious masks of these).  Goodness, justice are not objects of desire in the same way money or prestige are: they are (as imagined by Plato) more like a  light which makes other objects of desire visible for what they are – Socrates' goodness and justice – values which are invisible to ego-consciousness.  Yet in loving Socrates, Plato (and many of his readers over the centuries) comes to love goodness, justice, beauty, not as metaphysical entities or part of some theory, but as what shines forth in Socrates' life. Thus Platonic philosophy is not only presented as art – the dialogs. Contrary to all impressions, the form of Plato's art (like all great art) is not detachable from the content.  Plato's most abstract metaphysics is a kind of mimēsis.

            Plato is often accused of confusion by wanting to make ontological objects of the archetypes: like making a particular model into the standard by which to know and judge the beauty in others.   The clear implication is, however, that only by means of archetypes do we have objects at all – in this case, relatively just or unjust people. The archetypes are transcendent conditions of the possibility of judging just, good, etc. to put it in Kantish. And only in an economy of soul in which the spiritual transcends ego-consciousness can one apprehend Socrates' justice; can see the light of the archetype shining through Socrates' life.  I would say, less metaphysically: I am authoritatively moved by Plato's mimēsis of Socrates; he makes a claim on me; I see other people differently, deeper, with more justice and compassion, having meditated on Plato's portrayal Socrates' life and death. Plato's language of the archetypes is an attempt to picture what such responses reveal about Being – an imaginative vision of what he experienced through Socrates.  We see the world, ourselves, and others in a new light; the archetype is this light. Again, metaphysics and art are related; making pictures deriving from true visions – in this case, the meaning of Socrates' life and death – as portrayed in the mimetic art of Plato.

         Recall the traditional understanding (since Aristotle) of the archetypes and the obvious critique: in the simplest terms, the archetype is an abstraction which Plato mistakes for the particulars which gives rise to the abstractions: many particular leaves give rise to a concept and a definition based on what they have in common in the midst of their irreducible particularity. Plato ascribed to the concept cum definition an ontological status, which was thought of as the model or a blueprint upon which particular leaves were (less than perfectly) patterned – here the myth of the demiurge comes to mind, the artist or craftsman making particular leaves based on the blueprint he has in front of him – which also recalls the painter of the bed example from the Republic, making a copy of a copy. And then the obvious criticism that the concept cum definition is an abstraction, that the particulars are the primary reality and the concept-archetype a product of abstract thinking. As though Plato thought that “leaf-ness” was more real than a particular leaf, since in contrast to the latter the former never changes.

          One thing is clear: Plato did not become a necessary writer for so many generations because of such a doctrine.  Aristotle was recorded as saying philosophy begins with wonder.  I feel sure, though I of course I cannot prove it, that he learned his from his mentor, whose philosophy certainly is more responsive to a sense of wonder than is Aristotle's. (And the forms in which the philosophy of mentor and pupil are handed down surely have something to do with this.)   

           In this Platonic art resembles the iconography of the Eastern Church, which it influenced so heavily.  The icon is not just an artwork with a religious theme: it is a part of a liturgical practice; meditating upon it allows the contemplative to see through the image to that which it reveals, in whose reality it participates when energized by spiritual vision. The artist is in effect a medium in which the archetype „becomes flesh“ in a material image which retains from one point of view the presence of the original vision.  Just so Plato's depiction of Socrates, at least in the early and middle dialogs.

            Originality thus comes to mean something quite different for the Platonic artist: far from meaning innovation in style or technique (innovation in content, even for moderns for whom the “anxiety of influence” has become a defining feature of art, is almost unknown), it means expressing or revealing the origin – the archetype.  Nothing innovative about it: that is irrelevant. It is a faithful image (in the dynamic sense developed above) of the archetype. The archetype is not a model, but light.   The spiritual vision is the image not because it reflects the archetype in an exterior or impersonal way, but because the work shows forth the original as Socrates bodied forth justice in his life.  But because the presence of the original was embodied in the image, it may serve to a mind prepared to see it as a window to that origin.

         In fact, original artists in the modern sense are precisely those whom Plato wants to prevent having an influence on the soul.  When artists in the grip of conscious or unconscious ego make images, the copy can be of nothing other than their fantasies. Freud developed this Platonic notion when he maintained that an artwork expressed an relatively unconscious fantasy / desire of the artist, in which the consumer of art participates: that is, by which the consumer is seduced.  Originality as innovation is unlimited because it depicts emotions, excitements, secret wishes, desires – fleeting subjective states.  This is quite colorful, perhaps, and entertaining for very many people.  But minds formed by this kind of art will not be able to apprehend truth, goodness, beauty, reality; they will mistake Socrates for a corrupter of the youth, in other words. They will be trapped in the cave of shadows, which they will learn to accept as “real” and so lose the desire to ever want to be more. Such publics put those like Socrates to death.  [They also support criminal wars, elect corrupt governments, create degrading human images and worldviews... the list could be vastly extended.]

         Plato re-presents Socrates – in art. A merely scholarly biography would not have done for the truth what Plato's art achieves. And this truth is not experience-able apart from our emotional response to the character of Socrates. [Which is not to say that everybody will respond as I do; but there is no truth or falsity outside such responses.]  It is not a matter of blocking out imaginative or emotional response; it is a matter of informing these in true vision. If we read the Phaedo and break down in tears when Socrates takes the hemlock, my feeling is that one has not understood Socrates.  Socrates was not about sentimentality. But if I have no emotional response at all, but think like Mr. Spock, I have not understood it either. Being moved and filled with a certain reverence is not independent of understanding what he was about. And this is what art at its best can do, what philosophy typically cannot do. In this case, love allows the reader to participate in the vision, which is frozen beneath the dead letter and can only become present again through a certain kind of engaged reading.

           Language is inundated in value; we tell stories, most of us every day. We are thus all artists to some extent. When I tell my wife what happened at work and talk about my classes, I can't employ a neutral language. I am confronted every time with issues of justice – to resist the seductions of fantasy, to entertain, and by entertaining, seduce: “Oh, that student is so daft! You know what he did today? You'll never believe it!” [subtext:  “I am superior. The problem is not my inability to reach the student. I am a great teacher.  Feel free to have compassion with me because not all students worship my greatness.”].  To be just, to even tell a story about a student to my wife, involves me in issues of fairness and propriety – an insight made possible partly through my engagement with Plato.

            Great artists are able to see their characters – even the bad ones – in the light of justice (Think of Alcibiades.)  As good readers, we participate in their visions; and we often criticize them: Was Augustine just to his lover and the mother of his child?  Is Lawrence's vision of sex really deep? In a way, sex remains an image, but whether the participation is pornographic or informed by a will to justice (even love) is the difference between good and bad works of art, false or genuine unities.  This is what much literature is about; we are naturally curious about other people, other worlds, how we do respond and how we should respond to them, as Iris Murdoch reminds us.  Plato's art give us a make-believe world which is not a seduction but an exercise in understanding, justice, perhaps love.  Literature can educate – as Plato proved (any definition of literature which excludes the dialogs is to that extent deficient).   That it most often does not do so reminds one of its dangers.

            One could think of mimetic art like this: Even the best artists and works of art are 'cracked vessels,' to use a metaphor of John Donne.  Sacred art may aspire to 'real presence', but not anything connected with the muddle of human life in the world. Art can explain, reveal only partially. Reality lies just beyond the reach of our visions.  But Plato's love of the character he portrayed made possible an extremely important precondition for great art: the living knowledge – so difficult to achieve – that something other than oneself is real.  Love and art involve the discovery of reality of the inexpressible particularity of others.  The 'cracked vessels'  may be sound enough to hold some truth, at least for a while, like a net which catches the big fish but not the vast organic and non-organic substrate which nourishes this small, visible part of ocean life.

            Or one could give Donne's lovely metaphor a positive sense.  We know the structure of Eros (so wonderfully captured by Anne Carson) as a triangle of the desiring lover, the desired object of love which one lacks, and the absence of the beloved object, which powers the imagination or the fantasy:  I use this distinction of Iris Murdoch to differentiate between emotionalized images of the beloved powered, on the one hand,  by the ego-centered drive to possess, and, on the other, those arising from a purer love which desires not possession (the reduction of other to self) but the otherness, the real presence of the beloved.  One may know some part of truth – or a lover – deeply and intimately only because one loves the truth or beloved.  But it is self-delusion to think one can know either in the absolute sense as suggested by the metaphor of possession, such that one is no longer vulnerable or liable to error.  This is what drives possession, isn't it?  Vulnerability, loss of "self-control" which is as we know a part of Eros, moves the self to want to put an end to this painful loss by possession, thereby perversely cutting off the branch that supports life at its richest.

        The desire to possess is a wanting to cancel desire – a negative judgment on life itself; to stop the leakage of selves into and onto other selves and the world.  The space between Socrates and Plato's portrayal of Socrates, between Plato's words and our grasp of those words, is not a deficiency of mimetic art, but an erotic space which pictures our relationship to the otherness which is reality, including the reality of other particular people.  What Plato's art reveals about art is that mimetic art is good when it reveals true vision based on imaginative participation (metaxis)  empowered by love  (eros); mimetic art is bad when it turns the gaze inward, activating primal fears and desires, or empowering ego-driven fantasy. Participation (metaxis) is a leaking of selves; the “cracked vessel” of the self is not something to be hermetically sealed because the self's desire to be self-enclosed must be resisted – for the sake of a more human self. The direction is away from ego, opening out towards that which cannot be reduced.

            How different is this reading of Plato from the man fleeing from the “fragility of goodness” into some kind of self-induced ironical devaluation of the life of the world!  Perhaps my reading is more a suggestion for a revision than an accurate interpretation of Plato.  It is not surprising that this view – so eloquently advanced by Nussbaum – is conceptually tied to a view of Plato's hostility to art which puts the matter in terms of an option in favor of rationality and the abstract verses the emotions and the particular.  Yet given the view that Socrates devalues particular people, it is striking that Plato's Socrates does not stoically isolate himself from his friends and interlocutors; Plato's Socrates is not a stoic.  He just refuses to allow unregenerate sex or lust for power-and-prestige to color his vision of other people.  That is not always what Socrates words say when he is discussing particular issues within a dialog; it is what the fact that the irreducibly particular character of Socrates saying what he says within Plato's art implies. I wonder whether it is a mistake just to read Socrates as Plato's mouthpiece advancing a strictly philosophic argument, ignoring the difference between straight philosophy and philosophic art – between a treatise or a proof on the one hand, and a Platonic dialog on the other.

            There is no reason to suppose that the Alcibiades who lay next to Socrates in the Symposium was not very real for him; that Socrates did not see him with a very particularizing love, which however allowed very sexual desire to be experienced as a desire for the good of Alcibiades, meaning in practice an attempt to allow Alcibiades to experience a love which could not be reduced to narcissism. If Socrates had expressed his love genitally, in the context of the work he would have confirmed everything Alcibiades believed about eros as possession, about his own irresistibility; he would have closed the space between lover and beloved in such a way that Alcibiades' basic category of eros-as- possession-of-what-one-lacks and as elevation-of-ego would have been enshrined; he would have ended any chance that Alcibiades might have had to love the otherness of the other. Right or wrong, Socrates’ restraint was not meant to demonstrate his indifference to sex!  Only a primitive, specifically modern reductive view which collapses the distance between eros and its genital expression could blind us to the erotic nature of Socrates’ love and thus the meaning of his restraint.

            And the specifically Platonic art form allows us to see both Socrates and Alcibiades in light of a non-egoistic love, which resists our fantasy and primitive sexual desire (makes them so present, re-presents them in this way).  It is perhaps unfair, but I wonder whether reactions like Nussbaum's, which see in Socrates' restraint a cold rejection of individualized erotic love, do not express the disappointment of a reader who wants erotic fantasy from art (in the Freudian sense) rather than reality.  If Plato's language (at least in translation) does sometimes seem to support the view that Socrates is about attaining the frigid self-sufficiency that the Stoics and Nussbaum read into him as well as de-eroticizing art, then the problem is the failure to see that the dualism is not between body and mind but between the desire of the unenlightened soul for self-enclosure as against the opening of the enlightened soul onto reality (in particular, the reality of the beloved). The two different states of soul correspond to two different orderings of desire, ego, and mind; they are not a rejection of desire and ego. And precisely this corresponds to what I am tempted to call art-as-fantasy verses philosophical art, whereas in the latter mimesis is informed by true vision inspired by love, whereas in the former it is animated by fantasies which seek to maximize self-love and unregenerate desire. 

            The issue for Plato is ultimately the difference between these two forms of art, not between art and philosophy as unalterably opposed, although I doubt Plato would have thought about it like this. For Plato, philosophy was primarily to be conducted by personal contact and the spoken language.  Plato's art is a “make-believe” portrayal of philosophy, not philosophy itself. But if Plato believed that art necessarily distorted that which it portrayed, I cannot believe he would have written the dialogs.  Even if he at times wanted to restrict the meaning of art to fantasy, no reason exists for us to do so, unless we want to claim that the dialogs are not great works of art (as well as philosophy). 

 

Works consulted:

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

Erich Fromm, Haben oder Sein

Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness

Phillip Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art

George Steiner, Real Presence