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
