Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger / Edition 2

by Albert Hofstadter, Richard Kuhns

Overview

This anthology is remarkable not only for the selections themselves, among which the Schelling and the Heidegger essays were translated especially for this volume, but also for the editors' general introduction and the introductory essays for each selection, which make this volume an invaluable aid to the study of the powerful, recurrent ideas concerning art, beauty, critical method, and the nature of representation. Because this collection makes clear the ways in which the philosophy of art relates to and is part of general philosophical positions, it will be an essential sourcebook to students of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226348124
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/15/1976
Series:	Phoenix Books
Edition description:	1
Pages:	728
Sales rank:	649,271
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.90(d)

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CHAPTER 1

PLATO

Plato, the greatest literary artist among philosophers, is the founder of philosophical aesthetics. In his dialogues the central problems of philosophy of art are set out, explored, and resolved according to a metaphysics that has had the most profound influence on Western thought. Plato's writings are not systematic, and there is much in them that is tentative and suggestive, yet they are full of wonderful insights, and when taken as a whole, a clear philosophy of beauty and art emerges from them.

The selections here emphasize four themes: 1) the generic idea of art, techne, whose principle is measure; 2) the special concept of imitative art, mimesis, its aim and its deficiencies; 3) the concept of poetic inspiration, enthusiasm, or madness, or mania, as a necessary condition for poetic creativity; 4) the concept of erotic madness and its connection with the vision of Beauty. The extent to which these themes can be integrated is a conclusion the reader must draw for himself.

1) Art, conceived generally as techne, presupposes a knowing and a making: knowing the end to be aimed at and the best means for achieving the end. When a maker commands his art he can judge the excellence of his product according to his insight into proportion and measure. Fundamentally, then, the artist must, if he is to work well, know the nature of Measure (metron, Philebus 64 e). Basic to any one art is the art of measure without which there can be no art at all. For to know the proper length of a speech, the proper proportion of a painting, the proper distribution of functions in a society, the proper organization of language in a poem, is to command the art of measurement. Measure for Plato embraces the principles of the good and the beautiful, and in our terms the principle of taste as well.

2) Among the arts, the highest is that of the divine maker (the Demiurgos) who composed the universe as an imitation of Ideas or unchanging Forms. Like him, the statesman, most exalted of human makers, envisages the human community according to the Ideas of justice, the good, courage, temperance, and the beautiful. Within the state the various arts are practiced likewise as imitations of an external order of existence but the literary artist or the plastic artist, unlike the Demiurgos and the statesman, may fail to know the ultimate reality and instead present the mere appearance of perceivable nature. Therefore his art comes under the critical purview of the ruling statesman who exercises his legislative art in controlling the production and use of what we today would call the fine arts. While Plato distrusts the writer of dramas and would deny him a chorus, he sees an important role for the other literary arts as long as they are controlled by the vision of education which the philosopher possesses. There must be true imitation (eikastike) and not false imitation (phantastike) as Plato says in the Sophist. The determination of what is fit and what is unfit imitation depends upon the moral ends of the polis.

3) Yet there is something in imitative art that is different from, and not reducible to, techne. The poet is inspired, a winged, holy thing, filled with the power of the divine, hence mad in a noble way far above ordinary knowledge and consciousness. It is this possession which enables him to achieve the authentically artistic that is more than techne. Conscious, rational intellect cannot reduce this to a rule, nor can the man who commands techne raise himself to the genuinely poetic without divine assistance. (Cf., Phaedrus 245; Ion, 533-5.)

4) This poetic madness is but one of four types of madness: prophetic, initiatory, poetic, and erotic (Phaedrus 244 and 265 ff.). Such madness relates men to the gods and to the beauty of the eternal realm they inhabit. The vision of the beautiful described in the Symposium is possible only through the erotic longing of the lover, who is driven by the needs of his soul to contemplate the unchanging form of beauty. Poetic madness relates the poet to his muse, erotic madness relates the individual to his special divinity with its special form of beauty. But there is also, Plato implies by his picture of Socrates, a philosophic madness without which the philosopher could never produce his special kind of imitation, the city of his vision, represented in the Republic. In short, all making is a kind of imitation; all that the gods or men may create is the re-presentation of a vision in a material medium. Only the man who understands the fundamental principle of measure can judge which imitations are worthy, which debased. The arts of literature and painting are therefore properly subordinate to a generic principle of judgment, and the needs of the human community control the divine inspirations of art.

THE ARTS AND MEASURE

A fundamental principle which defines art is "measure," by which Plato means the determination of appropriate relationships through knowledge of proportion and of the mean.

FROM Statesman (283-285)

Stranger. Let us begin by considering the whole nature of excess and defect, and then we shall have a rational ground on which we may praise or blame too much length or too much shortness in discussions of this kind.

Young Socrates. Let us do so.

Str. The points on which I think that we ought to dwell are the following: —

Y. Soc. What?

Str. Length and shortness, excess and defect; with all of these the art of measurement is conversant.

Y. Soc. Yes.

Str. And the art of measurement has to be divided into two parts, with a view to our present purpose.

Y. Soc. Where would you make the division?

Str. As thus: I would make two parts, one having regard to the relativity of greatness and smallness to each other; and there is another, without which the existence of production would be impossible.

Y. Soc. What do you mean?

Str. Do you not think that it is only natural for the greater to be called greater with reference to the less alone, and the less less with reference to the greater alone?

Y. Soc. Yes.

Str. Well, but is there not also something exceeding and exceeded by the principle of the mean, both in speech and action, and is not this a reality, and the chief mark of difference between good and bad men?

Y. Soc. Plainly.

Str. Then we must suppose that the great and small exist and are discerned in both these ways, and not, as we were saying before, only relatively to one another, but there must also be another comparison of them with the mean or ideal standard; would you like to hear the reason why?

Y. Soc. Certainly.

[284] Str. If we assume the greater to exist only in relation to the less, there will never be any comparison of either with the mean.

Y. Soc. True.

Str. And would not this doctrine be the ruin of all the arts and their creations; would not the art of the Statesman and the aforesaid art of weaving disappear? For all these arts are on the watch against excess and defect, not as unrealities, but as real evils, which occasion a difficulty in action; and the excellence of beauty of every work of art is due to this observance of measure.

Y. Soc. Certainly.

Str. But if the science of the Statesman disappears, the search for the royal science will be impossible.

Y. Soc. Very true.

Str. Well, then, as in the case of the Sophist we extorted the inference that not-being had an existence, because here was the point at which the argument eluded our grasp, so in this we must endeavour to show that the greater and less are not only to be measured with one another, but also have to do with the production of the mean; for if this is not admitted, neither a statesman nor any other man of action can be an undisputed master of his science.

Y. Soc. Yes, we must certainly do again what we did then.

Str. But this, Socrates, is a greater work than the other, of which we only too well remember the length. I think, however, that we may fairly assume something of this sort: — Y. Soc. What?

Str. That we shall some day require this notion of a mean with a view to the demonstration of absolute truth; meanwhile, the argument that the very existence of the arts must be held to depend on the possibility of measuring more or less, not only with one another, but also with a view to the attainment of the mean, seems to afford a grand support and satisfactory proof of the doctrine which we are maintaining; for if there are arts, there is a standard of measure, and if there is a standard of measure, there are arts; but if either is wanting, there is neither.

Y. Soc. True; and what is the next step?

Str. The next step clearly is to divide the art of measurement into two parts, as we have said already, and to place in the one part all the arts which measure number, length, depth, breadth, swiftness with their opposites; and to have another part in which they are measured with the mean, and the fit, and the opportune, and the due, and with all those words, in short, which denote a mean or standard removed from the extremes.

Y. Soc. Here are two vast divisions, embracing two very different spheres.

Str. There are many accomplished men, Socrates, who say, believing [285] themselves to speak wisely, that the art of measurement is universal, and has to do with all things. And this means what we are now saying; for all things which come within the province of art do certainly in some sense partake of measure. But these persons, because they are not accustomed to distinguish classes according to real forms, jumble together two widely different things, relation to one another, and to a standard, under the idea that they are the same, and also fall into the converse error of dividing other things not according to their real parts. Whereas the right way is, if a man has first seen the unity of things, to go on with the enquiry and not desist until he has found all the differences contained in it which form distinct classes; nor again should he be able to rest contented with the manifold diversities which are seen in a multitude of things until he has comprehended all of them that have any affinity within the bounds of one similarity and embraced them within the reality of a single kind. But we have said enough on this head, and also of excess and defect; we have only to bear in mind that two divisions of the art of measurement have been discovered which are concerned with them, and not forget what they are.

* * *

IMITATIVE ART

Definition and Criticism

The famous passages in The Republic on art are addressed to the definition of imitation, its meaning and its inadequacy as a criterion. In the Sophist two kinds of imitation are distinguished. Two passages from the Laws help us to understand the competition between the poet and the philosopher, which Plato sees as an inevitable part of the confusion about imitation.

FROM The Republic

(376-402, with omissions; 595-608, with omissions) BOOK II

(Socrates, narrating his discussion with Adeimantus first and then Glaucon)

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

By all means.

And what shall be their education? Can we find a better than the traditional sort? — and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul.

True.

Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards?

By all means.

And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?

I do.

And literature may be either true or false?

Yes.

And the young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin 377 with the false?

I do not understand your meaning, he said.

You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn gymnastics.

Very true.

That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before gymnastics.

Quite right, he said.

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

Quite true.

And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

We cannot.

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.

Of what tales are you speaking? he said.

You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.

Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater.

Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.

But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them?

A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.

But when is this fault committed?

Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes, — as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.

Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what are the stories which you mean?

First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies, in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie [378] too, — I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him. The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common [Eleusinian] pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few indeed.

Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.

Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.

I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are quite unfit to be repeated.

Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true. No, we shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives. If they would only believe us we would tell them that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old woman should begin by telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also should be told to compose for them in a similar spirit. But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer — these tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such models to be found and of what tales are you speaking — how shall we answer him?

I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not [379] poets, but founders of a State: now the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their business.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Plato
The Arts and Measure
(Selections from Statesman)
Imitative Art: Definition and Criticism
(Selections from The Republic, Sophist, Laws)
Artistic Inspiration
(Selections from Ion, Phaedrus)
The Love of Beauty
(Selections from Symposium)
Aristotle
What Is Art?
(Selections from Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics)
Translated by W. D. Ross
Coming-to-Be and Artistic Production: Nature and Art
(Selections from Parts of Animals, Physics, and Metaphysics)
Translated by William Ogle, R. P. Hardie, and R. K. Gaye
Standard of Artistic Goodness
(Selections from Nicomachean Ethics)
Translated by W. D. Ross
Beauty
(Selections from Metaphysics, Rhetoric)
Translated by W. D. Ross, W. Rhys Roberts
The Imitative Art of Poetry
(Selections from Poetics, Rhetoric)
Translated by Ingram Bywater, W. Rhys Roberts
Theory of Music
(Selections from Politics)
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Plotinus
Ennead I, Sixth Tractate: Beauty
Ennead V, Eighth Tractate: On the Intellectual Beauty
Selections from Ennead VI, Seventh Tractate: Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms
Selections from Ennead III, Eight Tractate: Nature, Contemplation, and the One
Translated by Stephen MacKenna
Augustine
Selections from De Ordine
Translated by Robert P. Russell
Selections from De Musica
Redaction and Translation by W. F. Jackson Knight
Marsilio Ficino
Selections from Commentary on Plato's Symposium
Translated by Sears Reynolds Jayne
Shaftesbury
Selections from Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times . . .
Selections from Second Characters or the Language of Forms
Immanuel Kant
Selections from Critique of Judgment
Translated by J. H. Bernard
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
Selections from System of Transcendental Idealism
Translated by Albert Hofstadter
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Selections from The Philosophy of Fine Art
Translated by F. P. B. Osmaston
Arthur Schopenhauer
Selections from The World as Will and Idea
Translated by R. B. Haldane J. Kemp
Friedrich Nietzsche
Selections from The Birth of Tragedy
Translated by Clifton P. Fadiman
Benedetto Croce
Selections from "Aesthetics" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fourteenth Edition)
John Dewey
Selections from Art as Experience
Martin Heidegger
The Origin of the Work of Art
Translated by Albert Hofstadter