topics: |  philosophy | aesthetics | reference | art

Plato's Republic

[Republic: Art has a pedagogical function; only virtues; Propaganda]
It is not sufficient, however, that the young read the works of ‘good
poets’. While Plato consistently praises Homer as a fine poet, in the
Republic he proposes ruthless censorship of Homer’s works. Gods and heroes
must not be represented as cowardly, despairing, deceitful, ruled by their
appetites, or committing crimes: hence the excision of many well-known scenes
from the Iliad and Odyssey. A good fiction is one which (though false or
invented) correctly represents reality and impresses a good character on its
audience. Plato seems untroubled by the thought that an accurate
representation of the way human beings behave in battle or in love could fail
to impress the best character on its recipients. Is truthful representation
or ethical effect the higher criterion? At one point Plato suggests it is the
latter: some violent mythical tales are not true, and should not be told to
the young even if they were (Republic 378a). p.4

[Also, acting (mimesis) goes against the thesis of the Republic that
everyone should be a specialist performing only one role, w emphasis on _The
Guardians_.  Good acting would cause one to become a bit like the person
depicted.
Book 10: Poetry, and all image forming, because it is a kind of mimesis,
cannot be good in an ideal state.  ]

[Aristotle responds to Plato's condemnation of poetry.  Only his Poetics
survives, that too in the fragment dealing with tragedy:

	  Tragedy is the mimesis of a serious and complete action of some
	  magnitude; in language embellished in various ways in its different
	  parts; in dramatic, not narrative form; achieving, through pity and
	  fear, the catharsis of such passions (Poetics 1449b:24–28).

Aristotle puts catharsis at the end of his definition, and that closing
clause is his customary place for stating the purpose or goal of a thing.
Moreover, in Politics VIII he speaks of the catharsis that music and poetry
bring... 17
[several pages of debate over the meaning of Gk katharsis; majority view -
medical cleansing, purgation, flushing out. ]

[Aristotle:] Beauty is a real property of things. 24
... Kant distinguished between the beautiful and the good on the grounds that
the former is perceived directly, while ‘good’ always means ‘good for’
something, and must be evaluated relative to a goal. 24

One of the commonest beliefs about art is that it is essentially a form of
expression, and what is more, the expression of feeling.
Tolstoy in What is Art?:
    art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by
    means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived
    through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also
    experience them.

MUSIC: expressive (post 1850, romantic period) and that which is not... The
Art of Fugue by J. S. Bach is a work of great genius, but it is far more
readily interpreted as a kind of mathematics in sound than as an outpouring
or embodiment of feeling.

- Gordon Graham, Art as "Expressivisim", p.119