Plato (427- 347 BC)

Eventually, he returned to Athens and established his own school of philosophy at the Academy. For students enrolled there, Plato tried both to pass on the heritage of a Socratic style of thinking and to guide their progress through mathematical learning to the achievement of abstract philosophical truth, the written dialogues, on which his enduring reputation rests also serve both of these aims.

Plato (427- 347 BC)

Plato believes that the world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, and that there is a more REAL and PERFECT realm that is populated by entities that are eternal.

Plato (427- 347 BC)One of the most important of

these abstract objects are goodness, equality, and BEAUTY. The most fundamental distinction in Plato’sphilosophy is between observable objects that appear BEAUTIFUL and the one object that is what BEAUTY really is, from which those many beautiful things receive their names and their corresponding characteristics.Nearly every work of Plato is devoted to or dependent on this distinction.

Plato and the Arts

• Plato had a love-hate relationship with the

arts. • He found the arts

threatening. • He thought the arts are powerful shapers

of character. Thus, the arts must be strictly

controlled.

Plato and the Arts

• Plato saw the changing

physical world as a poor, decaying

copy of a perfect, rational, eternal, and changeless

original.

Plato and the Arts

• Beauty, Justice, and The Circle are all

examples of what Plato called Forms or

Ideas. • For Plato, these Forms

are perfect Ideals, but they are also more REAL than physical

objects.

Art is powerful, and therefore dangerous 

They can strongly influence our behaviour, and even our character. For that reason Plato insisted that music, along with poetry and drama and the other arts, should be part of the education of young citizens in his ideal republic, but should be strictly censored to present, at first, only the good.

Theories on Art

Beauty

Hippias Major• For a long time scholars

treated the Hippias Major as a spurious dialogue. Today most agree that Plato wrote it. This dialogue follows Socrates and the Sophist Hippias through a

sequence of attempts to define to kalon. Socrates

badgers Hippias, in classic Socratic ways, to identify beauty's general nature;

Hippias offers three definitions.

Hippias Major• Hippias had a

reputation for his factual knowledge, but his attention to specifics and facts

renders him incapable of

generalizing to a philosophical

definition.

Hippias Three Definitions1. "For be assured, Socrates, if I must

speak the truth, a beautiful maiden is beautiful “

2. "This that you ask about, the beautiful, is nothing else but gold...

For we all know, I fancy, that wherever this is added, even what

before appears ugly will appear beautiful when adorned with gold."[

3. "I say, then, that for every man and everywhere it is most beautiful to be

rich and healthy, and honoured by the Greeks, to reach old age, and,

after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be

beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring."

Socrates Response

1.Beauty that is appropriate

2.Beauty that is useful

3.Beauty that is favourable

4.Beauty that comes from hearing and

seeing

Beauty and art• The dialogue finds beauty in

vase paintings and music; but it takes pains to prevent beauty from appearing in poetry. Republic calls the beauty of poetic lines a deceptive attractiveness. Take away the decorative language that makes a poetic sentiment sound so right and put it into ordinary words, and it becomes unremarkable, much as young people's faces beautified by youth later show themselves as the plain looks they are.

The Form of beauty

Plato sees no opposition between the pleasures that beauty brings and

the goals of philosophy. Beauty is Form enough. Philosophers meet this

beauty in an experience in which they

consummate their deepest love while also

attaining the loftiest knowledge.

Imitation

Art as an Imitation (Mimêsis )

• Plato says that art imitates the objects and

events of ordinary life. In other words, a work of

art is a copy of a copy of a Form. It is even more

of an illusion than is ordinary experience. On this theory, works of art

are, at best, entertainment, and at

worst a dangerous delusion.

Art as an Imitation

• The idea of the artist as divinely inspired, or

even possessed, has also persisted to the

present day. Some of our most common art

vocabulary derives from this idea.

Problems with the Imitation Theory

• It is at least plausible as a theory about

representational painting, drawing and sculpture;

and it can be stretched to fit some abstract work, as

in the case of Brancusi and Mondrian., but even

with such work it leaves a lot out. Pollock drip paintings? Music?

Impersonation