Plato’s Aesthetics Reconsidered

Plato's Aesthetics Reconsidered I F. H. Anderson Writers full of metaphysics -and sometimes void of a sense of poetry--construe Plato's philosophy as an aesthetical ontology in which beauty is made equivalent to goodness and truth. Those who elaborate cognitive theories of art quote his works with approval. Experts in criticism-innocent of the complications of philosophy-say he has no aesthetics at all, that his absorption in moral and mathematical principles renders him blind to poetic truth and lacking in concern with poetry's forms and origins. Others again contend that whatever Plato thinks worthy in the fine arts is either inconsistent with his metaphysics or rendered otiose by considerations of a Divine or Transcendental Beauty subsisting beyond human use and practice. To give point to certain of these contentions we can do no better than quote a remark or two of F. P. Chambers in his Cycles of Taste. After contrasting what he calls the "anaemic Aristotelianism" of the Middle Ages with "the full-blooded aesthetics which was to mark the Renaissance ," Chambers comments, Probably the nearest approach to a doctrine of Beauty in the Middle Ages was the Neo~Platonic treatise of Dionysius the Areopagite, On Divine Names, which achieved so extraordinary a popularity in all the learned circles of Europe. It represented Beauty as one of the Divine names, but ipso facto that Beauty had no more to do with aesthetic Beauty than Plato's idea of moral Beauty aforetime. ... The Middle Ages must be recognized as an era when formal beauty in Fine Art, a self-conscious thought or act, did not exist. While we are not concerned with the nature of mediaeval aesthetics these remarks will serve to bring into focus two of the main causes from which proceed much of the derogation of Plato's teachings on art and beauty. These are, first, the assumption that Plato's aesthetics is 425 426 F. H. ANDERSON the conviction that the of he writes is to an attribute of God in a HebraicoChristian and an Aristotelian mf:tal)h,rsic:s. with the second. Aristotle defined the mClet.:)enae][u science throu~w no mE~thj[)d()loJgtcal relation between these and the boundaries of the two bodies of which had to do respec~tiv'elv with nature and with art. was made convertible and Goodness. The three of Transcendentals removed h ...';1"'14./1 catego1ric.aI d4esclriotion in terms of such pn~dij:atles space, active and n ..,"lI'h·'l"t" of human art. Certain ........u;u................ thf~o]()2i:ms came with the made known in Revelation cOIlvelrtibles, _""'....Inrl'......... Truth and-someThus lr~L~I~en.deIltrum from to nature and human works. As Chambers mdicates, two beauties was not COlnIlJlOnl1i prullos:op,nlC age. philoslDP1:ters of a For Plato is a different It is not comparto a Narne or an Attribute of the mcmo,thf:istic God of Christian tradition. It is not entlDc:iate~d as is set its author to be some.. common to the natures and actions of both men and As an of and desire it is attained man a love which ranges unbroken the human to the divine. 'When Plato in his describes this love as the of the ~~rni-inivini1h1 Eros and the life of as a choral ritual in which the do and men may, on behold feed upon re,m[]tes. he is not between divine and those of nature and art but-after the fasbion of his COJlltemt)Orariies-nrlJllgu :lg the two into co-orclin~ltion. The other contention in error~ that Plato makes a ...."'L..U,..'.................. practIc(~s "'.....l.."""·t'ttl.........t' to ethical goes back to the when masters and scholars found it necessary to defend the strictures of moral and authors. The error has been pelrpetuated tnrou~m academic persons more to ethical exhortation than aesthetic reflection. The lack of aesthetical among them itself in an all too common refusal to construe Plato's COIlcel0t PLATO'S AESTHETICS RECONSIDERED 427 to kalon. This term they will translate by any other word than beauty, which it means, if the alternative may conceivably be put into...