ELEPHANT TO MARCO (DEFENDING PLATO):
MARCO WROTE:
> Plato's point about art
> was that it is "mimesis" (imitation) of reality. Reality is truth, and art is
> merely its copy. Aristotle's point was that it's possible to reach the truth
> by means of the logic.
>
> In both visions, the Good becomes a frill.
ELEPHANT:
A "frill"? I think not. In Aristotle's case, perhaps. But Plato had more
than just the one "point about art". Plato's theory of art is deep and
complex, centrally fixed around the very Prisigian idea that 'good' is a
noun: "Good is what every soul pursues and for which it ventures
everything"[republic 505e]. Everything. Both the 'intellectual' and the
merely 'artistic'. Iris Murdoch's discussion with Bryan Maggee does some
justice to Plato's thought here (originally broadcast on the BBC and now the
accessible introduction to the extensive collection of papers
*Existentialists and Mystics*, ISBN 0140264922). I recommend that you read
this, because it also sheds some light on the central issues for MOQers.
Murdoch spent most of her career thinking about just the issue which first
set Prisig going when he was a literature master: what is good art, and what
is it about good art that makes it good?
Firstly, there is Roger's attempt to define of "intellectual" as distinct
from "art" (or atleast 'intellectual' as a sharply identifiable subset of
art). Mudoch has this to say on the distinction between Art and Philosophy:
"Philosophy aims to clarify and to explain, it states and attempts to solve
very difficult highly technical problems and the writing must be subserviant
to this aim. One might say that bad philosophy is not philosophy, whereas
bad art is still art...... Literature entertains, it does many things, and
philosophy does one thing."
Well, Roger, is this functional distinction between Art and Philosophy
anything like your distinction between art and intellect? (I would read
'philosophy' here as including 'natural philosophy').
Murdoch allows for the fact that certain works can be both literary and
philosophical, both art and intellectual, but stresses the enormous rarity
and difficulty of this. For, in art, what we are primarily concerned with
is the creation of some definite overt form and shape, "thingyness" Murdoch
calls it, whereas in Philosophy, a thorough intellectual investigation can
lead us down endless sidetracks and in various kinds of informative or
uninformative circles, conspiring against the feeling of completion and
"thingyness". Because doing philosophy is taking static patterns and
criticising them anew in the light of some requirement outside those habits,
the philosophical work is never ending, in a way in which the working of a
story or a picture is not - making it hard to impose a dramatic structure on
intellectual inquiry (indeed such structure would often make people
suspicious that the inquiry has been interfered with by artistic
considerations).
But dramatic form is attractive to Philosophers, as a way of letting
people know when we have got to some kind of end. This is a challenge which
literary philosophers like Plato and Prisig have met in their own ways. In
Prisig's case, the separation between the artistic form and the intellectual
content remains fairly clear, and actually that's rather like Plato's
dialogues too. We have a certain amount of scene setting, where the Art can
feed some themes into the intellectual discussion, but the real business at
hand progresses quite independantly, and in directions undictated by the
dramatic context: the intellectual meat in the artistic sandwich.
Secondly, there is the Dynamic/Static distinction, which Murdoch thinks
about with reference to Hume on the importance of Habit and Convention:
"Philosophy disturbs the mass of semi-aesthetic conceptual habits on which
we normally rely. Hume said that even the philosopher, when he leaves his
study, falls back upon these habitual assumptions.... philosophy is not a
kind of scientific pursuit [which must rely on atleast some habits/static
patterns], and anyone who resorts to science is falling straight out of
philosphy.... "
- Murdoch conceives of philosophy as the attempt, by means of hard critical
thinking about received wisdom, to stay in touch with the aesthetic ("The
Good") *outside* of "conceptual habits" - and isn't this Prisig's Dynamic
Quality?
Third, and to come back to your comment Marco, you will find that on Plato's
supposedly singular "point about art", Iris Murdoch has this to say:
"Plato was notoriously hostile to art. As a political theorist he was
afraid of the irrational emotional power of the arts, their power to rell
attractive lies or subversive truths.... Also he was afraid of the artist
in himself.... Plato thought art was mimesis, but he thought it was bad
mimesis.."
The important and intruiguing point made by Murdoch here is that for Plato,
copy making is not the only or most notable sin in art - distortion and
corruption in that copy making is. Copies are inferior ontologically, not
artistically: in art the only available distinction is between good and bad
copies. Plato prefers intellectual Philosophy-art to 'arty' art because he
sees it as a special, more disciplined, more austere, more challenging, less
self-indulgent, less attractively dreamy kind of copy-art than, say, the
theatre. The fact that the mass of people will pay good money to attend Les
Miserables, but are unlikely to spend their evenings reading Plato, would
seem to confirm this.
Plato and the lesser variety of musical theatre are both Art. The issue
is: how far it is possible to do Art well or badly? - whether it is
possible, by a special disciplined kind of art we call "metaphysics", to
produce a 'copy' of mystical reality which, although it is necessarily some
kind of distortion ("*only* a copy" -the mystics will remind us), is
nonetheless more transparent and suggestive of that mystic reality than
other forms of art.
If this improvement in our copies isn't possible, then we really ought to
pack up and go home, starting by giving up our subsription to MOQ Discuss
right away. If we think it is possible, then we can conceive of all kinds
of good art besides intellectual metaphysics: art which is good because it
replaces mere self-enwrapped fantasy with constructive imagination, and an
honest attempt to make sense of (or 'copy') realities (including Quality,
the ultimate reality), outside of ourselves. God (or mathematics) -directed
Bach can fall into the 'good art' category with other-directed art like that
of Plato, Prisig, and a good broadway musical like *How to get ahead in
business without really trying*. Inward looking, self-indulgent Wagner can
fall into the 'bad art' category, though still remain quite a few hellfire
levels above, say, Lloyd-Webber, whose companions are the penny-dreadfuls
and airport-thrillers, hollywood blockbusters and bruce-willis vehicles:
dead static patterns to the n-th degree.
In intoducing moral judgements into the aesthetic, saying that such and such
is "bad" art, and in describing the intellectual activity of philosophy (or
indeed science) as a specific limited variety of "good" art, we invite
certain kinds of counter-arguments with which readers of Prisig will be
familiar: all of them based on the false idea that subject and object (and
so subjective and objective) precede value. As we know value comes first,
(although an attribution of value to a specific object such as the Ring
cycle remains open to argument, to dispute about taste, the only thing worth
disputing about). In Murdoch's veiw, this value-ladeness is something
essential in language itself:
"It is important to remember that language itself is a moral medium, almost
all uses of language convey value.... If we attempted to describe this room
our descriptions would naturally carry all sorts of values. Value is only
artificially and with difficulty expelled from language.... The bad writer
gives way to personal obsession and exalts some charachters and demeans
others without any concern for truth and justice, that is without any
suitable aesthetic 'explanation'. It is clear here how the idea of reality
enters into literary judgement. The good writer is the just, intelligent
judge. He justifies the placing of his characters by some sort of *work*
which he does in the book..."
- The good writer, that is, does not just present static patterns: he tries
to indicate how those patterns evolve in relation to some suggested dynamic
quality, something we can see as sought by the charachter. If character is
fate, then no charachter is well drawn unless we see what draws him
magnetically to that fate: no character is well drawn unless we can see the
(often multiform and conflicting) pull of dynamic quality in his life. This
is a concern for the specific otherness of the charachter - the charachter
is a copy of something, yes, but that something isn't just the self-serving
obsessions of the author, or the conveiniences of plot.
When we move to writing metaphysics, the same is evident. Good metaphysics
is a copy of something, the issue is: what is it a copy of? Is it a copy of
something worth copying, or a copy of something low-quality and base,
unenlightened and self-obsessed? Murdoch saw all philosophy as moral
philosphy, and this means: to do philosophy well is to pursue the moral
virtues: truthfulness, determination, and, above all, other-centeredness.
Read the introductory sections of, say, Plato's Theaetetus. Plato pays alot
of attention to what kind of person the interlocutors of his dialogues are.
Prisig too. Moral qualities aren't "off limits" here. Philosophy is a kind
of spiritual discipline, or it is not philosophy at all. Buddhists might
say similar things about their practice. So, too, might an astrophysicist.
Does any of this help on the art/intellect question?
Does it suggest an interesting common reality approached from different
angles by both Murdoch and Prisig?
Well, I think so.
Puzzled Elephant
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