I thought this may be useful since it outlines the basic view of the ancient
greeks and their view on emotions vs intellect. Its actually an unedited
version for school, but it may prove to be useful in understanding the
grander scheme of things going on in the MOQ.
We can all agree that society is full of imitation. Imitation makes up a
great deal of our daily lives, and usually the true nature of this
'imitation' goes unnoticed. The art world is undisputedly the focal point
of this imitation, and also of innovation - but innovation must be based on
a context, and that context is usually derived from imitation. We can all
agree that the foundation of art is rooted in imitation, however, the way we
perceive imitation can go a long way in determining what sense of art we
have. As with most issues in the public eye today, we usually hear about
two opposing sides; pro and con. In this case we have the artists and their
supporters, versus the censors, or those representing the bourgeois. What
many people do not know, is that this cerebral war has been continuing over
many centuries. The earliest and most popular example is from the ancient
Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle, and while they both agreed that art was
a form of imitation, the way it was an imitation separated their viewpoints
and led them to opposing sides on the very value of art itself. This battle
has continued among intellectuals throughout the centuries, and one of the
more recent thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre, seems to take a more Aristotelian
understanding of the nature of art, rather than a Neo-Platonist point of
view. This may or may not be an indication of things to come, but to the
well-versed historian/philosopher, the current battle of artists versus the
censors is just a variation of this original debate.
If art is an imitation, then it's an imitation of what? Plato would say it
is an imitation of the ideal, as he elaborated on mainly in the Republic.
What is the ideal, you may ask? The ideal is the perfect, uncontaminated
concept as it occurs in thought. In Plato's opinion, every artist is
striving to duplicate this ideal, however there are always flaws and human
error, therefore nothing can reach the perfection of that which is the
original idea. Every object that you identify around you is also an
imitation of an ideal. For how else would you identify it, if you didn't
have the idea of the perfect instance of it? To put it in more modern
terminology, if you were to see a cat, how would you know it's a cat? Plato
thought that it's because there is a universal CAT, and all cats are
imitations of this perfect CAT idea. The same is true of trees. How would
you be able to point out a tree, if you didn't have a mental understanding
of a TREE in your mind? The 'tree' would be the object you were pointing
out, the TREE is the idea you were comparing the 'tree' to, in the attempt
to identify an otherwise peculiar object. 'TREE' is the universal and
'tree' is the particular. Plato separated the realm of universals and the
world of particulars and called them the world of Ideas and the world of
Form respectively. This was meant to designate the world of thought, and
separate it from the world of phenomena. If Plato designated the world of
Ideas as such, then he must have an Idea of the world of ideas, and if I
have an idea of the Idea of the world of ideas, then it logically follows
that this could potentially continue ad infinitum. He failed to address
this specifically. Let's assume however, that Plato's theory stands, and if
the phenomenal world, which is filled with particulars, is simply a
replication of the 'perfect' Idea, then what did he think of art, which is
supposed to be an imitation in itself? He thought simply, that art was an
imitation of an imitation and therefore twice removed from reality, or
separated two times from the world of Ideas. For instance, if a painter
paints a landscape, then his painting is an imitation of the landscape that
is an imitation of the Ideal landscape, which occurs only in thought. If
this is true, then art is essentially meaningless fluff. However, Plato was
well aware of the power of art to invoke emotions, and people in ancient
Greece seemed to willingly suspend disbelief in order to be put in the
throes of the artist's vision of reality. The next step then, would be to
ask himself; would this be beneficial to me, or detrimental? His answer was
that it would be almost certainly detrimental. The reason for this is
because emotions, being one of the most mysterious and most overpowering
phenomena that can occur in relation to a thinking person, tends to cloud
judgement, to blur the rational objective. If Plato was to be rational,
then he could be rational only in the absence of these deterring emotions.
Therefore, art was a threat to realising himself as a rational human being,
and in the 'ideal state', there would be no art - or only art that served to
further the goals of the Republic would be allowed.
Plato's one time pupil, Aristotle, had a different conception of imitation
- although he agreed that art was a form of imitation as well. Aristotle
presented his ideas first in the Politics and the Poetics. Although he
agreed with Plato that the mind can be divided into the rational and
irrational, he disagreed with him in which one should be pursued. He felt
that the irrational is just as necessary as the rational, and therefore one
should seek a unity between the two, instead of concentrating on one. With
this in mind, he felt that art could further the potential unity of the two
which would be intellectually and emotionally desirable. Experience then,
can be considered a potentiality, and because no one can conceive of a
moment in its entirety, shaping experience into a form would be realising
the potentiality and turning it into an actuality. It would be an actuality
because it gives meaning (by focus) to an otherwise meaningless, indefinable
"chaos". He thought, that in order to give form to something derived from
experience, one must include relevant things and leave out irrelevant or
incommunicable aspects. Therefore, the artist is shaping an otherwise
meaningless reality into a meaningful one, and one that can be relayed to a
specific audience. Giving reality and/or a set of experiences a form allows
the artist to cause certain reactions among the audience, and whatever
reactions he may desire. Aristotle was fundamentally concerned with poetic
tragedies that aroused and invoked emotional responses, and thought it would
be the ideal example of the power of art. Plato thought that emotions were
harmful to pure rationality, which he figured was a logical end to strive
for. As we have leaned before, Aristotle thought Plato had no arguable
basis for assuming that the irrational part of Being was detrimental, since
Aristotle perceives these two aspects as a whole. Therefore, Aristotle
concluded that emotions were part of the human condition, and therefore
necessary to form the complete human being. Aristotle then assumed that
emotional arousal is beneficial to understanding and purifying the emotions,
and furthermore an aspect of the Self. Through what he called katharsis,
emotions that are otherwise "pent-up" are allowed out, to cleanse and purify
the whole. He specifically cites fear and pity as necessary in the
successful tragedy. In his point of view, the tragedy invokes an emotion,
controls it, directs it (through empathy or some equivalent) and eventually
nullifies it. Through this process, parts of the human character which may
otherwise be manifesting in dormancy are allowed out in a controlled,
non-destructive way, and may serve the Self intellectually, as these
emotions may be deconstructed and/or rationalised creating a unity which is
uniquely attributed to art. In this way, emotions and intellect are
harmoniously combined, this is regarded as a positive end by Aristotle, and
as it logically follows, art must be a positive means.
The similarity between Aristotle and Sartre is rooted in Aristotle's
theory of katharsis, and the method of engagement between artist and
audience. Additionally, Sartre also agrees with the assumption that art is
an imitation, but in a much more complex way. In his essay, What is
Literature? Sartre alludes to the responsibility of the artist as perhaps a
"guardian of ideals", that is, ideals that can be found in everyday life and
is a part of the human condition. Therefore, by imitation, these ideals can
be relayed to an audience in a way that invokes emotion. Aristotle thought
that the invocation of emotion was necessary since it is a way for the
artist to "capture" the audiences attention and make them more open to other
motives the artist may have in mind, particularly the realisation of a moral
responsibility that the artist has. Sartre acknowledges this, but he feels
the most important question is "for whom does one write"? The following
explanation is an attempt to clarify this. His first relation, which he
cites as an integral one, is the relation of artist and audience - similar
to what Aristotle explained. The artist, giving form to experience, is
offering this form to the audience, which Sartre calls an "act of
generosity". All the feelings that are invoked by the artist's creation is
"changing" the audience, or more precisely, making "particular modulations"
of their freedom. "Freedom" is used because Sartre views the audience's
relation with the artist as a "free dream". Sartre also calls these
"modulations" as a form of accessing a totality of being. Therefore, the
audience is engaging in a "wilful suspension of disbelief", or an act of
faith, in order to be "modified" (however minutely) by the artist's work.
So it is a free act on the part of the audience, as well as a free act of
generosity on the part of the artist who is presenting his/her work to the
audience. It is in this mutual act that the audience is compromised by the
task that the artist is presenting to them. The method in which this works,
and Sartre uses the novel as an example -- as Aristotle used the poetic
tragedy,
is through a presentation of the means to end. In other words, this process
must be a "becoming", much like Aristotle used "form" in describing the
shape of a story. It cannot work, for example, if this entire becoming was
to be compressed into one overwhelming moment, for the audience would get
nothing out of it, except perhaps confusion - partly because life and its
trials and tribulations does not work like one crushing point in time.
Through a "becoming" one is able to define a moral imperative from an
aesthetic one, realise it's promises, its potentiality and its actuality,
even perhaps in the sense of its impact on the viewer. And it is through a
becoming, and the aforementioned characteristics, that the audience's state
of being is compromised. Throughout this explanation of Sartre's conception
of the relationship between artist and audience, one word and its related
synonyms repeatedly arise and that is freedom. Most importantly, the
necessary freedom of artist and audience. Therefore, Sartre has deduced
that freedom is the most important aspect in this relationship and is the
underlying imperative for any work of art to succeed. By the audience
allowing themselves to be compromised, the artist's form becomes meaning,
and the theory of katharsis is realised.
The focal point, or ground zero of these viewpoints is the nature of
imitation. What imitation inevitably creates, is a conception of what has
come to be known as "normality". Anything that deviates from this central
conception is pigeonholed as "fringe culture". The catch, and there usually
is one, is that society operates like an organism, and in this sense acts
like the white blood cells that try to destroy foreign bodies in the
blood-stream. That, in the process of defining and consciously or not
trying to destroy the deviant, it doesn't realise that normality is a
deviant itself, in more ways than one. In fact normality is merely a
concept, and doesn't actually exist, much like our concepts of "yesterday"
and "tomorrow". This is a profound question that the fringe-culture is
raising, and what is happening in the modern struggle of the Aristotelian
perspective and the Neo-Platonist one.
As history has made apparent, every century rebels against the last -
previously in the Victorian era, one can find traces of a more rigid
interpretation of Platonism in imitation and the subsequent works of art.
However, World War I led to a profound change, due to many happenings, and a
rebellion surfaced against rigid order and the limited conception of
imitation that sprung out of it. Perhaps that is why the Aristotelian
concept is favoured by the majority of intellectuals in this present cycle,
and Aristotle's rigid scientific class-system is not. Is there a right and
wrong? This question may be at the very root of this struggle itself.
END
Thanks for the attention, I hope this proved useful
Nishant Taneja
http://www.mp3.com/atomicbuddha
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