By Alison E. Denham
This specific choice of essays offers a number of points of Plato's perspectives on artwork and sweetness, not just within the Republic yet within the Ion, Phaedrus, Symposium, legislation and comparable dialogues. the choice goals to handle a consultant variety of concerns together with the ethical prestige of tune and visible artwork, the attract of creative and sensual good looks, censorship, the family members among aesthetic and ethical feelings, fact and deception in artwork, and the competition among philosophy and poetry. The essays aren't completely interpretive, even though a few (such as these through G. R. F. Ferrari, Jessica Moss and C. D. C. Reeve) are shut scholarly readings of particular dialogues. Others authors, together with M. F. Burnyeat and Stephen Halliwell, goal to find Plato's considering on paintings and wonder inside of wider controversies in ethics, politics and aesthetics. a standard thread uniting them is their appreciation of the level to which definite of Plato's texts are contributions to aesthetic and ethical psychology, up to routines in metaphysics and epistemology.
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Example text
By these criteria Tolstoy was quite prepared to dismiss almost all his own work as bad. Tolstoy particularly detested opera. Plato would have detested it too. Complex or ‘grand’ art affects us in ways we do not understand, and even the artist has no insight into his own activity, as Socrates says with sympathetic interest in the Apology and airy ridicule in the Ion. Plato distinguishes between very simple permissible beauty in art, and beauty in nature which, as I shall explain, he regards as very important.
D. Ross says that ‘Plato is no doubt in error in supposing that the purpose of art is to produce illusion’ (1976, 78). In fact Plato’s view of art as illusion is positive and complex. indd 18 1/23/2012 10:06:47 AM From The Fire and the Sun 19 ‘in images’. But images must be kept within a fruitful hierarchy of spiritual endeavour. What the artist produces are ‘wandering images’. In this context one might even accuse art of specializing in the degradation of good desires, since the trick of the aesthetic veil enables the good to descend.
Socrates finally consoles Ion by allowing that it must then be by divine inspiration (θείᾳ μοίρᾳ) that he discerns the merits of the great poet. Plato does not suggest in detail that Homer himself ‘does not know what he is talking about’, although he speaks in general terms of the poet as ‘nimble, winged, and holy’, and unable to write unless he is out of his senses. He confines his attack here to the secondary artist, the actor-critic; and in fact nowhere alleges that Homer made specific mistakes about chariots (and so on).
