Art and Truth after Plato

TOM ROCKMORE is the McAnulty College Distinguised Professor and professor of philosophy at Duquesne University and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Institute of Foreign Philosophy at Peking University. He is the author of many books, most recently Before and After 9/11: A Philosophical Examination of Globalization, Terror, and History and Kant and Phenomenology, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04002-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04016-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rockmore, Tom, 1942– author.

Art and truth after Plato / Tom Rockmore.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-04002-8 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-04016-5 (e-book)

1. Mimesis in art.  2. Imitation in art.  3. Truthfulness and falsehood in art.  4. Aesthetics.  5. Art—Philosophy.  I. Title.

N72.7.R63 2013

701.'17—dc23

2013000806

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Art and Truth after Plato

TOM ROCKMORE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. Plato and Platonism on Poetry, Art, and Truth

CHAPTER 2. Aristotle on the Theory of Forms, Imitative Poetry, and Art in General

CHAPTER 3. Art and the Transcendent; or, Christian Platonic and Anti-Platonic Art

CHAPTER 4. Kant and German Idealist Aesthetics

CHAPTER 5. Hegel on Art and Spiritual Truth

CHAPTER 6. Marx, Marxism, and Aesthetic Realism

CHAPTER 7. On the Theory and Practice of Aesthetic Representation in the Twentieth Century

Notes

Index

Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they.

PLATO, Republic 508D9–E3

Introduction

This book addresses anew the old question, often neglected in contemporary aesthetic debates, about art and truth, or art and cognition. This theme is now rarely examined, in part because of the assumption that the question was resolved long ago. A central thesis of this book is that, on the contrary, the question has never been resolved, that in a sense Plato has never been satisfactorily answered, and that taken as a whole the later Western aesthetic tradition counts as an ongoing effort to formulate a successful anti-Platonic analysis of art and art objects of the most varied kinds. Early in the Western tradition, Plato focused on the relation of art and truth in inventing an early form of aesthetics. There is little attention to the Platonic view that philosophers, who alone know reality, are the true artists, but the Platonic attack on artistic representation has been hugely influential in Western aesthetics. The post-Platonic Western aesthetic tradition can be read as a series of responses to the Platonic attack on the relation of art and truth.

The perennial aesthetic theme of art and truth can be introduced by a reference in an account of pictorial representation by E. H. Gombrich. Gombrich, who refers to a painting by George Inness entitled The Lackawanna Valley, commissioned in 1855 to advertise the railway, notes that at the time there was only a single track running in the roundhouse, but US president Franklin Pierce insisted on having four or five painted in since they would eventually be built. According to Gombrich the terms true and false applicable to statements and propositions do not apply to pictures, which cannot be in the same way. It follows that the lie was not in the picture, but in the claim to give accurate information about the railway’s roundhouses.

Gombrich, who believes that disregard of this simple fact leads to confusion in aesthetics,¹ is unconcerned with representational verisimilitude. He thinks the information that pictures are intended to communicate is a historical variable and that in any case an artist must always begin with an idea or concept.² Gombrich’s view identifies a historical approach to the relationship of art and truth running throughout the entire Western tradition. This relationship is only sometimes evoked, and rarely discussed in detail. It is, for instance, passed over in silence in Richard Eldridge’s recent introduction to the philosophy of art.³ It is mentioned more recently by Harold Pinter, the English writer, as well as by Noel Carroll and by Joseph Margolis. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Pinter examines the relationship between art, politics, and truth.⁴ Carroll identifies three arguments against the view that art has cognitive value. His basic claim is that artworks connect what we know with what we do not know⁵ and function as arguments.⁶ Margolis objects several times to the Kantian thesis that art does not yield knowledge.⁷

The origins of this problem lie in ancient Greek philosophy. The same ancient Greek tradition that proposes the link between the true, the good, and the beautiful also calls it into question. Plato, on some accounts the first great figure in the Western aesthetic tradition, criticizes the familiar ancient Greek imitative approach to art in denying that art is either true or good. The later Western aesthetic tradition can be read as a related series of responses to Plato proposing various analyses of the relation of art and truth. Plato’s view of the relation of art and truth follows from his theory of knowledge, especially from the notorious theory of forms. Hence the stakes in this debate are aesthetic as well as epistemological, focusing on the work of art as well as the question of knowledge.

Aesthetic imitation is a form of representation often enlisted to cognize the mind-independent real. This epistemological effort, which appears in the Western tradition as early as Parmenides, is central in Plato’s reaction to his predecessors, Heraclitus and Parmenides. In knowing, we embark on what for Parmenides is the way of truth in respect to what is variously described as mind-independent reality, the real, the noumenon or thing in itself, the absolute, and so on. This is the central insight in metaphysical realism, which has inspired observers from the time of Parmenides through Plato until the present.⁸ The conviction that to know is to know an unchanging mind-independent reality inspires Plato and many others who supposedly do not fear knowledge.⁹

Plato’s criticism of artistic imitation (or representation) is not directly focused on the relation to a visible object, but rather to an invisible reality. Plato’s attack on artistic imitation presupposes the failure of representationalism in all its forms. This rejection was further strengthened by a long series of post-Platonic thinkers including Sextus Empiricus, Berkeley, Kant, and more recently by Nelson Goodman.¹⁰ If reality however understood can be known through intuition alone, it cannot be successfully represented through ordinary or even extraordinary artistic means. Art, understood in the widest possible way as imitating, representing, or otherwise depicting the mind-independent real, fails not on artistic but rather on epistemological grounds.

Plato’s widely known rejection of imitative art is motivated and justified by his commitment to a political approach to art in the city-state. This is the art of constructing a just or good state, based on the intuitive grasp of reality beyond mere appearance. The true artist is not just anyone, certainly not someone who on grounds of nature and nurture cannot see invisible reality, but on the contrary, someone qualified to do just this, hence to direct the city. This problem, which echoes through Western philosophy, returns in Kant’s wake, for instance in the poet Schiller’s concern to solve the political problem through aesthetics.¹¹

Plato’s negative view of imitative art that is merely art, art that is not based on the intuitive grasp of the forms supposedly available only to philosophers, presupposes a positive view of philosophical art. Over the centuries, Plato has been answered at key points in the later debate. Some responses support his negative view denying any cognitive link between art and knowledge, and others ratify his positive view in attributing a cognitive role to a special kind of art only.¹² We do not know and cannot now recover Plato’s position, if there was one. I will be attributing to Plato the view that ordinary art is socially pernicious, and that the philosophical effort to bring about the ideal state is not only socially just, but further, the only correct way of joining together art and truth. A view of the ideal state as based on true insight, hence just or good in the political context, leads to an understanding of Plato’s view of aesthetics as richer, less arbitrary, arguably more interesting than when it is understood as simply condemning art on cognitive grounds.

It is sometimes said there is no ancient aesthetics. In that case, examination of Platonic aesthetics is anachronistic, a kind of category mistake. According to Paul Oskar Kristeller, aesthetics is specifically modern, and modern concepts of art and aesthetics emerged together.¹³ Kristeller thinks aesthetics begins in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), or at least does not precede Alexander Baumgarten’s introduction of the term aesthetics to mean epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined in his Halle master’s thesis.¹⁴ Yet if, as I believe, aesthetics had already been part of philosophy since Plato attacked it in a variety of dialogues, especially the Republic, and since Aristotle defended it in the Poetics in a complex theory of poetry, then Baumgarten’s denomination of the field was no more than, as has been said, a tardy adult baptism. I suspect that what is at stake is less the onset of aesthetics, which in the West goes back to ancient Greece,¹⁵ than the post-Kantian division of philosophy into various subspecialties. When Western aesthetics attains the dignity of a subspecialty is possibly relevant but not decisive for the deeper question of how questions of beauty relate to questions of knowledge in Platonism and in the later debate.

Whitehead’s famous remark that the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato¹⁶ is misleading. It focuses on a thinker whose position we do not know and cannot now identify and who is mainly known to us in what has come down as Platonism. The enormous influence of Platonism is reflected in later development of key insights as well as resistance to them. It is, then, not always clear if the later debate, though influenced by Platonism if not Plato, always remains within the compass of his thought. This is particularly true for aesthetics, which he does not create, but which he powerfully shapes, and which has struggled ever since to escape from its Platonic shadow.

Views of beauty, truth, and the good are historical variables. It appears that until relatively late the Greeks did not detect a connection between, say, poetry and such arts as sculpture and music, since poetry was understood not only as an expression, but also, as Plato indicates in the Ion, as inspired, and on the contrary, sculpture and music were not.¹⁷ Mimesis later meant imitation, but earlier dance in Pindar and the Delian hymns.¹⁸

Contemporary interest in epistemological representation joins together ancient and modern concerns. It is already central in ancient Greek discussion of the arts. Yet what is meant by art is often very different.¹⁹ Kristeller usefully points out that the Greek term for Art (tέχνη) and its Latin equivalent (ars) do not specifically denote the ‘fine arts’ in the modern sense, but were applied to all kinds of human activities which we would call crafts or sciences.²⁰ The ancient Greek view of art as imitation, which interests Plato and Aristotle, remains central in modern times. Johann Winckelmann, who invented typical German graecophilia in the eighteenth century, influentially argues that the moderns can only become great in imitating the ancients.²¹

The meaning of the term beauty varies widely. According to Tatarkiewicz the Greeks understood beauty under the term kalon in a widened sense as anything that pleases, attracts, and arouses admiration, for instance including the just, as in the pronouncement of the Delphic oracle: The most just is the most beautiful. For the ancient Greeks beauty includes charm, harmony, symmetry, appropriate measure, rhythm, and good proportion, all of which were mentioned by poets. Art (techne) is used in a widened sense to mean skillful production, following rules and applying to all human crafts.²² The stress placed on knowledge, for which skill mattered, is perhaps one reason why Plato criticizes the lack of knowledge of artists, who in this respect are no better than sophists. Ancient Greek artists did not distinguish between fine arts and crafts since all arts were fine arts. Today one might wish to distinguish between a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, and an artist as belonging to different disciplines. Yet from the ancient Greek perspective Plato’s famous example of a craftsman in book 10 of the Republic speaks to the problem of artistic creation of all kinds. Similarly, for an ancient Greek, poetry is based on inspiration and not, like art, on skillful production according to rules. Poetry, which requires divine intervention, was thought to give knowledge in making human beings better, whereas art produces what are sometimes called useful and perfect objects. Plato strongly denies that poets such as Homer possess knowledge. As Homer believes and Beowulf later still believes, the early, archaic poets see the role of poetry as spreading joy by glorifying the past through accounts of the fates of gods and men. Perhaps with himself as the example, Plato thinks the role of the poet must be to reach truth.

Plato provides neither the first nor the last word on the problem of the relation of art and truth, which echoes through the later tradition. Aristotle rehabilitates a conception of art as imitation, including the related claim for social utility. Aristotle’s intervention opens up several possibilities for considering this problem. A short list might include (1) a view of art as grasping mind-independent reality, or art as also good since it reaches truth featured in very different ways by medieval Christianity and Marxism; (2) a more modest view of art as grasping human life, and as true only in a weaker sense proposed by Aristotle in the Poetics; (3) conceptions of art as not useful but simply good in itself in theories of art for art’s sake; and (4) ways of understanding art that abandon any effort at imitation, for instance in cubism, which flourished early in the last century.

Post-Platonic claims about an artistic grasp of the mind-independent real are associated with two main aesthetic tendencies: medieval Christian art and Marxist aesthetics. The three main Abrahamic religions propose different views of art and truth. Medieval Christian art typically depicts the transcendent theological dimension of the real. This effort is acknowledged but resisted by the shared Jewish and Muslim interdiction of efforts to depict transcendent reality. Marxism is typically opposed to religion, hence to Christianity. But paradoxically the aesthetic anti-Platonism situated at the basis of Christian art returns centuries later in the Marxist view of representational art in the era of industrial capitalism. Thus Lukács claims that only the proletarian perspective of socialist realism can pierce the veil of capitalist illusion. Medieval Christian thinkers as well as modern Marxists suppose a representational aesthetic approach that provides a true grasp of the real understood either as the transcendent religious dimension of religious faith or as the real nature of modern capitalism. Other, more recent, aesthetic approaches drop the requirement of realism underlying truth claims in concentrating on the objet d’art as an end in itself, for instance in the context of the technical issues of artistic depiction without further consideration of epistemological veracity.

This book is not intended as a history of aesthetics, even in outline. It is rather a systematic inquiry focusing on several key interventions in the ongoing debate about art and truth concerning finally the social role of art. Each of the seven chapters examines an aspect of this overall theme, beginning with a chapter entitled "Plato and Platonism on Poetry, Art, and Truth." There is enormous interest in Plato’s writings on art, and a wide divergence of opinion about their message. Many observers think Plato is attacking art in general, but others, including R. G. Collingwood, believe Plato is only attacking contemporary artists in ancient Greece.²³ I argue that Plato’s attack on contemporary art is mainly motivated though his theory of knowledge, hence that the Platonic critique of imitative art presupposes the theory of forms. The theory of forms, which never assumes final shape in Plato’s writings, underlies the Platonic conviction that on grounds of nature and nurture some among us can grasp the invisible real to fashion an ideal state. The Platonic Republic is a kallipolis, or imaginary art object instantiating justice in a state not only beautiful but true and also good.

With then-contemporary Greek art in mind, Plato criticizes art as imitative or mimetic. Mimesis, a central aesthetic concept for both Plato and Aristotle, later gives way to representation. I examine mimesis and allied terms before turning to Platonic views of mimesis in the Ion and the Republic (books 2, 3, 10). The later development of the Platonic view of mimesis is further sketched in the Cratylus and the Sophist. The chapter then turns to the theory of forms underlying the Platonic understanding of mimesis and mimetic art in the Phaedo and the Republic. The theory of forms, which emerges as a nonstandard theory of causality in the Phaedo, and which refuses any inference from effect to cause, remains relevant.

The later Western aesthetic tradition can be regarded as a series of reactions to the influential Platonic analysis of art and truth. The second chapter examines Aristotle’s detailed theory of poetry in the Poetics. The chapter begins with Aristotle’s compressed critique of the theory of forms, including the so-called third man argument. Plato’s Parmenides can in turn be read as Plato’s response to his best student. A reconstruction of Aristotle’s theory of poetry follows Gerald Else’s suggestion that Plato and Aristotle focus on imitating different objects. As concerns mimesis, Plato has in mind the invisible forms, and Aristotle is concerned with human life, or action and activity. Aristotle maps out a positive social function for art in general, especially poetry, which he famously prefers to history. The chapter further considers Aristotle’s response to the famous quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

The third chapter studies art and the transcendent in Christian Platonic and anti-Platonic art. There are medieval treatises on beauty, but there is no medieval treatise on aesthetics. Yet there is clearly a shared medieval anti-Platonic view of art. According to Platonism, artists cannot know. This Platonic verdict is quickly reversed by Aristotle, and in turn reversed again by medieval Christian thinkers before Aristotle had been translated or known. Christian thinkers are committed to versions of the Neoplatonic view of an unbroken continuity between God and the world, God and nature. This further includes a characteristic triple cognitive link between human beings, who in imitating nature imitate and know God. This belief is voiced in different ways, for instance in Plotinus’s emanational theory, and more specifically in Pseudo-Dionysius, who thinks God, who is beauty, transmits beauty to all things. These and related formulations depend on and exhibit faith in the biblical view of God as the author of the world. This faith justifies the anti-Platonic aesthetic belief that in imitating the world due to God we can know God.

The chapter studies medieval theories of beauty beginning with a passage on the relationship of art to the wider medieval worldview before turning to biblical and Greek sources of medieval art. The chapter next considers anti-Platonic, Christian approaches to aesthetic phenomena as representational, analogical and allegorical. It then takes up Augustinian and Thomistic aesthetics before ending in a retrospective comment on Christian aesthetics and Platonism. Stress is placed on the substitution of religious faith for epistemological argument to justify the anti-Platonic claim, based on the conviction of an unbroken continuity between God and the world, that in knowing the world, or God’s works, we know God.

The fourth chapter discusses the aesthetic theory Kant formulates in the third Critique, an obscure and difficult but rewarding work still enormously influential in the debate. Kant’s famous suggestion that he knows Plato better than the latter knows himself points to an unclear relation of Kantian aesthetics to Platonism. Kantian aesthetics follows both the Platonic critique of artistic imitation in denying a link between art and truth—reflective judgment, which is featured in his aesthetic theory, does not yield knowledge—as well as the Platonic effort to link the beautiful to the good.

The chapter starts with a section on German idealism, German idealists, and German idealist aesthetics. It then situates Kantian aesthetics through remarks on predecessors who contribute to the formulation of his position (Baumgarten, Shaftesbury, Burke, Hume, and others). It next considers Kant’s discovery of reflective judgment and the anthropological shift in his understanding of the subject. The genesis of the Kantian aesthetic theory is studied in his early Observations. Successive sections, following the exposition in the third Critique, evoke main themes in Kant’s treatment of the beautiful and the sublime. There are accounts of the deduction of pure aesthetic judgments, of the dialectic of aesthetic judgments, and of the supersensible. The chapter further studies the relation of the Critique of Teleological Judgment to nature as well as the appendix on the methodology of the critique of teleological judgment. It ends with some critical remarks about Kant’s view of the relation of aesthetics and knowledge, or art and truth.

Chapter 5 focuses on Hegel’s view of phenomenology, art, and truth. The contrast between Kant and Hegel could hardly be greater as concerns aesthetic phenomena. Kant, who was familiar with some aesthetic thinkers, had little grasp of the broader aesthetic tradition and, since he did not travel, almost no direct experience of great works of art. His theory of aesthetics is an unexpected dividend of his concern to demonstrate what is sometimes called the unity of reason in relating the theories expounded in the first and second Critiques. In contrast, Hegel was equipped with an exceedingly broad grasp of the entire aesthetic tradition. It is well said that he almost single-handedly created the history of aesthetics. He further acquired a grasp of fine art in his travels and was sufficiently versed in artistic phenomena to be a consultant for purchases of Egyptian art for the museums in Berlin.

Hegel’s theory of aesthetics links art and truth through his conception of phenomenology in a historical analysis of the discipline. His theory of phenomenology carries forward Kant’s Copernican revolution in restricting knowledge claims to phenomena constructed by the cognitive subject. In aesthetics, this leads to the Platonic conclusion that Kant also shares: we cannot claim to represent reality.

Hegel left no treatise of aesthetics. The chapter outlines the three main discussions of aesthetics in Hegel’s corpus: in the Phenemenology, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and the Lectures on Fine Art. A brief sketch of Hegel’s phenomenological view of cognition in the Phenomenology is followed by an account of art and cognition in the section on religion in the form of art. The chapter next turns to the very compressed account of art in the Encyclopedia before tackling the Lectures on Fine Art. The account of the Lectures presents Hegel’s understanding of the relation of spirit, the absolute, and aesthetics in general followed by sections on his understanding of symbolic, classical, and romantic art. Special attention is accorded to the vexed question of the end of art both in Hegel and later in a very different key in Danto. The chapter ends with a short section on art and truth after the end of art.

The sixth chapter takes up the general theme of Marx, Marxism, and social realism. Until the sudden decline and disappearance of the Soviet Union, Marxism was one of the four main philosophical tendencies of the twentieth century. Marxist aesthetics, which includes such figures as Engels, Lukács, Adorno, Eagleton, Brecht, Marcuse, Benjamin, Jameson, and many others, is often very lively, one of the most interesting aspects of Marxism. Further, with medieval Christianity, Marxist aesthetics has long been one of the main modern sources of the claim for the intrinsic relationship of art and truth.

The chapter starts with an account of the relation of Marx and Marxism, followed by separate examinations of Marx’s and Engels’s very different conceptions of knowledge. Since Marx never worked out a theory of aesthetics, I consider his obiter dicta on this theme before turning to Engels and to Marxist aesthetics. Marxist aesthetics accords privileged cognitive status to socialist realism. The chapter considers in turn the theme of socialist realism and then Lukács’s two main efforts to make out the claim that this particular aesthetic style has an epistemological advantage over its alternatives.

The seventh and last chapter evokes the relation between art and truth some two and a half millennia after Plato. There seem to be four main possibilities: first, the view that the relationship between art and truth is plausible; second, the view that the relationship is implausible; third, the view that art has in the meantime come to an end in obviating any claim for the relationship of art and truth; and, finally the romantic view of art for art’s sake. The anti-Platonic view that after Plato’s wake a representational approach to art remains plausible is examined through Heidegger’s (and Sallis’s) defense of aesthetic realism on phenomenological grounds. Both presuppose, but do not demonstrate, a theory of epistemological representation. The view that the relationship between art and truth is implausible is examined through remarks on the general theme of representation as a condition of aesthetic representation in three ways: as concerns imitation and representation in general; in the views of Sextus and Kant on epistemological representation; and finally in Goodman’s attack on representation in general. Plato’s attack on and Aristotle’s defense of aesthetic mimesis, and any theory of representation, presuppose a unified cognitive object. The view that art has come to an end is examined in an account of the cubist movement, where even the possibility of representational verisimilitude gives way in the fragmentation of the object. The account of art for art’s sake as aesthetic anti-Platonism considers this movement as an effort to escape the Platonic critique of imitative art in cutting the link between art and truth. The Platonic relation between the true, the good, and the beautiful presupposes a link between aesthetics and the social good, whose absence Plato stigmatizes in his critique of imitative art.

CHAPTER ONE

Plato and Platonism on Poetry, Art, and Truth

There is an enormous interest in Plato’s writings on art but a very wide divergence of opinion about their message. Many observers think Plato is attacking art in general. Others, such as R. G. Collingwood, believe Plato should be understood as attacking contemporary artists in ancient Greece.¹ In this chapter, I argue that Plato criticizes contemporary art not on aesthetic grounds but rather from the angle of vision of his own theory of knowledge, which in turn presupposes a nonstandard conception of philosophical art based on an intuitive grasp of the forms. In short, for Plato aesthetics presupposes epistemology.

The suggestion that Plato’s attack on art as imitation derives from the theory of forms presupposes that such a theory can be identified in his writings. Important texts, positions, and theories are often enshrouded in hermeneutical controversy. This factor is increased as concerns the so-called Platonic theory of forms. The theory of forms never reaches a final formulation in his writings. Plato’s view of this theory is unknown and cannot now be determined. The interpretation, the general contours, and even the existence of the theory of forms remain controversial.

We do not know and cannot now recover Plato’s position, if he had one. It is scarcely easier to recover his views of art and poetry in particular. It is a commonplace that Plato begins the Western aesthetic tradition through his conception and criticism of a mimetic conception of poetry and art in general. Plato’s theories of the forms as well as of poetry and art in general are specialized topics, which have been intensively studied in an enormous literature, which is probably now beyond the capacity of any single individual to survey.

Some observers think Socrates is already committed to a version of the theory of forms. Gail Fine points to a series of passages in claiming that he already makes an epistemological argument for the existence of forms.² If this is correct, and if Plato accepts the theory of forms in its Socratic version, then it is possible that he was already committed to some version of it even before he discusses art. Some think his position developed over time while others believe he continues to restate in different ways the same or roughly the same view.

The evolution of the theory of imitative art and of the theory of forms suggests that whether or not Plato has anything resembling a philosophical position, his thought develops. Hence, there is probably a time before he held any version of the theory of art as imitation or possibly even the theory of forms, a time when he began to hold the former and perhaps even the latter as well. Though the theories of art and the forms at least initially appear to arise independently, their fate is later joined, for instance in the Republic, especially in book 10, where the theory of forms, hence a specific approach to knowledge, is invoked to justify Plato’s harsh critique of art produced by poets and others lacking in knowledge. Hence, at least initially, it appears as if Plato’s twin concerns with the nature of art and the theory of knowledge developed separately but later come together with the framework of his overall position.

Mimesis, Imitation, Appearance, and Representation

Plato’s view of art is firmly linked to the word mimesis. This term (ancient Greek: mimesis [μίμησις], from mimeisthai [μιμɛîσθαι]), whose origin is uncertain, is usually translated as imitation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines mimesis as a figure of speech, whereby the supposed words or actions of another are imitated and the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change. It further defines mimicry as the action, practice, or art of mimicking or closely imitating . . . the manner, gesture, speech, or mode of actions and persons, or the superficial characteristics of a thing. The precise meaning of imitation is unclear. Richard McKeon distinguishes five different meanings.³ According to Michelle Puetz, who may have Plato in mind, the two core meanings of mimesis are imitation and artistic representation.⁴ This suggests that art has a cognitive function in correctly representing an object, or reality.

This controversial thesis, which turns on the interpretation of mimesis, is contested by Plato but supported by a number of important post-Platonic figures. The term mimesis is discussed in various contexts by a long list of writers, too numerous to enumerate, where it is associated with a wide variety of themes running from aesthetics and literary criticism to feminism and anthropology. Mimesis is especially important in literary criticism. In one of the most important works in literary criticism of the twentieth century, under the heading of mimesis Eric Auerbach studies the representation of reality in Western literature from ancient times, starting with Homer and the Old Testament, up to Proust and Virginia Woolf.⁵ Edward Saïd ends his new foreword for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of this book in suggesting the Hegelian point that the representation of reality in Western literature is in fact the representation by Auerbach, writing out of his historical moment, of the way that central writers in the Western canon, writing out of their own historical moments, represent reality.

But the triumph of Mimesis, as well as its inevitable tragic flaw, is that the human mind studying literary representations of the historical world can only do so as all authors do—from the limited perspective of their own time and their own work. No more scientific a method or less subjective a gaze is possible, except that the great scholar can always buttress his vision with learning, dedication, and moral purpose. It is this combination, this mingling of styles out of which Mimesis emerges. And to my way of thinking, its humanistic example remains an unforgettable one, fifty years after its first appearance in English.⁶

Auerbach illustrates the complex transformation of mimesis from the time of ancient Greece until the present. In ancient Greece this term broadly designated such forms of imitation as the cross-dressing identified by Aristophanes in which men imitate women. It was also employed in an epistemological sense in classical Greek philosophy. Mimesis later takes on a very different series of connotations, such as Auerbach’s concern with the whole span of historically variable literary depictions of the real.

Auerbach’s historicist orientation toward the Western literary tradition differs from the ancient Greek philosophical usage of mimesis to designate the representation of reality, or again the mind-independent real world as it is beyond mere appearance. Plato, who has no technical vocabulary, or even a fixed philosophical language, uses the term mimesis loosely and in a pejorative sense in criticizing forms of artistic creation. He applies it, for instance, to painting and sculpture⁷ as well as to music and dance⁸ and in other contexts. Aristotle uses the same term in a different way to refer to an innate human tendency, which he relates to different kinds of poetry he analyzes in the Poetics. I come back to Aristotle’s view in the next chapter.

Plato does not begin aesthetics, which, depending on how one understands the term, originates in the West as early as the archaic period in the writings of Homer, Hesiod, and the early lyric poets.⁹ Aesthetics refers to theories of beauty, knowledge, and so on. Plato, like many later Western thinkers, approaches artistic creation mainly in terms of beauty. He considers beauty in detail in numerous places, including the Symposium, in which he praises it as the highest value; in the Hippias Major, in which he attempts to define the concept; and in lesser detail in the Phaedrus and the Philebus.

In the context of the theory of forms, Plato apparently takes mimesis to mean copying. The terms representation and copy" are related. To copy (something) is to represent it, and the most developed or highest form of representation is copying. A copy is intended to be an entirely faithful representation of something else. In the Platonic view of mimesis, we encounter one of the earliest and certainly one of the most widely known forms of the problem of epistemological representation as it arises within the general field of aesthetics. The general problem of the relation of artistic representation and cognition is a special case of the more general theory of knowledge in which representation has played an enduring role at least since early Greek philosophy.

Plato is apparently the first philosopher to discuss mimesis in the Greek tradition but not the first to mention it. When he intervened in the debate, mimesis had already taken root in the prior tradition long ago. Plato famously refers to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.¹⁰ Earlier ancient Greek philosophers criticize poetry for spreading false stories about the gods. Around 500 BC, Xenophanes attacked Homer and Hesiod for this reason,¹¹ and Heraclitus called for Homer to be excluded from competitions and thrashed.¹²

The transformation of the meaning of key terms is important. Scholars note that before Plato mimesis had a less precise meaning, neither specifically applying to a poetic process nor necessarily implying fraud and counterfeit—with one important exception. In his comedies, Aristophanes comments on the staging of tragedies in using the terms mimeisthai and mimêsis in consistently pejorative ways.¹³ This pejorative sense is amplified in Plato’s account, which ultimately derives from the theory of forms. There is reason to believe, as I will argue in the next chapter, that Aristotle’s rehabilitation of poetry and art in general crucially depends on reinterpreting the meaning of mimesis.

Platonic Mimesis and Representation

The core meaning of mimesis, or imitation, is to represent. Representation, which is understood in different ways, is often associated with resemblance. A number of observers, for instance Nelson Goodman, deny that representation can be based on resemblance. I come back to this point in chapter 7. At the limit, there are many cases in which there is not or even could not be a visual image. For instance, the term sublime is often used to designate what cannot be represented, or which lies beyond representation, as in the Kantian conception. Representation seems central to visual art but peripheral to music. Some representations refer to particular things and some do not. Sometimes representation is employed to claim direct, unmediated knowledge of the external world.

The term representation is currently used very widely to refer to such varied semantic situations as pictures, three-dimensional models, linguistic texts, mathematical formulae, diagrams, maps, graphs, and so on. In contemporary cognitive science it is widely assumed that cognitive processes concern representations. In representational theories of intentionality, believing is distinguished from desiring, and beliefs are distinguished from other beliefs, desires from other desires, and so on.

Representative realism, which is currently popular in analytic circles, is perhaps most famously associated with John Locke. Naïve or direct realists believe we directly perceive the world as it is without a representational interface. Representative realists hold we do not and cannot directly perceive the mind-independent world as it is beyond appearance. Rather, we directly perceive only our ideas. This theory is sometimes related to what is called act/object analysis of sensory experience. The key insight here is that sentences which rely on English terms such as looks, seems, and feels convey direct phenomenological acquaintance with something that has the relevant property. Locke holds that we do not directly perceive objects. We rather perceive primary or secondary ideas, which are constructed by us out of primary ideas. This view goes all the way back in the tradition until Aristotle, who, in De Anima, argues that ideas in the mind are images of things it thinks.

Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, who follows Louis Marin, distinguishes four views of representation.¹⁴ These views, which emerged in the debate after Plato, include (1) to re-present or to reflect; (2) presence and absence; (3) the substitution of one thing for another; (4) to outline or trace the contours of something in according it visual form. To represent by representing or reflecting something is the basis of the familiar reflection theory of knowledge, which probably originates in book 10 of the Republic at 596D, where Socrates talks about someone carrying around a mirror. This theory is usually credited to Francis Bacon, restated by Friedrich Engels, then adopted as the official Marxist view of truth by Lenin, restated again in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early work in the picture theory of language, and more recently refuted by Richard Rorty. Common to such theories is the idea that the original can successfully be made present or reflected, and that at the limit reflection is the functional equivalent of a mirror image. This form of representation is very close to imitation, hence to the view Plato criticizes.

Representation also assumes the distinction between presence and absence, between the re-presentation, which is present, and what it represents, or the represented, which is in fact absent, and present only in that and as it is represented. Among recent thinkers, this approach is most closely associated with Martin Heidegger’s theory of the metaphysics of presence. According to Heidegger, being in general is present under the mode of absence. Jacques Derrida, under Heidegger’s influence, formulates a theory of the so-called trace in such works as Writing and Difference and in Of Grammatology.¹⁵ One can re-present or make present what is not already present, but what is present can neither be made present nor re-presented.

Representation further assumes the form of substituting or standing in for, as when something takes the place of something else. Such a representation is a sign of something else, so that representation here loses the sense of copying or imitating its referent. C. S. Peirce famously invented a triadic theory of signs. "Namely, a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C."¹⁶ Immanuel Kant formulates a sophisticated theory of representation he later abandons in favor of epistemological constructivism identified in the debate as the Copernican revolution in philosophy. He indicates in the Opus Postumum that to think is to represent, or repraesentare per conceptus.¹⁷

Finally, representation can mean to give form to something, as, for instance, integers or whole numbers can be represented, but so-called irrational numbers, such as the square root of 2 cannot. Thus for Kant the beautiful can be represented but the sublime cannot be represented. Louis Marin detects a basic turning point in the discussion in Descartes, who supposedly abandons imitation. For Descartes, to represent does not mean to copy¹⁸ but rather that the figural, or what can be reduced to a figure, or stated in the form of a sign, takes the place of images.¹⁹ It further means that what cannot be reduced to a finite figure, what is hence not finite but infinite, hence cannot be represented at all. Thus, for example, according to Marin, while the beautiful can be represented, the sublime cannot. On this basis, he regards Poussin as a theoretician of the problem of representation.²⁰

This fourfold classification is useful here to call attention to some of the ways representation is understood in Plato’s wake. Plato’s critique of mimesis counts as an attack on representation in all its forms. The later debate records a series of different ways in which after Plato—but not after Platonism, which continues to inform the discussion—art and representation have been linked.

In appealing to a mimetic theory of art, Plato chooses as his standard the strictest possible form of representation, which supposedly cannot be found within poetry or aesthetics in general, and can only be met with on the philosophical plane. Later theories of representation count as a series of efforts to meet Plato’s criticism in adopting different mimetic and non-mimetic views of aesthetic creation, hence different normative conceptions of art, with an eye to responding to Platonic criticism of aesthetics.

Pre-Platonic Mimesis and Aesthetics in General

Plato’s critique of artistic imitation focuses on poetry, particularly Homer, whom Plato attacks but Aristotle praises. Homer and Hesiod are the first great Greek poets whose work has survived. Homer is probably slightly earlier, though that is disputed. If he existed, he probably