Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
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Plato is a great artist attacking what he sees as bad and dangerous in art. His warnings are apt today. Popular literature and film argue the dullness of the good, the charm of the bad. The violent man is the hero of our time. The technical excellence of television (the Cave) leads us to accept vivid scrappy images and disconnected oddments of information as insight into truth. W. H. Auden observed that ‘no poet can prevent his work being used as magic’; even good art can be taken over by its client as fantasy and pornography, a process facilitated by the ready-made ‘magic’ of vulgar entertainment which makes what is good increasingly difficult to hold in the mind. (And so on and so on.) However, if it is to enlighten us, Plato’s attack on art must be seen in the context of his whole moral philosophy. Life is a spiritual pilgrimage inspired by the disturbing magnetism of truth, involving ipso facto a purification of energy and desire in the light of a vision of what is good. The good and just life is thus a process of clarification, a movement toward selfless lucidity, guided by ideas of perfection which are objects of love. Platonic morality is not coldly intellectual, it involves the whole man and attaches value to the most ‘concrete’ of everyday preoccupations and acts. It concerns the continuous detail of human activity, wherein we discriminate between appearance and reality, good and bad, true and false, and check or strengthen our desires.
At the beginning of the Phaedrus (250E) we are told that the most vividly seen of the Ideas, or Forms, is beauty. We see and love beauty more readily than we love good, it is the spiritual thing to which we are most immediately and instinctively attracted. Plato presents this idea as part of a myth of recollection. He pictures the human soul, in some previous state of being, as having been able to see the spiritual Forms (Ideas) with perfect clarity, a vision of which the incarnate soul retains a shadowy memory.
‘Few can recall these things at all well, only when they see any reminder of them they are astounded and are beside themselves, but cannot understand this affliction because their sight is dim. The earthly copies of justice and temperance and the other virtues which are prized by the soul give off no light, and only few of us with our weak faculties can with difficulty see in the imitations the likeness of their originals. But at that former time we saw beauty shining out so brightly ... when we beheld that vision and were initiated into what is properly called the most blessed of mysteries, which we celebrated in entire perfection, unmarked by the evils of a later time, able as initiates to perceive in a pure light, being ourselves pure, those perfect, simple, calm, and happy showings.’
(250A-C.)
This ecstatic passage about anamnesis, spiritual recollection, exhibits Plato’s sense of certainty about the reality of goodness, which we are properly destined to love. We know about good and evil. In this, mutatis various mutandis, he resembles Kant who held, who saw, an equally strong certainty which was central to his philosophy. We should also notice in the Phaedrus passage the four adjectives, perfect, simple, calm and happy. Beauty, Plato goes on to tell us (250D), is the most readily recovered of those heavenly visions, ‘shining out most clearly, apprehended by the clearest of our senses. Sight is the clearest of our physical senses, though it is unable to perceive wisdom. Wisdom would arouse the most frenzied and passionate love if any clear perception of it could come to us through sight ... Only beauty has the special role of being physically perceived.’ Plato here draws attention to the dominance of sight over the other senses. We also, in a natural metaphor, ‘see’ (perceive) non-visual forms of beauty. Plato, in his myth, does not discuss exactly what seeing beauty is like. He assumes his hearer will understand. He is suggesting to us the naturalness of using visual images to express spiritual truths. Plato has been criticised for his use of visual imagery by thinkers who want to connect this with allegedly abstract or intellectual aspects of his ethics. In fact many of these images, in which the visual so eloquently mirrors the moral, are to suggest the absolute closeness, at some points at any rate, of the spiritual world, how close and how numerous are its cues. The sun may be far away, but its reflection in beauty is near, and so is the light which breaks in the carpenter’s mind as he learns the rudiments of science (Republic 567B). When Plato speaks of the immediacy and visibility of beauty and its uplifting role in our lives he is not however thinking of the beauty of art, or in any romantic sense of the beauty of nature. Plato rarely mentions the charm of nature or suggests that it is a spiritual starting point. The lyric poets enjoy birds and flowers, but Kantian (or Wordsworthian) sublimity in nature is generally absent from the Greek mind.
The Phaedrus contains one of the few rural scenes in Plato. Here we find Socrates out in the country, the conversation taking place (230B) near a little shrine beside a spring, shaded by a plane tree and an agnus castus. The naming of the trees is remarkable. The song of the cicadas is also mentioned, though what Socrates likes best is a gentle grassy slope suitable for lying on. He displays some acquaintance with nearby shrines of various gods and speaks reverently as one who feels their presence. The dialogue ends with a prayer which we may take to be inspired by the beauty and holiness of the scene. ‘O beloved Pan and all other gods of this place, grant that I may be made beautiful within, and that all outer things may be in amity with that inner life. May I consider the wise man rich; and have only such wealth as a sensible temperate person can carry and direct.’ Socrates observes, however, that in his quest for knowledge he is taught by people in the city and not by fields and trees. The beauty which prompts the spirit is more directly spoken of in this dialogue, as in the Symposium, in terms of sexual love, and of ascent from physical passion to a vision of divine absolute beauty. Love which is only physical treasures mere ‘mortal trash’ (Symposium 211E), but even bad egoistic love may lead on to teach us virtuous selfless love, and perception of beauty as unselfish attachment can bring about spiritual change. The lover, Plato says, reveres the beloved as if he were a god. When Christopher Isherwood asked his guru if it was all right to love boys, the guru replied that Christopher should regard his loved one as the young god Krishna. How does this go in Christian terms? At Matthew 25. 35 — 40 the disciples are told that in so far as they ever fed the hungry or clothed the naked or visited those in prison they did this unto the Son of man. To see Christ in those you pity or even in those you hate may seem a more intelligible charge than to see him in those you are madly in love with; where the sacred image might appear as an unwelcome or irrelevant obstacle or else as blasphemously degraded! In such a context Christian western puritanism instinctively envisages as sinful aspects of carnal love which eastern religion has more freely spiritualised. However the command tends to suggest, even to clarify, the difference between good and bad love. It puts the idea of love under judgment. We are said to love each other ‘in Christ’, and that should mean that we look as Christ and that we look at Christ in loving another person. Compare Kant’s colder injunction that we see and respect and appeal to the rational being in every man. We may see here how love of beauty in art and in nature can be (as Kant thought) a symbol of goodness since such love is naturally, or readily, pure and unpossessive. We may also see how sex can be the image of spirituality as well as its substance. Love as the fruit and overflow of spirit. Plato’s visions may seem far away from the mess of ordinary loving, but they shed light, we can understand. Falling in love is for many people their most intense experience, bringing with it a quasi-religious certainty, and most disturbing because it shifts the centre of the world from ourself to another place. A love relationship can occasion extreme selfishness and possessive violence, the attempt to dominate that other place so that it be no longer separate; or it can prompt a process of unselfing wherein the lover learns to see, and cherish and respect, what is not himself. There are many aspects to this teaching: for instance, letting the beloved go with a good grace, knowing when and how to give up, when to express love by silence or by clearing off. This negative heroism may be very enlightening, aided by the palpable satisfaction of having behaved well
when one desired to behave otherwise! Human relationship is no doubt the most important, as well as the first, training and testing-ground of morality; and common-sense as well as Freud emphasises the influence of family life, of which Plato does not speak. Certainly he, who returns so often and so ardently to the importance and the ambiguity of love, cannot be called a cold or abstract or purely intellectual moralist. It is rather the other way round. He does not ‘intellectualise’ love, but sees intellect as passion. A desire for perfection, for clarity and understanding and truth, in craft or intellectual studies, is for Plato the other main road to virtue: a starting point, an inspiration, a discipline of the emotions, a spiritual cue. The way of beauty which passes through human love has a more obvious, evident and immediate, starting point, but also involves great psychological dangers and temptations. The way of intellectual activity in the broad sense of Plato’s word techné, which would include craft but not fine art, lacks the initial charm of the beautiful, but is on the whole less perilous, although knowledge is power, and power poses moral problems. Power as magic, pride, secret superior knowledge infects science and technology, as it has always infected religion. The computer age also breeds its gnostics. The moral nature of all learning has however nothing mysterious about it. For the Greeks who were inspired, even intoxicated, by their progress in mathematics, this form of thought appeared as a sovereign techné, and to Plato as a basic form of spiritual discipline as well as a source of metaphysical imagery.
I return now to the main line of the argument, which concerns an attitude to art thought of as a form or style of ‘demythologisation’. It may seem odd to us that Plato did not think that fields and trees had anything to teach him, and that, when speaking so passionately about beauty as a spiritual guide, he did not see works of art in that light. Of course in real life, as it were, as opposed to philosophy, Plato clearly loved art, especially music and poetry. He often, and with evident knowledge, speaks of music, and was himself (modestly) a poet. There may even be an element of envy in his hostility to the tragedians. He several times refers to the ‘divine madness’ of the poet, which is irresponsible and dangerous, yet also God-given. For one so prolific in visual imagery he shows comparatively little sensibility to the visual arts. Plato stands late in the brief amazing history of Greek visual art. Classical sculptors were concerned with the problem of how to render the human form realistically, and by the time they had solved it their art was already in decline. So little did the later practitioners and connoisseurs value the earlier efforts that the divinely beautiful kouroi and other votive statues, some of which survive in the Acropolis Museum, were thrown into a pit to make room for less wonderful but more up-to-date works. I suppose an intellectually disciplined concern about the past, or a meticulous curiosity about it (as opposed to legend and folk memory), is a fairly modern phenomenon, as indeed is the writing of history. Herodotus and Thucydides invented history, but they do not seem to have endowed their own civilisation with anything like a modern sense of the past. One may note in passing that history, in the usual modern academic understanding of it, and respect for and interest in the past, part of which is an appreciation of tradition, are not only recent flowers but frail ones, menaced by technology, totalitarian states, and also by certain iconoclastic aspects of modern thought. But to return to Plato, it is not perhaps difficult to understand why he thought, or at any rate spoke, of visual artists as mere copyists. He was himself a great artist, as he must have been well aware, but had deep reasons, moral, psychological, political and metaphysical, for mounting an attack on art. One of these is an uneasiness about the nature of language itself. This metaphysical anxiety is also characteristic of our age. Reflections prompted by technological (scientific, computer) languages may remind us of what Plato has to say in the Phaedrus (274 — 5) and the Seventh Letter (341) about the dangers of the written word. Here his anxiety about art appears as an aspect of a deeper concern about the independent creative thinking remembering person. Writing was still something of a novelty in Plato’s day, invented, then forgotten, then invented again. Of course Plato knows that writing (as we know that books and now computer technology) is valuable and inevitable; but he also sees a crisis which demands pause and thought. He questions the ability of writing to convey fundamental ideas. He presents his contention playfully in the Phaedrus in the form of a myth about a junior god who invents writing and proudly shows it to the chief god who finds it most objectionable. The objections as set forth in Phaedrus and Seventh Letter may be summarised as follows. Written works can only be inert reminders of real communications which take place orally in particular contexts between one person and another. Only thus in such contexts can important truths be discovered and stated. In philosophy for instance (Seventh Letter 341C – D) it is only after a persistent study of the matter in hand – the thing itself — and an abiding with it, that understanding suddenly comes ‘like a light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter nourishes itself’. The speaking person is ultimate. A written statement cannot reply but can only say one thing. It is moreover portable and can be handed around among those who do not understand or respect it. It is ambiguous, and defenceless in the hands of knaves or fools. So it may become a vehicle of falsehood even though it was set down as a memorandum of truth. Art then (so we may gloss the Phaedrus), or as a present-day thinker might more generally put it, any use of written signs, is falsifying in so far as it professes to be a permanent record of an understanding which can only occur in ephemeral contexts of real person-to-person communication when one honest mind speaks to another. Art corrupts because by an attractive eloquent commentary upon human affairs it apes a sort of insight, a unified vision, which in its true form is a spiritual achievement. (Corruptio optimi pessima.) Bad art damages us in obvious ways by prompting false egoistic fantasy. But even serious art is dangerous, or is especially dangerous, because it resembles the good, it is a spurious short-cut to ‘instant wisdom’. The written text seems to ‘do it for us’, and need not be diligently assimilated or transformed into our own personal understanding and practice. It represents something which we deeply (unconsciously) want to be the case. We intuit in art a unity, a perfection, which is not really there. Even when wise men talk to each other it is beyond the words that the flame of understanding leaps. And with such considerations we move from ordinary common-sensical criticisms of art to a kind of metaphysical criticism.
Those thoughts of Plato do not seem to us remote. Television with its flickering series of trivial momentary unreflective uncomprehended images, pictures the state of the prisoners in the Cave who can only see the flickering shadows of things which are themselves copies of real things. Plato’s view gives reasoned expression to the puritanical watchdog who thinks that art is corrupting, and to the (e.g. Tolstoyan) anti-art artist who feels that it is insincere. Much contemporary art is inspired by this judgment on the past. Writers used to use sticks or quills, then they used pens or typewriters, now they use wordprocessors. Much of what was once expressed in words is now ‘written’ and ‘remembered’ in arcane computer languages. Such reflections may lead people to see art as in process of reification, externalisation, losing spontaneity and directness, leaving what used to be its ‘content’ as private stirrings in the individual mind. This sort of pervasive anxiety has, indeed prophetically, been leading to the development of informal semi-coherent, even anti-intellectual sub-arts of ‘participation’ or ‘minimalism’, intended to stir up private emotion and make the client ‘do all the work’. But has not the client always been doing most of the work? This is a main point made against art by Freud, a self-styled modern disciple of Plato. Freud, with the imposing edifice of European civilisation, looking its most sacred and majestic, behind him, cannot be grossly disrespectful. ‘Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.’ (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, 177. ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’.) He finds, neverthe
less, many damaging things to say about art. His thesis, variously expressed, is that art is the fantasy life of the artist stimulating the fantasy life of the client, with the factitious ‘work of art’ lying ‘overlooked’ between them as a sort of disguised bribe. Art is a magic which excites the magical propensities of those who enjoy it: a case of what Freud calls in Totem and Taboo (XIII 3) ‘the omnipotence of thought’, an illusion characteristic of all neurotics. (We may all be supposed to be partly neurotic, or neurotic sometimes.) As he explains elsewhere (‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Standard Edition, vol. IX, 153), we would normally be repelled by the private fantasies of another person, but the artist persuades us to accept his by disguising them cleverly, and by offering us formal and aesthetic pleasures which then incite us to release, upon our side, a play of personal fantasy which is normally inhibited. (The lower part of the soul speaking to the lower part of the soul.) ‘Our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us henceforth to enjoy our daydreams without reproach or shame.’ The purely aesthetic pleasure of the art work is called by Freud ‘fore-pleasure’ and is according to him analogous to the superficial or initiatory sexual stimulation which leads on to the ‘end-pleasure’ of full gratification. (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, vol. VII, chapter iii(i), 211, ‘The Transformations of Puberty’. He develops a similar theory in relation to our pleasure in the mysteriously condensed aesthetic medium of jokes. (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, vol. VIII, chapter iv, 137.) It begins to look as if, where the art object is a mechanical stimulus to personal fantasy, pornography is the end point. All art aspires to the condition of pornography? It may be true at least that more does than meets the eye.