PLATO, ART AND ETERNITY
According to the philosophy of Spinoza, this would be to see the world ‘under the aspect of eternity’ (sub specie aeternitatis) and not just ‘under the aspect of time’ (sub specie durationis). Spinoza sees the intellectual recognition of facts, impassively, without the intrusion of subjective fears and hopes. To attain objectivity in face of rationally ascertained truth is to achieve eternal life through the intellectual love of God/Nature: ‘he who understands himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so the more he understands himself and his emotions’ (E 5, 15). Arising necessarily from the pursuit of knowledge, this delineates an intellectual love of God/Nature (amor intellectualis Dei) through activity of mind. Such a mind rejoices constantly in the object of its contemplation.
We are in that eternal realm that connects all the transcendental idealists - Plato, Plotinus, Dante, Berkeley, Blake, Kant. Plato asks: ‘how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?’ But being a spectator of the objective world is not simply contemplative or passive, but entails the idea of participating in a higher realm. This becomes clear in Plato’s conception of art and the role of the artist in relating us to eternity and Being.
In Plato's hierarchy of values, the desire for the human body ranks lowest on the scale. The body is of time; there is nothing permanent to it, it soon passes and decays. Highest on Plato’s scale of values is the desire to produce 'eternity', the ideals of truth, goodness and beauty. Accordingly, Plato expresses a love for eternity which is a higher form of love than the 'human' desire for the body, which is merely transient. Plato's extraordinary love is transcendent in being beyond sense experience, and relates us to eternal life and to Being itself. This love transcends the life of the here and now, the transitory affairs of human beings absorbed in the reproduction of everyday life. Plato’s conception is an ode to art and to the artist. So much so that Max Schoen writes this paean to art:
An Art work cannot be anything but wholesome in its influence. ... It raises the self to a realm of experience cleansed of the dross and dirt, the strife and struggle, the back-biting and back-sliding, which often ... are the substance of day-to-day existence.... No one can leave... a great performance of a great play or symphony without feeling that he has been in touch with perfection; that for a moment which was also an eternity, God was truly in His Heaven. This is good at its highest because it is life at its best.
Schoen 1944: 20
In truth, that overstates Plato’s view. Plato does not justify all art, art as such, in these terms. This is art its highest when life is at its best and the true, the good and the beautiful are attained in unity. The idea that ‘art with a clear and independent ethical purpose is preferable to the concept of “art for art’s sake”’ and a ‘pure’ aestheticism … which negates any involvement with ethics’ (Margherita Muller Under what stars to plough the earth? The aesthetics and ethics of three Scottish gardens 2012) has a clear Platonic resonance (and also Aristotelian, in the reference to ‘purpose’, telos, of which I shall write more later). Independence in the Platonic sense would refer to the way that art takes us beyond transitory temporal concerns and relates us to eternal life and Being itself. Thus, artists realize, not merely their personal dream, but also the ideal plan for humanity designed from eternity by God. The thinking is clearly teleological, in that there is a purpose at work. (Republic. 395c ff., Laws 903b ff. 817b f).
The question, then, is whether, upon entering the realm of eternity, time and space cease to exist. To understand Plato’s point concerning art, we need to understand how Plato’s community is organised according to eternal principles and purposes.
In creating objective works of art, the artist believes that s/he is fulfilling his or her function as an artist, producing a painting, a poem, a statue, a piece of music. The artist detaches his/her personality from such works, going on to create other art-works, also similarly detachable. So detached, Plato points out, the creative vitality seems to leave the artist, or the work, left to itself. (Ion 535d f. Protagoras. 347b f , Phaedrus 275d f, Theaetetus 165e f, 171c f, Sophistes 243a f.) But such an artist has no further conception of his/her function beyond creation. The artist is completing a technical job to order, marketing a product precisely the same way as a carpenter, weaver, or potter does.
This is not Plato’s artist at all. Plato’s artist is a creative being and does not produce detachable objects to be exposed for sale, handed around, maybe criticized unfairly and rejected. For Plato, the artists’ creativity is an integral part of the community life. In contributing to that life, the artist demonstrates an active citizenship and produces art which is never detachable. The community is a living and growing thing, developing as part of a plan designed from eternity in accordance with the principles of the true, the good and the beautiful. The artist participates in that life and that growth, interpenetrating with others and with the community as a whole, in the process coming to unfold eternal principles. The artist thus copies, produces, and identifies with the spirit of citizenship in his/her full personality. The Platonic artist is never detached from community life, and that life is never detached from the artist. It lives in his life and in the life of his fellows. (Republic 395 ff; The Laws 664e ff., 817b f).
The artist is therefore the creative individual who gives birth to eternal forms, to truth, beauty, and goodness. Plato has been accused of being anti-woman in this respect, creating a transcendent male realm of creation to replace the natural female realm in which women give birth to life. (In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy A Cavarero 1995 Polity). Such a reading misses Plato’s central point spectacularly (and contradicts the familiar feminist anti-essentialist piety that ‘biology is not destiny’). Plato is affirming an ethical position that is beyond biological nature and which raises both men and women to the eternal realm which is highest on the scale of values.
There is no denying that transcendence has often functioned as a male fantasy in denial of live-giving female nature, and that is certainly how it is functioning today with the massive military and technological armament of a machine world increasingly detached from Nature. But Plato’s transcendentalism is of an altogether different kind. Platonic love is both sexless and timeless, it is beyond biology and history and mechanical materialism and reveals the higher, rational humanity in all of us, male and female. Further, Plato’s transcendental idealism (as expressed in the Phaedo and Georgias) is balanced and buttressed by the ‘mixed life’ of The Laws, combining idealism with realism and humanism. The finite with the infinite.
Bibliography
Lodge, R.C., Plato's Theory of Art, Routledge, 1953
Schoen, Max, The Enjoyment of the Fine Arts, Philos. Libr., New York, 1944