Art and Logic

At the beginning of the movie Joe vs. the Volcano, the protagonist Joe, enters an office. In the background a man is arguing on the phone.  The man is Joe’s boss, Mr. Waturi, who is shouting repeatedly over the phone, “I know he can get the job, but can he do the job!” Interestingly, in his book, The Republic, Plato seems to be asking his audience much the same question about the Philosophy and Arts. That is, while philosophers may talk about what art is, or what art does, it is very careful to point out that art and philosophy are fundamentally different.  Thus, in Book 10 of the Republic, Plato bans artists from the Republic not because art is mere imitation but because he is afraid that people will confuse the art of an artist with the art of the philosopher.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the average reader found this confusing. After all, isn’t there a substantial difference between art and philosophy? Philosophy is a study of the nature of knowledge. It is rational, it is orderly, and it is systematic. Art is a study of the human condition. It is emotional, it is empathic, and it is messy. So why does Plato expel artists from his Republic, his ideal city? Perhaps he fears the competition that artists will give philosophers, since both disciplines aim at a revelation of some type of truth, one about logic and knowledge the other about the human condition. However, Plato believed that the type of knowledge that artists communicated was an inferior type of knowledge. And even if we put that aside for a moment and admit that there are types of “truth” that each discipline espouses, at first glance these two types of truth seem very different from one another.

Plato states quite plainly that artists are solely concerned with the particulars of appearance, and as such they do not fit into the broad scheme of universal ideals that Plato believes to be the penultimate goal of the philosopher’s quest. Plato calls the refinement of knowledge aimed at revealing "universal ideals" phronesis, a word loosely translated into English as "judgment". In other words, refining our judgment is the definitive intellectual virtue. I suppose then, for Plato, there can be no match between what the artist does and what the philosopher does.

Aristotle, on the other hand, divides our knowledge of understanding into three different parts, and while part of our understanding of the world is theoretical (i.e. Plato), it is also productive and practical. Thus phronesis or judgment is not an unqualified intellectual virtue, but only in matters regarding human conduct.  Furthermore, because humanity exists as a multiplicity, and the judgment of the individual is subjective the individual can share his or her aesthetic appreciation of an art object with the community. Thus I can contemplate an object of art, appreciate it, critique it and discuss it with others and arrive at a universal understanding that reflects the multiplicity of the community.

It is interesting because, aside from judgment, the overlap between the disciplines of art and philosophy may take the form of moral virtue, by which I mean that artists goal is to create a work of art that reveals some truth about the nature of the human condition to elevate the viewer, and in the same way the philosophers the aim it to arrive at a kind of moral virtue through a refinement of phronesis. That is both discipline ultimately strive to reveal truths about the nature of existence that will ultimately better human kind.

Universals and Particulars

When discussing the definition of portraiture with my students, I always begin with this, “Good portraits convey likeness; great portraits convey personality.” Surprisingly, no one ever seems to argue with this statement. I mean, what is a portrait if not a likeness? Also in an attempt to glamorize the sitter, wont an artist make the characters easily excitable and colorful? Don’t these additions subtract from the reality of the individual? Isn't the only reliable identification of the sitter their likeness?

At the same time don’t actions speak louder than words, and don’t we know a person by their moods, their peculiarities of habit and so forth, and isn’t an individual's personality just as important as what they look like? I mean, how do we recognize a person? By their looks? A face in the crowd? Or by the memorable quirks of character that are so defining?

Interestingly the Greek word for mirror, katoptron, is at the heart of an analysis of the purpose of artistic activity in Plato’s Republic. Just as a mirror reflects the details of life as it appears to us, says Plato, so an artist imitates all things. In contrast to the artist is the artisan or craftsperson, like a cobbler or a carpenter who are also creative, but who, in Plato’s esteem, occupy an invaluable place in society. The artisan, unlike the artist, doesn’t simply reproduce mere representation, but creates something useful and valuable to society.

Unlike the artist, who creates an imitation of reality, the artisan holds a specific idea in view, like the pattern of a shoe. In this way, the artisan works from a universal ideal and creates a particular that is contained under it.

One might object that once the artisan has created an object, for example a shoe, the artisan has created something sensible, no longer ideal and that this is an inherent contradiction in Plato’s logic. However, I do not believe that Plato was as concerned about shoes as he was about a paradigm of thought. Plato calls possessing the highest form of thought “phronesis”. It is a knowledge both scientific and theoretical and works from universals to particulars.

Aristotle, of course will invert this relationships. Whereas Plato confines artists to narrowly reflecting particulars, Aristotle insists that the artist is not concerned with the factual, but with the possible. Aristotle defines the activity of art making as a process of composition, bringing together different particulars in order to form a cohesive plot. What is more, because the effort to link particulars to universals is forever potential, there is no universal way of teaching art or rules for implementing art.

I suspect, though I am not certain, that when one looks at a portrait in search of a series of personality traits that make up the individual, that portrait is going to vary from person to person, and that each person is going to bring their own understanding of particulars and thus the understanding of the portrait will be different for each person who looks at it.  This is the anathema to Plato’s understanding of aesthetics, because it relegates beauty to an open ended series of judgments that have nothing to do with the ideal.

At the same time, there are works of art that are often agreed upon as “masterpieces of art.” Which suggests that while these works may not be taken from universal blue prints, so to speak, there are, none the less inspirations, works of art that are familiar, historical references, and other likenesses that allow us to appreciate both likenesses and differences in a universal way.  A balance must be struck between genius and taste, between universal and particular, between the likeness of sitter, and their personality. And really this is what makes a great portrait, or any great work of art.

Beauty is Divine

Years ago I was glancing at the headlines on a paper in a newspaper vending machine when one tagline caught my eye, Science Confirms Plato, Beauty is Absolute. Unfortunately I did not buy the paper and subsequently did not read the article. For all I know it was an op-ed piece on gardening tips. Still, my interest remains piqued. I have tried to Google variations of the title but have never found any writing that presents definitive proof demonstrating categorically that Beauty is an Absolute.

When talking about Plato’s term “absolute” it might be more appropriate to say “beauty in itself.” Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Plato’s theory of ideal forms understands that Beauty is not tied to things that we would describe as beautiful, like a flower or a woman. Instead beauty leads us to a love of truth, which for Plato was the divine. In Plato’s world, everything that is good or noble must be beautiful. The lover of truth purifies the mind of desires and appetites and focus instead on knowledge that wells up from within.

You might ask how can beauty be thought of as objectively separate from the thing that we call beautiful? Shouldn’t beauty be a relative value instead of an absolute principle? Isn’t what I call beautiful and what you call beautiful necessarily going to vary? Beauty changes over time. The flower wilts.

Plato says that the absolute is independent of thoughts existing in men's brains. At the same time Plato identifies his universal Ideas with characteristics of a particular objects, such as the chair-ness of a chair, which would not appear to have an independent reality. I suspect this is the character of the divine that is necessarily resident in Plato’s understanding of the Absolute. These absolutes must exist as some emanation of God’s thought, otherwise, if they are just the stuff of our thoughts they are mortal and not eternal.

So beauty is divine, and if the newspaper headline is to be believed, science has proven it.  I begin to think that my memory may not be as accurate as I once imagined, and that the article might be less about Plato’s world of heavenly forms than I once believed.

Another possibility that occurs to me is that we may be dealing with a problem of semantics, and just as the Eskimos had a hundred words for “snow”, or as C.S. Lewis had his 4 loves, shouldn’t there be many types of beauty, one for every taste and imagination?

Anyway, I was talking with a friend a few days ago and she suggested I start dusting off my writing skills when it comes to the topic of aesthetics. Mainly because I have been thinking about going back to school again to study the philosophy of art know as aesthetics. So be warned faithful readers, the next few blog posts will probably be more of the same.