Plato’s Philosophy of Art

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So these are elections in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. And as I say in the prospectus, in the notes, on the lectures,

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these are primarily designed for people taking the ascetics when on nine paper for finals.

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But anybody else who is interested is welcome to attend as well.

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For today, there's a handout on that chair there. And I'm going to post a more detailed version of that on Web LERN, which you can download.

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If you are taking this paper,

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you should download the faculty aesthetics reading list because the topics on that are those from which the exam questions are drawn.

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And the readings on there are also very important to know for the exam.

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If you're revising those particular topics, if you look at that list, you'll see that's the way it's divided is half on historical texts,

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anaesthetics that have been of great importance and half issue based topics not tied to any particular text.

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And I'm going to follow the same division of topics in these lectures.

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So half of the lectures will be on important historical texts in aesthetics, and half of them will be on important topics and aesthetics.

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So the first four are going to be on Plato, Aristotle, Hume and Kant.

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And the last four are going to be on pictorial representation, literary interpretation, musical expression and defining art.

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So that's how the lectures are divided. But I first want to say a little bit about the branch of philosophy excuse me, that we're doing aesthetics.

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I think that roughly speaking, and this is by no means a hard and fast division.

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You can divide the questions that as the Titians attempt to answer into three kinds.

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So the first kinds concerns, questions about the nature of art and of aesthetic properties.

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So under this heading would fall questions about the definition of art.

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As we'll see when we look at Aristotle, the definition of particular genres of art and also the nature of aesthetic properties.

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So what sort of property is beauty? What sort of property is elegance, grace, these sorts of things?

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And in particular, how do they interact with non aesthetic properties?

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So that's the first category of questions that aesthetics tends to deal with about the nature of art and of aesthetic properties.

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Second category of questions, concerns, broadly speaking, topics that have to do with the understanding and appreciation of art.

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So this has been particularly important in more recent centuries.

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In aesthetics,

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you'll notice that not a lot of the people we're going to look at in the first half of the course are concerned with these sorts of questions.

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But these have to do with what is it? For example, in virtue of which picture depicts what it does, is it because it resembles its subject?

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Or is it because there are certain conventions, these sorts of things? What is it in virtue of which a literary work has the meaning?

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It does. Is it because of the author's intentions? Or is it because of something else or something in addition?

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How does music express what it does? How is it that sounds plucked by a stringed instrument can be expressive of deep passion or deep sadness?

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These sorts of questions. There are also questions about the nature of our appreciative response to works of art.

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So is it possible to pity a fictional character? Is it rational to pity a fictional character?

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And in addition, there are questions about the standards that we should use in evaluating on interpretation

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offered by a critic and questions about what indeed the aims of criticism are.

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All of these and that's by no means an exhaustive list,

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fall into the second category questions about our understanding and appreciation of works of art.

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The third category, it has been extremely important historically and both, both historically and today.

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And those are questions to do with value. So what makes a work of art a good work of art?

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What sort of qualities are aesthetic merits and aesthetic flaws?

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Is sincerity, for example, a good thing about a poem? It's sentimentality, a bad thing about a piece of music.

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How does aesthetic value interact with ethical value? So is Nazi propaganda worth art for expressing horrible moral views?

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All of these sorts of questions are very much live ones. Also, there are questions about the judgements we make about the value of a work of art.

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So how do you justify the view that a work of art is great or beautiful or better than another?

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And a very important question is what good are the arts?

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So I've talked about just now some questions concerning what makes work of art.

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Good work of art. You could all. Is it a good thing for there to be good works of art?

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And if so, why? And it's that question that we're going to look at today.

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So, Plato, the topic of today's lectures provides really the first systematic large scale account in philosophy of the arts.

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And it is an uncompromisingly hostile account.

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He is relentlessly hostile to the arts, believing, arguing that there are very little value,

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if at all, and certainly in many, many cases very, very harmful, have negative value.

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And a difficult thing about Plato is it's very hard to get inside his mindset.

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Why on earth he would have this kind of attitude reading him?

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It seems really quite unintelligible a lot of the time where this hostility is coming from.

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So to start off with,

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I'd like to talk a little bit about the background to Plato's attack on the arts concerning the nature of art in Greece and the status that it had.

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So, first of all, it's slightly misleading to say that Plato attacked art.

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A lot of people dispute whether the Greeks had a concept corresponding quite to our concept of art.

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What's certainly true is that he attacked certain art forms and in particular, his focus was on painting and above all, on poetry.

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At one point in the Republic, he says that a number of his arguments would also apply to various other arts.

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So he mentions just very quickly music, weaving, embroidery and architecture.

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And he talks a bit more about music than any of those others. But primarily his attack is directed against painting and poetry.

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It's an interesting question to what extent his criticisms of painting and poetry apply to other art forms.

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And that's worth thinking about as we go along. But bear in mind, his attack on the arts is, above all, an attack on poetry.

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And to some extent as well, on painting. Now, poetry in Greece had a very different status than it does today.

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So for one thing, a lot more things were written in verse rather than prose.

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So there were works of philosophy written in verse, for example, and it had a very much a very public role.

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A very important thing to think about when you're reading Plato on the arts is to bear in mind that poetry was primarily read aloud.

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So most people's contact with poetry was not a private contact in the study.

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Reading silently to themselves, most people's contact, most of the time with poetry was as a public performance.

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So it's actually, I think, fair to say that played as a attack on poetry is as much an attack on acting, singing and recitation as it is on poetry.

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And that's helps to make some of his criticisms a bit more intelligible as you reading them.

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So epic poetry, for example, was recited at festivals. Dramas were performed at festivals, lyric poetry was often sung.

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So lots of Greek citizens would sing lyric poetry at drinking parties, for example.

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This public role of poetry and the fact that it was experienced as something read aloud is, as I say, very important to keep in mind.

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The second thing that's worth keeping in mind about poetry in Greece is the status that poetry had.

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So there's lots of evidence that poetry had a status comparable to the status that the Bible had in our culture until recently.

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So children were taught poetry at school in order to help form their character.

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People read Homer for examples of how to behave and if the evidence of Plato's dialogue ion is any indication.

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Some of them also read it for information about ship building and other sorts of technical skills.

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Aristophanes, the comic poet, actually says at one point that poets are schoolmaster's for adults.

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And it's, as I say, it's often described. Homer in particular had the status.

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Homer is often described as the Bible of the Greeks.

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And when you're reading Plato, you really must keep this background in mind.

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A lot of people have the reaction. That's why isn't Plato more sympathetic to aesthetic values?

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Why is he so concerned about moral values all the time concerning poetry?

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And I think the comparison with the Bible is an instructive one, because if you're in a society where people look to this work for moral

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guidance and you find all kinds of morally objectionable elements in this work,

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then it's going to seem to you like the aesthetic side is kind of irrelevant.

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So you could think of Plateau as a kind of Richard.

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Dawkins of ancient Greece, it wouldn't do very much to reply to Richard Dawkins that there's lots of wonderful poetry in the Bible,

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a lot of various authentically valuable elements that would be sort of missing his point.

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OK, so that's the kind of background that I think you should keep in mind here.

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So as I say, on the handout, you can divide Plato's criticisms of poetry into two kinds.

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First, he provides various moral criticisms of poetry.

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And second, he provides various epistemological criticisms of poetry.

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I'm not going to follow exactly the order in which he presents these criticisms.

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They're presented primarily in the early dialogue, the eye on and most especially in the later dialogue, the republic.

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OK. So what is his case against poetry?

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First of all, his moral case against poetry.

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One of his moral criticisms of poetry is that audiences will acquire beliefs that will corrupt them, that will have a bad moral influence on them.

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And he goes through at excruciating length early in the republic, describing all of the things that poets convey to us first and foremost.

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He says that they will convey to us that the gods and the heroes of ancient times are not good.

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So poets, for example, say that the gods created evil things and then they can't be good.

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Poets say that the gods can change, which is inconsistent with being perfect and at a extreme length and quoting

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quite a number of different passages from the tragedian and also from Homer.

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He gives examples in which the poets show the gods and the heroes acting immorally.

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So just a rough list, he goes.

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He cites passages in which they are depicted fighting amongst themselves, deceiving people, mourning the deaths of good people,

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being overcome by laughter, lack of self-control, defying authority, being greedy and kidnapping.

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You don't have to know all that. He just lays it on very, very thick to give you a sense of just how bad these revered texts are.

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So another belief that the poets will give audiences.

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That's going to be corrosive. Is that the afterlife is bad.

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So in the context of the republic in which he's concerned to form the character of the people who are going to be guarding the state,

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the sort of military police class, as well as the philosopher rulers of it,

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this is a very bad belief to inculcate, because if you think the afterlife is a miserable place,

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you will prefer slavery to fighting people who are going to invade your country.

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So that's a corrosive belief. The poets give you. And also the poets portray good people as miserable.

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So, of course, if you think of tragedy, plenty of good people fall to grief and tragedy.

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And this also is a corrosive belief. So morally corrosive beliefs.

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That's the first charge against Poetry Illustrated. As I say, with many concrete examples.

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Now, the second charge is that audiences of poetry will feel emotions that will corrupt them.

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And this, Plato says, is the most serious of the moral charges against poetry.

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This is one that occurs in Book 10 of the Republic. And he says that even good people will feel this effect of poetry.

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Even good people are not immune to the corrosive effects on their emotions of poetry.

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So Plato's view is that being a good person, being a morally upright person involves crucially, rationally controlling your desires and your emotions.

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This is often slightly caricatured as the view that reason has to cover govern desires.

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That's a slight caricature because in his view of the soul, the rational part also has desires.

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Notably, it has a desire for wisdom. But the key thing is that the other desires have to be kept in cheque by the rational part.

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There has to be a rational control on desires.

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And in contrast to Book three, in which he simply cites examples in which poetry happens to do morally corrosive things in Book 10,

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he argues that it's in the very nature of poetry to represent people whose souls are not rationally controlled.

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It's in the very nature of tragedy, for example, to show people who are overcome by greets and not rational.

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In control of their desires, it doesn't just happen to be the case.

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The Greek literary history has been like that. And the reason he says this is that calm, rational behaviour, as he puts it,

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is very difficult for audiences to understand and indeed very hard to represent because of this.

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And the reason for that is that most people aren't common, rational, and so they wouldn't know what to make of it.

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If you succeeded in representing get on stage and because of this, it's in the very nature of poetry,

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particularly dramatic poetry, to represent people whose souls are not as they should be.

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Now, this has a certain effect on the audiences of those poems.

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Even if they are good, it causes audiences to enjoy rather irrational behaviour.

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People take pleasure in the representations of people behaving in these ways, and in particular,

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it causes audiences to have feelings in the theatre that they should not have in other contexts.

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So Plato spends a great deal of time talking about pity.

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So his view, consistent with his general view of the soul, is that if you are afflicted by grief,

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it's not that you shouldn't grieve, is that you should keep your grief under rational control.

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You should keep as calm as is necessary to get your life back in shape and not be overcome by it.

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However, in the theatre we spend lots of time pitting people who have experienced affliction.

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So we give free reign to emotions that in other contexts we ought not to give free rein to this.

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Plato says, will weaken our ability to rationally control our desires and emotions in real life.

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And he, as I say, regards this as the worst thing. Morally speaking, about poetry's effects on its audience.

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Now, those are criticisms of poetries, effects on its audience.

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As I said, it's also important to remember that poetry was performed and he has a number of criticisms about its effects on performance.

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I'll just go through these quickly. Performers, too, can become bad people by performing poetry.

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Plato, in the third book of the Republic distinguishes between three kinds of poetry,

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one of which corresponds to narrated poetry, another of which corresponds to poetry in direct speech.

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So this would be primarily drama and another of which, of course, is a mixture of the two.

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And Homer is an example of this. Sometimes Homer narrates. Somehow, at times, Homer quotes directly the kind of poetry in which there's direct speech.

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Plato describes as that in which the speaker quotes the characters,

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speaks like the characters, and actually tries to get us to think he is those characters.

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And this Plato calls Mimesis. This is a very controversial word in reading these Greek texts on the philosophy of art.

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In this context, it looks like the best translation of it is imitation.

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So the objectionable thing here is that the performer imitates bad characters because great many,

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as we said of the characters in poetry, are bad ones. And imitating bad characters can make you like those characters.

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As it can make you similar to those characters. At least, he says, if it's done seriously and from one's youth onwards.

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So that's a problem with performance. But we'll go back to the possible meanings of the Mace's later in the lecture.

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But that's seems to be what it means in Book three. The final criticism poetry is that performance can become bad at their social roles.

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So in the context of the republic in which the well-ordered state is being sketched out,

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one of the features of a well ordered state is that each person plays their own

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one social role on the principle that no one can do more than one role adequately.

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Poetry, he says, has a corrosive effect on this.

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Performing a variety of social roles will make you bad at your own.

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OK, those are the moral problems with poetry. Now, even more wide ranging, though, are the epistemological criticisms that he presents.

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Now I. I'm going to skip the criticisms he provides in the eye on and you can find more detailed information about this on the handout on Web.

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This is the two a I think on your handout.

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It is. If we have time, I'll go back to them. But I'm going to focus on the ones that he presents and the republic.

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So the big charge against poets and painters is that they do not know the nature of the things that they're talking about.

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And he has a number of arguments to attempts to establish this.

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So one of these arguments appeals to Plato's best known theory, the theory of forms.

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In many of Plato's dialogues, he attempts to define quality.

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So, for example, in the Euthyphro, he attempts to define piety in the republic.

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He attempts to define justice. And Plato's view is, as it develops, is that these qualities exist independently of the things that have them.

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So there is such a thing as piety. In addition to all the pious actions that there are in the world and it's in virtue of piety,

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this thing that exists independently of all the pious actions in the world, that pious actions are pious.

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So pious actions, as you sometimes put it, participate in piety.

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And that's what makes them pious. And when we're trying to define equality like that, what we're trying to get at,

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what we're trying to know is the nature of this thing, piety independently existing, and this Plato calls the form of piety.

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This is the aim of knowledge to or the aim of strive of this kind of pursuit of knowledge is to know the nature of the forum.

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Now, there's a lot more to Plato's theory of forms in this.

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But I just want to flag up that aspect of it for the purposes of this argument that there are these independently existing qualities.

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And as we advance in knowledge, we advance in knowledge of the forms.

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Now, it's important also to realise is that it's not our senses that give us knowledge of the forms.

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So our senses tell us about particular things. So particular pious actions or particular beautiful objects.

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And when we're trying to grasp their nature, we consider what they have in common,

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in virtue of which they are pious or in virtue of which they are beautiful. And we ignore all kinds of other irrelevant aspects of of those things.

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So take the form of the bed, which he mentions in the context of his criticism of poetry.

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If you wanted to know what a bed really is, you want to give a definition of a bed, you would ignore all kinds of aspects of particular beds.

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So it's not essential to being a bed that it be of any particular colour.

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It's not essential to being a bed that it's be unmade, as your bed may be this morning.

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All of these aspects of it that you learn from your senses about particular things are irrelevant to what being a bed essentially is.

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It's the intellect that discerns what these things have in common, in virtue of which they are beds.

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So that's the background from the theory of forms and it follows from this.

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That's to know the nature of how to know what a bed is, is not to know how beds look.

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It's not to know the appearance of a thing.

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However, painters, he says, only have knowledge of the appearance of a bed, and indeed they only have knowledge of it from one angle.

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They don't even paint the other side of the bed usually.

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Indeed, he doesn't make this point, but you might make it for him that you wouldn't even have to know that what you're looking at is a bed scene.

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Maybe in order to paint a bed adequately so painters don't have knowledge of the forms he sets,

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they only have knowledge of the appearance of particulars.

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And he also says the same thing is true of poets.

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Now, he doesn't quite explain how this analogy applies to poets.

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And there's an issue about how much he's depending on the analogy between poetry and painting.

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At this point in the exposition. But he definitely says this about painters.

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So it's another thing to have the knowledge that's worth having, at least, is to know the form of the thing.

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Painters lose out. Painters don't have knowledge worth having.

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They don't know the forms. They know the appearance of particular things.

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They don't even, he says, have true belief about the forms.

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So our carpenter, for example, at least as he puts it, needs to look to the form of a bed in order to make a bed.

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So this is just Plato's way of saying a carpenter needs to at least have true beliefs about what makes something a bed.

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Even if they don't have knowledge of it. They're at least guided by a conception of what a bed really is.

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Painters aren't even in that category. They don't even need to know what a bed essentially is.

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Therefore, they don't have knowledge. And as I say, he says. Same thing applies to poets.

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However, he then goes on to say, I'm not going to rely on this analogy between painting and poetry in order to criticise poetry.

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He goes on to talk about the consequences that knowing something has.

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And he says none of the things that follow when you know something are true of poets.

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And this is kind of a curious argument. He says that he focuses on knowledge of virtues and skills in this argument.

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So says if poets knew the nature of the virtues and skills that they write about.

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So generalship in Homer, courage in Homer as well, they themselves would act virtuously or act skilfully.

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They wouldn't write about it. That's what people do when they know the nature of these virtues and skills.

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And similarly, they would teach others to do so. They would develop a following. None of this happens, though.

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He says Homer didn't develop a band of disciples.

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And therefore, that's another argument says that poets lack knowledge in this case of the virtues and skills that they write about.

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But further argument. He provides is what I've described in the handout as the argument from users and makers,

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and it concerns knowledge of whether what the poets paint, the poets describe and the painters paint are good examples of their kind.

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So he there's only the user of a thing knows whether a thing that thing is a good or bad example of its kind.

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And this is because the goodness or badness of the thing is relative to the use for which it is made.

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So the user of a flute knows whether a flute is a good flute because he knows what a flute is supposed to do.

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There is use of it.

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Indeed, even the maker of the thing, as I mentioned, can get true beliefs about what makes a thing a good or bad example of its kind.

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And that's because he takes his orders from the user of the thing.

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Poets, however, and so to painters, are neither users nor makers of the thing that they produce representations of.

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Therefore, they have neither knowledge nor true belief of the things that they talk about or paint.

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All right. Final epistemological criticism in the republic, painters, he says, exploit parts of us that lead to error.

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In particular, painters use shading to make the same thing appear concave and convex.

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Likewise, they use prospective diminution to make things appear to be bigger or smaller than they are.

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So that is something far away. They paint with a small space paint blob of paint.

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Now, of course, only, as he puts it in one translation, simple people or children would really be fooled by this.

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But the point is that even those of us who know better,

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it still looks to us as though the thing is smaller than it is, or that the flat surface is concave or convex.

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And that he takes is proof that the painters are appealing to or exploiting parts of the soul,

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which if we took them seriously and fortunately we don't, would lead to error.

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And he says in this respect, poetry is like painting because it also appeals to a lower part of the soul,

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namely the base emotions and desires that need to be kept under control.

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But in the context of painting, it's an epistemological criticism rather than a moral criticism.

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OK. Now, as I say, there's a few other criticisms he raises in the iron and I may get to those further on,

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but based on these criticisms of the value of painting and poetry,

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Plato develops in our policies that he thinks states ought ideally to be pursuing with respect to painting and poetry.

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And so, in the context of Book two and three, Plato is discussing the education that the guardians of his ideal state ought to be given.

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And from all of this, he thinks it follows. We should adopt these policies.

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First of all, educate the children who are going to grow up to be the guardians.

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Only with poetry that gives them morally beneficial beliefs and forbid them to hear any other kind of poetry.

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So Homer and the Greek classics are going to be censored heavily according to this policy.

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That's for the Guardian children, the Guardian adults there to be forbidden to hear any other poetry than that kind unless there is some need

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and they're sworn to secrecy and they're forced to make the sacrifice of an extremely expensive animal.

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All of this rendering it unlikely that they will frivolously go and listen to dangerous poetry,

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very strict conditions even on the adults guardians of the city.

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Those are policies for four audiences, for performers, as he puts it.

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Guardians are forbidden to seriously imitate bad behaviour.

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Now, there's a point where he says maybe for fun in amusement, that might be OK, but definitely not seriously.

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Definitely not. Inertness. Furthermore, they're to be forbidden to perform characters that are inconsistent with their social role,

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that displayed behaviour that's inconsistent with the role that they ought to have. Again, on the principle that you can only do one thing well.

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I think he even says at one point that you shouldn't imitate thunderstorms on this principle as well.

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So a lot of things are going to be cut out, even imitating natural phenomena.

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Lastly, guardians are required to use mostly narration.

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So this is again, we're talking in book three here. Guardians will imitate only these kinds of things.

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And when they do perform poetry or read poetry, they're mostly going to use narration rather than direct imitation.

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These are the policies in book three. And I think some of them are proposed in book two possibly as well.

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Handbook 10. A much harder line is presented. I mean, that's already pretty harsh.

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But in Book 10, rather confusingly, he comes out and says it was a good thing that we decided back then to ban as much poetry as his mimetic.

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Well, that's very surprising because it sounds like he didn't quite do that previously.

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He allowed mimetic poetry under certain circumstances. But then we have this new policy.

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So ban all mimetic poetry. Is the plan in book 10.

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Now, that's just one of a number of confusing things about Plato's position,

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as I said, I think it's one of the strange things reading him when you do so,

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even granting the kind of status that poetry had in ancient Greece is what are we to make of this barrage of arguments against poetry,

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of unmitigated hostility towards poetry and also painting a lot of objections, as you can imagine, have been raised against Plato.

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So one, of course, is this point about inconsistency. He's inconsistent in his policies.

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Another objection that's often raised is that he is using the word mimesis in a different sense in the different parts of the republic.

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Some book two and three. As I say, it looks like Mace's means imitation in book 10.

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Socrates is asked. Someone asks, what is the basis?

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And he talks about painting in order to explain what makes this is.

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Well, that's very strange. If in Book three, Mace's is defined as direct speech in poetry.

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What's the equivalent in painting to direct speech in poetry?

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It's not so evident what this could possibly be.

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So this has led some people to think that he's using the word mimesis suddenly in a different sense in Book 10 as meaning,

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not imitation, but representation.

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So painters produce representations of objects. Other people think that perhaps you can make them consistent here.

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I can concede somebody suggesting that he's talking about producing an imitation of the object that's being represented.

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So you might say that painters produce representation of produce, rather imitations of the things that they paint.

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That's one conception of it. But that's one thing that's worth being aware of,

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is whether he's actually consistent in this key word that he is using here, mimesis and its derivatives mimetic.

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Another striking feature of this that confuses lots of people is whether Plato's theory is actually inconsistent with his own practise.

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So as most of you probably know, Plato himself wrote in dialogues, almost his entire canon is mimetic, even in the sense of Book three.

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A great deal of it is direct speech.

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There is some narration in some of the dialogues, but a great deal of it is straightforward, direct speech, just like the playwrights use.

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And now you might think this is consistent with Book ten, at least when a good person like Socrates is speaking.

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Because, of course, in book, ten direct representations of speech of good people is permitted.

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But of course, it's not just Socrates who speaks even in the Republic. There are interlocutors who express bad views.

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So Thrasymachus at the beginning talks about is sceptical of justice, doesn't think there's anything in being just for a person.

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So what are we to make of that? Plato. Plato's own dialogues have direct speech of bad people.

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It seems like Plato's Republic would be banned from Plato's Republic. So how are we to reconcile this with what he says?

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One interesting suggestion I came across puts a great deal of stress on that qualification that he provides in book.

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Three says the Guardians aren't to imitate bad people seriously.

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So according to this line of thought, which G.F. Ferrari presents, guardians can imitate bad people if it's not done seriously.

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Now, what seriously means is not entirely clear, but he says if you look at the bad characters in Plato's dialogues, the kind of buffoons.

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It's a bit. Anybody who imitated them would be doing it would be clear that they're to do so a bit.

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Ironically, that's maybe one way out.

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So those are some problems concerning the inconsistencies in what he says.

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Of course, another problem with his arguments is that regarding the effects of poetry, the morally corrosive effects,

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epistemological effects, Plato doesn't provide any evidence that it actually has these effects.

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I mean, he may provide anecdotes at certain points, but it's an empirical question.

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What are the effects of poetry on a person?

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You need to provide some good empirical evidence for this.

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And it's all too familiar, of course, that people talk about the bad effects of movies, TV, videogames and violence represented in them.

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But it's anybody's guess. Until you actually do some empirical research into the question to see what actually are the effects of poetry on people.

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And Plato, I think it's fair to say, doesn't give us adequate evidence for that.

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Now, he may have thought it was common sense and perhaps it was back then.

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But from our perspective, in evaluating his arguments, what we need is some empirical evidence.

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Now, that being said, if you want to defend Plato on this,

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I'm going to leave aside the moral criticisms, the kinds of moral effects that poetry painting have.

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I think you could do worse than to look at some of the psychological research on what are called cognitive biases.

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That has been done, particularly stemming from the work of the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Frisky.

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I'm not saying this has been done with reference to the arts, but it's rather suggestive.

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So cognitive biases are ways in which we're inclined to reason that lead us to error,

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particularly in judgements about the probability of an event and the frequency with which some state of affairs occurs.

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One of the biases that has been identified or that there's a certain amount of evidence for is called the availability heuristic.

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And this is the out the available ability heuristic is a way in which we reason in an inclination we have to judge some state of affairs,

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more frequent or more probable than it is or then were warranted in thinking.

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If an example comes to mind very easily. So, for example,

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one of the examples they give in the literature is people are apparently much

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more inclined to overestimate the proportion of celebrities that take cocaine,

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you know, given a certain amount of evidence because they can think of prominent examples come to mind easily.

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Another, I'm not sure if this has been confirmed, but this is the sort of thing that they're talking about,

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is people are inclined to overestimate how likely they are to die in a plane crash because, of course, very prominent examples come easily to mind.

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Striking, frightening examples of certain states of affairs are one kind of state of affairs that is more likely to come to mind very easily.

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A further interesting feature of the research on this, and this was conducted in the mid 70s,

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is that it appears that when people are asked to imagine a specific outcome,

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they are inclined to regard it as much more likely than people who were not asked to imagine it.

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So in the experiment, they asked people to imagine Jemmy Carter winning the 1976 presidential election and the people who were asked

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to imagine that overall tended to regard it as much more likely than people who were not asked to imagine this.

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Now, modern Platonist would pick up their ears at this point.

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Reading this kind of evidence that's been presented about cognitive biases and because, of course,

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it presents examples of very memorable states of affairs and more particularly, art gets us to imagine very memorable sorts of states of affairs.

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I think there was a Facebook group once that said Bollywood lied to me about what relationships are like, those sorts of things.

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You might think it distorts people's views about things like relationships because we're very familiar with a certain narrative arc.

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Then we learn real world, not like that, not as frequently as we would be led to believe through the availability.

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Here Ristic being twigged by these works of art. Another example you might.

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I think I've heard that people were much more inclined to think to overestimate the danger of shark attack after Jaws was released.

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That seems to be pretty clear case of the availability heuristic of the kind these psychologists have identified working its effects.

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Now, as I say, this is not evidence yet to my knowledge.

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At least no study has been done on these cognitive biases with reference to the arts.

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But it's not obvious that Plato is wrong in general about this,

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because there is some evidence that the kinds of reactions that are works appealed

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to us have to do or are likely to provoke these kinds of cognitive biases.

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Now, I'd like to finish with this with the following.

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So one of the important things that questions that play to raise it is quite apart from others,

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arguments are any good and whether his whether it provides any evidence for them.

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Is this question of what the value of art is.

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So it's a striking fact that we often praised works of art in epistemic terms.

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So we praise movies, poems, works of narrative art, paintings, sometimes as truthful, as insightful.

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As I mentioned at the start, a certain controversy over whether sincerity is a marriage as well.

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But we praise them in epistemic terms. And one take on this is just to suppose that we value the arts as a source of knowledge.

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This is kind of a hot topic in aesthetics at the moment, whether the arts are valuable as a source of knowledge.

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Now, one of the difficulties with this is in formulating the alternatives, formulating the question and the alternative answers to this question.

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So quite obviously, it's it's dead obvious that we can learn things from works of art.

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I mean, you could just maybe a work of art would contain a mathematical proof and you would learn the conclusion of that.

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But that's clearly not what we're talking about. When we suggest or debate whether the arts are valuable as sources of knowledge,

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what it seems to be is I suggest a question about whether there's something distinctive of the arts,

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some feature of how they present things or something. Otherwise distinctive of them in virtue of which we acquire knowledge from them.

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So it's tempting to think, for example, that arts, that some of the arts are a source of knowledge of what certain experiences are like.

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So a novel about the Second World War could give you knowledge,

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perhaps about what the Second World War was like or something very insightful about having very insightful work of art,

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about human nature or say, King Lear on ageing.

384
00:47:32,960 --> 00:47:43,180
Give you a sense of what ageing is like for a certain type of person, a certain type of physician and so forth.

385
00:47:43,180 --> 00:47:51,290
Now, that's it sounds like a rather natural thing to say. A question that arises, though, concerns justification.

386
00:47:51,290 --> 00:48:01,370
So it would be natural to say that one of the things that knowledge requires is justification of the belief that things like that.

387
00:48:01,370 --> 00:48:09,110
How exactly is it that a work of art like King Lear could give you a justified belief that ageing is like that?

388
00:48:09,110 --> 00:48:16,650
This is a particularly difficult question for works of fiction. These people didn't exist.

389
00:48:16,650 --> 00:48:24,080
None of this stuff happened. Happy to give us a justified belief that stuff like this happens.

390
00:48:24,080 --> 00:48:34,660
Now, it's not in principle a problem to say that the arts can give us a justified belief, say that World War Two was a certain way.

391
00:48:34,660 --> 00:48:40,930
Testimony, as it's sometimes put, is a perfectly respectable source of justification.

392
00:48:40,930 --> 00:48:49,090
Somebody who is an authority on something telling you about that thing can justify your beliefs.

393
00:48:49,090 --> 00:48:50,410
So if you know, for example,

394
00:48:50,410 --> 00:49:04,330
that the author or the artist lived through World War two and is writing this in order to tell you about it and you have no reason to distrust them,

395
00:49:04,330 --> 00:49:13,930
etc, etc., it's perfectly possible that you could be justified by a testimony and in believing what the work of art conveys to you.

396
00:49:13,930 --> 00:49:23,290
However, that raises the question again. Is there anything distinctively artistic about the means by which you've got the knowledge?

397
00:49:23,290 --> 00:49:34,330
And by that I mean, if it's all based on testimony, then that person could simply have told you about it in a non artistic form.

398
00:49:34,330 --> 00:49:42,600
It's not essential that it be a novel or painting or play.

399
00:49:42,600 --> 00:49:54,750
If the aim is to get knowledge, so that seems to pose a certain difficulty, that returns us to that seeming requirement here,

400
00:49:54,750 --> 00:50:06,040
that it be something distinctive of the arts that is responsible for your getting the knowledge.

401
00:50:06,040 --> 00:50:15,940
Furthermore, there's also the question on this as to whether it's really one of the main reasons we value the arts, that it's a source of knowledge.

402
00:50:15,940 --> 00:50:19,240
If it is so, a painting might be good.

403
00:50:19,240 --> 00:50:26,920
It's a doorstop. But you wouldn't explain the value of the arts by saying that while some works of art are good doorstops.

404
00:50:26,920 --> 00:50:33,400
What we want is something that explains why we play such great value on

405
00:50:33,400 --> 00:50:39,100
artworks and that some artworks are incidentally valuable for certain purposes.

406
00:50:39,100 --> 00:50:49,900
Is maybe not really what we're on about here. So this is why I say formulating the question is actually a somewhat delicate matter.

407
00:50:49,900 --> 00:50:54,670
Another possibility is that even though we praise works of art in epistemic terms like insightful,

408
00:50:54,670 --> 00:50:58,870
truthful, etc., we don't value them as sources of knowledge.

409
00:50:58,870 --> 00:51:10,660
So it could be that we do value insightful and truthful works of art, but not because we get knowledge from them.

410
00:51:10,660 --> 00:51:19,870
So Van Gough, for example, said that his aim in painting was to be simply honest before nature, Gainsborough said.

411
00:51:19,870 --> 00:51:24,820
I like Truth and Daylight Order to express his philosophy of painting.

412
00:51:24,820 --> 00:51:29,380
Now, this note is talking about truth. It's not talking about knowledge.

413
00:51:29,380 --> 00:51:35,260
He didn't say, I like teaching people or my aim is to teach people things, give people knowledge.

414
00:51:35,260 --> 00:51:41,110
They talked about being truthful. And when we praise the work of art is insightful.

415
00:51:41,110 --> 00:51:46,420
That doesn't necessarily mean that we learn something we didn't know before.

416
00:51:46,420 --> 00:51:52,900
Of course, when you put it that way, you might think that has a slightly odd sounding ring.

417
00:51:52,900 --> 00:52:04,560
Why do we value truthfulness insight? If the truth and the insights we're being told are not things we didn't know before.

418
00:52:04,560 --> 00:52:11,340
Maybe one possibility is that we value the articulation of certain truths.

419
00:52:11,340 --> 00:52:21,330
So something is expressed very aptly in a way that we never could do ourselves or represented very athletic,

420
00:52:21,330 --> 00:52:29,880
and that we value apt representations of truths like what Alexander Pope said about wit,

421
00:52:29,880 --> 00:52:35,460
which is nature to advantage, dressed off with stock, but never so well expressed.

422
00:52:35,460 --> 00:52:41,340
Maybe that's the kind of thing we value about artworks, although, of course,

423
00:52:41,340 --> 00:52:49,930
that raises the question, is it essential that they be truths that are well expressed?

424
00:52:49,930 --> 00:53:03,200
Maybe truth or insight falls out here. If we're going to put the stress on how well expressed it is.

425
00:53:03,200 --> 00:53:12,430
Just sketching out these sorts of options, these are options if we want to try and answer Plato on his own terms to defend art in epistemic terms.

426
00:53:12,430 --> 00:53:23,300
Of course, it's perfectly possible that the arts are not valuable, primarily for epistemic reasons.

427
00:53:23,300 --> 00:53:27,370
Oscar Wilde wrote a very interesting dialogue called The Decay of Lying,

428
00:53:27,370 --> 00:53:34,070
in which he said that lying, the telling of beautiful, untrue things is the proper aim of art.

429
00:53:34,070 --> 00:53:39,590
And that's one view you could take that we shouldn't be trying to answer Plato on his own terms,

430
00:53:39,590 --> 00:53:49,460
that we should be trying to vindicate other values that the arts embody.

431
00:53:49,460 --> 00:53:58,430
Next week, we are going to take a look at Aristotle's response to Plato, which is a very subtle response,

432
00:53:58,430 --> 00:54:05,720
and tries to answer Plato to some extent on his own terms and to some extent in other terms.

433
00:54:05,720 --> 00:54:13,850
And it's worth reading the poetics, Aristotle's work on this rather closely, because it's not always clear,

434
00:54:13,850 --> 00:54:21,830
as we'll see exactly whether he is presenting a direct replies Plato at certain points and where he's not.

435
00:54:21,830 --> 00:54:28,587
Thank you so much.