Plato (427-347 BCE)
ART AS IMITATION OF IMITATION
“But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life...?”
—Plato, Symposium, 212
You may vaguely recall from Philosophy 101 that a guy named Play-Dough wrote about some cave and was really into these things called “forms.” Well, besides the spelling, you wouldn’t be too far off. Plato was definitely obsessed with the unattainable ideals that he (and his mentor Socrates before him) called Forms. In Plato’s view, these perfect ideas exist only in the mysterious Realm of Forms, outside the world of sensory experience. So, our earthly perceptions of virtues like Truth or Beauty are only inferior approximations of their corresponding Forms.
This means that when an artist creates an original work that imitates human experience, the result is nothing more than an imitation of an imitation of the Forms. Artists with a keen sense of measurement and proportion can come closer than others in reflecting the essence of Beauty. But, because of the senses’ inherent fallibility, human creations will never capture the perfection of the Forms.
Since art is always twice removed from the Forms, Plato is not a huge fan of it. However, he respects art’s ability to shape people’s thoughts and feelings, and therefore believes it should be strictly censored by the wisest members of a society. —CKG
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
• Is any work of art ever perfectly beautiful, or is it always flawed in some way?
• Are the five senses capable of receiving universal truths about our world?