The Being of Art According to Plato

Plato's conception of art needs some investigation. I want to explore specifically the aspect concerning the 'double removal' from truth, or being. We start with the concept of something (e.g., "couch", to use Plato's example), and this concept is said to range over all particular couches. So couch A and couch B may be materially constituted in completely different ways (A is made of straw and wool whereas B is made of metal and cloth), but insofar as they both instantiate the function that "couch" calls for (presumabely, being a legged, long piece of furniture for resting), both couches may be fairly designated by that concept. Plato's claim is that an art object participates in an analogous relation as "particular" and "concept", except in its case it is between itself and a particular, respectively. This is where the notion of double removal comes from. Particulars are (singly) 'removed' from their concept just as an art object is removed from its particular, thus in a transitive way the art object is doubly removed from the original concept.

A language which admits of degrees of being and degrees of truth is useful for comprehension. I often personally get frustrated with the idea that something can be more true than another or that something can simply be more than another. My usual notion of being is a function of whether there is a thing in the world which instantiates its concept. The notion of truth too is merely a function of a proposition's correspondence with an objective state of affairs. These notions don't exactly admit of degrees -- something either is or is not, or a statement is either true or false (Just how many details are wrong in the statement doesn't affect how false the statement as a whole is -- it takes only one). But I have to admit that I'm being a little hasty in dismissing the idea that we can speak meaningfully about 'more' truth and 'more' being, and I think a proper modification of the concepts can help us make sense of Plato's taxonomy.

Plato speaks of the forms as having the most truth and the most being. I will be fair to Plato and not take him as meaning to posit some ethereal realm of forms that exists outside space and time; that would be unfairly attributing weighty metaphysical claims to Plato that he may not necessarily have intended. For us, a form will function as a concept without any metaphysical significance. Strictly speaking, a form is itself NOT spatiotemporal, though it may designate things which are. I believe that the most important distinguishing property about all forms is their timeless and eternal character, and I will take this property as equivalent to highest being and highest truth. For example, in our universe's existence, dogs have only inhabited it for a finite, quantifiable length of time. However, in an important sense, "dog" (as form) has always existed because in principle this form is always 'there' for designating (whether or not there are any objects in the world that can satisfy its conditions as a referent) and its existence as form is not conditioned by time or whether or not it has occupied a person's mental content in the guise of a concept. Similarly, eternal truths would be such that they range over all possible worlds. This is the sense of "eternal" Plato invokes in his description of all forms.

Now let's take all dogs that have ever existed as our object. These dogs do not have the eternal character of "dog" that we described above; the existence of dogs is finite and specific to time. Thus, by our new definition, they have 'lesser' being. It appears then that the degree of being that an object has is directly proportional to its approaching timelessness and eternity.

We can make sense of the double removal from being of art since an artwork stands in direct relation not to a form, but to a particular instantiation of the form (at least according to Plato). We've already seen that all beings conditioned by time and only approximate a form have a lesser degree of being, so if the artwork's existence is contingent upon such a being, then the artwork's being necessarily has a lesser degree than both the form itself and its instantiation.

Remarks on science, truths, and lies

In "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense," Nietzsche insists that we recognize that our claims of truth cannot extend beyond the sphere of metaphor. The truths of science are conditioned by human subjective perception, but this is forgotten by the 'rational' person. Two things struck me while reading this.

First, I'm curious about truth claims expressed by scientific fields like biology. He writes, "If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare 'look, a mammal,' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value" (p. 68). It appears then that the biologist's project of taxonomizing the various life forms into hierarchical structures is, in an important sense, a fiction. It is true that the numerous genus-species relations do tell us what properties are inherited by individual classifications of life, but what do we learn from this? The activity appears to be a mere subsuming of perceived nature into these fabricated categories in order to make this nature more digestible to the human. But we shouldn't expect to find a hierarchical structure 'in nature'; things simply are as they are while our human conceptualization merely formalizes what is present to us. A project like this one appears to not be a position to claim 'truth', since nothing is really learned from nature.

Second, I am also intrigued as to the extramoral value of truths and lies. This is typical of Nietzsche, especially in works like On the Genealogy of Morals. He takes what appears to have absolute value -- for lack of a better term -- like morals, truths, and lies, and whereas other philosophers take their value as for granted, Nietzsche investigates the values themselves from a sort of historical, naturalistic perspective. Nietzsche writes, "What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth" (p. 66). This is a very interesting remark on the possible origins of the value of truths and lies, and I believe that is is quite plausible but too often overlooked. At the origin, the object of the hatred or pleasure is not the instance of "lie" or "truth" in itself, but rather the very material, tangible results associated with the act of lying or truth. It is the invention of the human that abstracts away from these particular instances to the forms of "lying" and "truth-telling", and somehow the object of scorn or pleasure gets focused on these concepts themselves -- as if they were absolutes -- rather than their material consequences.

Kant's Aesthetic of the Sublime

Francisco Goya, "Saturn Devouring his Son."

      When we read Kant for this class, we focused on Kant's Aesthetics of the beautiful, but Kant also describes, as Dr. Grady mentioned, the sublime in relation to his aesthetic theory. The sublime, like the beautiful, is a kind of feeling that arises when we behold an object of art or nature, but while the beautiful is a wholly positive feeling, the sublime is a mixed bag of pleasure and displeasure. Kant insists that the sublime reminds us of the superiority of reason to nature, and we may see from this that the experience of the sublime is a reminder of the superiority of morality to inclination.

     While Kant's Critique of Judgment is concerned primarily with aesthetic judgments of the beautiful, he also devotes considerable time to an analysis of the sublime, that which we call "absolutely great" (94). The beautiful and the sublime each operate in a similar way. They both are relations of the faculty of the understanding to another faculty of cognition: with the beautiful, the understanding; with the sublime, reason (90-1). But while we can call a certain object or phenomenon beautiful, Kant understands the sublime to be held not in the object, but in the apprehending subject: "true sublimity must be sought in the mind of the judging subject, and not in the Object of nature that occasions this attitude by the estimation formed of it" (104). Furthermore, while Kant's analysis of the aesthetically beautiful starts with the apprehension of the beautiful in nature and moves on to the beautiful in art, his analytic of the sublime considers mostly objects in nature.

     Kant suggests that the sublime reveals to us the limits of our own imagination and, thereby, the superiority of the rational to the natural. We can understand, through reason, the phenomenon of a thunderstorm, but our imagination fails to grasp its enormity, even when it is displayed before us. The feeling of the sublime that arises when we behold a thunderstorm is a feeling of pleasure at the extent of our reason and displeasure at the limits of our imagination (106). This is what Kant calls the "mathematically sublime"  The limits of our imagination, our grasp of the sensible, in comparison with what we may grasp through reason, leads us to the apprehension that we, as rational beings, are superior to the natural, purely sensible world that does not posit ends for itself (91-2). The sublime is a feeling of greatness in ourselves.

     The sublime, however, is not wholly a feeling of pleasure. It is a combination of pleasure and displeasure, for while we are certainly rational beings, we are also bound by the laws of nature. Thus, Kant writes:

The feeling of the sublime is therefore at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason.... (106)

He also describes it the sublime terms of a "vibration," oscillating back and forth between  "repulsion and attraction" (107). The example of the storm is an apt one: we are nonetheless drawn to watch them if we are safely indoors, despite the fact that they are frightening. Our imagination fails to present them in their entirety. We can only conjure up certain details. Storms serve as a reminder to ourselves of our own limitations: if it were not for our houses, we would fear them more. But this is precisely where the pleasure arises. Our rational being allows us to build protection against nature. We are capable of thwarting nature's might (to an extent), in this case, capable of raising up shelters to shield us from storms.

     But what of the sublime we apprehend in art? It would seem to operate the same way as would the sublime we see in nature. The feeling of the sublime operates in the mind the same way as does beauty (purposiveness without purpose). The apprehension of the sublime, the feeling of an interplay between the imagination and reason, is prompted by a given representation or object. For Kant, the moral law is derived from reason, and if the sublime in nature reminds us of the superiority of our rational, lawful selves, then the sublime we behold in art might be a reminder, specifically, of this latter superiority. Because we are rational, lawful, moral, we are superior to that world which is merely sensible, and does not posit its own duties and ends.

     Artwork has the capacity to remind us of our moral selves, often, paradoxically, through the representation of immorality. Think of our response to tragedy, or to a play like Merchant of Venice. It's a difficult comedy, We are entertained, drawn in by the language, the plot, and the characters: foolish, cruel Antonio, petty Bassanio, the vengeful Shylock. Our reaction is a moral one, or, at least, the feeling inspired by the play is evidence of our moral considerations. Any experience of the sublime in a work such as this is a reminder that it is better to treat others with dignity, as Kant might say, as opposed to treating others as prices. We are reminded of how it is better to act out of respect for the law and from reason, and of the horrors and limitations of acting purely on impulse.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique Of Judgment. Trans. James C. Meredith. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Classifying video games as art...

http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/are-video-games-art/Content?oid=2282684