Ancient Aesthetics

Andrew Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317449867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Ancient thought, particularly that of Plato and Aristotle, has played an important role in the development of the field of aesthetics, and the ideas of ancient thinkers are still influential and controversial today. Ancient Aesthetics introduces and discusses the central contributions of key ancient philosophers to this field, carefully considering their theories regarding the arts, especially poetry, but also music and visual art, as well as the theory of beauty more generally.

With a focus on Plato and Aristotle, the philosophers who have given us their thought about the arts at the greatest length, this volume also discusses Hellenistic aesthetics and Plotinus' theory of beauty, which was to prove very influential in later thought. Ancient Aesthetics is a valuable contribution to its field, and will be of interest to students of philosophy and classics.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781315697444-1

This book aims to introduce the reader to some of the leading philosophical writings and ideas of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers in the field of aesthetics. It focuses in the first instance on the writings of Plato and Aristotle, who have had a major influence on the development of the field, and then goes on to consider some thinkers of later antiquity who responded, in various ways, to issues which Plato and Aristotle had raised. The thoughts of these philosophers had a significant impact on the development of aesthetics in modern times, and some of the issues they raised are still discussed today.

We will approach the subject primarily through these philosophers’ thought about the arts, especially poetry, though visual art and music will also be considered. The theory of beauty also formed a major part of the thought of many ancient philosophers, including Plato, and later the Stoics and Plotinus; we will not explore every aspect of this, but as it is often linked with their philosophy of the arts, it will feature in our discussion.

However, when we set out to discuss ancient aesthetics or theory of art, we face an immediate problem; the ancients had no term corresponding either to our ‘aesthetics’ or to our ‘art’. Can we, therefore, think of them as discussing the same subject as us, or is there too great a gap between ancient and modern thought for this to be possible?

The idea of the arts

It is well known that the ancient world had no word that translates as ‘art’, in the sense in which we speak of the fine arts or the creative arts. The ancient Greek word that is sometimes translated ‘art’, technē, means craft, skill or expertise, as does its Latin equivalent ars; it can refer to any activity which can be learned, or which involves a body of knowledge, or else to the ability displayed in such an activity. It includes what we naturally call crafts, which are directed to making things, but also other forms of expertise like medicine or navigation, and abstract sciences like mathematics. It can also include creative arts like poetry and painting; they are regularly referred to as technai, and it would be odd not to translate the term as ‘art’ in those contexts. But it does not pick out anything distinctive of them.

The matter is complicated by the way in which some ancient thinkers argued that some, at least, of these activities were not arts, that they did not involve expertise; Plato questions whether poetry is an art in the Ion, and the matter was clearly still being debated in the time of Horace, who alludes to it in his Art of Poetry. Yet in general they were allowed to count as arts, and grouped with other forms of skill.

It is tempting, therefore, to draw a sharp distinction between ‘our’ view and the ancient one; we might say that we recognise art as something distinctive, while the ancients did not. This, however, would be deceptive. There may turn out not to be such a radical distinction between ancient and modern views, both because our practice is not as clear-cut as this way of making the point suggests, and because the ancients did after all see some unity between these activities.

We certainly have a practice of distinguishing art from other things; while the term ‘art’ can have wider senses, we would all agree that in one central sense painting, for instance, is an art while medicine is not. It is not clear, however, that we have a very definite concept of art and of how it differs from other practices; there is room for debate both about the definition of art, and about what are examples of it (e.g. it can be debated whether photography is one). More specifically, while many thinkers hold that art has a distinctive kind of value, this is not universally agreed. What we clearly have is a practice of grouping certain activities together; but when we compare ancient practice with this, it may turn out that the difference between the ancient and modern worlds is not as great as it first seemed.

It is true that the creative arts were in the ancient world grouped along with other activities under the general term technē; but just because this was such a broad term, covering so many different activities, it did not place too much of a limit on how they were understood; we should not suppose that they were seen as exactly like other technai.

In fact, when we look at how ancient writers thought about the creative arts, it is clear that they were often linked with one another. Music and poetry in particular were closely associated; music was normally vocal, and much, though not all, poetry was sung; indeed the term mousikē was used to cover the words as well as the melody, and could be extended to cover spoken poetry as well, as it is by Plato in Book 2 of the Republic (376e). When philosophers began to discuss specific issues that mousikē raised, they would often separate questions about rhythm and melody from those about the words, as Plato does at Rep. 198c: Aristotle likewise separates off song as one of the elements of tragedy at Poetics 6. But they begin by regarding them as part of the same subject. The visual arts are less closely associated with poetry, but they are very often used as an analogy for it, as by Plato in Republic 10 or by Aristotle discussing the origins of poetry in Poetics 4.

A theme that runs through much of the ancient discussion of the arts and connects them is that of mimesis.¹ This term, which can be translated ‘imitation’, though this will not always be idiomatic, will be further discussed in chapter 4; but the central idea is that of making something like something else. Many of the arts can be seen as doing this. Painting and sculpture clearly create likenesses; so, in a way, does poetry, especially dramatic poetry. It is less clear that music does, but in the ancient world it, and dance, were widely seen as having a kind of likeness to states of character and emotions. The kind of likeness involved differs between cases, so it is not clear that ‘mimesis’ can be applied to them all in the same sense; but the use of the term does create a link between them.

It would be going too far to say that we could use the concept of mimesis to define a group of arts. For one thing, the term ‘mimesis’, meaning simply making one thing like another, covers many cases which are not artistic; for another, doubts could sometimes be raised over whether some arts were form of mimesis. Plato in the Republic defined mimesis in ways which implied that not all poetry was mimetic; and Philodemus was to argue that music was not mimetic. Nevertheless, the concept would often be used to link these arts, and for many purposes we can think of them as mimetic arts. The group may not be exactly the same as the arts we would recognise today – architecture, for instance, would not be included – but it has enough overlap to make ancient discussion of these arts still relevant.

In any case, many issues that arise in aesthetics are about particular arts; the question of the pleasure of tragedy, for instance, raised by Aristotle, is especially relevant to drama, and there are questions specifically about music, such as whether it represents emotion, a question that was debated by Stoics and Epicureans. Even without an overarching conception of art, these questions can still link ancient and modern thought.

The idea of aesthetics

The term ‘aesthetics’ now stands for an area of philosophy which comprises a number of distinct topics. Questions to do with the arts are generally agreed to fall within it, and so are questions about beauty, and perhaps related topics such as the sublime, though these may not exhaust the subject; there is widely agreed to be an aesthetics of nature, and perhaps concepts like horror might also fall within the field. Ancient philosophers did not have this same concept of aesthetics, and so did not group topics in the same way. They certainly thought about the arts, and also about beauty; but they did not, in general, see any special connection between the two. Beauty was found just as much in nature as in art, and also, for some thinkers, in the soul, in mathematical relations, or in the intelligible realm of Forms. Nevertheless we will see that the idea of beauty does have some impact on the theory of art, in Plato, in the Stoics and particularly in Plotinus.

Once again, the lack of a single term in antiquity which corresponds to our ‘aesthetics’ may lead us to think that ancient ways of thought are radically different from our own. But once again, we may be led to wonder whether the difference is so great, when we consider that the modern field of aesthetics is not perfectly unified. The term ‘aesthetics’ was coined in the eighteenth century by Alexander Baumgarten in his Aesthetica to indicate a particular kind of awareness, distinct from intellectual awareness. Many aestheticians have believed that there is a distinctively aesthetic kind of experience, although views have differed on just what the defining feature of this experience is; but by no means all aestheticians would agree that such a distinctive experience exists. The idea of an aesthetic experience historically guided the development of the field, linking the various subjects that fall within it; if that idea is abandoned, it is not clear that there is still a fundamental link between them. What remains is a practice of grouping them together; this is not unjustified, since they have been historically connected, but may still be in some degree arbitrary.

In this case it may not matter that ancient philosophers did not group subjects in the same way. Some, at least, of the topics they discussed may be relevant to modern thought, even though they did not group them together as aesthetic questions. For instance, Plato raises questions about the value of the arts, the part morality has in assessing it and the implications of this for censorship. Aristotle implicitly addresses a question about tragedy, why we want to experience it and derive pleasure from it. These questions are relevant to modern aesthetics, no matter how ancient philosophers classified them.²

Plato and Aristotle

The core of this book will consider some central arguments of Plato and Aristotle about the arts. We will begin by looking at Plato’s Republic, where he is notoriously alleged to have banished the artists from the ideal state; although this is an overstatement, he certainly proposed extreme restrictions on both the form and the content of the arts. In chapters 3 and 4 we will explore his reasons for doing so, and the issues this raises about censorship and the relation of art and morality.

The next two chapters will consider other passages in Plato which give a rather different picture of his attitude to the arts. We will look first at those dialogues which link poetry with divine inspiration, and then at some passages which seem to see some value in art, either as an embodiment of beauty or as a vehicle of philosophy. Plato’s attitude to the arts is not always as negative as it appears in the Republic, and there are in his work the seeds of later developments that would rehabilitate them.

Our discussion of Aristotle will focus on his Poetics, which is primarily a discussion of tragic poetry, and has helped to form our modern conception of tragedy. Chapter 7 will give an overall introduction to the themes of the work, while chapters 8 and 9 will explore two particularly tricky problems that it raises: first the nature of catharsis (purgation or purification), the effect of the tragic experience; then the ideal structure of tragedy and the part played in it by hamartia or error.

Each philosopher will be addressed on his own terms; they are approaching the subject from different angles, as part of different kinds of inquiry, and it is not always clear to what extent Aristotle sees himself as responding to Plato. However, there are some striking contrasts between their views, which will be considered as they arise: on the nature and value of mimesis, on the way in which poetry can give us understanding of the world, and perhaps, depending on how we read the concept of catharsis, on the relation of tragedy to the emotions.

Later antiquity

The final chapters will look at the thoughts of later authors who responded in various ways to the issues that Plato and Aristotle had raised.

In the Hellenistic period, Epicurus seems to take Plato’s attitude in the Republic to an extreme, not only condemning existing poetry as lacking educational value, but, unlike Plato, not seeking an improved poetry that can replace it; this, however, created problems for later Epicureans. The Stoics, meanwhile, affirm the value of poetry more wholeheartedly and are able to find beauty in it, even while recognising its fallibility.

In the Roman Empire, Horace seeks to give new application to Aristotle’s principles for writing poetry, combining them with elements of Stoic thought. Longinus develops a distinctive conception of the sublime, inspired by Plato’s theory of beauty, but giving it new application to speech, and the way it reveals powerful thought and intense emotion. Plutarch, in the light of Plato’s objections to existing poetry, grapples with the problems of teaching poetry to young people in the real world.

Finally, in the last chapter we see Plotinus developing a theory of beauty which is based on Plato’s thought, but set within a new metaphysical context, and applying it to the arts, especially visual art and music; other Neoplatonists, notably Proclus, do something similar for poetry.

The value of art

The various writers we will look at have different interests and are not all considering the same questions, but there is a theme that runs through many of their works; that of the value of art. There was a tradition of seeing poetry as having moral value; it was meant to give moral guidance and, through its characters, present people with moral examples. Plato castigates it for its failure to do this, and seeks to replace it with a better poetry that can perform that function. He seems, as I will argue, to allow to music and to visual art some value that does not rest on their moral content, but never does so with poetry.

Aristotle, by contrast, does see poetry as having moral value, though in a more subtle way, not, or not simply, as providing moral instruction; just how he sees it as working will depend on our reading of the concept of catharsis.

Epicurus takes Plato’s position to an extreme, thinking that poetry can never have educational value; the Stoics and Horace defend the view that it can, while Plutarch tries to work out in practice how this can be achieved in the real world. Meanwhile, Philodemus and Longinus, in very different ways, seem to allow it a quite different kind of value: for Philodemus, in the effective representation of a thought in words; for Longinus, in revealing greatness of mind.

Finally the Neoplatonists, picking up some elements in Plato’s thought, th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The artistic background
• 3 Plato: the arts and education
• 4 Plato: mimesis
• 5 Plato: poetry and inspiration
• 6 Plato: art, beauty and philosophy
• 7 Aristotle: introduction to the Poetics
• 8 Aristotle: catharsis
• 9 Aristotle: the shape of tragedy
• 10 The Hellenistic age
• 11 Aesthetics in the Roman Empire
• 12 Plotinus
• Index