Aesthetics: Classic Theories, Tate Modern
Download Course Outline as a pdf
What is Aesthetics?
The word 'Aesthetics' is used in a number of different ways.
Within philosophy it is now usually taken to be synonymous with 'The Philosophy of Art', so that books called Aesthetics or an Introduction to Aesthetics cover questions such as 'What is Art?' 'How relevant are an artist's intentions to interpretation?' 'What is the status of a good forgery?' and so on.
Another way in which the word is used is to refer to thinking about beauty in art or nature. Some art, such as Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' is deliberately anti-aesthetic and so outside the realm of such discussion (whereas it would fall within the realm of 'aesthetics' in the first sense mentioned above).
In the eighteenth century, 'aesthetics' focused on sensory experience and in particularly judgements based on sensory experience. For more on the 18th Century uses of 'aesthetics' and on the origin of the notion of the 'Fine Arts' see Kristeller 'Introduction' in the set book for this course). For a more detailed discussion of what 'Aesthetics' can mean, read Malcolm Budd's article on Aesthetics.
Plato on Imitation
Plato was perhaps the most anti-aesthetic philosopher of all time (in senses 1 and 3 above, at least). He gave much higher priority to truth acquired through reason than to the evidence of the senses. He also wanted to exclude art that involved representation from his ideal state as described in his famous dialogue The Republic. [for a critical summary of the main themes of The Republic, including his views on art, listen to an audio file from my book Philosophy: The Classics 'Plato The Republic'- approximately 26 mins]
The Forms
Plato believed that we are most of us misled into believing that we understand the world we live in: we are dwelling in the world of phenomena, of appearances, but reality consists of the Forms or Ideas. To get a sense of what he meant, think of an equilateral triangle. Your idea of the triangle is perfect in the sense that each angle is exactly sixty degrees, the sides are perfectly straight, and exactly the same length. If you try to draw an equilateral triangle or make one out of wood, it will always be slightly imperfect: it will never achieve the perfection of your idea of the triangle. In Plato's terms, the imaginary perfect triangle is the Form. But such Forms don't just exist for triangles and other geometrical shapes, they also exist for such things as a couch. The couch you see is an imperfect rendition of the Idea or Form of a couch as interpreted by a craftsperson. If someone then paints a picture of the couch, this will be even less perfect (and require even less knowledge of the Form of the couch than required by the craftsperson): the painting will be at two removes from reality (where reality is the Form). [for more on this see the extract from Plato's Republic in the set book]
One of the ways he explained this idea that reality lies beyond appearances was through the famous analogy of The Cave. Prisoners chained to the floor, look at flickering shadows which they take to be reality, but is in fact produced by light cast from a fire behind them in front of which people carrying cut-out shapes walk making shadows on the wall. When one of the prisoners escapes into the real world and turns even to face the sun, none of his fellow prisoners believe him when he returns to the cave. They still dwell in the world of mere appearances and are ignorant of reality. In Plato's view, it is philosophers who have the capacity, through reason, to understand the real world. Consequently he set them at the head of his ideal society, making them philosopher-kings.
Listen to an interview with Simon Blackburn about Plato's Cave (13 mins 42 secs) - this is from the podcast series Philosophy Bites which is also available on iTunes.
Plato argued that representational art should be excluded from his ideal republic because it was fundamentally misleading about reality. Those who ruled needed to keep focused on the Forms and in particular on the Form of the Good. He was particularly worried about the corrupting effects of poetry, which often misrepresented the nature of the gods, and also the kind of first person poetic expression that encouraged a reader to identify with an evil person's viewpoint. So poets and painters would be politely turned away from the borders of his ideal society and those who attempted to practice these deceptive and corrupting arts within would be prevented from doing so. As Karl Popper pointed out in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, this is an aspect of his totalitarian tendencies...(for a more sympathetic account of Plato's censorship of art, see Myles Burnyeat article from the London Review of Books, 1998, reprinted in Nigel Warburton ed. Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd edition).
In The Gallery
We looked at five large photographs by the contemporary photographer Thomas Demand.There is a slideshow of Demand's work here, including some from the series 'Tavern' (click on 'previous' and 'next' to scroll through the slideshow). Each was a colour photograph of a paper sculpture that represented part of a building in which a child had been held after a kidnapping. The child was never discovered.
These images have an uncanny feel (because they at first look like straight documentary images of banal scenes, but yet which aren't quite right in some way - the lines are too clean). At one level, as in all his work, Demand is playing with ideas about representation and realism, about what we see, and about what we think we see.
Susan Sontag, explicitly invoking Plato's Cave, in her book On Photography claimed that photographs inevitably deal with appearances and so cannot deliver moral knowledge or deal with what is not seen or what is not in front of the lens. Here Demand seems to have found a way to use photography to represent what cannot be seen - the missing child - in a nested series of representations (the photograph represents the paper sculpture recreation of the scene; the paper sculpture represents a real scene of crime; the scene of crime is symbolically empty of the child's presence - he is experienced as a concrete absence).
Plato, would, of course, ban Demand's paper sculptures, and also the photographs of the sculptures, because each was misleading in various ways about reality.
