Notes from Aesthetics - Classic Theories, Week Two

In the second session of the course Aesthetics: Classic Theories, we continued looking at Plato's approach, concentrating on his ideas about beauty, as expressed in his great dialogue The Symposium. There, through the nested characters of Socrates and Diotima, Plato  stresses the limitations of the phenomenal world. He does, though, allow that physical beauty can play a part in the ascent towards appreciation of the Form of beauty.

This is all part of a conversation about the nature of erotic love that takes place at a drinking party. [Listen to a podcast interview about Plato on Erotic Love]. Socrates recalls Diotima's teaching that the desire for one beautiful man's body is merely the first rung on the ladder that leads up to the appreciation of the Form of beauty, and so is merely a means to the higher end of appreciating the abstract idea. To learn about beauty, first of all recognize the physical beauty of the desired lover. But then the rational individual will appreciate not just the individual loved one's beauty, but also the physical beauty of others too. From this the next step up the ladder is to see the beauty that lies beyond appearances in wisdom and knowledge. The last step is to come to recognize the Form of beauty itself - with the implication that this Form itself possesses beauty. The Form of beauty also carries with it moral qualities of goodness. Plato does not mention beauty in art as having a potential role in this ascent - given the views he expressed in The Republic, it is unlikely that he thought it could play a role. (For a nice summary of Plato on Art, see Christopher Janaway's essay in the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics).

[To read the rest of this summary click on the red writing below]

This sort of approach stands in stark contrast with an empiricist one. For an empiricist beauty is a quality in objects which tends to produce a certain sort of effect upon human bodies when it is perceived. It is intimately linked with the senses, not least because empiricists believed that everything comes to us via the senses. Whereas for Plato, once again, beauty is best appreciated through thought not perception.

Friedrich Nietzsche in his first book, The Birth Of Tragedy, gave Art a far more significant role than Plato did. This provides another contrast. Nietzsche believed that art was what made life endurable and creative for the ancient Greeks who were fundamentally pessimists; remember that Plato wanted to turn the mimetic artists away from the borders of his ideal republic. [Listen to a podcast interview on Nietzsche on Art] Without their great art of tragedy, the Greeks would have been lost, Nietzsche believed. The combination of the musical theatre with the enactment of taboos that tragedy provided allow sufficient engagement with the Dionysian aspects of life while at the same time tempering it with Apollonian elements for the Greeks to emerge invigorated from experience. Dionysius symbolised loss of self, intoxication, and wild revelry; Apollo, on the other hand, symbolised order, and self-consciousness.

Nietzsche (influenced by Schopenhauer) believed (or feigned to believe) that at a deep level reality is simply a seething mass that is completely impersonal. Great art can give us a glimpse of that reality without destroying us. The Dionysian element in art is essential to its profundity, but without some Apollonian element the art would be too dark to endure.

In the gallery we looked at Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals [this link includes an interview with the curator Achim Burchardt-Hume on the paintings linked from 'Curator's Commentary' above the image]

Read a fascinating article by Jonathan Jones about this series here: 'Feeding Fury?' ].

Rothko described Nietzsche's book as a major influence on his painting. He wrote a seven page essay in the late 1950s on this topic. The Birth of Tragedy gave him a 'syntax'  as he put it, that informed his painting, presumably referring to the Apollonian/Dionysian contrast.

Rothko, in his late work, was attempting a tragic art, one that like great music revealed something of the true nature of reality. The biggest insult would have been to call his work 'decorative'. Like music his art is predominantly abstract and nonrepresentational yet it is undoubtedly profound - if you believe the Nietzschean story, this might be because of their strongly Dionysian aspect. Viewers of his paintings were encouraged to stand close to them and to immerse themselves in them, and in the process would lose some sense of self. Another influence on Rothko was the notion of the sublime: in the 18th century theorists such as Edmund Burke contrasted the sublime with the beautiful. While the sublime had something of terror about it, brought about by its large scale and often real danger (the sublime nature of a thunderstorm, or a craggy mountain, for example); the beautiful was characterised by small, smooth, gently varying forms...

Next week: David Hume on the Standard of Taste