[MD] Dr McWatt's advice to his unknown student from a remote spot of the world.

[Ron Kulp]

> On Aug 21, 2014, at 5:25 PM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Ron said to Ant:
> 
> The Stanford Essay on Plato - aesthetics ...clearly states after a more careful reading, that Plato was banning imitation in poetry and art. The mimicking of women and musical instruments and such in artistic performance. It recalled the painting "this is not a pipe". It sounds to me that what Plato really wants to ban is reification. He wants to ban stereotypes, characitures. He thinks art and poetry (and the performance) is best when it deals with the empirical. Imitation, like worshiping graven images, encapsulates, and renders
> static the now of experience.
> 
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> 
> I think Plato's attitude toward poetry and art has to be understood as a feature of his overall view, which is extremely anti-empirical. He is the godfather of rationalism. What's really real, for Plato, lies beyond mere appearance. The Forms, ideals that somehow exist outside of empirical reality, are the real thing and everything down in this dirty old phenomenal world (not just art and poetry and unoriginal copying) is a pale imitation of these Forms. The empirical world, Plato thought, is not to be trusted. In the famous allegory, the empirical world is the world of mere appearance, nothing but empty shadows on a cave wall. 
> 
> 
> So art was denigrated as an imitation of a copy of the Form. It was considered to be mighty low indeed, especially when compared to the rational understanding of philosophers. The radical empiricism of James, Dewey, and Pirsig reverses this so that empirical reality is primary and ideas are always secondary. There are no Forms and there is no reality beyond appearance - or if there were we could never know anything about it because appearance is the only reality we can ever have access to.

Ron:
What I'm taking issue with is
That the article supplied did
Not seem to support the claim
Anthony made. The article is
A good read.
What is interesting is Stanford's 
Take on the subject. Supplied
By Ant:
>> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/

"The subject needs careful looking into. If perennially footnoted by later philosophers Plato has also been perennially thumbnailed. Clichés accompany his name. It is worth going slowly through the main topics of Plato's aesthetics—not in the search for some surprising theory unlike anything that has been said, but so that background shading and details may emerge, for a result that perhaps resembles the customary synopses of his thought as a human face resembles the cartoon reduction of it."

"Many passages in Plato associate a Form with beauty: Cratylus 439c;Euthydemus 301a; Laws 655c;Phaedo 65d, 75d, 100b; Phaedrus254b; Parmenides 130b; Philebus15a; Republic 476b, 493e, 507b. Plato mentions beauty as often as he speaks of any property that admits of philosophical conceptualization, and for which a Form therefore exists. Thanks to the features of Forms as such, this must be a beauty, something properly called beauty, whose nature can be articulated without recourse to the natures of particular beautiful things. (See especially Phaedo 79a and Phaedrus247c on properties of this Form.)

Beauty is Plato's example of a Form so frequently because it bears every mark of the Forms. It is an evaluative concept as much as justice and courage are, and it suffers from disputes over its meaning as much as they do. The Theory of Forms mainly exists in order to guarantee stable referents for disputed evaluative terms; so if anything needs a Form, beauty does, and it will have a Form if any property does.

In general, a Platonic Form F differs from an individual F thing in that Fmay be predicated univocally of the Form: The Form F is F. An individual F thing by comparison both is and is not F; in this sense the same property F can only be predicated equivocally of the individual (e.g. Republic 479a–c). Plato's analysis of equivocally Findividuals (Cratylus 439d–e,Symposium 211a) recalls observations that everyone makes about beautiful objects. They fade with time; require an offsetting ugly detail; elicit disagreements among observers; lose their beauty outside their context (adult shoes on children's feet). Odd numbers may fail to be odd in some hard-to-explain way, but the ways in which beautiful things fall short of their perfection are obvious to unphilosophical admirers.

Furthermore, physical beauty makes the process known in Plato's dialogues as anamnêsis or recollection more plausible than it is for most other properties. The philosophical merit of things that are equivocally F is that they come bearing signs of their incompleteness, so that the inquisitive mind wants to know more (Republic 523c–524d). But whereas soft or large items inspire questions in minds of an abstract bent, and the perception of examples of justice or self-control presupposes moral development, beautiful things strike everyone. Therefore, beauty promises more effective reflection than any other property of things. Beauty alone is both a Form and a sensory experience (Phaedrus 250d).

This is why the Phaedrus (250d–256b) and Symposium ignore people's experiences of other properties when they describe the first movement into philosophizing. Beautiful things remind souls of their mystery as no other visible objects do, and in his optimistic moments Plato welcomes people's attention to them.

Beauty's distinctive pedagogical effects show why Plato talks about its goodness and good consequences, sometimes even its identity with “the good” (Laws 841c; Philebus 66a–b;Republic 401c; Symposium 201c, 205e; but the relationship between beautiful and good, especially inSymposium, is controversial: White 1989); also why Plato speaks so reluctantly of the beauty that might inhere in art and poetry. For him the question is not whether poems are beautiful (even perceived as beautiful), and subsequently whether or not they belong in a theory of that prized aesthetic property. Another question matters more to him than either poetry or beauty does: What leads a mind toward knowledge and the Forms? Things of beauty do so excellently well. Poems typically cannot. When poems (or paintings) set the mind running along unphilosophical tracks away from what is abstract and intelligible, the attractions they possess will be seen as meretricious. The corrupting cognitive effect exercised by poems demonstrates their inability to function as Plato knows the beautiful object to function."

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