Art and Aesthetic Theory: the Greek Contribution

D. P. M. Weerakkody

Although the word aesthetics is itself derived from the Greek verb aisthanomai (I perceive) the word was not coined until 1753 by the German philosopher Alexander Gotlieb Baumgarten. Since then it has gradually come to embrace philosophies of both art and beauty, whether natural or created. This is not to say that the ancients did not have a tradition of what we understand by aesthetics i.e. a philosophy concerned with the essence and perception of beauty and ugliness.Apart from the evidence that is implied in their creative works, we are able to form some idea of the views on art and beauty held by the Greeks from at least four types of writing: literary criticism, art criticism philosophy and rhetoric.

One general idea that emerges from this evidence is that to the Greeks art was a representation (mimesis) of life. This is evident from the description of Achilles shield in Il. 18, where the artists depiction is praised for its faithfulness to life. This was true not only of the visual arts and works of literature but even of instrumental music. "Next he depicted a large field of soft rich fallow which was being ploughed, ... a number of ploughmen who were driving their teams across it to and fro.... The field, though it was made of gold, grew black behind them, as a field does when it is being ploughed. The artist had achieved a miracle." The artist is praised for his ability to give life to what is inanimate and movement to what is static; and his achievement is praised for its lifelikeness. However, what the Greek thinkers understood by mimesis was something much broader than mere copying. It could encompass a wide range of modes of depiction and symbolism that ranged from imitative realism to imaginative idealism, and embraced different accounts of the artists relation to their creations, circling around the polarities of nature and craft, inspiration and technique. Accordingly, ancient attitudes to the representative arts include many distinctive configurations of emphasis. As Aristotle says in the 26th chapter of his Poetics, the artist could represent men as they are, as they ought to be, or as they are thought to be.

According to Xenophon, Socrates regarded the beautiful as coincident with the good, while both of them are resolvable into the useful. We call something beautiful when it serves some rational end, be it human gratification or human security. He seems to have emphasized the power of a beautiful object to further the more necessary ends of life rather than the immediate gratification it afforded to perception and contemplation. For him, beauty was a relative thing, unlike Plato, he did not recognize a beauty itself without any relation to a percipient mind.

The Memorabilia (3.10) records a conversation of Socrates with the sculptor Parrhesius, in which Socrates introduces two qualifications to the idea of representation: the sculptor can combine into one statue features that in real life belong to many people; and the artist represents not only physical features, but also the soul. When Parrhesius says it is obviously impossible for him to represent the soul, Socrates goes on to show that the artist does in fact imitate facial expressions and bodily stances which express the feelings so that the sculptor does imitate the character of the soul as well as of the body. The earliest aesthetic theory of any scope is that of Plato. According to him reality consisted of forms or archetypes that were themselves imperceptible to the senses, but were perceptible to the soul in its purest essence. But they were the patterns on which all objects of sense perception were modeled. Thus phenomena imitate the forms or participate in them. From the objects of sense perception the philosopher reasons to the pure forms of which they are mere imitations. But the artist merely copies the objects of sense experience without possessing a knowledge of their forms. What he produces is thus an imitation of an imitation. Because he did not possess the philosophers knowledge of reality, the artist had no claim to be the teacher of men.

Plato also believed that certain types of artistic production such as those that portrayed the character and adctions of base people were harmful to the moral and emotional integrity of their audiences. Even certain musical modes could induce laziness or incite people to intemperate actions. Accordingly, in formulating an ideal state Plato in the Republic recommends rigorous censorship or even expulsion of the existing breed of poets and painters in favour of an ideal race of artist-philosophers whose creations should provide moral and political training.

Although Plato was inclined to the conception of an absolute beauty that took its place within his scheme of self-existing forms or ideas, it is not easy to determine exactly what he meant by beauty. Various definitions are rejected in his dialogues by the Platonic Socrates as being inadequate. The only notion of a common element in beautiful objects that we come across in his dialogues is proportion, harmony and unity among their parts. According to the Symposium, true beauty is not something that one can find as an attribute in this or that beautiful thing. For beautiful things, although they partake of beauty, are not themselves beauty itself. Eros or Love causes aspiration towards the pure idea of beauty that Plato also identifies with goodness and truth. According to the Phaedo the Souls knowledge of beauty itself results from recollection of its pre-natal existence.

Incidental references in Platos works to artistic topics are numerous and important. But his most systematic treatment of the subject is contained in the Republic of his middle period, and the Laws, the work of his old age. His whole attitude to art has been censured for its ethical bias, and it is true that he often seems to assume quite arbitrarily the identification of the beautiful with the good. Two facts, however, must be borne in mind. In the first place, both in the Republic and in the Laws, Plato is primarily concerned with politics, not with aesthetics. His business is to inquire whether certain forms of art are politically valuable, not whether they may be defended on other grounds. That they may have been so defended he himself occassionally hints. As, for example, in the famous passage in the Republic where he expels the poets from his ideal state: after anointing them with myrrh and crowning them with garlands. But why should they have myrrh and garlands unless, condemned by a political standard they be approved by another and different test?

In the second place, the Greeks aesthetised their morals so much that they could hardly be expected not to moralize their aesthetics. Then in a language in which kalos (beautiful) also means good, it was impossible for him not to confuse morals and aesthetics to some extent.

The discussion of literature in the Republic falls into two parts. The subject is first broached in the third book, where Plato is sketching the education of the guardians of his ideal state: it is resumed in an altered form, in the tenth and last book. In the third book Plato limits the poet in point of matter and in point of art. The term imitation itself does not appear to be of great originality or importance. When Plato objects to certain stories in

Homer as unedifying, he is only saying what Zenophanes has said long before. We must remember, in passing, that Homer was to the Greeks of the classical period no mere poet, but a revered, almost sacred teacher.

The second limitation is a more striking one. The poet is to speak, where possible, in propria persona, not through the mouths of his characters. In Platos words, he must employ simple narration rather than mimesis (impersonation). Thus not only drama but also all speeches in epic are ruled out. The reason for this restriction is that impersonation can find no place in a city where everyone is to look after his own business and leave other peoples alone.

When Plato returns to the subject in the tenth book, the treatment is on a different plane. Here we find raised for the first time in extant Greek literature, fundamental questions in the metaphysics and psychology of art. The discussion starts with an expression of relief that the mimetic poet has been banished from the state. But mimesis has changed its meaning since we met it in the third book. It now signifies not impersonation but the copying of the actual world in art. And so, according to Platos metaphysics, the actual world is a copy of the ideal; the world as depicted in art must be merely the copy of a copy.

After thus reacting to art on metaphysical grounds, Plato proceeds to attack it on psychological and moral grounds. The easiest and the most popular model for imitation, he says, is the man in whose mind conflict is raging between a higher and a lower element. The fight against temptation, in fact, is the favourite theme of art. This preoccupation with the baser part of the soul (so Plato restates the position ignoring the consideration that the higher part is also a combatant and may prove a victor) has demoralizing effect. Moreover, apart from the question of conflict, poetry feeds and strengthens the emotions and passions which it should be our object to weaken.

In the Laws, Plato returns to the task of constructing an ideal state, but one more in accordance with practical possibilities. The necessity for laying down an educational system leads him early in the treatise to a discussion of art. But this time the argument takes a new turn. Our citizens are to be trained in good art, but what art is good? That which gives the most pleasure. But in practice different people take pleasure in different kinds of

art. And further, since all art is imitative, surely truth, not pleasure, should be the criterion.

It is not enough, however, that the imitation should be true, the object imitated must be beautiful (or good, the equivocal kalos covers both); and, as men are pleased by imitation of what is akin to them, good men will be pleased by imitations of the good. And so, after all, art can be judged by the pleasure it gives to the best men.

It is extremely difficult to estimate as a whole Platos views on this subject. It has always been a matter of astonishment that one of the greatest prose stylists who ever lived should have adopted so uncompromisingly hostile an attitude to poetry. To some extent, Plato seems to be accepting the verdict of an erroneous metaphysical test. To some extent also, he seems to recoil with a sort of ascetic fervour from the madness of poetry which may be so dangerous an enemy to the sanity of philosophy. And yet, inspite of all, he can speak of the educative value of art in the most eloquent and novel language.

In several of his works Aristotle attempts to defend the claims of representative art as the basis of moral education, the origin of catharsis and the instrument of character formation. He attempts to develop certain principles of beauty and art by scientific analysis. For Aristotle, just as for Plato, aesthetics was inseparable from morality and politics. In his Politics (8.5) he dwells on the power of art to influence human character, and hence the social order. In the metaphysics he tries to make a distinction between the good and the beautiful. The good is always found in action, whereas beauty may exist in motionless things as well. The good may also be called beautiful, under certain circumstances, although essentially, they are two different things. Beauty is also different from what is fitting, and is above the useful and the necessary. The pleasure it provides is of the purest kind. The universal elements of beauty are order, symmetry and definiteness and determinateness (metaphysics) as well as magnitude (poetics). An object should not be so large as to prevent a synoptic view of the whole, or so small as to prevent a clear perception of the articulation of the parts.

Aristotle wrote two treatises on the subject of literature, the Rhetoric and the incomplete Poetics. His main theory of mimetic art in general, and poetry in particular, is to be found in the latter work. Although Plato is not mentioned by name, Aristotle is clearly much preoccupied with the task of

answering him. Thus, for example, Platos contention that poetry being a form of imitation, must be judged by the standard of truth, not of pleasure, is met with the reply that correct imitation is in itself a source of pleasure. Against Platos postulate that the object imitated must be beautiful, it is urged that imitations of ugly things can be beautiful. Plato had objected to poetry because it excited the emotions. So it does, answers Aristotle, but by exciting it releases them, and so its ultimate effect is to make man less emotional. Plato had condemned poetry as an imitation of an imitation. but, Aristotle replies, there is a certain philosophic universality in the poetic treatment of a subject, which differentiates poetry from history. Lastly, in the politics, Aristotle meets the platonic contention that few people are wise, and therefore competent to judge art, by the ingenious, if unconvincing argument that, though each member of a crowd knows little individually, collectively they know a great deal, each supplying his neighbours deficiency. Their common verdict is therefore correct.

Aristotle expounds his views about the mimetic character of music, and its didactic, entertaining and cathartic functions, in the Politics. The relevance of Politics to Poetics is the basis of the medical interpretation of tragic catharsis since Jakob Bernays, but it is denied by the cognitivist interpreters of the Poetics and others who reject Bernays' view that tragic catharsis concerns people withexcessive or pent-up emotions; and because Bernays' theory is based on the idea that "the Politics discusses a cathartic use of music to treat abnormal people, who experience emotional states more strongly than do others," as Belfiore writes (BMCR 2002.06.34, p. 2), the same scholars also reject the relationship of Aristotle's discussion of music in the Politics to the Poetics. However, Bernays and his continuators are wrong on both counts because they fail to take into account Aristotle's references to the allinclusive character of audiences of both poetry and music (Pol. 1342a 1822), and above all his clear statements in Politics iii to the effect that the many or indeed the populace (hoi polloi, to ple^thos, ho ochlos), consisting of farmers, artisans, traders, seamen, manual laborers, and any other such groups (1291b 18-30), are, collectively, not only wiser, stronger, less corruptible, but also, specifically, "better judges of music and poetry [sc. than a single excellent man or the few best ones]; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole" (1281b 7-9). Once the view that tragedy addresses or produces its effect on -- an abnormal audience is understood to be wrong, no interpretation of tragic catharsis can stand unless it can accommodate what the philosopher says in the Politics about the catharsis brought about by music: "all (members of the audience) have a kind of purgation and are relieved with pleasure" (1342a 14-15). Perhaps the most interesting aesthetic observation which has come down to us from the three centuries after Aristotle is the observation of a certain Philodemus of Gadara, an Epicurean

who lived in the closing years of the first century B.C., that music, of itself, has no power whatever to imitate where, or even (a surprising statement) that arouse, intensify or allay emotion. It would be interesting to follow the arguments on which Philodemus bases this violent reaction against the imitation theory. But the papyrus discovered at Herculaneum which is our sole authority for the text of his De Musica, though intact enough to stimulate curiosity, is too mutilated to satisfy it. While Philodemus attacks the mimetic view of art for claiming too much, the tendency of aesthetic theory in the early centuries of the Christian era is to attack it for claiming too little. The inadequacy of the view as indicated even before Platos exposition of it, by Socrates, who laid stress, if we may believe Xenophons account on the artists power to select and combine objects for imitation, and so, in a sense to create a new thought. And when Aristotle, in order to meet the facts, is constrained to admit that a poet may imitate either what exists or what might exist, he is putting a severe strain on the elasticity of the word imitate. Then again, he observes that poetry is more universal than history, he seems to be on the verge of a radical modification of the imitation theory. But the modification is not made, and we have to wait till the first century A.D. for a restatement of the artists Modus Operandi. Dio Chrysostom (A.D. 50-117) an itinerant lecturer from Bithynia, in his oration On Knowing God, remarks that painters and sculptors invest god with the human body, the vessel of wisdom and reason, seeking to manifest the imageless and unseen in the visible which can be portrayed.

In the same manner Philostratus in the early third century speaks of Phidias sculptures of the gods, says: It was imagination that wrought these forms, a more cunning artist than imitation. Imitation will make what it has seen, but imagination will make what it has not seen. Earlier Greek had no word for imagination. Philostratus uses phantasia, which to Aristotle had meant nothing more than feeble perception, the half-faded recollection of something once experienced. The need felt for a word meaning imagination is symptomatic of a considerable advance in aesthetic theory. Finally, the Neoplatonist Plotinus (A.D. 208-282) defends art against Platos attack in terms of Platos own metaphysics, when he says boldly: We must bear in mind that the arts do not simply imitate the visual, but go back to the reasons from which nature comes; and further that they create much out of themselves and add to that which is defective, as being themselves in possession of beauty. This improved view of the metaphysical basis of art is the last achievement of Greek aesthetic philosophy. The more mystical writings of Plato, the Timaeus in particular, suggest a different approach to aesthetics based on the Pythagorean theory of the

Kosmos or ordered universe. This exerted a decisive influence on the Neoplatonists, among them Plotinus, (born c. A.D.205) accorded far greater significance to art than did Plato. The essence of his philosophy is the desire to escape from the material world. According to him, Nous or objective reason, which is self-moving invests form on inanimate matter, thereby turning it into a logos or notion whose beauty lay in its form. Objects that have not been acted upon by reason are formless, and therefore ugly. The creative reason is absolute beauty which Plotinus calls the more than beautiful. Beauty manifests itself in three stages: the highest is human reason, next comes the human soul, which is less perfect because of its links with the material body. Lowest of all are the real objects. In other words he explains the universe by a hierarchy rising from matter to soul, to reason and reason to God. The final abstraction without form or matter, i.e. pure existence. Only the spiritual world contemplated by reason is real, the phenomenal world being a creation of the soul and hence a thing without real existence, while matter is only a receptacle for forms imposed on it by the soul. Unlike Aristotle he believed that a single thing indivisible into parts might be beautiful through its unity, and simplicity. He accorded a high place to the beauty of colours in which material darkness is over-powered by light and warmth. According to him art reveals the form of an object more clearly than ordinary experience does, and it raises the soul to contemplation of the universal. When the artist contemplates notions as models of his creations, such creations may attain to greater beauty than the products of nature. For Plotinus the highest moments of life were mystical and by this he meant that in the world of forms the soul was united with the divine or the one. Since one loses oneself in contemplating an aesthetic object, aesthetic experience comes closest to mystical experience. The influence of Plato is also manifest in the rhetorical treatise known as Longinus on the Sublime (first century A.D.). According to this author, sublimity consists in a certain excellence and distinction in expression, and it is from this source alone that the greatest poets and historians have acquired their pre-eminence and won for themselves an eternity of fame. According to him, the sublime not merely persuades, but transports the audience out of themselves. It is thus a mystic experience, an ecstasy, which is why its effect is different from that of all merely technical skills. In the seventh chapter he says, For by some innate power the true sublime uplifts our soul. We are filled with a proud exultation and a sense of vaunting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we had heard. For him the sublimity of a work is proved by its ability to stand repeated hearings and its unanimous recognition or universal appeal. In chapter nine, he describes the sublime as the echo of a noble mind. The sources of sublimity are (1) the ability to form grand conceptions; (2) the stimulus of powerful and inspired emotions; (3) figures of speech and

thought; (4) diction, and (5) composition. Although he makes several references to the visual arts, his prime concern is literature. Among the Greeks, examples of art criticism are found in literary works mostly from the later periods, which contain descriptions of artists and works of art. One such work is Pausanias Guide to Greece (second century A.D.). Another is the Eikones by one of the Philostrati of Lemnos, who appear to have lived in the second and third centuries A.D. The latter consists of two sets of descriptions in prose of pictures that the author professes to have seen. There was a strong tendency among ancient Greeks to connect both art and beauty to more general considerations of human needs and values, so that their aesthetics, so far from being isolated, was involved with the psycho-sociological aspects of culture, in considering questions concerning the origin, subject matter, form, style and effect of the arts. Several Greek writers adopted a comparative approach. The elder Simonides described poetry as vocal painting and painting as silent poetry. Aristotle in his Poetics also makes frequent reference to the visual arts, and so do the later authors of rhetorical treatises, even though their analogies are often misleading. Christianity at first regarded the depiction of religious images as idolatrous because of the Old Testaments prohibitions against graven images (Exodus 20.15). This reservation was however overcome and a pictorial tradition was established by the third century A.D. It is in relation to this early condemnation of pagan idolatry and the consequent reluctance to depict sacred Christian figures and stories that the Byzantine art must be understood. Although many notable exceptions exist, figural scenes were usually avoided and were presented in an allusive symbolic mode or were embedded in complex programs that rendered the veneration of single images practically impossible. From about A.D. 550, such restraint weakened, and in seventh-century church decorations small isolated panels depicting single figures begin to appear at or near eye-level. The representational theory of art was retained through the Byzantine period as well, and even hagiography emphasized the resemblance of the icon to the original. This naturalistic approach was, however, contradicted by the concept of bodily beauty as a reflection of the absolute beauty of God. The artists aimed at representing what was eternal rather than what was ephemeral, and they therefore concentrated on the spiritual elements of the human body, the face and especially the eyes. The figures are frontal and stable: the opposite qualities being the marks of devils, barbarians and the enemy in general. Being didactic in purpose Byzantine art sought to convey its message through a symbolic language. Along with its historical place and time, each event depicted had its place in the ever repeating cycle of the divine plan, thus conferring upon it profound significance.

Greek and Roman aesthetics / [edited and translated by] Oleg V. Bychkov.
Cambridge University Press, 2010.