The Good the Bad and the Ugly: The Geometry of Aesthetic Norms in Plato Plato often enthusiastically

compares the normative images of the good, the true and the beautiful. Frequently this rough equating does more to conflate the meanings of the three conceptual frameworks than to mutually illuminate them. In this paper I will try to show that at certain select places within the dialogues, Plato defies this sloppy practice and instead presents very clear and elaborate analogies as to the precise set of relations that hold among his various aesthetic concepts. I will try to show that an understanding of this aesthetic system enables us to appreciate the full scope of Platos aesthetic normative system. I will further try to establish that this understanding can help us to make clearer possible mediation between certain dualities in both Platos causal model and his ethical-political system. In the Gorgias, Socrates contrasts the fourfold distinctions of legislation and justice for the soul and gymnastics and medicine for the body, with their designated, shadowy analogs: sophistry, oratory, cosmetics and pastry baking: gymnastics:medicine::legislation:justice:::cosmetics:pastry baking::sophistry:rhetoric This complex web is meant to look at the differing arts of protecting and healing the body and soul in relationship to the arts of sophistry and rhetoric. The normative axes for these components is one of comparing the prophylactic and the restorative with respect to the body and soul, in both authentic and imitative modes. In this comparison rhetoric is paired with justice and sophistry with legislation in a relation of imitative vs.

authentic technes of protecting the soul from future harm and restoring the soul from past harm. This interesting set of analogies might be merely paradic if it werent taken to a further degree in a latter dialogue. In the Sophist, right at the point where the interlocutors have seemingly cornered their prey, the Stranger begins to expand on our Gorgias analogy. One point of controversy that this tight textual connection raises, is the organization and development of the dialogues themselves. These two instances of this single continued analogy recall the contemporary writing practices with a word processor and suggest that Plato may have done some cutting and pasting among his many scrolls. The analogy is not brought to completion until the student has achieved a certain level of expertise. If my contention is correct as to the seamless continuity of this analogs ratios, it would speak to the position that Platos works were more planned than evolved in their development. At Sophist 228a this elaborate model is expanded to include a more intricate model of the relationship between the virtues of moderation and justice. The Stranger contrasts sickness and ugliness of the body, and wickedness and ignorance of the soul with the fourfold analogs of discord, disproportion, disease and injustice. In this somewhat deeper exposition of the model of orderliness, health is implied to be a concordance or balance: an orderliness between the pieces of a whole. Beauty on the other hand is related to proportion or the order or similarity between the individual part and the whole: Vis. We have to say that there are two kinds of badness that affect the soul. Tht. What are they?

Vis. One is like bodily sickness, and the other is like ugliness. Tht. I dont understand. Vis. Presumably you regard sickness and discord as the same thing, dont you? Tht. I dont know what I should say to that. Vis. Do you think that discord is just dissension among things that are naturally of the same kind, and arises out of some kind of corruption? Tht. Yes. Vis. And ugliness is precisely a consistently unattractive sort of disproportion? Tht. Yes. Vis. Well then, dont we see that theres dissension in the souls of people in poor condition, between beliefs and desires, anger and pleasures, reason and pains, and all of those things with each other? Tht. Of course. Vis. So wed be right if we said that wickedness is discord and sickness of the soul. Tht. Absolutely right. There are two kinds of badness, wickedness, a disease of the soul, and ignorance, a correlate to ugliness. These again are related to the two forms of the curative, gymnastic for ugliness and medicine for sickness. But this double badness of the soul presents a difficulty for its possible cure, teaching. The Visitor observes: By seeing whether ignorance has a cu down he middle of it. If it has two parts, that will force teaching to have two parts too, one for each of the parts of ignorance (229b). These two parts of teaching turn out to be a smooth part, admonition, and a rough one, cross-examination, or elenchis. This latter form is considered an involuntary cleansing in which those souls who are already infected with ignorance can be forced to lose their inflated and rigid beliefs about themselves. So our former analogy has been expanded: ugliness (disproportion):disease (dissension)::gymnastics:medicine::: ignorance:wickedness::admonitions:refutation Putting the two analogies together we can note some of the implied interrelations.

As interesting as this further development of our model has been, there are clearly problems that I believe that Plato expects us to work out. Along with the elaboration, there has also been a collapsing of conceptual relationships. What had been originally a sickness and an ugliness of the body were treated as if they were both forms of disease from the earlier analogy: the technes of gymnastics and medicine. Even though gymnastics seems broad enough to be a preventative for both ugliness and disease, we must remain somewhat cautious that Plato has not conflated these as a diagnostic test for our own state of health. We need not pause for indecision on the point. Plato has provocatively given us a geometrical clue to how we can follow through on this examination. Ugliness and sickness are characterized by distinct forms of mathematical ratios: disproportion and discordance. Plato presents these concepts as whole-part relationships. Discord, or dissension is an uneven or dissonant ratio between parts that are naturally of the same kind. Disproportion represents parts that are out of proportion with the whole. These two kinds of dissonance cannot be easily resolved, because they are inherently competitive with each other. It is only be understanding this internal conflict that we can begin to make sense of what this elaborate analogy is meant to clarify. These two kinds of geometrical badness equally imply two competitive forms of aesthetic value or good. The good of the whole would seem to be the model of health, where all the parts function in balance to maintain the metabolism of the

functional whole. The good of the parts, however, would seem to be that of beauty in some autonomous norm of proportionality in imitating the whole. We can better envision this inherent tension between the competing goods in the geometric elaboration of being in the Timaeus. Partiveness is epitomized by the triangular forms of the receptacle. They represent a level of being that can only be known through a bastard form of reasoning. Their disordered motion is balanced by the harmonic and orderly motion of the heavens. Again, the holism of the cosmos is exemplified in the circularity of the motion. Circularity is triply divine in Platos Pythagorean ontology. First, due to its fundamental qualities. Circles are partless and therefore represent a level of being beyond the generative and corruptive. Circles also represent perfection of form in every element being equidistant from its center. Circles also represent the possibility of perfect motion. Circular motion is able to exemplify the seeming paradox of remaining immutable within a nexus of change: and thus move in one place, just as the circumference of circles that are said to stand still (Laws 893c). It is this dynamic element of circularity that captures the critical distinction between wholes and the sums of parts. Aggregations of parts have no unifying power or being. For parts to have a significant ontological unity they must be able to act in unison. Circular motion is paradigmatic of such functional unity. This power to exemplify functionality leads to the third capacity of circularity. Functionality is an intermediate ontical framework between things and concepts. It is functionality that helps us define specific and generic qualities. Circularity can equally

be utilized to represent relationships between the scopes of concepts or that between parts and wholes. It is exactly this categorical equivocation that logicians from Aristotle to Frege have utilized to both enrich their conceptual models or fall prey to unseen fallacies. This model of competing aesthetic norms also helps to clarify the relationship between Platos two apparently redundant ontological mechanisms, participation and imitation. There has been a longstanding debate as to which of these causal mechanisms primarily carries the explanatory weight in accounting for how the forms are operative in the world of flux. Plato scholars divide evenly between which of the two approaches Plato finally adopted with a large middle group just contending the two are the same. But none of these three approaches can possibly be true to Plato, as his separate and distinct references to each of these mechanisms remains throughout all periods of his writing. The problem of this dual model for the efficacy of the forms is played out in the equivocation between the model of parts and wholes with that between universals and particulars. Both Plato and Aristotle utilize the familiarity of the part-whole relationship to illustrate and exemplify aspects of the more abstract relationship of universals and particulars. Medieval logicians mad special note of this parasitic relationship and extended the analogy to cover the parallel structure between logical categories and rhetorical places. Heidegger, with his peculiar and penetrating sense for languages, finds something fundamental in this relationship between and . In his introductory chapter to his commentary, Platos Sophist, Heidegger shows how the whole-part relationship discloses the structure of the universal-particular determination:

The term is composed out of and . The concept of will be our path to a closer elucidation of the Being of . Aristotle provides a orientation toward the in Metaphysics V, 26. There he understands the as a determinate mode of the .1 Even though Heidegger specifies that the universal can never be fully uncovered by an , it somehow takes its origin through the perception of wholes. Under my own account imitation is what takes place between wholes and universals. The functional activity of a integral whole can capture the unity of a universal holding it as an end. It is the basis of good proportionality and its norm is beauty. Participation is the relationship between parts in their interaction within a whole. The Good processes down the hierarchy of the cosmos with its circular motions and indirectly influences all aspects of the world through this motion: And we learn, at any rate, that in this rotation such motion carries the largest and smallest circles around together, distributing itself proportionally to the small and the large, being less and more according to proportion (Laws 893d). Mutual participation in the activity of the whole helps to bring parts or elements of a system into balance, or health. There is, however, a problem with this dualist approach to the causal influence of the forms. To the degree that parts can participate in the unity of a whole, they must be able to be most tightly packed or rectilinearly ordered. To the degree that any such partitive beings are to directly imitate the unity of the gods, they must be circular. These two forms of causal influence are mutually competitive. It would seem that beauty and health are systemically incommensurable. There is also resonance for this approach in the Neo-platonic tradition. Proclus in his essay On the Subsistence of Evil differentiates between primary and secondary
1

Martin Heidegger, Platos Sophist, (Bloomington, IN, 1992), p. 57.

evils2. Primary or absolute evil is jus separation from the good. But this sort of evil is uninteresting. All being and power come from the good, so absolute evil has neither. It is secondary evil that is more pernicious. There are two forms of secondary evil, relative to the two forms of secondary good in the cosmos. One form of good comes indirectly through procession down through the levels of henads. Beings within a given level participate in the unity of their henad and share in its good. But there is also a kind of direct route to the good through imitating the gods. These two ways to goodness, participating with other equals and imitating the gods, are competitive and contrary to each other. To the degree that one works with equals, one is like the other parts. To the degree that one imitates the gods one is unlike the other parts. These two forms of goodness and their reciprocal evils have clear analogs in Platos model of sickness and ugliness. This same aesthetic tension is reflected in the traditional problematic of cutting the monochord or scaling. The Ancient Greeks primarily used a diatonic tuning system to construct their musical scales. This means that the sizes of the individual notes were determined from their relationships with the major harmonies. Major harmonies are all small number ratios of whole numbers. The ratio 2:1 determines the octave. From any given note, if one doubles or halves the vibrations, the same note will sound at a higher or lower pitch. The major fifth (3/2) and major fourth (4/3) together make up a whole octave (3/2 x 4/3 = 2/1). The difference between these same two harmonies is a Pythagorean whole note (3/2 4/3 = 9/8). It is in filling out the octave with the individual notes where the mathematics gets messy. First of all there is not any number of whole notes that fit into our octave in such
2

Proclus, Two Treatises of Proclus the Neoplatonic Philosopher, (Montana, 1980), p. 91

a way to preserve the major harmonies or maintain a simple small number ratio. An "octave" is almost exactly six whole notes. The discrepancy between the size of an octave (2/1) and six whole notes ([9/8]6 ), leads to the need to create "half-notes". But these "half notes" are really less than the calculated value of half a whole note. In addition, when moving from one octave to another, the order of whole and half notes begins to shift, making tuning and coordination almost impossible. This introduction of "disorder" in the larger collection of notes is what prompted Socrates to favor the smaller, more harmonic City of Pigs in the Republic. All of the diatonic scales suffer form this same limitation. In the Republic, Plato discusses the "virtues" and weaknesses of the various models. Each distinct tuning had its own "mood" and were utilized to instill courage (Dorian), moderation (Prhigian) or any assortment of virtues. Plato's option in the Timaeus is to fill in the octave with five whole notes and two Pythagorean half notes measuring 256/243. Modern scales, post-date Bach, are all equi-temperment. This means that all notes are composed of equal "half-notes". This arrangement has strong advantages in terms of both range of usage and transposibility. There are, however, no perfect harmonics in the modern scales. Only the major third (5/3) is closely approximated, and this harmonic the Greeks felt to be "dissonant". It is a widely known phenomenon in orchestras that the non-fretted instruments and vocalists will often "stray" from the written music to "seek out" the true harmonics. The problem of scaling comes down to mediating between the cuts down the middle (octaves and fifths) from those between the joints (notes and half notes). The one set of cuts is algorithmic or syntactic in form and unscaled in its application. It follows

the pattern of a geometric series. The other is absolutely affected by the situation of where the particular octave falls in relation to the generative series. Its division is not "neat" or algorithmic, and determines a contextualized normative construction. There is no right or wrong about such divisions, they rather account to a semantic criterion of better or worse. Such a sequence is arithmetic in the accumulative dominance of its "material." These two kinds of cuts are operative in all scaling problems between absolute form and a given matter, and are emblematic of the contending forms of badness, ugliness and sickness, in the whole-part problem. The paradox between the causal influences of participation and imitation are also represented in the moral conflict of the Republic. The two parts of the Noble Lie are presented as consonant and unproblematic conditions. The first part tells us we are all brothers: All animals are created equal. The second qualifies that some are made of gold, others silver and some of iron and tin: Some animals are more equal than others. Satiric parody aside, there is a serious conflict between the demands of moderation/equality and justice/freedom. The more equal we are compelled to be, the less freedom we can anticipate. The more freedom allowed, the less equality we can expect. Equality/moderation is the virtue of the health of the parts. Justice/freedom is their beauty. It would seem that one must choose ones fault along with ones virtue3. But if this difficulty can have a geometric expression, so might its resolution. Citizens that participate in a good republic, one that is itself imitating the circular motion of the heavens, would have their rectilinearity moderated through such a continuous motion. The closer that the participation was functioning towards a truly

Nietzsche was to turn this tension into a archetypal conflict between aesthetic and moral values that of the warrior and that of the priest/philosopher.

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good end, the more many sided the rectilinearity of its citizens would become. In such a well formed city women and men may agree to cloth themselves for wrestling matches and philosophers would willingly forgo their contemplation of the forms for the sake of the overall health of the system. Since no amount of participation could ever achieve complete squaring of the circle, we must see this citizen participation in a good republic as the necessary condition, the propaduetic attainment of health, for the imitation of the gods in the final elimination of ignorance.

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