Review: About Plato and about Art Author(s): I. M. Crombie Source: The Classical Review, New Series, Vol.

29, No. 1 (1979), pp. 76-77 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3062732 . Accessed: 14/07/2011 07:53
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THECLASSICAL REVIEW

of these stories. Can even a fictitious anecdote help date its subject's life? Despite such occasional anachronisms as Gorgias' disparagement of the Gorgias (anecdote 37), the Platonic biographers' record in this regard appears fairly healthy. Finally, it is hard to avoid remarking that the earliest extant life of Plato, that in the Index Academicorum Herculanensis, survives in a papyrus which has not been examined since 1904. Mekler's edition, although a work of exceptional quality, was produced without the technical aids which are today enabling us to improve the texts of many Herculaneum papyri. Until somebody undertakes a new edition, no truly definitive work on Platonic biography can be written.
Christ's College, Cambridge D. N. SEDLEY

ABOUT PLATO AND ABOUT ART The IRIS MURDOCH: Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Pp. 89. Oxford: University Press, 1977. Cloth, ?2-50.
The sub-title reminds one that too much light can be dazzling. This essay is as illuminating as it is obscure. It is about the relation between the sensible and the intelligible worlds (the fire and the sun of the Simile of the Cave), and about the role that art can play as a mediator between sensibility and reason. Miss Murdoch's purpose is to try to understand what it is about art that Plato concentrated too much on, so that, for all the importance he attached to beauty and to eros, he came, on the whole, to under-estimate the mediating role of art. Her method is to expound Plato's developing views on ethical and metaphysical matters, fitting what he says about art and artifice (for example his views about the limited value, indeed the danger, of philosophical writing) into this account, and breaking off, whenever convenient, to introduce by way of parallel or contrast the related views of Kant, Freud, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, and (passim, and often rather gnomically) Murdoch. One gets the impression that the systems of metaphysicians and theologians are a kind of mythical representation of a perennial philosophy which transcends them, and in which Good is sovereign, and is also the Real and the Beautiful, and in which the eros which beauty excites can counter-act the tendency of human 'egoism' (or concern with the trivial and mundane) to evade the sovereignty of Good. Since this perennial philosophy can so easily be found in the Phaedrus, the problem becomes acute why Plato should have, on the whole, rated art as eikasia. The answer is that Plato was too vividly aware of the negative half of the truth, stated in the Sophist, that God is the only genuine artist. 'The Demiurge is attempting against insuperable difficulties to create a harmonious and just world. The (good) human artist, whom Plato regards as such a base caricature, is trying to portray the partially failed world as it is, and in doing so to produce something pleasing and beautiful' (p. 80). Again (p. 65): 'Art is dangerous chiefly because it apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivializes it'; not, I think, that in Plato's view it necessarily does so, but that for the most part it does so, and that 'the desire to become the Demiurge and reorganize chaos in accordance with one's own excellent plan' (p. 69) is the strongest motive to art as it is also the strongest motive to philosophy. The 'harsh but inspiring truth of the distance between man and God' can be covered up with 'charming imagery' by the artist as it may

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also be concealed by the 'metaphysical ladders' of the philosopher. (We remember that Plato also distrusted the sungrammata which are the philosopher's artefacts). Perhaps it is clear from what I have said that the essay aims to improve one's understanding rather than one's knowledge. There is little exegetical novelty, anyhow on points of detail, in Miss Murdoch's account of Plato's views, which is on the whole traditionalist. But the picture of the development of the Theory of Forms is individual and striking. Plato moves from a belief in perfect particulars, through the high status given to psuche in the Sophist, to 'the great uncreated Particulars' (p. 55) which play the role of the Father (the cosmos being the Son, and the Demiurge the Holy Ghost) in the Trinity of the Timaeus. One may or may not wholly believe this story of Plato's intellectual growth (the details of which I have, of course, left out); indeed one may be a little dazzled by it; but I think that, when one's eyes have become adjusted, some things may be more clearly seen. This essay, then, is rewarding, but not easy. Miss Murdoch begins on p. 1, starts a new paragraph from time to time, and stops on p. 89. No sub-headings, no signposts; no notes, no index, no bibliography. I seldom understand more than half the time why people do what they do in a Murdoch novel, and I doubt whether I understand more than half the time why Miss Murdoch moves from one point to the next in this essay. And at least a quarter of the sentences washed over my head without my understanding them. 'The pierced structure of the art object whereby its sense flows into life is an essential part of its mortal nature' (p. 85) for example. Not, however, without leaving something behind. The student who wants plain information about Plato's views on art will not find it here. But he will find something else, which he may or may not find digestible, both about Plato and about art.
Wadham College, Oxford I. M. CROMBIE

ARISTOTLE'S DE IDEIS
WALTER LESZL:II 'De ideis' di Aristotele e la teoria platonica delle

idee. Pp. 360. Florence: Olschki, 1975. Paper, L. 9,500.

One of the useful aspects of this volume is that it includes D. Harlfinger's new text of the passages of Alexander's Metaphysics commentary generally thought to draw on the IIep' ibecw (PI). Harlfinger bases his text on the six manuscripts he considers earlier than 1400; of these he rates O (collated here for the first time) as more important than A, on which Hayduck and other earlier editors relied. The recensio altera of LF is printed fully, in parallel. Leszl (L.) adds a translation of his own, covering those parts of the vulgate he believes to derive from PI. (Two minor puzzles: i) L. generally translates Harlfinger, but at 86.12 translates Hayduck instead. ii) Why does the text not include 97.17-19, which not only has at least some connection with PI ('quasi certamente', p. 341), but also appears in the translation?) There then follows the main part of the book, which consists chiefly in patient analyses of the Platonist arguments cited by Aristotle in PI, and his criticisms of them. L. is generally uncontroversial on the reconstruction of PI. He considers Alexander reliable as paraphrast, though less good as an interpreter of Aristotle: