Does Plato Think There Can Be Art That Is True
Defending Plato's Renunciation of Art
This is in reference to a 2011 lecture entitled "Plato'due south Philosophy of Art", given by Dr. James Grant of the University of London, Birkbeck. An audio recording of the lecture tin can exist establish at the lesser.
Today, Plato is probably known best for his piece of workRepublic, an outline of a highly idealistic and just city-state. Many remember bits and pieces from their Intro to Philosophy classes, but a criticism that is generally brushed over in discussion of the Commonwealth is Plato's flat-out renunciation of art. A prerequisite in understanding Plato'due south position is realizing the office that art, and specifically poetry, played in Greek culture.
Poetry in the time of Plato played a similar role to the Bible in early American culture. Sections were recited at schools, in homes, and children were expected to memorize various passages for later recitation. Much like the Bible, these poems formed early moral backbones in young Greeks and were very much responsible for the development of certain cultural norms. It wasn't so much a trouble for Plato that fine art had such a grip on the cultural norms and moral fibers of a lodge, but rather that the artists themselves had no agreement of what they were representing, and thus inspired decadent and destructive morals. In the eyes of Plato, the artist or poet was typically not the ideal moral grapheme in whatever society, and thus should not have been in charge of dictating moral grounds or developing cultural norms. A second complaint Plato had nigh the role of the artist was that even if they were generally a moral and civilized human being, they were falsely representing reality through their art, something which Plato very much opposed to and which undermined a central theory in Platonism.
A mainstay in Ideal thought is the idea of ideal forms. The Theory of Forms posits that beyond the world we run across, impact and hear, there is a earth of key reality, of pure truth and form. In this school of thought, the class of a bed, for example, is not its color, textile, unmade sheets or mattress, but the essence of "bed" itself. Plato claims that the trouble herein is that artists know null of grade, particularly painters. He claims that the painter simply knows visual cues and expresses his ideas only through visual representation. Plato says that painters use tricks to inspire error in their weak viewers, making them call up that in that location is a real world inside of the canvas, when there really is not. Dr. Grant elaborates with an example about a painter of a flute versus a flutist. He says that in the eyes of Plato, the flutist has a much deeper understanding of the course of a flute than the artist who represents a flute in a painting. It was this discrepancy in sincerity and honesty of knowledge that disturbed Plato most.
A modern approach in defending Plato'south dislike of art has to do with cognitive biases and more specifically with what we call the Availability Heuristic. The Availability Heuristic is the tendency of people to overestimate the likelihood of an event happening if an example of that event hands comes to mind. Illustrations of this bias include general over-estimations of dying in a plane crash following the attacks on September eleventhursday, an increased worry about shark attacks after the release of the pic Jaws in 1975 and the general supposition that all celebrities must regularly use cocaine considering we see a few cases of celebrity drug binges on tv. Similarly, fine art can impact our perception or reality in a similar way. Dr. Grant claims that perhaps the standardization of "story arcs" in movies and books take given the public an altered and idealized version of how reality works. When life does non, and Dr. Grant notes that information technology rarely does, follow the standard structure of a Western novel or the story arc of a modernistic romance film, the cerebral dissonance that arises many times leads to disappointment and sadness.
Duchamp's Urinal
Another instance pertaining to art's stranglehold on modern cultural norms is the allegation that excessive tobacco use in pop films is what led to the wide use of tobacco in everyday life. Still today, public health experts are advocating for the reduction of cigarette use in movies, though efforts have continually come upwards brusque due to large bribes from the very informed and enlightened tobacco companies. This horrible truth highlights why now, more than ever, we may indeed want to question who is doing the teaching in modern culture.
Whether or non Plato was correct near art'due south destructiveness to the moral material of order, the fact is that it does take a large impact. We should then begin to ask, what is the part of art in social club? And if that function is very of import, who can we trust every bit an artist? And is fine art a valuable source of cognition? For now, these questions will be left out in the open for contemplation and assay at a later point.
References
Plato's Philosophy of Fine art – James Grant Ph.D
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Source: https://sites.bu.edu/ombs/2012/11/12/defending-platos-renunciation-of-art/
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