Plato's Symposium is a mine of information about his fellow-Athenians' interests as regards aesthetics. What the cultivated Athenian of the time - the public speaker, the rhapsode or the craftsman - went for was animated discussion about Homer or the Parthenon or Parrhasius and his pictures or Euripides and his tragedies. But Plato goes beyond this first level. He poses key questions in aesthetics, with unprecedented clarity and insight. The main dialogues in which he states these positions of his are (from his earlier period) the Ion, the Symposium and the Republic and (from his later period) the Phaedrus, the Sophist and the Laws. The following is a brief survey some of Plato's most basic ideas on aesthetics:
For Plato, art is our ability to do something that requires dexterity, specialization, and knowledge. The arts can be divided into those that produce a hoard and those that produce an output. Painting is juxtaposed with weaving, architecture with furniture-making: in other words our normal modern distinction between fine art and applied art did not hold good for Plato (though he does seem to tacitly accept a distinction of a sort between fine art and handicraft). Whenever he is speaking, in the Republic and the Laws, about what he regards as the highest art, ability in politics, he will liken it to composing a tragic play, colouring a sculpture, or painting.
 Every purposeful activity producing an output to a plan is, for Plato, mimesis ('imitation'). He never manages to clarify this term (or rather group of concepts): often he seems to have used it as a synonym for methexis, homoiosis, or paraplesia. Plato sees some degree of deliberate distortion as an essential part of mimesis, if one is to achieve an illusory similarity to the idea and archetype, which he calls morphe ('form'). These were certainly views which the architects of the Parthenon would have been at home with. Had they not (to take but one instance) deliberately made the corner column of the building thicker than the other columns, so that it should appear to be of equal thickness? |
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For Plato, behind every work of art that we find beautiful there lies the archetype of beauty itself. The art work is no more than a guide leading us back to the morphe of beauty. Our soul once knew this ideal loveliness, but by passing into the world has forgotten it - Plato's famous doctrine of anamnesis. Through the mouth of Diotima in the dialogue Symposium, he tells us that we too can make the passage from physical to spiritual beauty; then to the beauty of institutions, laws, and sciences; and finally to beauty pure and unalloyed.
Art has, on Plato's view, an extremely important role. It can strengthen characters and cultivate virtues, so that it is in fact a useful delight. But it can also have degenerative, even catastrophic side-effects. This is why people must not be allowed to play about on their own with such dangerous things as tragic poetry or works of music. Art needs to be supervised, and this must be done by the lawgiver and the works of art submitted to censorship. Plato's position, so strongly decried from that day to this, is logically perfectly consistent, once we take into account his attitude to the nature of art and the essence of virtue.
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