This is in reference to a 2011 lecture entitled “Plato’s Philosophy of Art”, given by Dr. James Grant of the University of London, Birkbeck. An audio recording of the lecture can be found at the bottom.

Today, Plato is probably known best for his work Republic, 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 Republic is Plato’s flat-out renunciation of art. A prerequisite in understanding Plato’s position is realizing the role 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 problem for Plato that art had such a grip on the cultural norms and moral fibers of a society, but rather that the artists themselves had no understanding of what they were representing, and thus inspired corrupt and destructive morals. In the eyes of Plato, the artist or poet was typically not the ideal moral character in any society, and thus should not have been in charge of dictating moral grounds or developing cultural norms. A second complaint Plato had about 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 Platonic thought is the idea of ideal forms. The Theory of Forms posits that beyond the world we see, touch and hear, there is a world of fundamental reality, of pure truth and form. In this school of thought, the form of a bed, for example, is not its color, material, unmade sheets or mattress, but the essence of “bed” itself. Plato claims that the problem herein is that artists know nothing of form, especially painters. He claims that the painter only 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 think that there 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 form 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’s 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 easily comes to mind. Illustrations of this bias include general over-estimations of dying in a plane crash following the attacks on September 11^th, an increased worry about shark attacks after the release of the movie Jaws in 1975 and the general assumption that all celebrities must regularly use cocaine because we see a few cases of celebrity drug binges on television. Similarly, art can affect our perception or reality in a similar way. Dr. Grant claims that perhaps the standardization of “story arcs” in movies and books have given the public an altered and idealized version of how reality works. When life does not, and Dr. Grant notes that it rarely does, follow the standard structure of a Western novel or the story arc of a modern romance film, the cognitive dissonance that arises many times leads to disappointment and sadness.

Duchamp's Urinal

Another example pertaining to art’s stranglehold on modern cultural norms is the accusation that excessive tobacco use in popular 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 up short due to large bribes from the very informed and aware 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 not Plato was right about art’s destructiveness to the moral fabric of society, the fact is that it does have a large impact. We should then begin to ask, what is the role of art in society? And if that role is very important, who can we trust as an artist? And is art a valuable source of knowledge? For now, these questions will be left out in the open for contemplation and analysis at a later point.

References

Plato’s Philosophy of Art – James Grant Ph.D

Most would agree that the most important of our basic senses is sight. Without it, many basic forms of communication fall apart, the vibrance of the world around us dulls, and our understanding and ability to sense the complexity of the physical world diminishes. Without the ability to see, it would logically be impossible to portray our surroundings artistically in a coherent and visually realistic manner…

…wait…what?

Esref was born without the privilege of sight. As a result, he never developed the thalamo-cortical projections from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) to the primary visual cortex necessary for sight perception. However, instead of letting his occipital lobe go to waste, Esref’s brain adapted by using that same cortical real estate for other senses, primarily touch.

With Esref’s enhanced sense of touch he claims he can, “see more with his fingers than sighted people can see with their eyes.” A bold statement: after all, Esref has no idea what seeing is like. Conversely, sighted people don’t know what the sense of touch is like when the visual cortex becomes involved, so can we really deny his claim? The circular nature of this subjective discussion renders both opinions null but it does raise the question: is a subjective experience a product of the sensory modality involved or is it a product of the cortical area involved? And what exactly is Esref subjectively perceiving when he is feeling his way through a landscape? Is it as vivid as the subjective experience that sighted people perceive? It seems this question is impossible to resolve but seeing the landscapes Esref paints makes one believe that he is indeed sensing the world just as vividly as the rest of us.

Esref provides a new perspective on perception which throws a kink into anyone’s previously held beliefs about subjective experience and raises many internal questions. Personally, this new perspective leaves me with one question in particular: we can all agree that the 2003 blockbuster Daredevil was horrible, but wasn’t the rooftop rain scene where the blind Ben Affleck uses the sound of the raindrops on Jennifer Garner’s face to create a mental construct of her one of the most forward thinking, cognitive science-inspired scenes in all of cinematography?

Foreshortening, convergence and drawings from a blind adult – Perception

The neuroscientist, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, attained renowned status after discovering a particular type of neuron that fired in an ‘abstract’ manner to pictures of different individuals, allowing for some predictive value of whom the person was looking at from a data of their neuronal firing. Fascinated with human perception, he teamed up with well-known Argentinean artist Mariano Molina to study the mind’s perception of art, particularly in juxtaposition to its perception of regular photos and individuals. Molina will spend five months working in the lab, learning about how perception works from a scientific viewpoint. In turn, Quiroga will get a look at perception through an artist’s frame.

Molina has discovered that many of his pieces of art intuit unconscious principles of perception that science had previously  identified. Consider one of Molina’s paintings: “The Center of Gaze.” Staring into it, one’s eyes are immediately drawn to the center. Center? How do I know that’s the center? At least, that would be the afterthought of one with a normal sense of perception. Upon further study, conscious reflection dwells on the “how” behind what the eye has intuited. This process that an individual feels within herself, the ex post facto rationalization of a quick and thoughtless, yet insightful, perception is akin to the methodology of the project itself.

Molina will complete a dozen pieces of art within a five month period, helping to draw insight into perceptual processes intuited by the artist. Molina believes that his artistic ability will also benefit from the scientific understanding of perception. Scheduled to begin in November, the project is hoped to bring scientific knowledge as well as an enriched appreciation for art, and encourage communication between the sciences and the arts that is of mutual benefit.

How Do We Perceive Art?  Artist in Residence to Work Alongside Neuroscience Research Lab -Univ. Leicester