4. History of Aesthetics - Plato on Art

Have you ever wondered what effect art has on people? You may recall different controversies since the 1980s. The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, the music of Marilyn Manson, and violent video games like Grand Theft Auto have all been accused of corrupting the youth. Plato was also concerned about the effects of art on the youth and the city, and had a really interesting strategy for dealing with this problem: banish the artists from the city!

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; to give him the benefit of the doubt, we should at least try to understand why he comes to this drastic conclusion. To get there we start with his most famous image, the cave.

Plato’s Cave

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors address the question, “What is Justice?” In book 7 (out of 10), Socrates presents the famous allegory of the cave. Many people have heard this before, but let me describe the basic scenario (see the image below). People are chained and forced to look at a wall. Behind them are other people holding shapes that, from a fire, cast shadows on the wall. These prisoners, therefore, have only ever perceived these shadows on the wall. Now imagine one of them gets free somehow and makes it out of the cave. The brightness of the sun causes a tremendous amount of pain in their eyes as they have never seen anything so bright. But eventually they get used to it, and they realize that the shadows were not the complete understanding of reality.

People can focus on different aspects of this analogy, but for here, I’ll say that Plato believed that what we perceive on earth is only a shadow of Ultimate Reality. Plato seems to posit an immaterial—possibly heavenly—realm of Forms. All of the perfect ideas of concepts like Beauty, Truth, Justice, and Goodness exist there. But there is also the perfect image of all physical things too, such as Dog, Tree, Couch, and Person.