Platos Argument: Art is an Imitation of an Imitation

Abstract  Like most western philosophers, Plato focused a substantial amount of energy on aesthetics.  Aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into beauty.  For many philosophers, the concept of beauty was synonymous with the concept of art.  However, Plato made a substantial distinction between beauty and art.  Not only did he consider art a poor imitation of beauty, in fact labeling it an imitation of an imitation, but he thought that this imitation was somehow dangerous.

 It leads to one of the most interesting almost paradoxes in all of Plato’s philosophy.  While Plato appeared to consider beauty inherently good, he viewed art as not only inferior to natural beauty, but also dangerous.  A further exploration of Plato’s philosophy, and its place in the development of Western philosophy, reveals that Plato’s concept of aesthetics was more about establishing the philosophical rules to discuss beauty and art than it was about placing value on either concept.

 This article explores Plato’s role in philosophy, his introduction to aesthetics, and his approach to art as an imitation of an imitation. Introduction Western philosophy is built upon the philosophical musings of three famous thinkers: Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.  These three famous philosophers were linked together by student-teacher relationships, and many students have a difficult time distinguishing their different ideas.

 However, there are substantive differences in many parts of their philosophies, and these differences help highlight how aesthetics, which is the philosophical inquiry into beauty and art, developed.  In fact, while Plato is well known for his discussions of art and beauty, he did not actually discuss them in a way that would be familiar to most modern students of philosophy.

 Instead, when one studies Plato’s arguments, one sees how they have helped shape core concepts about the study of aesthetics, including the ideas of beauty, inspiration, and imitation.  Only after understanding those concepts can one understand what Plato meant when he described art as an imitation of an imitation.   Body For those who are new to the study of philosophy, understanding the relationship between the three fathers of Western philosophy can be a little confusing.

 Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are often treated by some as the same individual, which leads to inherent misunderstandings about their different philosophical approaches, because, while there were substantive differences in their philosophies.  However, the error is understandable because of the relationship between the three men, and, in turn, their impact on the Western World.  Therefore, understanding those relationships can make it much easier to understand their individual approaches.   Socrates was the first of the three philosophers.

 He was a real person who is described by Greek contemporaries.  Socrates was Plato’s teacher.  He was well-known as an educator who worked extensively with the youth of Athens, but his actions were not viewed positively by many Athenians.  On the contrary, Socrates was opposed to the democratic government of Athens and his views had helped inspire some of his students to attempt to overthrow the democratic government of Athens (“The Suicide of Socrates”).

 For these reasons, he was charged with corrupting the youth and found guilty at his trial.  Socrates was asked to propose his own punishment, but eventually sentenced to death and ordered to drink hemlock to kill himself.  While his death is often described as a suicide, the description is only partially accurate; while Socrates did drink the hemlock that killed him, he did so only because he was under a death sentence and ordered to do so.

While Socrates was a real person, it is important to realize that much of what is known about Socrates is derived from Plato’s descriptions of Socrates.  Therefore, what people think of as Socratic philosophy might better be described as Plato’s take on Socratic philosophy.  In fact, it is suspected that Plato often used the example of his teacher as a means to highlight his own philosophy.

 Therefore, although Socrates was a real person, the Socrates people study today might better be considered a fictionalized description of a real person.   Plato was a well-known Greek teacher.  According to Plato, his own teacher was Socrates., and it is, in fact, in Plato’s writings that one finds most descriptions of Socrates, including the famous account of Socrates’ death.  Plato was also a teacher of youth, but he took a much more formalized role than Socrates had.

 Plato founded Plato’s Academy in 387 BC in Athens.  Plato used Socrates work as a foundation for his own and explored the relationship between the mind and reality.  According to Plato, the forms, which included beauty, were only accessible by the mind and they formed the basis of reality.

 “In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational treatment of the forms and their interrelations, starting with the most fundamental among them (the Good, or the One); in ethics and moral psychology he developed the view that the good life requires not just a certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had suggested) but also habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony between the three parts of the soul (according to Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite)” (Meinwald, 2019).

  Aristotle was one of Plato’s students and spent approximately twenty years learning at Plato’s Academy.  While Aristotle’s own development of a personalized philosophy may not have influenced how Plato viewed beauty and art, Aristotle certainly impacted how they were viewed by the Western world.  That is because Aristotle left Plato’s Academy and became the tutor to Alexander the Great.

 Alexander would go on to conquer much of the Eastern world, spreading Western philosophical ideas outside of Greece, including views of beauty.  One need only consider how beauty is still equated with goodness throughout much of the world to understand just how pervasive these philosophical ideas have become.    Understanding these relationships is important to understanding Plato’s philosophy, which is built in this history of skepticism.

 “What was obvious to many of the early Greek philosophers was that we live in a world which is not an easy source of true, ie, eternal, unchanging knowledge.  The world is constantly undergoing change” (Macintosh, 2012).  This constant fluctuation was a source of frustration to these early philosophers who were, in many ways, attempting to derive a consistent means of explanation for a constantly changing world.  Socrates, at least according to Plato, decided that because the world was changing it was unreliable.

 Plato seemed to agree with parts of that approach, but he also believed that underneath the appearance of a changing world was a more permanent version of reality.  He referred to this more permanent world as the Forms.  “According to Plato, for any conceivable thing or property there is a corresponding Form, a perfect example of that thing or property” (Macintosh, 2012).  One of those forms is beauty. Plato’s discussions of beauty draw upon Socrates own approach to beauty.

 Socrates was taught by a teacher named Diotima, who believed that the soul progressed towards greater and greater beauty (Pappas, 2016).  Diotima then described poets as producing their works as part of their desire for beauty, but Socrates almost immediately warns that the beauty found in poetry has the power to corrupt the young.

 On the one hand, Socrates believed it was necessary to teach the youth to appreciate and value beauty because it would lead them to be good people, but, on the other hand, poetry, which was a type of false beauty, was seen as a potential tool that could be used to lead the youth to prefer vulgar deeds over noble ones (Pappas, 2016).  Plato built on this foundation by expanding his concept of beauty, which was central to his philosophy.

 “Plato sees no opposition between the pleasures that beauty brings and the goals of philosophy” (Pappas, 2016).  In fact, when developing his forms, which would stand as the foundation for his philosophy, Plato seemed to suggest that beauty was sufficient and that “philosophers meet this beauty in experience in which they consummate their deepest love while also attaining the loftiest knowledge” (Pappas, 2016).

  In practical terms, what this means in terms of Plato’s explanation of perception is that, while a person might perceive an object, there is a duality to that perception.  Any object is not just the object itself, but also a representation of the perfect form of that object.  The object is almost certainly not going to meet the requirements of this idealized form of the object, which would be considered beauty.

 Therefore, what a person visually perceives, whether it is a chair or another human being is only going to be an imitation of the idealized form that would be described by beauty.  Only those who are able to go beyond the appearance of something and know its true form can understand this beauty.

 Moreover, it is important to realize that Plato was not an egalitarian; he did not think that all men could perceive of beauty or even be educated to perceive beauty or any of the other forms.  Instead, he believed that it required a special class of men, whom he referred to as philosopher-kings, to understand the form of things, and that only these men were qualified to lead others.

  However, Plato seemed to suggest that all men might have the desire to lead others or at least the desire to believe that they were sufficiently aware to do so.  That is why he cast the idea of imitation as somehow dangerous, because it would allow people to confuse their perceptions of a form with the true reality that goes beyond the physical form.

 In this way, seeming reality is an imitation of the actual reality that is found in the forms, in the unchanging and constant layer of reality that is underneath the ever-changing physical world.  Adding art to the discussion, it is easy to understand why Plato believed that art was an imitation.  After all, works of art are designed to copy, emulate, or remind people of objects found in the changing physical reality.  They are, in many ways, by definition works of imitation.

  In addition to suggesting that art could not, on its own, be.