Part 13 (1/2)

243. +Transliteration: gignetai toinyn hos egomai polis epeide tunchanei hemon hekastos ouk autarkes. E-text editor's translation: ”As I see it, the city will come into existence because it so happens that as individuals we are not sufficient to provide for ourselves.” Plato, Republic 369b.

243. +Transliteration: Poiesei hos egomai ten polin hemetera chreia. E- text editor's translation: ”As I see it, it will be our needs that create the city.” Plato, Republic 369c.

244. +Transliteration: hoi demiourgoi. Liddell and Scott definition of demiourgos: ”workman.”

245. +Transliteration: eis hen kata physin. E-text editor's translation: ”to one activity in accordance with [a given person's]

nature.” Plato, Republic 372e..

246. +Transliteration: polis ede tryphosa. E-text editor's translation: ”a city already [grown] luxurious.” The verb tryphao means ”to live softly or delicately, fare sumptuously, live in luxury.” (Liddell and Scott.) Plato, Republic 372e.

246. +Transliteration: polis ede tryphosa. E-text editor's translation: ”a city already [grown] luxurious.” The verb tryphao means ”to live softly or delicately, fare sumptuously, live in luxury.” (Liddell and Scott.) Plato, Republic 372e.

246. +Transliteration: kai he chora pou he tote hikane smikra ex hikanes estai. E-text editor's translation: ”And the land that used to be sufficient will be insufficient.” Plato, Republic 373d.

246. +Transliteration: oukoun tes ton plesion choras hemin apotmeteon.

E-text editor's translation: ”And so we will appropriate for ourselves some of our neighbor's land.” Plato, Republic 373d.

247. +Transliteration: Phylakes . . . epikouroi. Pater's translation: ”watchmen or auxiliaries.”

247. +Transliteration: hos en pharmakou eidei ta pseude ta en deonti genomena. E-text editor's translation: ”timely falsehoods that take the form of medicine.” Plato, Republic 389b and 414b contain parts of the quotation.

247. +Transliteration: phoinikikon pseudos. E-text editor's translation: ”Phoenician story.” Plato, Republic 414c.

251. +Transliteration: nomisma tes allages heneka. E-text editor's translation: ”a common currency for exchange.” Plato, Republic 371b.

254. +Transliteration: oikeiopragia. E-text editor's translation: ”functioning,” from oikeios (proper to a thing, fitting) and pragos or, in everyday non-poetic speech, pragma(deed). Plato, Republic 434c.

255. +Transliteration: demos. Liddell and Scott definition: ”the commons, common people, plebeians; in Attica, towns.h.i.+ps or hundreds.”

255. +Transliteration: ta ton philon koina. E-text editor's translation: ”the possessions of friends are held in common.” Plato, Phaedrus 279c contains similar language.

257. +Transliteration: archontes. Liddell and Scott definition of archon: ”ruler.”

257. +Transliteration: philopolides. Liddell and Scott definition: ”[those] loving [their] city, state, or country.”

258. +Transliteration: Ta ton philon koina. E-text editor's translation: ”the possessions of friends are held in common.” Plato, Phaedrus 279c contains similar language.

260. +Transliteration: kalokagathos. Liddell and Scott definition: ”beautiful and good, n.o.ble and good.”

264. +Transliteration: h.o.m.oiosis to theo. Pater's translation: ”a [process or act of] being made like to G.o.d.” Plato, Republic 454c.

266. +Transliteration: Kallipolis. Liddell and Scott definition: ”beautiful city.” Plato, Republic 527c.

CHAPTER 10: PLATO'S AESTHETICS

[267] WHEN we remember Plato as the great lover, what the visible world was to him, what a large place the idea of Beauty, with its almost adequate realisation in that visible world, holds in his most abstract speculations as the clearest instance of the relation of the human mind to reality and truth, we might think that art also, the fine arts, would have been much for him; that the aesthetic element would be a significant one in his theory of morals and education. Ta terpna en h.e.l.ladi+ (to use Pindar's phrase) all the delightful things in h.e.l.las:-- Plato least of all could have been unaffected by their presence around him. And so it is. Think what perfection of handicraft, what a subtle enjoyment therein, is involved in that specially Platonic rule, to mind one's business (to ta hautou prattein)+ that he who, like Fra Damiano of Bergamo, has a gift for poikilia,+ intarsia or marqueterie, for example, should confine himself exclusively to that. Before him, [268] you know, there had been no theorising about the beautiful, its place in life, and the like; and as a matter of fact he is the earliest critic of the fine arts. He antic.i.p.ates the modern notion that art as such has no end but its own perfection,--”art for art's sake.” Ar' oun kai hekaste ton technon esti ti sympheron allo e hoti malista telean einai;+ We have seen again that not in theory only, by the large place he a.s.signs to our experiences regarding visible beauty in the formation of his doctrine of ideas, but that in the practical sphere also, this great fact of experience, the reality of beauty, has its importance with him. The loveliness of virtue as a harmony, the winning aspect of those ”images” of the absolute and unseen Temperance, Bravery, Justice, shed around us in the visible world for eyes that can see, the claim of the virtues as a visible representation by human persons and their acts of the eternal qualities of ”the eternal,” after all far out-weigh, as he thinks, the claim of their mere utility. And accordingly, in education, all will begin and end ”in music,” in the promotion of qualities to which no truer name can be given than symmetry, aesthetic fitness, tone. Philosophy itself indeed, as he conceives it, is but the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things.

There have been Platonists without Plato, and a kind of traditional Platonism in the world, independent of, yet true in spirit to, the Platonism [269] of the Platonic Dialogues. Now such a piece of traditional Platonism we find in the hypothesis of some close connexion between what may be called the aesthetic qualities of the world about us and the formation of moral character, between aesthetics and ethics.

Wherever people have been inclined to lay stress on the colouring, for instance, cheerful or otherwise, of the walls of the room where children learn to read, as though that had something to do with the colouring of their minds; on the possible moral effect of the beautiful ancient buildings of some of our own schools and colleges; on the building of character, in any way, through the eye and ear; there the spirit of Plato has been understood to be, and rightly, even by those who have perhaps never read Plato's Republic, in which however we do find the connexion between moral character and matters of poetry and art strongly a.s.serted. This is to be observed especially in the third and tenth books of The Republic. The main interest of those books lies in the fact, that in them we read what Plato actually said on a subject concerning which people have been so ready to put themselves under his authority.

It is said with immediate reference to metre and its various forms in verse, as an element in the general treatment of style or manner (lexis)+ as opposed to the matter (logoi)+ in the imaginative literature, with which as in time past the [270] education of the citizens of the Perfect City will begin. It is however at his own express suggestion that we may apply what he says, in the first instance, about metre and verse, to all forms of art whatever, to music (mousike)+ generally, to all those matters over which the Muses of Greek mythology preside, to all productions in which the form counts equally with, or for more than, the matter. a.s.suming therefore that we have here, in outline and tendency at least, the mind of Plato in regard to the ethical influence of aesthetic qualities, let us try to distinguish clearly the central lines of that tendency, of Platonism in art, as it is really to be found in Plato.