I thought this may be useful since it outlines the basic view of the ancient greeks and their view on emotions vs intellect. Its actually an unedited version for school, but it may prove to be useful in understanding the grander scheme of things going on in the MOQ. We can all agree that society is full of imitation. Imitation makes up a great deal of our daily lives, and usually the true nature of this 'imitation' goes unnoticed. The art world is undisputedly the focal point of this imitation, and also of innovation - but innovation must be based on a context, and that context is usually derived from imitation. We can all agree that the foundation of art is rooted in imitation, however, the way we perceive imitation can go a long way in determining what sense of art we have. As with most issues in the public eye today, we usually hear about two opposing sides; pro and con. In this case we have the artists and their supporters, versus the censors, or those representing the bourgeois. What many people do not know, is that this cerebral war has been continuing over many centuries. The earliest and most popular example is from the ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle, and while they both agreed that art was a form of imitation, the way it was an imitation separated their viewpoints and led them to opposing sides on the very value of art itself. This battle has continued among intellectuals throughout the centuries, and one of the more recent thinkers, Jean-Paul Sartre, seems to take a more Aristotelian understanding of the nature of art, rather than a Neo-Platonist point of view. This may or may not be an indication of things to come, but to the well-versed historian/philosopher, the current battle of artists versus the censors is just a variation of this original debate. If art is an imitation, then it's an imitation of what? Plato would say it is an imitation of the ideal, as he elaborated on mainly in the Republic. What is the ideal, you may ask? The ideal is the perfect, uncontaminated concept as it occurs in thought. In Plato's opinion, every artist is striving to duplicate this ideal, however there are always flaws and human error, therefore nothing can reach the perfection of that which is the original idea. Every object that you identify around you is also an imitation of an ideal. For how else would you identify it, if you didn't have the idea of the perfect instance of it? To put it in more modern terminology, if you were to see a cat, how would you know it's a cat? Plato thought that it's because there is a universal CAT, and all cats are imitations of this perfect CAT idea. The same is true of trees. How would you be able to point out a tree, if you didn't have a mental understanding of a TREE in your mind? The 'tree' would be the object you were pointing out, the TREE is the idea you were comparing the 'tree' to, in the attempt to identify an otherwise peculiar object. 'TREE' is the universal and 'tree' is the particular. Plato separated the realm of universals and the world of particulars and called them the world of Ideas and the world of Form respectively. This was meant to designate the world of thought, and separate it from the world of phenomena. If Plato designated the world of Ideas as such, then he must have an Idea of the world of ideas, and if I have an idea of the Idea of the world of ideas, then it logically follows that this could potentially continue ad infinitum. He failed to address this specifically. Let's assume however, that Plato's theory stands, and if the phenomenal world, which is filled with particulars, is simply a replication of the 'perfect' Idea, then what did he think of art, which is supposed to be an imitation in itself? He thought simply, that art was an imitation of an imitation and therefore twice removed from reality, or separated two times from the world of Ideas. For instance, if a painter paints a landscape, then his painting is an imitation of the landscape that is an imitation of the Ideal landscape, which occurs only in thought. If this is true, then art is essentially meaningless fluff. However, Plato was well aware of the power of art to invoke emotions, and people in ancient Greece seemed to willingly suspend disbelief in order to be put in the throes of the artist's vision of reality. The next step then, would be to ask himself; would this be beneficial to me, or detrimental? His answer was that it would be almost certainly detrimental. The reason for this is because emotions, being one of the most mysterious and most overpowering phenomena that can occur in relation to a thinking person, tends to cloud judgement, to blur the rational objective. If Plato was to be rational, then he could be rational only in the absence of these deterring emotions. Therefore, art was a threat to realising himself as a rational human being, and in the 'ideal state', there would be no art - or only art that served to further the goals of the Republic would be allowed. Plato's one time pupil, Aristotle, had a different conception of imitation - although he agreed that art was a form of imitation as well. Aristotle presented his ideas first in the Politics and the Poetics. Although he agreed with Plato that the mind can be divided into the rational and irrational, he disagreed with him in which one should be pursued. He felt that the irrational is just as necessary as the rational, and therefore one should seek a unity between the two, instead of concentrating on one. With this in mind, he felt that art could further the potential unity of the two which would be intellectually and emotionally desirable. Experience then, can be considered a potentiality, and because no one can conceive of a moment in its entirety, shaping experience into a form would be realising the potentiality and turning it into an actuality. It would be an actuality because it gives meaning (by focus) to an otherwise meaningless, indefinable "chaos". He thought, that in order to give form to something derived from experience, one must include relevant things and leave out irrelevant or incommunicable aspects. Therefore, the artist is shaping an otherwise meaningless reality into a meaningful one, and one that can be relayed to a specific audience. Giving reality and/or a set of experiences a form allows the artist to cause certain reactions among the audience, and whatever reactions he may desire. Aristotle was fundamentally concerned with poetic tragedies that aroused and invoked emotional responses, and thought it would be the ideal example of the power of art. Plato thought that emotions were harmful to pure rationality, which he figured was a logical end to strive for. As we have leaned before, Aristotle thought Plato had no arguable basis for assuming that the irrational part of Being was detrimental, since Aristotle perceives these two aspects as a whole. Therefore, Aristotle concluded that emotions were part of the human condition, and therefore necessary to form the complete human being. Aristotle then assumed that emotional arousal is beneficial to understanding and purifying the emotions, and furthermore an aspect of the Self. Through what he called katharsis, emotions that are otherwise "pent-up" are allowed out, to cleanse and purify the whole. He specifically cites fear and pity as necessary in the successful tragedy. In his point of view, the tragedy invokes an emotion, controls it, directs it (through empathy or some equivalent) and eventually nullifies it. Through this process, parts of the human character which may otherwise be manifesting in dormancy are allowed out in a controlled, non-destructive way, and may serve the Self intellectually, as these emotions may be deconstructed and/or rationalised creating a unity which is uniquely attributed to art. In this way, emotions and intellect are harmoniously combined, this is regarded as a positive end by Aristotle, and as it logically follows, art must be a positive means. The similarity between Aristotle and Sartre is rooted in Aristotle's theory of katharsis, and the method of engagement between artist and audience. Additionally, Sartre also agrees with the assumption that art is an imitation, but in a much more complex way. In his essay, What is Literature? Sartre alludes to the responsibility of the artist as perhaps a "guardian of ideals", that is, ideals that can be found in everyday life and is a part of the human condition. Therefore, by imitation, these ideals can be relayed to an audience in a way that invokes emotion. Aristotle thought that the invocation of emotion was necessary since it is a way for the artist to "capture" the audiences attention and make them more open to other motives the artist may have in mind, particularly the realisation of a moral responsibility that the artist has. Sartre acknowledges this, but he feels the most important question is "for whom does one write"? The following explanation is an attempt to clarify this. His first relation, which he cites as an integral one, is the relation of artist and audience - similar to what Aristotle explained. The artist, giving form to experience, is offering this form to the audience, which Sartre calls an "act of generosity". All the feelings that are invoked by the artist's creation is "changing" the audience, or more precisely, making "particular modulations" of their freedom. "Freedom" is used because Sartre views the audience's relation with the artist as a "free dream". Sartre also calls these "modulations" as a form of accessing a totality of being. Therefore, the audience is engaging in a "wilful suspension of disbelief", or an act of faith, in order to be "modified" (however minutely) by the artist's work. So it is a free act on the part of the audience, as well as a free act of generosity on the part of the artist who is presenting his/her work to the audience. It is in this mutual act that the audience is compromised by the task that the artist is presenting to them. The method in which this works, and Sartre uses the novel as an example -- as Aristotle used the poetic tragedy, is through a presentation of the means to end. In other words, this process must be a "becoming", much like Aristotle used "form" in describing the shape of a story. It cannot work, for example, if this entire becoming was to be compressed into one overwhelming moment, for the audience would get nothing out of it, except perhaps confusion - partly because life and its trials and tribulations does not work like one crushing point in time. Through a "becoming" one is able to define a moral imperative from an aesthetic one, realise it's promises, its potentiality and its actuality, even perhaps in the sense of its impact on the viewer. And it is through a becoming, and the aforementioned characteristics, that the audience's state of being is compromised. Throughout this explanation of Sartre's conception of the relationship between artist and audience, one word and its related synonyms repeatedly arise and that is freedom. Most importantly, the necessary freedom of artist and audience. Therefore, Sartre has deduced that freedom is the most important aspect in this relationship and is the underlying imperative for any work of art to succeed. By the audience allowing themselves to be compromised, the artist's form becomes meaning, and the theory of katharsis is realised. The focal point, or ground zero of these viewpoints is the nature of imitation. What imitation inevitably creates, is a conception of what has come to be known as "normality". Anything that deviates from this central conception is pigeonholed as "fringe culture". The catch, and there usually is one, is that society operates like an organism, and in this sense acts like the white blood cells that try to destroy foreign bodies in the blood-stream. That, in the process of defining and consciously or not trying to destroy the deviant, it doesn't realise that normality is a deviant itself, in more ways than one. In fact normality is merely a concept, and doesn't actually exist, much like our concepts of "yesterday" and "tomorrow". This is a profound question that the fringe-culture is raising, and what is happening in the modern struggle of the Aristotelian perspective and the Neo-Platonist one. As history has made apparent, every century rebels against the last - previously in the Victorian era, one can find traces of a more rigid interpretation of Platonism in imitation and the subsequent works of art. However, World War I led to a profound change, due to many happenings, and a rebellion surfaced against rigid order and the limited conception of imitation that sprung out of it. Perhaps that is why the Aristotelian concept is favoured by the majority of intellectuals in this present cycle, and Aristotle's rigid scientific class-system is not. Is there a right and wrong? This question may be at the very root of this struggle itself. END Thanks for the attention, I hope this proved useful Nishant Taneja http://www.mp3.com/atomicbuddha ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com ------- End of forwarded message ------- MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
