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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO AESTHETICS

The third edition of the acclaimed Routledge Companion to Aesthetics contains oversixty chapters written by leading international scholars covering all aspects of aesthetics.

This Companion opens with a historical overview of aesthetics, including entrieson Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault,Goodman and Wollheim. The second part covers the central concepts and theoriesof aesthetics, including definitions of art, taste, the value of art, beauty, imagination,fiction, narrative, metaphor and pictorial representation. Part III is devoted to issuesand challanges in aesthetics, including art and ethics, art and religion, creativity,environmental aesthetics and feminist aesthetics. The final part addresses the individualarts, including music, photography, film, videogames, literature, theater, dance, archi-tecture and design.

With ten new entries, and revisions and updated suggestions for further readingthroughout, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics is essential for anyone interestedin aesthetics, art, literature and visual studies.

Berys Gaut is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland,and President of the British Society of Aesthetics. He is the author of Art, Emotionand Ethics and A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, and coauthor, with Morag Gaut, ofPhilosophy for Young Children: A Practical Guide (Routledge, 2011).

Dominic McIver Lopes is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor ofPhilosophy at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and President of theAmerican Society of Aesthetics. He is the author of Understanding Pictures, Sightand Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures, A Philosophy of Computer Art (Routledge, 2009) andBeyond Art.


ROUTLEDGE PHILOSOPHY COMPANIONS

Routledge Philosophy Companions offer thorough, high-quality surveys and assessmentsof the major topics and periods in philosophy. Covering key problems, themes andthinkers, all entries are specially commissioned for each volume and written byleading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited and organized,Routledge Philosophy Companions are indispensable for anyone coming to a majortopic or period in philosophy, as well as for the more advanced reader.

The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of ScienceEdited by Stathis Psillos and Martin Curd

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century PhilosophyEdited by Dermot Moran

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and FilmEdited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of PsychologyEdited by John Symons and Paco Calvo

The Routledge Companion to MetaphysicsEdited by Robin Le Poidevin, Peter Simons, Andrew McGonigal and Ross Cameron

The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century PhilosophyEdited by Dean Moyar

The Routledge Companion to EthicsEdited by John Skorupski

The Routledge Companion to EpistemologyEdited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and MusicEdited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania

The Routledge Companion to PhenomenologyEdited by Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of LanguageEdited by Gillian Russell and Delia Graff Fara


The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of LawEdited by Andrei Marmor

The Routledge Companion to TheismEdited by Charles Taliaferro, Victoria Harrison and Stewart Goetz

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second EditionEdited by Chad Meister and Paul Copan

The Routledge Companion to Social and Political PhilosophyEdited by Gerald Gaus and Fred D’Agostino

Forthcoming:

The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century PhilosophyEdited by Dan Kaufman

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century PhilosophyEdited by Aaron Garrett

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, Second EditionEdited by Stathis Psillos and Martin Curd

The Routledge Companion to Islamic PhilosophyEdited by Richard C. Taylor and Luis Xavier López-Farjeat

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of LiteratureEdited by Noël Carroll and John Gibson

The Routledge Companion to BioethicsEdited by John Arras, Rebecca Kukla and Elizabeth Fenton

The Routledge Companion to Ancient PhilosophyEdited by Frisbee Sheffield and James Warren

The Routledge Companion to Medieval PhilosophyEdited by J. T. Paasch and Richard Cross

The Routledge Companion to HermeneuticsEdited by Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander


PRAISE FOR THE SERIES

The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics

“This is an immensely useful book that belongs in every college library and on thebookshelves of all serious students of aesthetics.”

– Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

“The succinctness and clarity of the essays will make this a source that individuals notfamiliar with aesthetics will find extremely helpful.”

– The Philosophical Quarterly

“An outstanding resource in aesthetics … this text will not only serve as a handyreference source for students and faculty alike, but it could also be used as a text fora course in the philosophy of art.”

– Australasian Journal of Philosophy

“Attests to the richness of modern aesthetics … the essays in central topics – manyof which are written by well-known figures – succeed in being informative, balancedand intelligent without being too difficult.”

– British Journal of Aesthetics

“This handsome reference volume … belongs in every library.”– CHOICE

“The Routledge Companions to Philosophy have proved to be a useful series of high-quality surveys of major philosophical topics and this volume is worthy enough tosit with the others on a reference library shelf.”

– Philosophy and Religion

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion

“ … a very valuable resource for libraries and serious scholars.”– CHOICE

“The work is sure to be an academic standard for years to come … I shall heartilyrecommend The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion to my students andcolleagues and hope that libraries around the country add it to their collections.”

– Philosophia Christi


The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2008

“With a distinguished list of internationally renowned contributors, an excellentchoice of topics in the field, and well-written, well-edited essays throughout, thiscompendium is an excellent resource. Highly recommended.”

– CHOICE

“Highly recommended for history of science and philosophy collections.”– Library Journal

“This well-conceived companion, which brings together an impressive collection ofdistinguished authors, will be invaluable to novices and experienced readers alike.”

– Metascience

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy

“To describe this volume as ambitious would be a serious understatement. … full ofscholarly rigor, including detailed notes and bibliographies of interest to professionalphilosophers. … Summing up: Essential.”

– CHOICE

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film

“A fascinating, rich volume offering dazzling insights and incisive commentary onevery page … Every serious student of film will want this book … Summing Up:Highly recommended.”

– CHOICE

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology

“This work should serve as the standard reference for those interested in gaining a reliableoverview of the burgeoning field of philosophical psychology. Summing Up: Essential.”

– CHOICE

The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics

“The Routledge Philosophy Companions series has a deserved reputation for impressivescope and scholarly value. This volume is no exception … Summing Up: Highlyrecommended.”

– CHOICE


The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy


“This is a crucial resource for advanced undergraduates and faculty of any disciplinewho are interested in the 19th-century roots of contemporary philosophicalproblems. Summing Up: Essential.”

– CHOICE

The Routledge Companion to Ethics

“This fine collection merits a place in every university, college, and high schoollibrary for its invaluable articles covering a very broad range of topics in ethics …

With its remarkable clarity of writing and its very highly qualified contributors, thisvolume is must reading for anyone interested in the latest developments in theseimportant areas of thought and practice. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”

– CHOICE

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music

“Comprehensive and authoritative … readers will discover many excellent articles inthis well-organized addition to a growing interdisciplinary field. Summing Up:Highly recommended.”

– CHOICE

“ … succeeds well in catching the wide-ranging strands of musical theorising andthinking, and performance, and an understanding of the various contexts in whichall this takes place.”

– Reference Reviews

The Routledge Companion to Epistemology


“As a series, the Routledge Philosophy Companions has met with near universalacclaim. The expansive volume not only continues the trend but quite possibly sets anew standard. … Indeed, this is a definitive resource that will continue to prove itsvalue for a long time to come. Summing Up: Essential.”

– CHOICE


THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONTO AESTHETICS

Third Edition

Edited byBerys Gaut and

Dominic McIver Lopes


First published 2000by RoutledgeSecond edition published 2005by RoutledgeThis edition published 2013by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge711 Third Ave., New York City, NY. 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2000, 2005, 2013 Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, editorial and selectionmatter; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and ofthe authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance withsections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilisedin any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known orhereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any informationstorage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registeredtrademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intentto infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataThe Routledge companion to aesthetics / edited by Berys Gaut andDominic McIver Lopes. – Third Edition.pages cm. – (Routledge philosophy companions)Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Aesthetics. I. Gaut, Berys Nigel. II. Lopes, Dominic.BH39.R677 2013111’.85 – dc232012041826

ISBN: 978-0-415-78286-9 (hbk)ISBN: 978-0-415-78287-6 (pbk)ISBN: 978-0-203-81303-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Goudyby Taylor & Francis Books


CONTENTS

Notes on contributors xiiiPreface xx

PART IHistory of aesthetics 1

1 Plato 3CHRISTOPHER JANAWAY

2 Aristotle 13NICKOLAS PAPPAS

3 Medieval aesthetics 25JOHN HALDANE

4 Empiricism: Hutcheson and Hume 36JAMES SHELLEY

5 Kant 46DONALD W. CRAWFORD

6 Hegel 56MICHAEL INWOOD

7 Idealism: Schopenhauer, Schiller and Schelling 66DALE JACQUETTE

8 Nietzsche 77RUBEN BERRIOS AND AARON RIDLEY

9 Formalism 87NOËL CARROLL

10 Pragmatism 96RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

11 Expressivism: Croce and Collingwood 106GORDON GRAHAM

12 Heidegger 116THOMAS E. WARTENBERG

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13 Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Sartre 126ADRIENNE DENGERINK CHAPLIN

14 Adorno 137THEODORE GRACYK

15 Benjamin 148MARTIN DONOUGHO

16 Foucault 159ROBERT WICKS

17 Postmodernism: Barthes and Derrida 170DAVID NOVITZ

18 Goodman 179JENEFER ROBINSON

19 Sibley 190COLIN LYAS

20 Wollheim 200DEREK MATRAVERS

PART IIAesthetic theory 211

21 Definitions of art 213STEPHEN DAVIES

22 Categories of art 224DAVID DAVIES

23 Ontology of art 235GUY ROHRBAUGH

24 The aesthetic 246JAMES SHELLEY

25 Taste 257CAROLYN KORSMEYER

26 Aesthetic universals 267DENIS DUTTON

27 Art and evolution 278MOHAN MATTHEN

28 Value of art 289MATTHEW KIERAN

29 Beauty 299RAFAEL DE CLERCQ

CONTENTS

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30 Interpretation 309ROBERT STECKER

31 Imagination and make-believe 320GREGORY CURRIE AND ANNA ICHINO

32 Fiction 330DAVID DAVIES

33 Narrative 340PAISLEY LIVINGSTON

34 Metaphor 351GARRY L. HAGBERG

35 Depiction 362CATHARINE ABELL

PART IIIIssues and challenges 373

36 Criticism 375JONATHAN GILMORE

37 Art and knowledge 384EILEEN JOHN

38 Art and ethics 394BERYS GAUT

39 Art, expression and emotion 404DEREK MATRAVERS

40 Tragedy 415ALEX NEILL

41 Humor 425TED COHEN

42 Creativity 432MARGARET A. BODEN

43 Style 442AARON MESKIN

44 Authenticity in performance 452JAMES O. YOUNG

45 Fakes and forgeries 462NAN STALNAKER

46 High art versus low art 473JOHN A. FISHER

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47 Environmental aesthetics 485ALLEN CARLSON

48 Feminist aesthetics 499KAREN HANSON

49 Art and religion 509GORDON GRAHAM

PART IVThe individual arts 519

50 Literature 521PETER LAMARQUE

51 Poetry 532PETER LAMARQUE

52 Theater 543JAMES R. HAMILTON

53 Film 554MURRAY SMITH

54 Videogames 565GRANT TAVINOR

55 Comics 575AARON MESKIN

56 Photography 585DAWN M. WILSON

57 Painting 596DOMINIC MCIVER LOPES

58 Sculpture 606SHERRI IRVIN

59 Design 616GLENN PARSONS

60 Architecture 627EDWARD WINTERS

61 Music 639ANDREW KANIA

62 Dance 649GRAHAM MCFEE

Index 661

CONTENTS

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CONTRIBUTORS

Catharine Abell is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, UK. She workson a variety of topics in aesthetics, including depiction, expression, the nature ofart, the nature of fiction and truth in fiction.

Ruben Berrios completed a doctorate on Nietzsche’s aesthetics at the University ofSouthampton, UK, in 2000.

Margaret A. Boden OBE ScD FBA is Research Professor of Cognitive Science atthe University of Sussex, UK. Her most recent books are Creativity and Art: ThreeRoads to Surprise, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (2 vols) and TheCreative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (2nd edn). She is currently preparing a bookon computer art coauthored with Ernest Edmonds.

Allen Carlson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta,Canada. His research interests include environmental philosophy, aesthetics andespecially the aesthetics of nature and landscapes. He has published numerousarticles and several books, including Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciationof Nature, Art and Architecture and, with Glenn Parsons, Functional Beauty.

Noël Carroll is Professor of Philosophy at Graduate Center, the City University ofNew York, USA. He is the author of several books and articles in aesthetics,including, most recently, Art in Three Dimensions.

Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin is an independent scholar living in Cambridge, UK.She taught philosophical aesthetics at the Institute for Christian Studies inToronto, Canada, and is past president of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics.Her publications include essays on art and meaning, art and embodiment, and theinterface between aesthetics and theology.

Ted Cohen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, USA, and pastPresident of the American Society for Aesthetics. He is coeditor of Essays inKant’s Aesthetics and among his recent publications are the books Jokes andThinking of Others, and the essays, “Identifying with Metaphor,” “Metaphor,Feeling, and Narrative,” “Three Problems in Kant’s Aesthetics” and “At Play inthe Fields of Metaphor.”

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Donald W. Crawford is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara, USA. He is the author of Kant’s Aesthetic Theory andnumerous articles on Kant and aesthetics. He is also a past editor of the Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism.

Gregory Currie teaches philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is aFellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an editor of Mind &Language. His most recent book is Narratives and Narrators and he is now writinga book on literature and the mind.

David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. He worksmainly on metaphysical and epistemological questions in the philosophy of art, andhas published widely on issues relating to the ontology of art, literature, film, photo-graphy, painting and the performing arts. He is the author of Art as Performance,Aesthetics and Literature and Philosophy of the Performing Arts, and the editor of TheThin Red Line.

Stephen Davies teaches philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.His recent books are The Philosophy of Art, Philosophical Perspectives on Art,Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music and The ArtfulSpecies. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Rafael De Clercq is Assistant Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR,where he is affiliated with the departments of Visual Studies and Philosophy.He has published on a range of topics in aesthetics and metaphysics, includingaesthetic properties, modern architecture and criteria of identity.

Martin Donougho is Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina–Columbia, USA, where he taught philosophy and comparative literature. He haspublished widely, on Hegel, European thought and philosophy of art. His currentproject is a genealogy of discourse about art.

Denis Dutton taught philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand,until his death in 2010. He wrote The Art Instinct, and edited Philosophy and Literatureand the Arts and Letters Daily website. He studied the sitar under Pandarung Parateand did fieldwork on wood carvers of the Sepik River region of New Guinea.

John A. Fisher is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Colorado atBoulder, USA. He is the author of Reflecting on Art and articles on various themesin the contemporary arts, including the ontology of rock music, mass art as art,the nature of songs and of popular music, technology and art, as well as articleson the aesthetics of nature.

Berys Gaut is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland,and President of the British Society of Aesthetics. He is the author of Art, Emotionand Ethics and A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, and coauthor, with Morag Gaut, ofPhilosophy for Young Children: A Practical Guide. His next book will be on thephilosophy of creativity.

Jonathan Gilmore is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and a VisitingScholar at Columbia University, USA. He is the author of The Life of a Style,

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articles in aesthetics and legal theory, and numerous reviews for such publicationsas Art in America, Artforum and Modern Painters.

Theodore Gracyk is Professor of Philosophy atMinnesota State UniversityMoorhead,USA. He is the coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music.He is the author of three philosophical books on music (Rhythm and Noise: AnAesthetics of Rock Music, I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity andListening to Popular Music) and many articles on aesthetics and its history. Hismost recent book is The Philosophy of Art: An Introduction.

Gordon Graham is Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at PrincetonTheological Seminary, USA. He has written extensively on topics in aestheticsand is the author of Philosophy of the Arts (3rd edn) and The Re-enchantment of theWorld: Art Versus Religion.

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Jr Professor of Philosophy andAesthetics at Bard College, USA. He is author of Describing Ourselves: Wittgensteinand Autobiographical Consciousness and Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, andAesthetic Theory, among other books and numerous articles. He is editor of Artand Ethical Criticism, coeditor of the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy ofLiterature and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy in the University of St Andrews, Scotland,and Consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture, Rome, Italy. He writeswidely in philosophy and art, and is the author of several books, includingFaithful Reason, Reasonable Faith and Arts and Minds.

James R. Hamilton teaches philosophy at Kansas State University, USA. He haspublished The Art of Theater and articles on theater and other performance arts inthe British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the Jour-nal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and the Journal of Aesthetic Education, and anentry on Brecht in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

Karen Hanson is Senior Vice-president for Academic Affairs and Provost of theUniversity of Minnesota, USA. She writes mainly on topics at the intersection ofaesthetics, ethics and the philosophy of mind.

Anna Ichino is a doctoral candidate at both the Universities of Milan, Italy, andNottingham, UK, working on motivational and other aspects of the imagination.With Gregory Currie she has written on alief, and she is currently writing on theinfluences of fiction on belief and other mental attitudes.

Michael Inwood was formerly Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College,Oxford, UK, and is now an Emeritus Fellow of the college. In addition to severalpublications on Hegel, he is also the author of Heidegger and A Heidegger Dictionary.

Sherri Irvin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma,USA, and aesthetics and philosophy of art editor of Philosophy Compass. She haspublished numerous articles on the philosophy of contemporary art and the natureof aesthetic experience and has a strong research interest in feminist aesthetics. She isworking on a book, Immaterial: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art.

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Dale Jacquette is ordentlicher Professor für Philosophie, Abteilung Logik und the-oretische Philosophie (Senior Professorial Chair in Philosophy, Division for Logicand Theoretical Philosophy), Universität Bern, Switzerland. He is the author,among other recent works, of Philosophy of Mind: The Metaphysics of Consciousness(2nd edn), Wittgenstein’s Thought in Transition, Ontology, The Philosophy of Scho-penhauer and Logic and How It Gets That Way.

Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton,UK. He is the author of Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts and ofvarious articles in aesthetics. He has also published widely on the philosophy ofSchopenhauer and Nietzsche, including Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophyand Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy.

Eileen John is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK.Her research is in aesthetics and philosophy of literature, with publicationson artistic and ethical value, poetry and imaginative thought, literature andconceptual knowledge, and engagement with fictional characters.

Andrew Kania is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity University in SanAntonio, USA. His principal research is in the philosophy of music, literatureand film. He is the editor ofMemento, in Routledge’s series Philosophers on Film, andcoeditor, with Theodore Gracyk, of The Routledge Companion to Philosophy andMusic.

Matthew Kieran is Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at the University of Leeds,UK. He is the author of Revealing Art, numerous articles on aesthetics, ethics andphilosophical psychology and coauthor of Media and Values. He is editor ofContemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art and coeditor ofImagination, Philosophy and the Arts and Knowing Art.

Carolyn Korsmeyer is Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, USA. Inher book Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy, she investigated aesthetic andgustatory taste. Her most recent book is Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair inAesthetics.

Peter Lamarque is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK. Hecoauthored, with Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A PhilosophicalPerspective. Other books include: Fictional Points of View, The Philosophy of Litera-ture and Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art. He is a formereditor of the British Journal of Aesthetics.

Paisley Livingston is Chair Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department ofPhilosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His books include Cinema, Philosophy,Bergman: On Film as Philosophy and Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study. WithBerys Gaut, he coedited The Creation of Art, and with Carl Plantinga, The RoutledgeCompanion to Philosophy and Film.

Dominic McIver Lopes is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor ofPhilosophy at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and President of theAmerican Society of Aesthetics. He is the author of Understanding Pictures, Sightand Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures, A Philosophy of Computer Art and Beyond Art.

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Colin Lyas was formerly Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University ofLancaster, UK. He held the Cowling Professorship at Carleton College and theVisiting Research Professorship at the Bolton Institute.

Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University in England. Heis the author of Art and Emotion and many articles in aesthetics, ethics and thephilosophy of mind. He is currently working on a book on narrative and fiction.

Mohan Matthen is a senior Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the Universityof Toronto, Canada, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He works onphilosophy of perception and the philosophy of biology. He is the author ofSeeing, Doing, and Knowing and he is currently editing the Oxford Handbook of thePhilosophy of Perception.

Graham McFee was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brighton, UK, andis presently at California State University Fullerton, USA. His primary interestsare in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, philosophical aesthetics (especially ofdance) and philosophy of sport. His books include Understanding Dance; FreeWill; Sport, Rules and Values; Ethics, Knowledge and Truth in Sport Research; ArtisticJudgement and The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance.

Aaron Meskin is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, UK.He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aestheticsand other philosophical subjects. He coedited Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthologyand The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach.

Alex Neill is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, UK. Heworks mainly on topics in the history of philosophical aesthetics, and is coeditorof Arguing About Art, The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern andBetter Consciousness: Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Value.

David Novitz taught at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand until his death in2001. He wrote Pictures and Their Use in Communication, Knowledge Fiction andImagination and The Boundaries of Art, as well as many articles in the philosophy of art.

Nickolas Pappas is Professor of Philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center,the City University of New York, USA. He is the author of the Routledge Guidebookto Plato and the Republic, now in its third edition, The Nietzsche Disappointment andarticles mainly in aesthetics and ancient philosophy.

Glenn Parsons is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto,Canada. He is the author of two books, Aesthetics and Nature and (with AllenCarlson) Functional Beauty. His main interests are in environmental aesthetics.

Aaron Ridley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, UK.His books include The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations; Music, Valueand the Passions; Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the Genealogy andNietzsche on Art.

Jenefer Robinson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, USA,author of Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art,

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editor of Music and Meaning, area editor for aesthetics, Encyclopedia of Philosophy,and past President of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Guy Rohrbaugh is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, USA.He works primarily in metaphysics, on ontology and modality, but his interestsinclude aesthetics, epistemology, mind, language and practical reason.

James Shelley is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, USA. His workapplies the history of philosophical aesthetics, particularly that of the eighteenthcentury, to questions about the nature of aesthetic value, the aesthetic status ofartworks and the value of tragedy.

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanitiesat Florida Atlantic University, USA, and directs its Center for Body, Mind andCulture. His recent books include Body Consciousness and Thinking Through theBody; his Pragmatist Aesthetics has been translated into fourteen languages.

Murray Smith is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Aesthetics ResearchCentre at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. His publications includeEngaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema; Film Theory and Philosophy(coedited with Richard Allen); and Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy(coedited with Thomas Wartenberg).

Nan Stalnaker has taught writing at Harvard University and philosophy atConnecticut College, USA. She has written essays of art criticism and articles ontheoretical aspects of the paintings of Édouard Manet.

Robert Stecker is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University, USA.Among his recent publications are Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn,and Aesthetics Today: A Reader.

Grant Tavinor is Lecturer in Philosophy at Lincoln University, in Christchurch,New Zealand. He is the author of The Art of Videogames and other papers on aes-thetics and gaming.

Thomas E. Wartenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College,USA. His most recent book is A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other PhilosophicalDiscoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children’s Literature. Among his other publicationsare Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy; The Nature of Art; Existentialism: ABeginner’s Guide and Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Chil-dren’s Literature.

Robert Wicks is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland,New Zealand. He is the author of seven books, including Modern French Philosophyand Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and of articles on aesthetics and the history ofphilosophy.

Dawn M. Wilson (née Phillips) is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the Universityof Hull, UK. Her publications on photography address topics such as time,causation, automatism and self-portraiture. She is currently preparing a book onAesthetics and Photography.

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Edward Winters is an artist and writer. He studied painting at the Slade School ofFine Art and took a PhD in philosophy at University College London. He is theauthor of Aesthetics and Architecture. He has published widely in aesthetics andalso writes art and architectural criticism.

James O. Young is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Canada.He is the author of Global Anti-realism, Art and Knowledge, Cultural Appropriationand the Arts, a forthcoming book on philosophy of music and more than fiftyarticles in refereed journals.

CONTRIBUTORS

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PREFACE

You are now looking at the third edition of The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.That we have attained such a grand age for an anthology is testament to the con-siderable success of the first (2001) and second (2005) editions, which have beenwidely used in teaching and consulted by innumerable researchers interested in aes-thetics. But if any laurels were on offer for reaching a third edition, we have notrested on them. The first edition comprised forty-six entries, the second fifty-two,and this edition adds a further ten to bring the grand total to sixty-two (we may haveto offer a free wheelbarrow with the next edition). In the historical section there arenew entries on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, which further strengthenour coverage of continental aesthetics, and on Richard Wollheim. To the aesthetictheory section are added chapters on categories of art and on art and evolution. Inthe third section there is a new chapter on art and religion. The final section on theindividual arts has new chapters on poetry, videogames, comics and design, reflect-ing philosophers’ increased attention to individual art forms. Almost all the chapterscarried over from earlier editions have been revised, many substantially so, to reflectrecent developments in the subject, and in some cases we have invited new authorsto contribute entries. The result is a wide-ranging and up-to-date survey of the richvariety of work being done in philosophical aesthetics.

Both the success of the earlier editions and the need for a new one bear witness tothe fact that philosophical aesthetics today is a vibrant field. Thirty or forty yearsago, it was not uncommon for philosophers to claim that there was nothing much ofphilosophical interest to be said about the arts. Nonphilosophers interested in thearts used to complain that contemporary philosophers had indeed said nothing ofinterest to them. As the painter Barnett Newman quipped, “aesthetics is for artistslike ornithology is for the birds.” Even at the time, this unhappy convergence ofviews was badly grounded. Today, it is entirely without justification. Philosophy hasrediscovered aesthetics, and this volume bears the fruits of philosophers’ newfoundinterest in art.

Partly this has arisen from philosophers’ increased attention to the practice,history and criticism of the individual arts – including literature, music, painting,architecture, film and videogames – and from an awareness that philosophical pro-blems are raised by the particularities of the individual arts. Understanding art as awhole depends on an appreciation of the arts individually and what makes each of

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them unique. Some philosophers have begun to write about individual novels,poems, symphonies and films with an attention to detail and a level of insight rivalingthat of literary critics, musicologists, art critics and film critics.

Renewed philosophical interest in aesthetics also comes from a recognition thatmany topics of general philosophical importance – the nature of representation,imagination, emotion and expression, to name a few – cannot be adequately under-stood unless their roles in the arts and artistic appreciation are examined, for herethey find some of their most interesting and complex applications. Interest in aes-thetics also gets a boost from increased pluralism within analytic philosophy itself,which has advanced outwards from its heartlands of the philosophy of languageand metaphysics to conquer new areas, such as applied ethics, political philosophy,cognitive science and aesthetics.

The present volume is broadly within the tradition of analytic philosophy andshares that tradition’s commitment to clarity of expression and precision ofargument. It also shares and aspires to advance the increasing pluralism of the ana-lytic approach, and attends to thinkers outside the analytic tradition, showing whatanalytic aesthetics can learn from them.

The Companion provides an introduction to many of the most important topicsand thinkers in philosophical aesthetics. As such, it should prove its worth as atextbook for university courses in philosophy of art. It is also a snapshot represent-ing some of the best work being done in aesthetics today. Numbered among itsauthors are both distinguished senior scholars and outstanding young researchers.We have asked them to provide not just a survey of the area, but also something oftheir own views. The results will be of interest not just to students of aesthetics, butalso to specialists in the area.

The first part of this volume is historical, covering many of the classic writers onaesthetics, as well as some more recent and influential thinkers from within theanalytic and continental traditions. Our criterion for inclusion within this section isthat the writer’s body of work should be substantially complete. Major figures whoare still developing their views are discussed elsewhere in the volume, in the chaptersdealing with the subjects on which they have written. The second part covers centralconcepts and theories within aesthetics, dealing with basic issues such as the defini-tion of art, the nature of the aesthetic and the standards of correct interpretation.The third part covers more specific issues, such as art and knowledge and art andemotion, and also examines challenges to traditional aesthetics posed by feminism,environmental aesthetics and popular art. The final part addresses the individual artsof music, painting, photography, film, videogames, comics, literature, poetry, theater,dance, architecture, sculpture and design. The volume works well as a guide to aes-thetics approached historically, or by focusing on theories of art and the aesthetic,or by centering on issues in aesthetics, or by examining the individual arts.

While the Companion gives a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the field, itobviously cannot, within the compass of a single volume, cover everything of inter-est and importance in aesthetics. Each reader is likely to have his or her own view onwhat might have been usefully included, and we would probably agree with many ofthese suggestions. Nevertheless, the volume captures the sheer diversity, livelinessand interest of current aesthetics. Instead of short dictionary-style entries, we have

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asked our authors to produce chapters of around 5,000 words each – long enough toexplore the debates about their topic in some detail, but short enough to be read atone sitting, and to allow for a wide range of articles within a single volume. Eachchapter has cross-references to other chapters which are germane to the topic, a listof references to works discussed and, where useful, suggestions for further reading.The reader will thus find plenty of scope for following up points of interest in any of thetopics covered. The Companion might well be viewed as an invitation to aesthetics.

When the credits roll, they should list more than the names of the contributorsand editors. We are grateful to all those who have had a hand in the publication ofthis volume: To our contributors, for their enthusiasm and their ability to producework of high quality within tight deadlines and tighter word limits, some putting upwith our demands through several editions. To the many scholars we consulted inthe course of planning the volume, including those who told us not to do it (we enjoybeing proven right). To those who wrote reviews of the earlier editions – we have(usually) taken their criticisms constructively (though they may not believe it if theyreview the third edition). To Tony Bruce and his team at Routledge, for theirunstinting enthusiasm and support for the volume, not once but thrice over.

Berys GautDominic McIver Lopes

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Part I

HISTORY OFAESTHETICS


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1PLATO

Christopher Janaway

Plato’s writings about the arts play a foundational role in the history of aesthetics,not simply because they are the earliest substantial contribution to the subject. Thearts are a central, rather than a marginal topic for Plato, and for him the whole ofculture must reflect and inculcate the values that concern him. His philosophy of art(as we would call it) is closely integrated with his metaphysics, ethics and politics.From a modern point of view two features are perhaps most striking. First, thearguments Plato gives to the characters in his dialogues contest the autonomousvalue that we might expect from what we call art, and in the most prominent casesrefuse it such value altogether. For Plato the philosophical task is to uncover ametaphysical and ethical order to the world, and the arts can have true worth only ifthey correctly represent this order or help in aligning us with it. Yet at the samePlato the author often proceeds in an artistic manner: his language and imagery arefrequently beautiful and expressive, he writes elaborate myths, and distances himselfin sophisticated ways from the dramatic characters he portrays. Long ago Sir PhilipSidney called Plato “of all philosophers … the most poetical” (Sidney 1973: 107), toemphasize the urgency of understanding why he portrays poetry in such an antag-onistic fashion. We shall examine in outline the major issues that a reading of Platois likely to raise for modern aesthetics.

The arts in Republic 2 and 3

In the Republic Plato has his character Socrates construct a picture of the ideally justindividual and the ideally just city state, in which he gives an account of the natureof knowledge and education, culminating in the proposal that the rulers of the idealstate would be philosophers, those uniquely in possession of methods for attainingknowledge of the eternally existing Forms that constitute absolute values in Plato’suniverse. Quite early in the discussion Socrates considers the role of the arts ineducation. The young, especially those who will be the Guardians responsible forthe city’s well-being, must receive an education that properly forms their characters.Since the young soul is impressionable and will be molded by any material thatcomes its way, the productive arts and crafts will be regulated so that they pursue“what is fine and graceful in their work, so that our young people will live in a

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healthy place and be benefited on all sides, and so that something of those fineworks will strike their eyes and ears like a breeze that brings health from a goodplace, leading them unwittingly, from childhood on, to resemblance, friendship, andharmony with the beauty of reason” (Republic 401c–d).

Much of Books 2 and 3 concerns the scenes and characters poetry contains. Platoassumes that fictional tales and poetic representations will play a dominant role ineducation – a conventional assumption, as we see from remarks in the dialogueProtagoras: “they are given the works of good poets to read at their desks and have tolearn them by heart, works that contain numerous exhortations, many passagesdescribing in glowing terms good men of old, so that the child is inspired to imitatethem and become like them” (Protagoras 325e–326a). But it is not sufficient that theyoung read the works of “good poets.” While Plato consistently praises Homer as afine poet, in the Republic he proposes ruthless censorship of Homer’s works. Godsand heroes must not be represented as cowardly, despairing, deceitful, ruled by theirappetites, or committing crimes: hence the excision of many well-known scenes fromthe Iliad and Odyssey. A good fiction is one which (though false or invented) correctlyrepresents reality and impresses a good character on its audience. Plato seemsuntroubled by the thought that an accurate representation of the way human beingsbehave in battle or in love could fail to impress the best character on its recipients.Is truthful representation or ethical effect the higher criterion? At one point Platosuggests it is the latter: some violent mythical tales are not true, and should not betold to the young even if they were (Republic 378a).

The other main topic for discussion is mimesis, which here should be taken asimpersonation or dramatic characterization. There are two modes of poetic discourse:one where the poet “speaks in his own voice,” the other (mimesis) where he “hideshimself,” “makes his language as like as possible to that of whatever person he has toldus is about to speak,” and – at the beginning of the Iliad – “tries … to make us thinkthat the speaker is not Homer, but the priest, an old man” (393a–c). Hiding oneselfbehind a pretend character is implicitly deceitful and dubious. But Plato’s objectionto mimesis here is more sophisticated. He claims that to enact a dramatic part bymaking oneself resemble some character (and perhaps even to be the composer of adrama in which diverse persons appear; see Burnyeat 1999: 270–72) causes one tobecome like such persons in real life. Given a prior argument that all members of theideal community, and a fortiori its Guardians, should be specialists who exercise onlyone role, it follows that the city will produce better Guardians if it restricts the extent towhich they indulge in dramatic art. Those whose dominant aim is the production ofmimesis are ingenious and versatile individuals, but the ideal state will not toleratethem. The Guardians should use mimesis as little as possible, and be restricted toenacting the parts of noble, self-controlled and virtuous individuals, thus assimilatingthemselves to the kind of human being the state requires them to become.

The arts in Republic 10

Republic Book 10 contains Plato’s most prominent criticisms of the arts. Mimesis isthe chief topic, but now, arguably, we must understand this term in a different sense,as image-making: making something that is not a real thing, but merely an image of a

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thing. Both poets and visual artists are practitioners of mimesis in this sense, but theaim of this passage is to justify the banishment of mimetic poetry from the ideal city.The grounds are that mimesis is far removed from truth, though easy to mistake forthe work of someone with knowledge, and that mimetic poetry appeals to an inferiorpart of the soul and thereby helps to subvert the rule of intellect and reason. Whilepromising cognitive gain, poetry delivers only psychological and ethical damage toindividual and community.

Socrates here invokes the theory of Forms to explain the nature of mimesis assuch. Whereas an ordinary object, such as a bed, is an “imitation” of the single andultimately real Form of Bed, a painted picture of a bed is an “imitation” merely ofthe way some bed would appear from a certain angle. The use of the theory of Formshere is in some respects anomalous. Plato has a god bring Forms into existence,though elsewhere they exist eternally and no one creates them. Earlier in the Republicit seemed that philosophers alone have knowledge of Forms; here the ordinarycraftsman “looks to the Form” for guidance in constructing a physical bed.

Plato disparages mimesis in the visual arts by comparing it with holding up amirror in which the world mechanically reproduces itself. The point of the com-parison is arguably that the painter makes no real thing, only an image. His product,when compared with the bed and the Form of Bed, is thus at two moves from reality.To make such an image requires no genuine knowledge: no knowledge of the realthings of which one makes an image. By a slightly strained analogy, Plato argues thata poet makes only images and is distant from knowledge: “all poetic imitators,beginning with Homer, imitate images of virtue and all the other things they writeabout and have no grasp of the truth” (600e). They produce only images of humanlife, and to do so requires no knowledge of the truth about what is good and bad inlife. There is moreover no evidence, Plato suggests, of any good poet’s manifestingethical or political competence. Why does it matter that poetic image-making entailsno genuine knowledge? Because there are people who hold the opposite view: “theysay that if a good poet produces fine poetry, he must have knowledge of the thingshe writes about, or else he wouldn’t be able to produce it at all,” on which groundsthey claim “poets know all crafts, all human affairs concerned with virtue and vice,and all about the gods as well” (598d–e). Plato aims to refute these claims. Fine poetryconsists of image-making, and as such is compatible with the poet’s ignorance oftruths about what is real.

Plato also undertakes to show which part of the human psyche mimetic poetryappeals to. The higher part of the soul uses reasoning in pursuit of its essential driveto understand the overall good. But the images of mimetic poetry are gratifying to adistinct “inferior” part, which is childish, unruly and emotional, and reacts in anunmeasured fashion to events in real life and in fiction. For example, when someoneclose to us dies, part of us considers what is for the best and desires restraint in feelingand outward behavior. At the same time another part tends towards indulgence inunbounded lamentation. There is a conflict of attitudes towards the same object,analogous to the phenomenon of visual illusion, where part of the mind calculatesthat a stick in water is straight, while another part persists in seeing it as bent. Poetryaffects us emotionally below the level of rational desire and judgment. The kinds ofevent that provide the most successful content for mimetic poetry (and tragedy

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especially) involve extreme emotions and actions driven by emotion. So mimeticpoetry naturally addresses and gratifies the inferior, lamenting part of us and fosters itat the expense of the rational and good-seeking part that should rule in a healthy soul.

Plato’s “most serious charge” against mimetic poetry (605c) also concerns itseffects on the psyche. It is that “with a few rare exceptions it is able to corrupt evendecent people.” Plato imagines such a decent person being powerfully affected by theexperience of “one of the heroes sorrowing and making a long lamenting speechor singing and beating his breast … we enjoy it, give ourselves up to following it,sympathize with the hero, take his sufferings seriously, and praise as a good poet theone who affects us most in this way.” The distancing provided by the artistic contextinsidiously lulls us into a positive evaluation of responses which we should avoid inreal life. We relax our guard and allow the rule of the rational part of ourselves tolapse – “only a few are able to figure out that enjoyment of other people’s sufferingsis necessarily transferred to our own and that the pitying part, if it is nourished andstrengthened on the sufferings of others, won’t be easily held in check when weourselves suffer” (606b). The positive evaluation of our sympathetic feelings for thehero’s sufferings rests on the fact that to see them brings us pleasure. So instead ofregarding as valuable that which we judge to be best, we begin to value responsesthat happen to please us, and, Plato argues, this habit can corrode our attachment tothe rational and the good in real life.

Plato makes many assumptions here, but perhaps most notable is one that hasfeatured in recent debates about the psychological effects of television and films(for the comparison see Nehamas 1988): that if we enjoy seeing the image of some-thing enacted in a dramatic narrative, this causes in us an increased disposition to actor react similarly in real life. It is as if mimesis is transparent in a particular way: toenjoy or approve of a poetic image of X is not really different from enjoying orapproving of X itself. Aristotle’s remark in the Poetics that the enjoyment of mimesisis both natural for human beings and a source of learning (Aristotle 1987: 34) is thebeginning of a reply to this assumption.

On the grounds that it falsely masquerades as knowledge and is detrimental to thehuman mind, Plato banishes poetry from his ideal city. We may wonder how muchof poetry this affects. At the beginning of the discussion “poetry that is mimetic”is to be excluded, but by the end it appears that all poetry is meant, and the inter-vening argument seems to tell us that all poetry is indeed mimetic, although Homerand the tragic poets (seen as a single tradition) provide the most focused target. Platoproposes to retain some poetry, namely “hymns to the gods and eulogies to goodpeople” (607a). Given the earlier comments about beauty and grace, these worksneed not be dull and worthy, but clearly Plato prefers them because they will presenta correct ethical view of the world and be a means to instilling the right character inthe citizens.

In his concluding remarks Plato mentions an “ancient quarrel between poetry andphilosophy” (607b). Poetry (of the kind excluded) aims at pleasure and mimesis, butif it can satisfy philosophy by producing an argument that it is beneficial to the com-munity and to human life, then it can reclaim its place. If philosophers hear no sucha justification, they will use the argument of Republic Book 10 “like an incantation so asto preserve ourselves from slipping back into that childish passion for poetry” (608a).

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It is like keeping oneself away from a person one is in love with but with whom anassociation is not beneficial. This image, and the accompanying invitation to poetryto defend itself, reveal Plato as less authoritarian than he often appears in theRepublic. He recognizes the power of poetry over the human soul and intimates thathe has full appreciation of its pleasures. It is not through insensitivity that Platorejects pursuit of the pleasures of poetic image-making. It is because he has anargument that shows we should resist these pleasures unless poetry or its loversperform on philosophy’s home ground and present a good counterargument.

Beauty

According to Iris Murdoch, “Plato wants to cut art off from beauty, because he regardsbeauty as too serious a matter to be commandeered by art” (Murdoch 1977: 17). Thismay have been difficult for some modern aestheticians to grasp, given widespreadassumptions about their discipline (such as Hegel’s view that its subject matter is“artistic beauty”; Hegel 1993: 3). Some commentators on Plato have thought, mis-takenly, that a positive philosophy of art is implicit in Plato’s inspirational passageson the love of beauty as an absolute value.

Plato’s concept of beauty is arguably quite different from the modern aestheticconcept, whatever exactly that is. We translate Plato’s word kalon as “beautiful,” buta preferable translation in many contexts is “fine.” Definitions and examples fromthe Platonic dialogue Hippias Major illuminate the broad application of kalon: a finegirl is fine, so is anything made of gold, so is living a rich and healthy life and givingyour parents a decent burial. Here even the first two may not be cases of beauty inwhat we might call a purely aesthetic sense: desirability and exchange value play apart in their fineness. Another aspect of fineness is “what is pleasing through hearingand sight”: “Men, when they’re fine anyway – and everything decorative, picturesand sculptures – these all delight us when we see them, if they’re fine. Fine sounds andmusic altogether, and speeches and storytelling have the same effect” (HippiasMajor 298a). This looks like a rudimentary definition of the aesthetically pleasing.But it neither embraces the whole range of kalon nor lends the arts a value that rescuesthem from the critique of the Republic.

Beauty finds its most significant treatment in the dialogue Symposium, in the speechby Socrates, which he presents as the teaching of the wise woman, Diotima. Despitethis double-nesting of narrators, the speech is commonly seen as revealing Plato’sown philosophical views. The whole dialogue concerns the nature of love. In Socrates’saccount beauty is love’s highest object. To grasp this, we must make a Platonicmetaphysical distinction between, on the one hand, the beauty of things and prop-erties as they occur in the sensible world and, on the other, The Beautiful Itself – asPlato calls the eternal, unchanging and divine Form of Beauty, accessible not to thesenses, but only to the intellect (Symposium 211d). Instances of beauty in the sensibleworld exhibit variability or relativity: something is beautiful at one time, not atanother, in one respect or relation, not in another, to one observer, not to another.The Beautiful Itself lacks all such variability, it “always is and neither comes to be norpasses away, neither waxes nor wanes’ (211a). This passage may be taken to imply thatthe Form of Beauty is itself beautiful. That reading seems to make sense of Beauty’s

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being an object of love on a continuum with other such objects, though whetherPlato thinks of Beauty as “being beautiful” in the same way as a boy or girl is beautifulis a matter of debate.

Elsewhere Plato describes nonphilosophers as unable to grasp that there is a singleunvarying Form of Beauty. The sophist Hippias equates beauty with a beautiful girland then with the property of being made of gold. But a girl is beautiful in onerelation (to other girls), not in another (to goddesses), and being made of gold makessome things beautiful, but not others: the eyes of a statue, for instance, would berepulsive if fashioned from gold. So it looks to Plato as if no object or propertyaccessible to the senses can be what constitutes beauty as such. A similar distinctionoccurs in the Republic, where Plato disparages “lovers of sights and sounds” (475d–476b) who eagerly attend arts festivals, but think there are “many beautifuls” ratherthan the single Form of the Beautiful that the philosopher recognizes.

In the Symposium the ideal lover is portrayed as ascending through a hierarchy oflove objects – first the beautiful body of a particular human beloved, then all beautifulbodies equally, then the beauty of souls, then that of laws, customs and ideas – andending as a lover of wisdom or philosopher. At the culmination of his progress thephilosophical lover will “catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in nature …

the reason for all his earlier labors” (210e), namely the Form of Beauty itself. (“Fine-ness” here will hardly convey the requisite fervor.) All love desires some kind ofoffspring. The highest form of love catches hold of a superior object and produces asuperior offspring: “if someone got to see the Beautiful, absolute, pure, unmixed,not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality …

only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue(because he’s in touch with no images), but to true virtue (because he is in touchwith the true beauty)” (211e–212a).

If we recall that in the Republic Plato applies the phrase “images of virtue” topoets, a contrast suggests itself. While the poet makes only images, and understandsonly images, the philosopher, who strives for and encounters the eternal unchangingBeauty, can bring genuine goods into the world because he understands what virtue is.This contrast can be hard to accept for the modern reader, because Plato’s own lit-erary genius is fully manifest in this extraordinary and moving passage, and becausewe imagine that he must find a place in his hierarchy of beauties for something likeart, or at least think that art enables its author to produce something immortal anduniversal. “Strangely enough,” one historian of aesthetics has written, “Diotima andSocrates do not assign a role to the arts in this process of reawakening to Beauty,though it takes but a short step to do so” (Beardsley 1966: 41). But this is an ana-chronistic reaction. It is more likely that Plato’s next step comprises the argumentshe gives to Socrates in the Republic, probably written shortly afterwards.

Inspiration

In the short early dialogue Ion Plato has Socrates say that poets are divinely inspiredto produce their fine works. The character Ion is a rhapsode, a professional reciterof poetry and a critic or expert on Homer. Socrates undertakes a demolition ofIon’s claim that he succeeds as performer and critic because he has knowledge. An

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important concept in this dialogue is technê. The word has been translated as “craft,”“skill” or “expert knowledge.” Plato regards doctors, generals and mathematicians aseach possessing a technê, meaning that they are knowledgeable about a specific sub-ject matter, can transmit their knowledge in teaching, understand general principlesor rules that apply across all instances within their field, and can give a rationalaccount of why their practice succeeds. A further criterion of technê, offered in thedialogue Gorgias, is that it aims at the good and is based in knowledge of the good(Gorgias 463a–465a).

An antique translation for technê is “art,” but examination of this concept will notyield Plato’s “philosophy of art,” chiefly because practices we regard as “artistic”tend to be denied the status of technê. In the Gorgias persuasive rhetoric, tragedy andmusical performances by choruses or instrumentalists all fail to be cases of technê,because their aim is not to make their audiences better, but to gratify them. Platoargues that there are no principles concerning what pleases a mass audience, andthat it is by guesswork that these practices succeed, rather than by rational principleor knowledge. The Ion takes a similar line: the rhapsode discerns what is fine andpleasing in Homer’s poetry, but in so doing he works to no generalizable principles.And there is no subject matter on which he is an expert solely in virtue of being arhapsode and being familiar with Homer’s fine work. Ion’s preposterous claim to bean expert on “everything,” because Homer writes finely of everything, prefiguresthe superficially more plausible claim, rejected in the Republic, about the knowledgeof the poet himself.

How is it then that Ion succeeds in discerning the fineness in Homer’s poetry andperforming it so brilliantly as to delight his audiences? Socrates’ answer is itself poetic,or perhaps mock poetic: “the poets tell us that they gather songs at honey-flowingsprings, from glades and gardens of the Muses, and that they bear songs to us asbees carry honey, flying like bees. And what they say is true. For a poet is an airything, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspiredand goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer with him” (Ion 534a–b). Thepower of poetry is divine: the Muse attracts the poet, who is then a mouthpiecethrough which the divine speaks. The performer succumbs to the same attractionand transmits it to the audience. But at no stage does rational thought or expertcompetence account for the success of the proceedings. There seems to be a mixedmessage here: Ion is admirable and even (if ironically) “divine.” But he deserves nocredit for his artistic success, because he is “out of his mind.” Not only can he giveno rational account of why he succeeds, he is also, Plato assumes, irrational inresponding emotionally to the dramatic scene he performs, despite that scene’sunreality.

The Ion may surprise us because although it locates features regarded in themodern era as characterizing the “artistic,” it rates them disparagingly, or at bestequivocally. The later work Phaedrus, a literary masterpiece which explores thenature of rhetoric, writing, love, beauty, Forms and the philosophical life, promisesa more openly positive account of the inspiration of poets. Here Socrates praises“madness,” explicitly including the state of mind in which good poets compose,“a Bacchic frenzy” without which there is no true poetry: “If anyone comes to the gatesof poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge

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[technê] … he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by poetry ofmen who have been driven out of their minds” (Phaedrus 245a).

It has been claimed that the Phaedrus marks Plato’s recantation of the hard-linecondemnation of poetry in the Republic (Nussbaum 1986: 200–33), but a more soberverdict is perhaps better supported. Part of the extravagant myth Socrates enunciatesconcerns the fate of reincarnated souls, who are placed in rank order. The highest,most worthy soul is that of “a lover of wisdom or of beauty … cultivated in the arts[mousikos] and prone to erotic love” (248d). Sixth in rank, lower than generals, politi-cians, gymnasts, doctors and prophets, is “a poet or some other life from among thoseconcerned with mimesis” (248e). The contrast tests the modern reader’s intuitions.Surely the prime rank must go to the genuine artist, while some poor uninspireddabbler is relegated to the sixth? Yet there is no word for “art” here, as Nehamasreminds us: “the ‘musical’ … is not the artist, but the gentleman who patronizes theartists and knows what to take from them” (Nehamas 1982: 60). The first-ranking soul israther that of the cultured philosopher and lover, with whom poets, all mimetic poets,including the great Homer, cannot compete. The comparative evaluation of theRepublic is echoed in a very different tone of voice, but it is not reversed.

Philosophy and art

Although Plato writes of a “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic 607b)as already something ancient, he is often seen as the chief instigator of such anopposition. When Arthur Danto writes that “from the perspective of philosophy artis a danger and aesthetics the agency for dealing with it” (Danto 1986: 13), he isimplicitly treating Plato as the founder of philosophical aesthetics and generalizingPlato’s strategy to the whole subsequent discipline. The story is akin to that inNietzsche’s influential The Birth of Tragedy, where the cultural force embodied inSocrates, the “theoretical man” and antithesis of the artist, destroys the artistic spiritthat once dwelt in tragedy but has remained lost to the modern world (Nietzsche1999: 60–75).

There is something in the thought that Plato’s endeavor is to establish philosophyin opposition to the prevailing culture that not only prizes the arts but adopts certainill-thought-out theoretical views concerning their value. It is a culture of sophists,rhetoricians, performers and connoisseurs who advocate the educational value ofpoetry, but who lack a genuine conception of knowledge and any proper grasp on thedistinction between what is fine because it brings pleasure and what is genuinelygood or beneficial. Without the rigor of philosophical thinking, this culture lacksthe critical distance required to assess the true value of the arts. Yet Plato’s responseis not merely that of head-on dialectical confrontation. He realizes that the art-loving,pleasure-seeking soul in all of us must be charmed and enticed towards the philo-sophical life. To supplant tragedy and Homer he uses rhetoric, myth, wordplay,poetic metaphor and dramatic characterization. Socrates in the dialogues is an imageor invention of Plato’s, who enacts for us the life and style of the ideal philosophicalthinker. So if Plato is the most poetical of philosophers, it is in the service of leadingus, by poetry’s means of persuasion, to philosophy proper, a place from which wemay begin to understand and evaluate poetry and all the arts.

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That the quarrel between philosophy and poetry plays itself out within Plato isone source of the belief that he himself provides the material for a defense of art. Inthe history of aesthetics there have been numerous attempts to answer Plato on hisown ground by claiming that art puts us in touch with the eternal and the absolute,or that it provides a privileged form of knowledge. Others have sought to rejectPlato’s criteria of evaluation as misguided, and have looked to aesthetic responses ofvarious kinds to secure an autonomous value for art. Some have even combinedboth approaches (see Schopenhauer 2010: 191–295). But Plato’s writings themselvesoffer none of these resolutions, and for that reason continue to be a unique stimulusto profound questioning about art, philosophy and the relations between them.

See alsoAristotle (Chapter 2), Medieval aesthetics (Chapter 3), Value of art (Chapter 28),Beauty (Chapter 29), Depiction (Chapter 35), Art and knowledge (Chapter 37), Artand ethics (Chapter 38), Tragedy (Chapter 40), Creativity (Chapter 42).

References

Aristotle (1987) Poetics, trans. S. Halliwell, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Beardsley, M. C. (1966) Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present, Birmingham: Universityof Alabama Press.

Burnyeat, M. (1999) “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” Tanner Lectures in HumanValues 20: 215–324.

Danto, A. C. (1986) The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1993) Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. B. Bosanquet, ed. M. Inwood,London: Penguin.

Murdoch, I. (1977) The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Nehamas, A. (1982) “Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10,” in J. Moravcsik andP. Temko (eds) Plato on Beauty, Wisdom and the Arts, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

——(1988) “Plato and the Mass Media,” Monist 71: 214–33.Nietzsche, F. (1999) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. R. Speirs, ed. R. Geuss and R. Speirs,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nussbaum, M. C. (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy andPhilosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Plato (1997) Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper, Indianapolis: Hackett. (All quotations fromPlato’s works that are cited above are taken from this volume.)

Schopenhauer, A. (2010) The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. Judith Norman,Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sidney, P., Sir (1973) “A Defence of Poetry,” in K. Duncan-Jones and J. van Dorsten (eds)Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further reading

Ferrari, G. R. F. (1989) “Plato and Poetry,” in G. A. Kennedy (ed.) The Cambridge Historyof Literary Criticism, vol. 1: Classical Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(A comprehensive, succinct account of Plato’s relationship to poetry.)

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Halliwell, S. (1991) “The Importance of Plato and Aristotle for Aesthetics,” Proceedings of theBoston Area Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy 5: 321–48. (Relates Plato’s refusal of autonomyfor art to modern aesthetics.)

Havelock, E. A. (1963) Preface to Plato, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Classicstudy that places Plato in the context of Greek culture and education.)

Janaway, C. (1995) Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress. (Philosophical commentary on all major discussions of the arts in Plato’sdialogues.)

Kamtekar, R. (2008) “Plato on Education and Art,” in Gail Fine (ed.) The Oxford Handbook toPlato, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Discusses the arts in the course of analyzing Plato’sviews on education.)

Keuls, E. (1978) Plato and Greek Painting, Leiden: E. J. Brill. (On painting of the period andPlato’s knowledge of it.)

Moravcsik, J. (1986) “On Correcting the Poets,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 4: 35–47.(On Plato’s ethical criticisms of poetry.)

Moravcsik, J. and Temko, P. (eds) (1982) Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts, Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield. (A valuable collection of pieces by different authors.)

Moss, J. (2007) “What Is Imitative Poetry and Why Is It Bad?,” in G. R. F. Ferrari (ed.)The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(A detailed analysis of the argument of Republic Book 10.)

Nadaff, R. A. (2002) Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic, Chicago:University of Chicago Press. (Argues that censorship reflects complex rivalries betweenphilosophy and poetry in Plato’s writing.)

Plato (1988) Republic 10, trans. S. Halliwell, Warminster: Aris & Phillips. (Greek and Englishtexts, with detailed commentary.)

Stern-Gillet, S. (2004) “On (Mis)interpreting Plato’s Ion,” Phronesis 49: 169–201. (A criticalreview of interpretations of the account of poetry in Ion.)

CHRISTOPHER JANAWAY

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