Art

Plato's treatment of art in Republic X proceeds from his theory of Forms. The Form of the bed is original; the carpenter's bed is an imitation of the Form; the painter's representation of the carpenter's bed is an imitation of an imitation, three removes from reality. On this account, art produces a phantom rather than knowledge, and one that nourishes the lower, passionate parts of the soul rather than the rational part.

His particular concern is with poetry. Homer's representations of gods behaving badly and heroes surrendering to grief teach the young that such conduct is permissible, even admirable. Poets work, moreover, not by knowledge but by inspiration; the Ion suggests that the rhapsode can give no reasoned account of what he recites. Art may move its audience deeply while communicating no genuine understanding.

Yet Plato does not treat art as simply worthless. Beauty in the Symposium and Phaedrus draws the soul upward toward the Forms; the lover of beauty may, if rightly guided, ascend from sensible beauty to intelligible beauty itself. The question this leaves open is how art that is three removes from truth can nevertheless serve as an occasion for the soul's ascent—a difficulty that Plotinus addresses by locating the artist's vision at the level of the Forms rather than among their copies.

Plato's censure of the poets in the Republic is closely bound up with his treatment of education and the governance of the ideal city; his account of inspiration in the Ion bears on the wider question of the difference between genuine knowledge and mere belief or enthusiasm. Both lines of inquiry are taken up by those who follow him, and the question of art's relation to truth is treated more fully in the chapter on Beauty.

Aristotle's treatment of art begins from the observation that imitation (mimesis) is natural to human beings from childhood, and that it gives pleasure precisely as imitation: we take satisfaction in recognizing what is represented. On this view, the pleasure of art is cognitive rather than merely emotional, and the imitation of even painful or ugly subjects can produce delight in the spectator. Art is thus not, as Plato held, simply an appeal to the passionate part of the soul.

The Poetics applies this general principle to tragedy in particular. Tragedy is an imitation of a serious, complete action of a certain magnitude, which through pity and fear produces a catharsis of those emotions. Aristotle identifies six parts of tragedy—plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle—and ranks them in order of importance. The priority given to plot reflects his judgment that tragedy imitates action primarily, and character only as it bears on action.

In the Physics, Aristotle states that art imitates nature, but the meaning of this principle is more complex than it may first appear. Art does not merely copy natural appearances; it completes what nature leaves unfinished, bringing into matter forms that nature, left to itself, could not always realize. This account of art as a productive activity governed by reason, distinct from both scientific knowledge and moral action, is further developed in the discussion of the intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. The relation between art and nature is also considered in the chapter on Nature.

Aristotle's account of catharsis has generated wide disagreement among subsequent interpreters, in part because the passage in the Poetics is brief and does not fully explain what kind of purging is intended. Whether catharsis is to be understood physiologically, morally, or aesthetically remains a question the text does not settle with finality.

Plotinus takes up the question of art in Ennead V.8, "On the Intellectual Beauty," in the course of arguing that beauty belongs to the intelligible order rather than to sensible form alone. If the artist merely copies visible appearances, Plato's objection holds: the work is twice removed from reality. But Plotinus maintains that the accomplished artist does not stop at the sensible; in producing a work of beauty, the artist draws upon the intelligible principles to which nature itself owes its forms.

The example of Phidias illustrates the point. Phidias did not model Zeus upon any visible man; he formed the image according to what Zeus would be if he deigned to appear in human form. On this account, the work of the artist and the work of nature are not separated by a difference in kind: both draw upon the Forms, and in certain respects the artist may realize the intelligible form more completely, since the matter in which nature must work sometimes resists the form it strives to embody.

Art is thus, for Plotinus, neither mere imitation of appearance nor three removes from truth, but a participation in intelligible beauty. Its highest function is not the reproduction of natural objects but the manifestation of the Forms through sensuous material. The bearing of this position on the theory of beauty, and on the relation between aesthetic contemplation and philosophical ascent, is treated more fully in the chapter on Beauty.

The consequences of this position are worked out by Augustine, who inherits the Neoplatonic account of intelligible beauty but must reconcile it with the Christian doctrine that sensuous beauty, however it points toward God, may also become an occasion of sin when it is loved for its own sake rather than as a sign of the divine.

Augustine's treatment of art is shaped throughout by his broader theology of signs. Every work of human making—music, poetry, the physical forms of liturgy—is in the first instance a sign, and signs are rightly used when they direct the mind to what they signify rather than when they are rested in as ends. The liberal arts, which Augustine treats in On Christian Doctrine, are thus ordered to the understanding of Scripture; they are useful precisely insofar as they make possible the discernment of meaning in sacred texts.

Music provides Augustine with his most searching examination of aesthetic pleasure. In the Confessions he acknowledges the power that sung words exercise over him; he finds himself moved more by the melody than by the text, and wonders whether this constitutes sin. The difficulty is that musical form, which is grounded in the mathematical ratios of number and proportion, participates in a divine order; yet the pleasure of that form may draw attention away from its meaning toward itself. The question, as Augustine frames it, is not whether art can be beautiful but whether beauty can be loved in the right order—referred ultimately to God rather than rested in for its own sake.

His De Musica pursues the mathematical foundations of rhythm and meter with considerable detail, arguing that the numerical relations underlying music reflect the rational order of creation. Art and beauty are thus, in Augustine's view, neither arbitrary nor merely subjective; they participate in a divine order of proportion. Yet participation is not possession, and the soul that stops short of the source by fixing its love on created beauty commits a form of idolatry. This account of rightly ordered love provides the framework within which Aquinas later distinguishes the goodness of the work from the goodness of the maker.

The issue Augustine identifies—whether aesthetic delight leads the soul upward toward its proper end or detains it among created things—shapes not only the subsequent Christian tradition of thought on art and liturgy but also the more general question of whether any natural good can be sought for itself without becoming a disorder. This question, in different form, is treated in the chapters on Love and on Good and Evil.

Aquinas gives art its scholastic definition in the Summa Theologica: recta ratio factibilium, right reason about things to be made. Art is classified among the intellectual virtues, alongside prudence, science, understanding, and wisdom, but it is distinguished from prudence on the ground that prudence concerns things to be done, that is, moral action, while art concerns things to be made. The distinction between agere and facere, acting and making, goes back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

One consequence of this definition that Aquinas draws explicitly is that the goodness of the work and the goodness of the worker are, in the sphere of art, separable. The standard by which art is judged is internal to the making: whether the thing produced embodies its form well, whether it has the integrity, proportion, and clarity in which beauty consists. By this standard, a man of bad character may be an excellent craftsman, and the artist is not required to be virtuous in his private life in order to produce works of genuine quality. This separability of technical and moral virtue Aquinas regards as characteristic of art as such, contrasting it with prudence, where the goodness of the judgment and the goodness of the agent cannot be so readily distinguished.

Art, on Aquinas's account, extends over all skilled making, from carpentry and medicine to poetry and music. The fine arts are not yet distinguished as a separate category; the broader category is productive reason applied to any sphere in which a thing is brought into existence through human intelligence. The narrowing of the concept of art to the fine arts, which becomes characteristic of eighteenth-century aesthetics, represents a departure from this wider Aristotelian usage. The relation of art to the liberal arts and to the manual trades is discussed more fully in the chapters on Science and on Education.

The implications of Aquinas's definition bear not only on the theory of art but also on the question of how beauty relates to truth and goodness. Since beauty requires integrity, proportion, and clarity in the thing made, the good work of art participates, on Aquinas's account, in the transcendental properties of being. Whether this account can be extended to the fine arts understood in the modern sense, or whether it applies more naturally to the broader ancient conception of art as skilled making, is a question that subsequent discussions have addressed in various ways.

In Inferno XI, Virgil pauses to explain the organization of Hell and, in doing so, articulates a philosophy of art. Following the Aristotelian line that Aquinas had made current, he traces a chain of derivation: God creates nature, nature operates according to divine art, and human art follows nature as the pupil follows the master. "Your art," he says, "is almost God's grandchild." The formula situates all human making within a cosmic order. Art does not impose an alien form upon matter; it participates in the sequence by which the divine intelligence gives order to the world. This participation is the source of art's dignity, but it is also the ground for judging art that departs from its proper function — that gratifies rather than orders, or fosters pride rather than service.

The tension between art's dignity and its danger runs through the canticles that follow. On the terrace of pride in Purgatorio X, Dante encounters marble reliefs whose craftsmanship surpasses anything unaided nature could produce — works executed by the one artist who had no teacher but God. Yet the same terrace is where artists who confused their achievement with their worth are purged. Oderisi of Gubbio, once celebrated as the finest illuminator of his age, speaks of the vanity of artistic fame: the glory of one generation of masters gives way to the next, and the transience of reputation exposes how much pride attaches itself to skill. The Comedy praises excellence in making and insists, in the same motion, on humility about the maker. Both sides of this conjunction are held together by the theological framework that places art within a hierarchy it did not create.

Paradiso I then addresses the question of inspiration directly. Dante invokes Apollo — not the classical Muses but the god of poetic craft — and asks to be made a vessel adequate to the height of the final canticle. What is required is not primarily skill but an infusion of divine breath: something that comes from beyond the poet and that his own capacity cannot supply. Art at its highest is not the exercise of mastery so much as the reception of a power that transcends the artist. The implications for how artistic excellence is to be understood — whether as the product of rule-governed skill, of natural gift, or of something more closely analogous to grace — are held in productive suspension rather than resolved. These questions are taken up in various ways in the chapters on Beauty and on Poetry.

Dante's account of art as participation in divine order shaped Renaissance debates about the dignity of the poet and the relation of artistic inspiration to prophetic vision. The question whether the artist operates primarily by transmissible rule, as Aristotle and Aquinas suggest, or by a gift that cannot be taught, as the Paradiso invocations imply, proves durable. Milton will reformulate it in theological terms drawn from a different tradition; Kant will attempt to give it a philosophical account in which nature works through the individual genius without any determinate method. Neither formulation fully resolves what Dante suspends.

Milton's Areopagitica (1644) addresses the question Plato posed in the Republic — whether the arts ought to be subject to political supervision — and reaches the opposite conclusion. Where Plato holds that the influence of poetry on character is too great for the state to ignore, Milton holds that the harm of censorship to virtue is greater than any harm a bad book can do. His argument proceeds not from a theory of aesthetic value but from a theory of moral formation: virtue that has not been tested is not genuine virtue, and the mind that has not encountered false doctrine has not learned to reason through it. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue," he writes, "unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary." The works most likely to unsettle — precisely those Plato would exclude — may be the most necessary for the formation of citizens capable of free judgment.

The question of what makes great art possible runs alongside the question of what political conditions permit it. In the invocations that open the first four books of Paradise Lost, Milton addresses the nature of poetic inspiration directly. He does not call on the classical Muses but on the "Heav'nly Muse" — the spirit present at creation, moving over the waters in Genesis. What he asks is not primarily for skill or craft but for illumination: "What in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support." The poet's own capacity is, on this account, insufficient for the highest art. What is required is a receptivity to something that comes from beyond the poet and that cannot be acquired by practice or transmitted by instruction. This places Milton in the tradition — extending from Plato's Ion through Dante's invocation of Apollo — of those who locate the source of great art in inspiration rather than in technique.

There is a tension between Milton's political argument and his aesthetic one that is not easily resolved. The freedom he claims for the artist is grounded in the necessity of encountering and working through what cannot be prescribed. But the receptivity he describes in the invocations is not freedom in any ordinary sense; it is closer to a kind of availability to a power the artist serves rather than commands. The genius required for the highest art, on this account, is not autonomous self-expression but a capacity to be used. This position anticipates the Kantian formula in which genius is nature giving the rule to art through the individual, while retaining a theological register that Kant's account does not carry. Whether artistic freedom is ultimately grounded in the rights of the individual or in the demands of something the individual serves is a question the later tradition, from Kant through the Romantics and beyond, addresses in changing terms.

Milton's two arguments — that censorship harms the community by suppressing the trial of truth, and that great art depends on a form of inspiration no rule can produce — were received differently by later tradition. The political argument passed into the mainstream of liberal thought through Locke and Mill, becoming largely detached from its theological grounding. The aesthetic argument about inspiration was absorbed into Romantic theories of genius, where the note of receptivity and humility that marks Milton's own invocations was often exchanged for one of autonomous creative power. The question of which inheritance is the more faithful to what Milton himself held remains open.

Kant's treatment of art in the Critique of Judgment begins with a set of distinctions that separate fine art from craft, from nature, and from science. Craft, or mechanical art, aims at a definite end and can be pursued by following rules; science consists in theoretical knowledge that anyone can acquire by study. Fine art, by contrast, produces something that appears as if it were free from any determinate rule and is at the same time pleasing in itself, not as a means to any further end.

The source of fine art, for Kant, is genius: "the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art." Genius is original rather than imitative; it cannot explain the rule by which it produces, nor can that rule be communicated to others so that they may produce in the same way. What genius produces is exemplary—fit to serve as a model for others—but the procedure by which the model was arrived at remains irreducible to any method. This account stands in marked contrast to the classical and medieval understanding of art as a body of transmissible rules grounded in scientific knowledge of the subject matter.

Kant further distinguishes among the fine arts by reference to the mode of expression. Speech, gesture, and tone are the fundamental means by which human beings communicate; poetry, sculpture and painting, and music correspond respectively to these modes. Among the fine arts, Kant ranks poetry highest, on the ground that it engages the imagination most freely and stimulates the cognitive faculties without confining them to a determinate concept. Music, despite its power to move, is ranked lower because its effects are more evanescent and less connected to definite thought. These distinctions are more fully treated in the chapters on Poetry and on Beauty.

Kant's account of genius and of aesthetic pleasure as the free play of imagination and understanding has raised the question whether, on these terms, art can sustain any claim to truth. If the pleasure of the beautiful lies in the harmonious exercise of the faculties rather than in the cognition of any determinate object, then it may be difficult to explain the apparent seriousness of art's engagement with human life. Hegel's aesthetics undertakes, in part, to answer this question by relating art to the self-knowledge of Spirit.

Hegel treats art as one of three modes by which absolute Spirit apprehends itself, the others being religion and philosophy. Art gives the Idea sensuous form; in stone, color, sound, and language, what is inward and spiritual becomes outward and perceptible. The function of art is therefore neither merely to please the senses nor to express the artist's individual feeling, but to manifest in material the content that Spirit requires for its own self-recognition.

From this principle Hegel derives a philosophy of art history organized around three stages. In the symbolic stage, characteristic of Egyptian and Eastern art, the spiritual content is so indefinite that no sensible form can fully contain or express it; the art of this period is marked by vastness, obscurity, and a straining after significance that its materials cannot provide. In the classical stage, realized above all in Greek sculpture, form and content achieve a harmony: the human body, as the natural vehicle of spirit, becomes the medium through which the Greek conception of divinity is adequately expressed. In the romantic stage, which includes Christian and modern art, the spiritual content has become too inward and too infinite for any sensible form; art strains against its medium and the content ultimately exceeds it.

This historical scheme leads to what Hegel calls the "end of art"—the thesis that art, in the modern period, can no longer serve as the highest vehicle for the expression of what Spirit requires to know about itself. Thought and reflection have outstripped the fine arts; philosophy, which dispenses with sensuous form altogether, becomes the appropriate mode of Spirit's self-knowledge. Art nonetheless retains its significance; the great works of the past remain accessible and may be contemplated with profit. But they no longer occupy the position of highest dignity that they held in the classical world. The bearing of this thesis on the place of poetry and music in modern culture is more fully discussed in the chapters on Poetry and on Beauty.

The reception of Hegel's thesis has been various. Tolstoy, who holds that art's value lies in the communication of feeling rather than in the expression of Spirit's self-knowledge, represents one kind of dissent; those who hold that art has continued to bear genuine spiritual significance in the modern period represent another. The philosophical question at issue—whether there is a determinate content that art is peculiarly suited to express, and whether that content has been superseded—remains a matter of continuing discussion.

Tolstoy's What Is Art?, written in the late 1890s, opens with a sustained examination of prevailing theories of beauty and concludes that beauty is an insufficient and misleading criterion for understanding what art is and what it does. The elaborate apparatus of the modern aesthetic tradition—opera, academic painting, fashionable fiction—he regards as produced for and consumed by a leisured class at the expense of those whose labor supports it, and as communicating nothing of genuine human importance.

On Tolstoy's account, art is essentially a communication of feeling. The artist, having experienced a genuine feeling, employs external signs—words, colors, movements, sounds—by means of which the same feeling is aroused in the audience. The criterion of genuine art is what Tolstoy calls infectiousness: the capacity of the work to transmit the feeling with clarity, sincerity, and directness. The value of any given work of art depends both on the quality of the feeling communicated and on the degree to which that feeling unites those who receive it. Art of the highest kind transmits feelings of universal brotherhood and religious consciousness; art that produces refined pleasures for a restricted audience, however technically accomplished, fails this test.

By this standard, Tolstoy excludes a substantial portion of the celebrated art of his time, including, as he acknowledges, his own two major novels. The folk song, the simple tale, the popular religious image are capable of meeting the standard that the complicated productions of cultivated taste fail to meet. This position stands in direct opposition to the tradition that proceeds from Kant through Hegel, which identifies the highest art with what is least accessible to common feeling. The relation of art to the community and to social equality is also touched upon in the chapters on Democracy and on Wealth.

Tolstoy's theory has been criticized on the ground that it reduces art to a vehicle for moral and religious sentiment, leaving no adequate account of the formal qualities that distinguish art from mere communication. Those who follow Kant and Hegel in locating art's value in its formal properties or its intellectual content will find Tolstoy's criterion of infectiousness insufficient; those sympathetic to his moral seriousness may nonetheless question whether folk art can bear the weight he places on it.

Freud's account of art belongs to his broader theory of civilization and its relation to instinctual life. Civilization, on this account, requires the renunciation of direct instinctual satisfaction; libidinal energy that cannot be discharged in its original aim is redirected into other channels, among them the productive work of culture. Art is one form of this redirection, or sublimation: it provides what Freud calls substitutive satisfactions for drives that social life forces its members to forgo.

The artist, in Freud's description, is a person who turns away from reality because the renunciations it imposes are too severe, but who finds a way back by transforming his fantasies into a publicly acceptable form. What distinguishes the artist from the neurotic is not the content of his inner life but the capacity to give that content a form that others can share and take pleasure in. The work of art thus serves a social function: it offers a temporary relief from the pressure of reality and reconciles its audience, for a time, to the necessities that civilization imposes.

Beyond this general account, Freud applies psychoanalytic interpretation to particular works—Leonardo's paintings, Michelangelo's Moses, the dramas of Shakespeare—treating them as texts in which unconscious wishes and conflicts can be discerned by a method analogous to the interpretation of dreams. The validity of this method has been questioned on various grounds; critics have observed that the interpretation of a work's unconscious content leaves its formal qualities and its aesthetic value largely unexplained. Whether psychoanalytic interpretation supplements or displaces aesthetic evaluation is a question that bears on the relation between psychology and the theory of art, which is also touched upon in the chapters on Mind and on Science.

The question whether Freud's account adequately explains the value of art, rather than merely its psychological genesis, has been a recurring point of discussion. Even if it is granted that a great work originates in sublimated desire, the further question remains whether this origin determines its significance or whether the transformation of desire into form is itself what calls for explanation.