The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy by George Smith

Author:George Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

In other words, poetry poses a serious threat to the State, and therefore steps must be taken. Whereas the artist and the philosopher had until then been thought of more or less as one and the same, now in Book X, for the first time in Greek thought, we see the artist divided from the philosopher. As Socrates assures Glaucon, it is the philosopher alone who possesses truth, precisely insofar as he alone possesses and applies the logical instruments of “calculation and measure.” The unruly artist, on the other hand, pawns off vague and imperfect images, mimetic reproductions, fake copies of reality—in a word, corruptions of truth. This threat to the State must be dealt with. Splitting what for centuries had been taken for granted as the artist-philosopher into two separate entities, the artist and the philosopher, Plato gives us an incipient moment in the history of modern specialization. In this case, the artist is remanded to the side of ignorance, the source of evil; and the philosopher, master of mathematical logic, master of the “art of mensuration,” takes the place reserved for him at the font of truth and knowledge.

By contrast to the artist, the philosopher is the source of all good, the essence of certainty. Mensuration—ethics by “calculation and measure”—leaves us to understand—leaves, rather, Jowett’s Oxford undergraduates to understand—that those with the greatest knowledge of mathematics stand closest in proximity to the good. Invariably, they will be the most virtuous. By the same token, it follows, those most ignorant of mathematics are most likely the evilest of barbarians, precisely in that they stand farthest from the good. Such is the logic of proportion, ratio. It follows, too, therefore, that the stupidest of Oxford undergraduates is far more virtuous than the smartest of uneducated farmhands. As Plato insists, the same logic applies to the artist, who, to the extent he is unschooled in mathematics, invents lies for want of truth. Therefore, until such time as the artist can prove the renouncement of his dangerous ways, he is declared persona non grata.

In conferring upon the artist the title of genius, Kant would appear to be circumventing Plato’s injunction. But in fact the social contract Kant writes up for the artist keeps faithful covenant with Plato’s ethico-mathematical terms—terms, in other words, that reiterate the ideals of Dorian and Phrygian scales. For, if nothing else, Kant’s aesthetic form maintains and reproduces Plato’s politico-aesthetic sanctions against all but harmonious and temperate expressions of stability, regularity, and order, expressions that could not only purge the soul of unrest, but indeed compose the State in like manner. Little surprise, then, to find the art of mensuration as the key to Kant’s judgment of taste—which comes down to what Jowett calls, no doubt with Kant in mind, the “calculation of pleasure.” Here is one of myriad examples from Kant:

When the form of an object (as opposed to the matter of its representation, as sensation) is, in the mere act of reflecting upon it, without regard to

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