Philosophy of art, aesthetics, Plato

1. ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
Classical Concepts in Art and Beauty

2. PLATO
Ideals and Inspiration: Order out of Illusions.

3. Horizon Illusion

4. A
B C
Ictinus & Callicrates, Parthenon

5. trompe l’oeil, Pompeii

6. Intelligible
World
visible world
The
Good
The Mind
The True
The Beautiful
Recognition of:
The Good
The True
The Beautiful
understanding
reasoning
proofs
forms
geometric forms
functions
formulae
The Sunordinary things
beliefs
sensations
imaginings
Youknowbestthatwhichchangesleast
Thatwhichchangesleastismostreal
How do you know? What is real?
<3 sided figure>
illusions, shadows
<Pythagorean Theorem>
instantiation
The Eye
Plato’s Simile of the Line

7. ideals
things
Ideals
art
instantiation
mimesis
Plato’s Simile of the Line
Mimesis is, according to Plato, a copy of a copy of an ideal, thrice
removed from the truth. It mimics some of the properties of the
original without including the ideal function.

8. “I do not mean by beauty of form such
beauty as that of animals or pictures,
which the many would suppose to be my
meaning; but understand me to mean
straight lines and circles, and the plane
and solid figures which are formed out of
them by turning lathes and rulers and
measures of angles; for these I affirm to
be not only relatively beautiful, like other
works of art, but they are eternally and
abstractly beautiful.”
–Plato Philebus 51c
Uccello’s Chalice

9. Masaccio
Trinity
“Perspective is to painting
what the bridle is to the
horse, the rudder to a ship.”
—Leonardo

10. Raphael, School of Athens

11. Leonardo Figure Studies
“There are three aspects
to perspective. The first
has to do with how the
size of objects seems to
diminish according to
distance: the second, the
manner in which colors
change the farther away
they are from the eye; the
third defines how objects
ought to be finished less
carefully the farther away
they are.”
—Leonardo

12. Leonardo, Last Supper

13. “…sculpture and painting are in
truth sisters, born from one
father, that is, design, at one
and the same birth, and have
no precedence one over the
other…”
“…design, which is their
foundation, nay rather, the very
soul that conceives and
nourishes within itself all the
parts of man's intellect, was
already most perfect before the
creation of all other things,
when the Almighty God, having
made the great body of the
world and having adorned the
heavens with their exceeding
bright lights, descended lower
with His intellect into the
clearness of the air and the
solidity of the earth…”
—Vasari
Michelangelo Battle of Cascina

14. PLATO’S IDEAL BEAUTY
Ideals, with a capital ‘I’, sometimes called Forms are,
according to Plato, are what is real, and are eternal and
unchanging. There are three Ideals: Goodness, Truth, and
Beauty. Examples of lesser ideals, with a small ‘i’, might be
ratios, formulae and geometric forms. Beauty, as an Ideal, is
the abstract, intelligible value by which the cosmos (including
appearances, things, and ideals) are constituted, ordered, and
made intelligible.

15. PLATO’S IDEAL BEAUTY
Examples of Beauty as an Ideal are found in architecture and
architectonics, perspective, geometric shapes, and compositional
forms and ratios such as the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean,
considered one of the perfect ratios, represented by a point on a line
segment (C) that divides it such that the smaller segment (A) stands in
relation to the larger segment (B) in the same relation that the larger
segment stands to the whole (A:B = B:C). Other forms put forth as
candidates for Ideal Beauty are Platonic Solids and the Fibonacci
Sequence. Platonic Solids are the pyramid, cube, octahedron,
dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Each of these have faces that are
identical, regular polygons meeting at the same three-dimensional
angles. The Fibonacci Sequence is a sequence of numbers each of
which is the sum of the two previous numbers. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, .
. . ,. Examples in painting might include architectonics.

16. Reason
Emotions
Appetites
Rulers
Soldiers
Crafts workers
Wisdom
Courage
Self-control
Justice
Plato’s Ideal Polis
TRIPARTITE
SOUL
Plato’s Psychology
The Human Soul

17. Reason
Emotions
Appetites
Self-control–a
birth of the
cool
Plato’s Psychology
Parthenon Metope, Centaurs and
Lapiths

18. “God devised and bestowed upon us
vision to the end that we might behold
the revolutions of Reason in the Heaven
and use them for the revolvings of the
reasoning that is within us, these being
akin to those, the perturbable to the
imperturbable; and that, through learning
and sharing in calculations which are
correct by their nature, by imitation of the
absolutely unvarying revolutions of the
God we might stabilize the variable
revolutions within ourselves.”
–Plato Timaeus 47c
Polykleitos’ Doryphorus

19. PLATO—TEMPERANCE
Temperance (self-control) is the psychological disposition
achieved when Ideal Beauty orders the soul, it is a harmony
between the parts of the soul.

20. INSPIRATION: EMOTIONS WITHOUT
KNOWLEDGE
Reaso
n
Emotions
Appetites
Reason
Emotions
Appetites
Reason
Emotions
Appetites
Reason
Emotions
Appetites
Muse
Audience
For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art,
but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers
when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right
mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the
power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed

21. PLATO—INSPIRATION
Inspiration, a form of mimesis involving a psychological state
in which, according to Plato, emotions are transmitted from
one person to another without transmission of knowledge.

22. REFLECTIONS
What aesthetic terms would you use to describe the Viet
Nam War Memorial? The film?
Where would Plato place the Viet Nam War Memorial on his
Simile of the Line? Where would you?
Is the Viet Nam War Memorial mimetic or inspirational, in
Plato’s senses of the terms?