 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about ancient aesthetics with Anne Shepherd, who is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. Hi Anne, thanks for coming. So I'd like to start by asking you about ancient aesthetics in general. The word aesthetics actually comes from a Greek word, aesthesis, which means perception or something like that. And I guess that raises the question of whether the notion of aesthetics itself also comes from the ancient Greeks. Did they actually recognize an area of philosophy that they thought of as aesthetics? Half under that name, there's actually quite a lot of dispute about this. Some people would say that it's anachronistic to talk about ancient aesthetics. Other people disagree. I think what you do find, I mean, aesthetics in modern philosophical discipline covers both philosophical questions about the arts and philosophical questions about beauty. And those are all questions that are addressed by ancient philosophers, but very often in other contexts. So in context they do with morality or education or indeed metaphysics, rather than on their own. And do they think of those things as somehow relating to each other then? Or if they're thinking about, say, education, would they think, well, that's one thing, and then say this question about metaphysics is something completely different? Because for example, Plato in the Republic, he does seem to bring these things together more or less, doesn't he? Yes, that's true. I suppose that's partly because Plato is bringing everything together, so he's considering education in the context of metaphysics. But yes, that's true. And it's also true that although, well, although it's often said that the ancient Greeks didn't have a concept of fine art, and I think that's to do with the role of the arts in ancient society, that visual art, for example, things like statues were in temples to be worshipped. They weren't actually sitting in a museum. Drama was part of a religious festival. People weren't thinking of it as something for kind of leisure time activity in the way that we do. So there's quite deep-seated reasons, I think, for why they don't think of the arts as being separate. At the same time, somebody like Plato draws analogies between poetry and painting on the one hand and painting and sculpture on the other quite readily. So does Aristotle. There's a long-running comparison into non-philosophical writing about poetry that compares poetry to painting. So there's certainly some tendency to put what we call the arts together, but then they're not necessarily considered in relation to beauty. Those are sometimes sort of separate questions. Well, do you actually, do you think that it's even right to think about ancient aesthetics primarily as about beauty? Because as I mentioned, aesthetics relates to the word aesthetic. Right, indeed. Hence, you might think that it means something like the study of things we can perceive from some certain point of view. Indeed you might. I mean, I suppose you could argue that it's to do with pleasure just in perceiving things, as it were, just in, if you like, surface perceptions, and then that involves not only beauty but charm, ugliness, other kinds of what we would now call aesthetic qualities, just thinking about things as you perceive them rather than in any other way. Do you think that in the culture more broadly, they actually would have seen something like a dramatic performance and something like a sculpture as belonging even to the same realm of activity? Because you mentioned that, at least the philosophers do draw analogies between, say, a sculpture and a poem. Is that something the philosophers are bringing in that they've noticed? Or is that something that's actually true to the way ancient Greeks thought about what we would call their artistic productions? I don't think it's just the philosophers, because as I mentioned, there is this comparison between poetry and painting, which is supposed to go back to the 6th-century BC poet Simonides. So there's some indication that poets themselves are thinking like that. I suppose one of the problems is that if you say, well, what were the people who made the sculptures or the people who painted the paintings thinking, that we don't know, because we don't have reflections written by the sculptors or the painters on what they were doing. By Phidias didn't write a treatise. Here's what I was thinking. So, you know, unlike the great Renaissance artists or something who wrote quite a lot about what they thought they were doing and the way they thought about what they were doing. And what about music? Or, well, maybe we should use the Greek word here, which is mousike. And that includes, I guess, what we would think of as music or some kinds of music, that seems to be broader and it seems to have something to do with education. Is that right? Yes. I mean, I didn't mention music when I was talking earlier, but I mean, the Greek word mousike, from which the English word music comes, is originally the art to do with the muses. Actually, maybe that's where you should look for some kind of unity about the art, because I think the idea developed later, but there's a tendency to different muses were associated with different art, so different with different kinds of poetry and one specifically with music and so on. But the word mousike certainly as it's used by Plato tends to cover both poetry and music. And if you look at something like Tom Griffith's translation of the Republic, the stuff about poetry and music and education, he actually translates mousike by poetry and music. And a lot of what Plato has to say about the use of poetry in education, where he's actually very, he wants to censor it, he wants to restrict the amount of poetry that his guardians in the ideal state are going to be exposed to when they're growing up. He also then quite explicitly wants to apply that to music. And one of his concerns is about the emotional effect of poetry. And he has exactly the same concerns, yeah, exactly the same concerns or parallel concerns about the effect of music on the emotions. To specific instruments and specific rhythms and so on. That's right, that's right. He doesn't like the music of the Aulos for instance, kind of flute because he thinks that that's all jastic and whereas he prefers instruments and rhythms which are modes which are going to inculcate the right kind of emotions, make people warlike and this kind of thing. I mean, one of the reasons why music doesn't really get considered separately is again, I think to do with the way the arts were practicing in antiquity, in the sense that there doesn't seem to have been instrumental music on its own. It was either an accompaniment to poetry. So a lot of poetry was actually being sung to the la for instance, or an accompaniment to drama, or indeed used in a religious context. So coming back then to the business about the statues and the temples and the religious context, music was also used for some kind of therapy in a religious setting. That comes out in what Aristotle has to say in the politics about music. In that case, why is it that both Plato and Aristotle so strongly connect music to education? Is it just because they assume that as children grow up, they'll be exposed to the great poems and also music at the same time? I think so. Yes, yes, I think so. I think it's because the two things go together. Right, and so then their worry would be that if children hear a certain kind of music, it will make them more violent. That's right. It's almost like people worry about video games. Yes, yes. It's like people are worrying about video games. It's like people are worrying about rock concerts. I mean the kind of concern that Plato has about the emotional effects of music are much more comparable, I think, to the kinds of concerns from time, again, depending on what's popular at the time, but people have about the effects of rock concerts on the young. It's much more that than the kind of concerns you might have about what happens if you go to a concert listening to classical music. Right. He does have this other concern, though, which is about what he calls mimesis, which means imitation. And this seems to bring us to another very strong current in Greek thinking about art, which is that art typically or maybe always is supposed to be an imitation of something else and often an imitation of nature. So in the last book of the Republic, he has this complaint that art is often only giving you a copy of something that's already a copy because, of course, the real thing would be the form. Do you think that it would be fair to say that in general in ancient Greek aesthetics, they have a tendency to think about art insofar as they think about art generally at all, that they have a tendency just to think about it as a kind of imitation? Well, the notion of imitation is very pervasive, certainly, but not everybody used it in the way Plato does. I mean, I think Plato in Republic Book Ten is rather deliberately making it sound very much like basic copying. He's got a very famous image about the painter being like somebody who's just holding up a mirror, which gets both the idea that it's just a copy and also the idea that what you're getting is something inferior, something which is just like a reflection, a mirror. So not really in three dimensions in the way that the thing in the physical world is. So that's Plato putting a particularly derogatory spin on it. But the idea can be used in quite other ways. If you look at Aristotle in the Poetics talking about tragedy as being the imitation of an action, it's actually quite puzzling in a way. But I think that's related to another thing that Aristotle says, which is a very famous claim that poetry is more universal than history. He's somehow getting at the idea that, well, he's talking particularly about tragedy, he's getting somehow getting at the idea that a tragic drama is, as we might say, conveying universal truths. And that's all tied up with the way he's using the notion of imitation. And people often want to translate it by representation because they feel that the English word imitation is too much of, if you like, the platonic downgrading of it. So yes, ancient thinking about art is very dominated by the notion of mimesis, imitational representation, but they use it very flexibly. And I think the fact that Plato's use of it in Republic is a very well-known one, in a way tends to obscure our understanding of some of the other uses of it. Right. So that sometimes it could be a more positive idea. And I guess even in Plato, right, because in the Timaeus, he says that the entire cosmos is a work of art created by someone he calls a craftsman, a demiurge. And I guess that also is an imitation, right? Because it's supposed to be an imitation of the form of living being, as he says. And do you think that then means that there is an opportunity there, at least for Platonists, to think about nature itself as an aesthetic object or something that's beautiful, because it's been created by God, for example? Yes, yes. I mean, again, in a sense, it's all tied up with tensions in Plato's metaphysics, isn't it, about the relationship between the particulars and the forms, because very often he'll talk as though the forms are what's really real and the particulars are just inferior. But on the other hand, insofar as the particulars are copies of the forms, they're copies of something that's supremely valuable. And so that gives the particulars themselves a kind of value. And that's the way he's developing it. I take it in the Timaeus, with this notion that the physical world is a copy of some kind of divine blueprint. Right. Well, that is, now that we're starting to talk about Platonism, that brings us on to something that you and I both love very deeply, which is Neoflatanism. And ultimately, I want to ask you about Proclus. But first, maybe we can stop in with Plotinus, because he actually wrote a whole treatise on beauty. What does Plotinus bring to the ancient discussion of aesthetics, would you say? Well, I mean, one way of looking at it is that indeed, he's developing just the kind of themes in Plato that we've been talking about. His treatise on beauty links up very closely with Plato's symposium, where you get the idea that beauty in the physical world can be of value because it spurs us on to eventually now having an understanding of the form of beauty. And that idea is developed by Plotinus in his treatise on beauty, but developed then into a theory of where beauty in the physical world comes from, emphasizing the fact that it comes from, as he understands it, the world of platonic forms. It's not simply something to do with the way things are arranged. So he's very critical of the Stoic idea that beauty is simply to do with symmetry of parts. He says, no, it isn't that, it comes from somewhere outside the physical world. The other way in which he's developing Platonist aesthetics links up with the ideas we were talking about, about imitation, and also with his theory of beauty. Because, and again, it's not new in Plotinus, you find it in some earlier Platonists, you find it in Cicero and in Seneca, but he's picking up an idea that was around in the middle Platonic period, that rather than just copying an object in the physical world, an artist is actually having some kind of, if you like, direct access to the Platonic forms and copying that. So this in a way is another way, a Platonist way, of making Aristotle's point about poetry and universal truths, or if you like, paintings. I mean, let's say we might say a portrait isn't just a copy of somebody because it's somehow getting something about the person's personality or something like that. So it's a Platonist way, if you like, of expressing that kind of idea, and it links up with Plotinus' view of beauty, because beauty also for Plotinus is something which comes from the world of forms, the world beyond the world of sense experience and physical reality. Does that mean that an artist might be conceived of as doing something that's almost like philosophy, so the artist is trying to get back to the form in some way? I suppose so, yes. So in that case, presumably philosophy is still better than art, right? Sorry to all you artists out there. So why is philosophy better than art? Is it because the artist comes back down and does something in the sensible world? Is that the problem? Yes. And I think also, again, in a very Platonist kind of way, the philosopher can articulate what he's saying, the philosopher understands what he's doing. I mean, one of, to go back to Plato, one of the points he's always making about art is that they don't really have knowledge, they don't really understand what they're doing or why they're doing it. Platonists probably wouldn't want to push that point quite as hard, but I think that idea is still there. And so it's the philosopher who can, as I say, articulate an understanding of what he's doing in a way that the artist can't. And of course Plato says that even about poetry. So even artists who work in words don't understand what they're doing. Yes, yes, yes. Despite my comment about people reflecting on what they're doing, Plato doesn't set any store about that. Yeah, right. I guess the part of what's going on here is Platonist's idea that if every level of reality is an image of the higher level of reality, so our world is an image of maybe the ideas in the world soul and the world soul is an image of noose and the noose is an image of the one, that will beauty always just be kind of another way of talking about the expression of the higher thing and the lower thing? Yes, yes. But I think there's also the idea that it's a particularly, because beauty fascinates us because of the charm that it exerts over us, because it attracts us, it's then a particularly powerful or particularly effective way in which we can come to grasp the effect of the higher thing on the lower thing. Right. I guess, I mean, in the sense he wants to say, I guess that beauty is like goodness, right? Because goodness is also just the effect of the higher and the lower. But presumably he doesn't want to say that beauty and goodness are just the same thing. No, he doesn't. I mean, this is where in his treatise on beauty, it's a bit confusing, because he seems at moments almost to be saying that, but at the end of the day, he doesn't want to say that, because well, I mean, one way of explaining that is to, in terms of his system, where goodness comes out from the one at the very top of the system, beauty doesn't quite belong out there. Beauty belongs in the intelligent world with the forms. And I think his ideas that beauty is that were the first, the first image, the first representation of goodness, rather than being identical with it. Well, that's maybe all worth bearing in mind now as we finally turn to Proclus, someone you've written a lot about. And maybe we can stay with this topic of poetry first, because Proclus has a problem, which I guess a lot of Platonists had, which is that he really, really loves Plato, of course, but he also really, really loves Homer. So when he gets to these bits of the Republic that you were talking about before, where Plato criticizes Homer, he's basically got one of his great heroes criticizing another great hero. So how does he handle that? Well, he's got quite an ingenious solution to the problem, which is to pick up both on the sort of ideas from Plotinus that we've been talking about, and also on what Plato has to say about art being my meatic or imitative in the last book of the Republic and Republic 10. Because Proclus has a theory that there are different types of poetry. And in particular, I think the key thing, he's got three types, but the key thing is distinction between the highest type, which is inspired poetry, and the lowest type, which is imitative or my meatic poetry. So he wants to say that all that's going on in the last book of the Republic is Plato is criticizing my meatic poetry and that you don't get very much of that in Homer. Most of Homer is inspired poetry. And inspired poetry is poetry that reflects the highest metaphysical realities, still sort of imitative, but imitating, again, this is where the notion of my meatic becomes very flexible, imitating something not directly, but in a symbolic kind of way. And again, picking up on the idea you find in Plotinus that the artist is imitating platonic forms. In Proclus, as I know you explained in the podcast about Proclus, you have this explosion of the intelligible world and description of all the different entities within it as different divinities. That then opens the way for Proclus to say that, particularly in the bits of Homer about the gods, he's not talking about gods fighting each other or having sex with each other or anything shocking like that. This is in fact a symbolic or allegorical way of talking about something which is going on indeed among his gods at the highest levels of his metaphysical system, and that all of this is a product of inspiration, so it's all okay. Possibly doesn't mean that you should just be giving it to children uncensored, because you have to understand, you have to be, to use the language of the mysteries, you have to be initiated into the mysteries in order to understand it. But once you do understand, then you realize that actually it's inspired and it's not quite as valuable as Plato, but it's still very, very valuable. Would that mean that actually something like Homer is only appropriate for people who are really quite advanced, like philosophers who have some chance of understanding the theological underpinnings of it? I think that would be the implication. I mean, he doesn't spell that out. He doesn't, he concentrates on arguing that most of Homer is inspired in this very particular way that I've been trying to explain, and so not vulnerable to Plato's criticism. He doesn't quite spell out the educational implications, but I think that would have to be what it would imply. So he could probably live with the idea then that the poet should, as it were, be kicked out of the ideal city, because most of the people in the ideal city won't be philosophers, so they shouldn't be listened to. I guess. I mean, the fact is he says remarkably little about the ideal city, even though he wrote a whole series of essays about the republic, there's very little discussion of the political side of the republic. It's much more about the psychology and the metaphysics. It strikes me actually that one similar thing that happens in later Neoplatonism is that when Aristotle criticizes Plato, some Neoplatonists respond to that by criticizing Aristotle right back, but they have a tendency instead to say, well, what Aristotle's doing here is correcting a possible misinterpretation of Plato. It sounds like Proclus is doing the same thing with Plato's criticism of Homer. Yes, I think that's a very good analogy, because there's a kind of underlying desire to say that all the great authorities really agree, and that for Proclus doesn't just mean the philosophical authorities, it doesn't just mean Plato and Aristotle, though he does want to say that. It doesn't just, but it also includes other authoritative figures in his culture, and Homer is very much one. Before we stop, I wanted to ask you about one other thing, which you mentioned way back at the beginning of our conversation, which is the fact that a lot of what we would think of as artworks from ancient culture, the things that stand around in museums now, were actually religious artifacts, for example, statues that they might put up in temples. So Proclus, it was interesting to think about what Proclus would say about that, because on the one hand, since he's a Neoplatonist, he's not a big fan of the physical world, probably, but on the other hand, he must think that these statues would be yet another way of bringing us back to the divine. So what kind of views does he have about these sorts of artworks? Well, he does indeed put things together in the way that you suggested, and statues play a particularly important role in theology, which, again, I know you've mentioned in the podcast about Proclus. One of the main rights of theology seems to be in the strange business of animating statues, but that wasn't just, we might think that's like a magic trick, it wasn't a magic trick. They thought of it as a way of actually bringing the god to dwell in the statue, and so helping us to come into contact with the divine. And again, that does tie up with Plotinus' way, though Plotinus doesn't go into theology, it ties up with Plotinus' way of talking about statues and the activity of the sculptor as being somehow representing or imitating the Platonic form. Proclus thinks that too, he used the example of the statue of Zeus by the great sculptor Phidias as being, actually interestingly, he says that Phidias was imitating Zeus as depicted in Homer, and then Homer is inspired, so it's, you know, ultimately a correct understanding of the nature of Zeus. But for Proclus that isn't just a comment about the statue as a work of art, he also says statues have this very particular role in in theology. It's very central to what he's doing, in a way, it's very central to his whole religious way of looking at things. But one of the frustrating things, well possibly frustrating things, about the way that something like Proclus talks about the theogies, you get lots of theory, you get very little of actually how to do it. So if you wanted to find out from Proclus, you know, what to do for a theogie, right, you, there's not very much at all. Right, well speaking of the practical dimension of neoflatanism, next time I'm actually going to be doing another interview on neoplatonism with Dominique O'Mara, and we'll be talking about practical philosophy and neoplatonism, in particular political philosophy, and also what the neoplatonists thought about mathematics. But for now I'll thank Anne very much for coming on the show. Thank you for inviting me. And please join me next time when I will be in discussion with Dominique O'Mara here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.