aesthetics Stephen Halliwell, University of St Andrews Summary The nature and scope of aesthetics have been a subject of debate ever since the eighteenthcentury coinage of the term. Application of aesthetics as a theoretical or experiential category to the study of earlier periods therefore needs to be dialectical and pluralistic. But the contribution made by Greco-Roman antiquity to the evolution of ideas such as beauty, creative inspiration, and sublimity is indisputable; it reaches back to issues and values already salient in the pre-philosophical culture of archaic Greece, many of them associated with the uniquely Greek symbolism of the Muses. The early Greek association between song, music, and dance was consolidated and expanded, first by intermedial comparisons and subsequently by the concept of mimesis, into a standard grouping of the ‘mimetic arts’ which bracketed musico-poetic forms together with visual forms of artistic representation and expression. It was this cluster of activities which provided a frame of reference for philosophical theorizing. In Plato, representational and figurative art-forms are seen as carrying great cultural and psychological power, but consequently as in need of educational and political control in an ideal society. Aristotle moves nearer to a recognition of a qualified degree of aesthetic autonomy, while stressing the cognitive and emotional aspects of responses to mimetic art. In Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism regarded the whole cosmos as imbued with divinely sustained and quasi-moral beauty, while Epicureanism’s simplified standards of pleasure narrowed the valuation of mimetic art. [Longinus], On the Sublime is a prime instance of the way that new thinking could emerge from modifications of older ideas; its own model of creativity entails rivalrous emulation between present and past writers. Plotinus’s Enneads offers a revaluation of mimetic art through an intellectualized conception of beauty whose influence can be seen at work in Renaissance aesthetics and beyond. Keywords: aesthetics, beauty, creativity, fiction, inspiration, mimesis, Muses, organic unity, sublimity Between ancient and modern Ever since the eighteenth-century coinage of the term ‘aesthetics’ by Alexander Baumgarten (first, as it happens, in Latin, subsequently in German), there has been disagreement about what aesthetics is (or should be). This lack of agreement has far-reaching consequences for historical inquiry, but the vital part played by Greco-Roman texts and artefacts in shaping such ideas and values as those of beauty, creative inspiration, mimesis or artistic representation, organic form, imagination, fiction, and more, is not in doubt. The treatise On the Sublime, for instance, stimulated an explosion of interest in notions of sublimity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Hegel’s 1820s Berlin lectures on aesthetics, one of the most ambitious attempts to map the subject systematically (and within a culturally comparative framework), gave extensive consideration to both the visual arts and the poetry of Greece and Rome. If antiquity lacked an explicit category of aesthetics, modern terminology masks the fluidity of its own presuppositions. Historically sensitive study of aesthetics therefore needs to be dialectical and pluralistic. What follows focuses on philosophical and related theory; for some other traces of aesthetic sensibilities, see *Art, Ancient attitudes to*. Pre-philosophical roots Many preoccupations of ancient aesthetic thinking are anticipated in archaic Greek poetry. The Iliadic shield of Achilles (Il. 18. 478-608) is paradigmatic in this regard, as the history of its interpretation has underlined. The artefact embodies a conception of compellingly expressive representation, with self-reflexive implications for the artistry of the epic in which it is embedded. Displaying supreme craftsmanship in multiple metals (gold, silver, bronze, tin), its interplay of colours and textures is repeatedly foregrounded. Described as both beautiful and intricate, the shield is a work of ‘wonder’ (thauma, 18. 549), arousing the viewer’s intense absorption in the world of its miraculously vivid images. That world is panoramic, embracing sky and earth, gods and humans, war and peace, male and female, city and countryside. It also incorporates vignettes of song, music, and dance, thus mirroring some of poetry’s own importance. Direct enactment of what might be experienced through musico-poetic performance is found in the extraordinary Odyssean scene where Odysseus weeps profusely, in seeming anguish, over blind Demodocus’s first song about Odysseus’s own past life (Od. 8. 62-92), yet is moved by its beauty and truth to request another song which elicits the same emotional response (486-534). Homeric song exercises spellbinding ‘bewitchment’ or ‘entrancement’ (Od. 1. 337), but in Odysseus’s case a complex fusion of emotions arises from hearing his own life transfigured by the inspired bard. As with the shield of Achilles, the effect involves a paradoxical association of beauty with images of suffering. That paradox is elsewhere magnified when the Muses are pictured performing beautiful songs about human misery for the gods (Hymn. Hom. Ap. 189-93). The Muses have no close counterpart in ancient Near-Eastern or Indo-European cultures; they are a uniquely Greek way of endowing the ‘musical’ arts with quasi-divine aspirations and value. To regard the Muses as a naively externalized source of ‘information’ for poets imposes a primitivist reading on Hesiod’s teasingly ‘autobiographical’ narrative at Theog. 22-36; the Muses may always have been what they certainly became, a projection of Greek poetry’s deep selfconsciousness. The idea of the Muses also promoted an entwined conception of song, music, and dance. The term mousikê came to signify not just ‘music’ in the strict sense but the whole sphere of musico-poetic activity, together with devotion to this as a cultural ideal. Perceptions of the song-music-dance nexus were eventually reinforced by application of the vocabulary of mimesis to both musico-poetic and figurative ‘arts’ (i.e. highly skilled practices); Pind. Pyth. 12. 21 and Aesch. fr. 78a.1-17 attest emergent usage in these two domains respectively. If Achilles’ shield was implicitly homologous to the Iliad itself, explicit reflections on the intermedial relationship between verbal and visual representation prompted Simonides’ aphorism that painting is silent poetry, poetry painting with a voice (Plut. e.g. De glor. Ath. 346F). Mimesis crystallized such thinking into recognition of a family of practices, ‘the mimetic arts’ (taken for granted at Arist. Poet. 8. 1451a30), interconnected by both their representational capacities and cultural prestige. If, by the time of the sophists, ideas of artistic fiction and its psychology of make-believe ‘deception’ were becoming theorized (see Gorg. B23 DK and Hel. 18, on tragedy and visual art respectively), an intuitive awareness of fiction was arguably already present at, again, Hes. Theog. 27. Plato Plato is not only central to ancient aesthetics but the most influential figure in the entire evolution of the subject: Paul Guyer’s monumental History of Modern Aesthetics treats its material as a series of responses to problems posed by Plato. The Republic contains a sometimes neglected passage (3. 400c-402a) in which the potential to give expressive form to 2 a culture’s values is ascribed to poetry, music, painting, architecture, and other practices. But the context concomitantly emphasizes the need for educational and political control of the practices in question. Such ambivalence, elaborating concerns earlier broached by Xenophanes (B10-12 DK) and Heraclitus (B42, 46-7 DK), surfaces in many Platonic passages where the mimetic arts (presupposed as a coherent group, in multiple media, at Resp. 2. 373b) are in question, and marks a philosophical resistance to aesthetic freedom or autonomy while acknowledging the psychological and cultural potency of image-making. Relatedly, and not without an element of irony, we find seeming acceptance of poetic ‘inspiration’ coupled with a denial that poets possess knowledge (Ap. 22a-c, Ion 533e-4e, Meno 99c-d, Laws 4. 719c-e). Such tensions generate a demand for ethical scrutiny of the poets, whose credentials render them supposedly ‘guides to life’ (Lys. 214a). In Republic Books 2-3, Socrates notoriously ‘censors’ passages in Homer and tragedy which would imprint undesirable values on the young Guardians; this leads to the ‘banishment’ of the mimetically versatile poet (3. 398a-b), though not all poetry, from Callipolis. The banishment motif returns in Book 10, where Socrates develops a tripartite critique of ‘mimesis tout court’ (595c), now condemning it, in its supposedly mirror-like superficiality (596d-e), as twice removed from the plane of philosophically valid truth, as epistemologically worthless (Homer does not ‘know everything’, contra his admirers, 598e), but also as capable, where Homer and the tragedians are concerned, of exercising emotional sway over ‘even the best of us’ (605c), bypassing reason’s command and tapping the soul’s readiness to grieve over the sufferings of human existence. This last passage, which anticipates German Idealism in making tragedy the vehicle of a possible worldview, precedes Socrates’ famous claim of an ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (607b), but that claim is slanted apologetically and coloured by a nostalgic attachment to poetry’s bewitching allure. Socrates’ whole critique is rooted in an emotionally conflicted aesthetic; ‘love’ for Homer is declared at the outset (595b) and recalled at the end (607c-d). Platonic philosophy’s relationship to mimetic art entails rivalry, not mere hostility; [Longinus], Subl. 13. 3-4 describes Plato as locked in creative antagonism with Homer. One aspect of this rivalry is philosophy’s appropriation of beauty as one of its own supreme values, an impulse expressed most memorably in the speech of Diotima (Socrates’ mantic alter ego) in the Symposium. Diotima affirms that while passionate desire (erôs) for beauty is part of a universal human quest for the good, philosophy pursues this desire on a rising trajectory that looks beyond bodily beauty to beauty of soul, and ultimately reaches a mystically apprehended vision of pure, unchanging ‘beauty itself’. If Diotima allows for some cultivation of beauty qua ‘wisdom and virtue’ by poets, among others (209a, cf. 209d), this concession fades into the distance from the viewpoint of the transcendent philosophical heights she evokes. Even so, her speech leaves passion for beauty an essential place in all human culture: one might compare here Socrates’ resonant affirmation at Resp. 3. 403c that criticism of musico-poetic art should culminate in ‘the erotics of beauty’. Plato’s longterm legacy to aesthetics is double-sided. Despite the moralistic and epistemological challenges to mimetic art often voiced in the dialogues, his work has stimulated various versions of aesthetic idealism, not least in Renaissance Italy and among the Romantics, some of whom (e.g. Shelley) regarded Plato himself as a supreme philosophical ‘poet’. A more recent attempt to locate a positive aesthetic in Plato is that of the 3 philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch, who distinguishes, in her own spirit of Platonic ambivalence, between good, truth-seeking art, and ‘bad’ art that offers the ego false consolations. Aristotle If Platonic aesthetics is driven by an ethico-political imperative, Aristotle modifies such thinking with a crucial caveat: ‘politics and poetry do not share the same standard of correctness’ (Poet. 25. 1460b13-14). This is perhaps the first explicit Greek statement of a principle of aesthetic autonomy, but it is a subtly guarded statement: Aristotle subsequently permits the relevance of ethical considerations to criticism of poetry, provided these are applied with sensitive contextualization (25. 1461a4-9). For Aristotle, a poem, painting, or piece of music is a formally structured entity in its own right. But mimetic art-works (classified according to media, objects, and modes in the Poetics’ opening chapter) nonetheless project imagined ‘worlds’ which audiences seek to make sense of and respond to imaginatively. Ch. 25 of the Poetics importantly clarifies the scope of mimesis: a poet, ‘like a painter or any other image-maker’, can represent, in any instance, reality past or present, the world as people suppose it to be, or the way things ‘ought’ to be (1460b8-11). Far from being tied to naively literal ‘imitation’, mimesis encompasses a spectrum of depictive possibilities from real to ideal, from known to fictitious. Hence, also, the gradations of characters (n.b. in painting, dance, and music, as well as poetry) ‘better’ than, ‘worse’ than, or the same as, ourselves (Poet. ch. 3). Aristotle’s dual conception of mimetic art-works as both formally definable entities and simulations of the world is visible in many passages, including the complex discussion of music’s emotional expressiveness in Pol. 8. 5-7. But it is the Poetics’ treatment of tragedy (and epic) which most illuminates the core principles. Here, artistic form and meaning are meshed together. In a beautifully organized plot, the component parts are arranged in a wellproportioned, unitary structure, with ‘beginning, middle, and end’ cohering in terms of ‘necessity or probability’ (Poet. chs. 7-8). As well as exemplifying Aristotle’s general notion of beauty as the purposive and functional configuration of an entity, whether natural or artefactual (e.g. Pol. 7. 4, 1326a34-9), we see at work here a characteristic concern for intelligibility; making sense of the world, even in mimetic representation, is an imperative for the human mind. But the cognitivist foundation of this psychology is combined with, and counterbalanced by, an equally firm emphasis on emotion, hence repeated reference to ‘pity and fear’ as the defining kernel of tragedy’s and epic’s impact on its audiences (underpinning whatever further effect Aristotle intended by ‘catharsis’: Poet. 6. 1449b27-8, cf. Pol. 8. 7, 1342a4-15). And since Aristotle believes emotions can themselves be aligned with understanding (see the relevance of pity to ethical judgement, Eth. Nic. 3. 1, 1109b30-2), this makes his model of aesthetic psychology an integrated, concentrated compound of cognition and affect. Post-classical developments The Hellenistic expansion of Greek culture into an (eventually) Greco-Roman world brought with it new philosophical perspectives. At the same time, aesthetic ideas of philosophical origin became a common currency that nonetheless fostered subtle modulations of thought. Perceptions, for instance, of the interrelationships between parts of a human (or animal) body as an aesthetic paradigm of ‘organic unity’ had a long ancestry (e.g. Pl. Phdr. 264c, Arist. Poet. 7. 1450b34-51a4, [Longinus], Subl. 40. 1), yet the basic template could be adjusted to 4 suit different theoretical priorities. While Vitruvius makes an architectural principle of form analogous to the measurable ratios of the body’s limbs (De arch. 1. 2. 4), Quintilian compares the need for flexibility of rhetorical principle to the successful depiction of bodily contortion in Myron’s famous Discus-thrower statue (Inst. 2. 13. 8-10). Among new Hellenistic philosophical schools, Stoicism and Epicureanism developed starkly contrasting stances towards aesthetic questions. Taking its cue partly from the world-making figure of the craftsman Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, Stoicism conceived of the cosmos itself as a divine art-work to be contemplated for its rational beauty (e.g. Sen. Ep. 65). In Stoic terms, such beauty converges with goodness, though terminological and other intricacies make precise interpretation difficult. Furthermore, Stoicism enabled its adherents to find beauty, understood as a harmonious fit (summetria) between parts of an entity, in the details as well as the totality of nature: Marcus Aurelius, for example, presents Stoic insight as producing literally a new way of seeing individual objects with the same sort of satisfying attention one might bring to visual works of art (Med. 3. 2. 2). Given the near-equation of goodness and beauty, Stoics unsurprisingly construed judgement of art-works, again with some Platonic influence, in ways which entailed moral criteria. This applied even to music: adapting older Greek views, Diogenes of Babylon took music to express ethical qualities in its formal patterns, so that listening to music activates and shapes the hearer’s own character. We know about Diogenes’ theory of music from the Epicurean Philodemus’s treatise on music. Philodemus himself, counting music as meaningless sound, derided Diogenes’ position. This illustrates a larger disagreement. Epicureans, whose atomistic physics stripped nature itself of any inherent value, regarded pleasure as the sole justification of cultural practices and preferences. A startling index of the possible ramifications of this position for aesthetics is Epicurus’s remark that ‘I spit on beauty, and its empty admirers, when it produces no pleasure’ (fr. 512 Usener, 136 Arrighetti), an attitude borne out by other evidence for Epicurus’s belittlement of serious interest in musico-poetic culture. Not all Epicureans followed his lead. Philodemus wrote copiously on poetics, if for the most part to hack away polemically at others’ convictions; his own theory of poetry takes it to provide some sort of self-sufficient pleasure through skilful marriage of content and style but without any investment of belief or passion from the reader. Lucretius, however, paradoxically demonstrated that Epicurean doctrine itself could become the stuff of magnificent, even lifechanging poetry. Epicureanism’s value-system, with its aversion to unnecessary variation of pleasure, was too reductive to produce a distinctive aesthetics for its adherents in general. This renders Lucretius’s implicit aesthetic all the more ironic: his poem’s imaginative artistry presupposes the power to do nothing less than reorientate the reader’s entire worldview. Beyond the philosophical schools, much Hellenistic and Imperial Greco-Roman thought synthesized and reconfigured older materials into innovative forms. A striking case is the anonymous treatise On the Sublime (see *‘Longinus’*), addressed by its Greek author to an advanced Roman student. The work employs a traditional canon of Greek authors (none postdating the fourth cent. BCE, though Cicero is briefly cited as a Roman comparandum to Demosthenes) as well as standard literary-rhetorical tools, yet endows its master concept of hypsos with a vital energy of thought and feeling which brings the greatness of the past into the present. Of special note is its conception that experience of sublimity is one in which the mind feels it has itself created the work it encounters – an idea echoed in many later thinkers, including Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Mallarmé, and Freud. In addition, creativity itself is 5 reinterpreted as a form of internalized ‘inspiration’ mediated through the agonistic struggles of writers with their predecessors (including Plato’s rivalry with Homer), a theory which prefigures Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ (and Bloom indeed called himself a ‘Longinian’ critic). On one reading, this remarkable treatise, whose author is equally capable of admiration for the Hebrew book of Genesis and the erotic lyrics of Sappho, borrows philosophical and religious vocabulary to fashion a nonetheless secularized aesthetic of literature’s mind-expanding powers. If platonizing elements in On the Sublime come without metaphysical commitments, the reverse is true of the Enneads of *Plotinus*. Like the Stoics, Plotinus has a theory of beauty (most fully expounded in 1. 6 and 5. 8) with implications for contemplating both nature and mimetic art, and like Plato’s Diotima he has a hierarchy of beauty rising from the perceptual to the ethical (i.e. virtuous souls) to the noetic (i.e. pure thought). The highest beauty, ‘beauty beyond beauty’ (6. 7. 33), can be accessed only in mystic experience, but all levels of beauty are conceived as a kind of radiance, whether literal or metaphorical, that reflects the goodness emanating from the ultimate source of reality, the One. Where the mimetic arts are concerned, Plotinus distinguishes their status as merely sensory objects (5. 9. 11) from their capacity to participate in, and convey, nature’s supra-sensible principles and archetypes (5. 8. 1-2), grasped by the maker’s mind prior to embodiment in the work. In making the sculptor Phidias create his statue of Zeus by following an idea of perfection in his own mind (5. 8. 1), Plotinus allows even the mimetic artist some insight into higher truths. This model of creativity, which goes beyond Plato’s own occasional recognition of idealistic representation (esp. Resp. 5. 472d, 6. 500e-501c) but is partly reminiscent of the Timaeus’s trope of the Demiurge as cosmic painter (Tim. 55c), was not original with Plotinus. It belonged to an ongoing tradition of thought glimpsed also, with various inflections regarding the status of the artist’s inner vision, at e.g. Cic. Orat. 2. 9, Sen. Ep. 58. 18-21, Philostr. V A 6. 19, anon. in PVindob. 29800, and, fused with the Jewish creator-god, at Philo, De opif. 16-20. But it was Plotinus above all who not only contributed to Augustine’s Christian aesthetics of beauty, but also stimulated fifteenth-century Florentine Platonists like Marsilio Ficino to give new weight to the concept of the artistic maker, especially the poet, as a god-like ‘creator’, an important precedent in turn for later notions of genius and even Romantic imagination. Afterlife That last point exemplifies the processes of reinterpretation and transformation through which ancient ideas have continued to fertilize the history of aesthetics. A further example will highlight, in conclusion, the hazards of black-and-white contrasts between antiquity and modernity. It is a commonplace that antiquity lacked an equivalent to the modern aesthetic concept of ‘art’. But that concept, which in any case has never acquired a completely secure set of parameters, came into being in the eighteenth century as a coalescence of the ‘fine arts’ or beaux arts, a category which was itself a modified version of the ancient grouping of the ‘mimetic arts’, as we see in Charles Batteux’s influential treatise of 1746, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe, a work heavily indebted to Aristotle’s Poetics. This does not mean that antiquity had the modern concept of art after all. But it does show that in aesthetics, as elsewhere, the relationship of ancient to modern is often constituted by complex layers of historical evolution. 6 Bibliography Asmis, Elizabeth. “Hellenistic Aesthetics: Philosophers and Literary Critics.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Edited by M. Kelly, vol. 2, 389-391. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Burnyeat, Myles F. “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 20 (1999): 217-324. 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