Plato And The Poets
Iris Murdoch (1919 -- 1999) was educated as a philosopher and taught philosophy at Oxford from 1948 -- 1963. In her high regard for Plato, and in her struggles with him, Murdoch was somewhat out of step with the leading trends in philosophy of her day in Britain and the United States and on the Continent as well. Murdoch's difficult relation to Plato may be seen in this short, dense book "The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists". Published in 1977, the book is out of print but available in a compilation of Murdoch's philosophical writings. I have the original book, not the compilation, and there is much in it to discuss. The book is based on the Romanes Lecture Murdock gave at Oxford in 1976. Founded in 1892, the Romanes Lectures are a series of free public lectures on a variety of subjects in science, art, or literature which aim to appeal to lay people as well as to scholars. In her lecture, Murdoch tried to explain Plato's views of art and artists, to understand the reasons Plato gave for his views, and to try to respond to them.
The theme of the book derives from the title "The Fire and the Sun", a figure which in turn derives from Plato's allegory of the cave in Book VII of the Republic. In his allegory, Plato, pictures a group of people chained deep inside a dark cave facing a wall. With their chains, they can barely turn their heads. There are images on the wall of the cave that can be seen because they are illuminated by a fire in the back. The people looking at the passing images think they are real -- and that they exhaust reality -- because they don't see or know anything else. Outside the cave and barely visible from inside is the sun. With their chains and perspective of shadows, those in the cave have little conception of the sun and of reality outside the cave. It is the task of wisdom, for Plato, to free people from their attachment to the images on the wall, from their own partial and misshapen perceptions, to work their way from the cave and its fire, and to understand the sun and reality rather than their own images.
Plato remains a complex, elusive thinker and his philosophy may not be of a single piece. In much of his work, Plato evidences skepticism if not outright hostility towards much poetry and art which, in Plato's Greece, remains some of the greatest that has been produced. Murdoch tries to explain why. Broadly speaking, Plato criticizes artists for taking the easy, unenlighted, egotistical way out. Artists produce images and imitations, for Plato. These images derive from the shadows on the cave illuminated by the fire. Their products are even more removed from reality that the illuminations seen by the people chained to look at the wall. Artists mislead and seduce by portraying images of images without the requisite enlightenment and training to see things as they are.
Much of Murdoch's study elaborates this criticism as she moves through Plato's changing views of the nature of reality, his theory of Forms, as it develops and is qualified in his later works such as the "Philebus" "Parmenides", "Sophist", "Timaeus", and "Laws". It is always rewarding for me to be reminded of these writings. As Plato's thought deepened, it move somewhat away from a sharp divide between the abstract world of the form and the barren images on the wall. In "Sophist" and "Timaeus" in particular, Plato saw that there was interpenetration in reality. The sharp divide between image and reality suggested in the Cave allegory and in earlier dialogues is only part of the story.
Much modern philosophy rejects Plato and Platonizing, but Murdoch sees the force of Plato's criticism of art because she shares some of his underlying beliefs. She sees the purpose of thought and of philosophy as a movement beyond egoism and selfishness and grasping towards reality. And she shares in broad outline Plato's vague portrayal of a transcendent good to be contemplated and brought to bear in human life. She does not do so in any Christian or Western religious way. Her view is more akin to Plato's pagan view, or to that of Eastern religion from which she also learned much. Thus, Murdoch is able to present Plato's criticism of art with force, finding that it is of "a fundamentally religious nature." (p. 65)
In the final pages of the book, Murdoch tries to respond to Plato on his, and her, own terms. The world of the forms and of transcendent reality is mixed in a way difficult to explain with the world of images. Art, in common with every human endeavor, is a mixture of the two. High art is directed to the good and to the transcendent and in taking the viewer, hearer, outside of the binds of ego and illusion. It is a short cut, perhaps, but one democratically open to all. When illuminating goodness and reality it is valuable. Murdoch's portrayal of a Platonically valuable art too adopts a philosophical basis that is not entirely contemporary. This can be thoughtful and valuable. It is interesting to read Murdock's novels, such as "The Sea The Sea" with an understanding of her philosophical perspectives and her conflicted relationship to Plato and to claims for a transcendent reality.
This book is short, difficult, and includes many insightful parallels to thinkers such as Freud and Kant in addition to its exploration of Plato's writing. I enjoyed revisiting this book and thinking about Plato.
Robin Friedman
