Platonova estetika nastavak

Physical beauty is again atypical as a Form that human beings want to know. This is the
second reason Plato makes beauty such a frequent example of a Form. The process
known as anamnêsis or recollection is more plausible for beauty than it is for most other
properties. The philosophical merit of things that are equivocally F is that they come
bearing signs of their incompleteness, so that the inquisitive mind wants to know more
(Republic 523c–524d). But not everyone can read those signs of incompleteness. Soft or
large items inspire questions in minds of an abstract bent
he perception of examples of justice or self-control presupposes moral development, so
that the perceiver can recognize a law's double nature as just and unjust. By contrast,
beautiful things strike everyone, and arouse everyone's curiosity. Therefore, beauty
promises more effective reflection than any other property of things. Beauty alone is
both a Form and a sensory experience (Phaedrus 250d).
So the Phaedrus (250d–256b) and Symposium ignore people's experiences of other
properties when they describe the first movement into philosophizing. Beautiful things
remind souls of their mystery as no other visible objects do, and in his optimistic
moments Plato welcomes people's attention to them.
To make beauty effective for learning Plato needs to rely on its desirability (as
foregrounded in Konstan 2015) while also counting on the soul's ability to transfer its
desiring from the visible to the intelligible (see Philebus 65e). Plato is ambivalent about
visual experience. Sight may be metaphorically like knowledge, but metonymically it calls
to mind the senses, which are ignorant
Beauty's unmatched pedagogical effects, when the transfer of desire succeeds, show
why Plato talks about its goodness and good consequences, sometimes even its identity
with “the good”

These desirable effects also explain why Plato speaks grudgingly of beauty in art and
poetry. For him the question is not whether poems are beautiful (even perceived as
beautiful), and subsequently whether or not they belong in a theory of that prized
aesthetic property. Another question matters more than either poetry or beauty does:
What leads a mind toward knowledge and the Forms? Things of beauty do so excellently
well. Poems mostly don't. When poems (or paintings) set the mind running along
unphilosophical tracks away from what is abstract and intelligible, the attractions they
possess will be seen as meretricious. The corrupting cognitive effect exercised by poems
demonstrates their inability to function as Plato knows the beautiful object to function.
Za platona lepi o imaju jednu f koju ne ispunajvaju pesme uvek tako da zbog toga ne
pravi znak jednakosti jer mora biit oprezan kako ne bi ugrozio obrazovanje mladih ljudi.
The corrupting effect needs to be spelled out. What prevents poems from behaving as
beautiful objects do? The answer will have to address the orienting question in Plato's
aesthetics, namely: What fosters philosophical enlightenment, and what obstructs it?
Imitacija nije citav mimezis
mitation” is the commonest English translation of mimêsis. Alternatives include
“representation” and “emulation.” To make things confusing, the transliterated Greek
word sans diacritical mark has come to be accepted as English (“mimesis”). All the
translations capture something of the word's meaning in classical Greek. As long as
“imitation” is used with awareness that it will not mean everything that mimêsis does, it
makes a serviceable translation
esides mimêsis Plato sometimes speaks of a mimêma. “Imitation” like mimêsis can refer
either to a process or to that process's outcome. You engage in the act of imitation in
order to produce an imitation. A mimêma however is only ever a copy, not also the
copying act that produced it.
MIMEZIS U ARISTOFANU

Authors before Plato used mimêsis more vaguely than he did, neither specially applying
the word to a poetic process nor necessarily implying its fraudulence —with one
important exception. The comedies of Aristophanes, obsessed with Euripides and indeed
with tragedy in general (Birds 787, 1444; Clouds 1091; Plutus 423–4), introduce
comments about tragic stagecraft that say mimeisthai and mimêsis in consistently
pejorative ways.
But Aristophanes' influence on Plato extends, as commentators do not always recognize,
to the nature of mimêsis.
s in the Republic, mimêsis combines composition and performance, the invention of
characters and the portrayal of them

Republic 3: impersonation
Books 2 and 3 of the Republic assess poetry's role in the curriculum for the city's guardian
class. The first part of this passage, mainly in Book 2, condemns the images of gods and
demigods that Homer and the tragedians have produced, both blaspheming and setting bad
examples to the young (377e–392c). After this criticism of content Socrates turns to what
he labels the “style [lexis]” of narration. Poetic narration can take place through narration
alone, through mimêsis alone, or with a mix of the two (392d).
Likewise the taxonomy of narrations presumes that mimêsis must be deviant.
The subsequent pages continue treating mimêsis as anomalous, or rather as
comprehensible only under the sign of anomaly and failure. Socrates defines imitation,
develops two arguments against it, and finally proclaims that no poetry of this type will be
admitted into the city that the Republic is founding.
he defining example establishes mimêsis as impersonation. Homer's poems alternate
between third-person accounts of events (in which Homer narrates in his own voice) and
speeches of the characters involved in those events. When Homer relates Agamemnon's
rebuke to the priest Chryses he uses the abusive language that a warriors' king would use
when such a king refused to show mercy (393a–c). The presentation of character is,
notably, a process ambiguous between the act of writing or composing the words of a
character like Agamemnon, and the act of reciting (performing, acting out) the words.
The ambiguity lets Socrates deploy more than one argument against the presentation of
characters.
The main argument is blunt but clear, and plausible enough. What the new city really
does not want is the presentation of base types, because acting such parts fosters the
behaviors that are found in the persons being mimicked (395c–397e).
If acting a part does lead to taking on the characteristics of the part, then in one respect
Plato has a powerful point and in another respect is generating a misleading argument.
The point is powerful inasmuch as it lets Plato ban all portrayals of vicious and ignoble
characters but not the portrayals of brave soldiers, philosophers, and other wholesome
types. Moreover the basic factual premise is believable. Taking on someone else's traits
and tics can have a more lasting effect than the Republic's critics sometimes
acknowledge. Playing a coward or a sadist could well make an actor more cowardly or
sadistic
ven this most plausible part of the argument runs into trouble. Plato's list of things
unworthy of imitation proves surprisingly commodious. Alongside villains one finds
women, slaves, animals, musical instruments, gears and pulleys, and sounds of water.
And these last examples presuppose what the argument means to show. Sounding like
machinery does not make the imitator more like a gear or pulley; it must be a deranged
practice only insofar as all impersonation is deranged. And that is what the argument
was aiming to prove.
Znaci imamo kretanje u krugu
The case against mimêsis misleads in that it exploits the ambiguity between
impersonation as something a writer does and impersonation as the performer's task. In
1963 Eric Havelock stressed the importance of this ambiguity to Book 3; but Havelock
understated the degree to which Plato exploited the ambiguity for anti-poetic purposes.
The most convincing part of Book 3 has to assume that mimêsis is performance, both
because such effects as thunder are mimicked in performance, not on the page; and
because the bad effects of impersonation on character make more sense when describing
young actors' playing a vicious role than grown playwrights in the act of writing that role.
On the other hand performance does not involve a whole population. I
Even so, the extensiveness of the practice among young people does not justify barring all
drama from the city and from the sight of each citizen, and that is what Plato's concluding
ban comes to:
If a man were to arrive in the city whose wisdom [sophia] empowered him to become
everything and to mimic all things—together with the poems he wanted to perform
[epideixasthai]— we would worship him as someone holy [hieron] and wonderful and
pleasant, but tell him there is no man like him in our city, nor by our traditional law
[themis] can come to be here; and we would send him off to another city after pouring
myrrh on his head and crowning him with wool. (398a)
t is even doubtful whether the city will permit dramatic poems to circulate in written
form
he poet is a visitor because mimetic poetry has no natural home in the philosophers'
town. Moreover he arrives offering to recite his poems. That they are his makes him
a poet, that he comes to recite them makes him a performer. Thus he is a perfect target
embodying the ambiguity built into Book 3's definition of mimêsis.
If the fate of imitative composition stands or falls with the fate of imitative performance,
a reasonable worry about behaviors that young people experiment with balloons into an
argument against a mammoth body of literature. In short, the ambiguity in Plato's
definition of imitation does not merely remind us (as Havelock argued) that he is
witnessing the transition from oral to written culture. The ambiguity makes Plato's grand
conclusion possible.
Imitation is a formal concept in Book 3. This is to say 1) that one can distinguish
poetic mimêsis from poetic narration by looking for a formal element in the poetry; and
2) that mimêsis may make poetry more deleterious than it would otherwise be, but does
not work these bad effects by itself, only when the characters represented are bad to
begin with. The definition of imitation in Book 3 entails no general ideas of similarity or
likeness. Mimêsis functions as a technical term
Book 10 will look at imitation from a different perspective. S
Still one may say that Republic 10 revises the formal aspects of mimêsis with a picturing
or portrayal that involves more than direct quotation. The enhanced concept cannot be
understood without reference to the Republic's psychological theory. And in its
expanded form the term refers to something bad in itself.

Republic 10: copy-making

The topic in this passage (595a–608b) is a mimêsis common to painting and poetry and
much like picturing or copying.
As Book 10 begins, Socrates links the coming treatment with what Book 3 had said about
imitation. He also establishes the difference between the passages. What follows will
defend Book 3's banishment of “imitative poetry” in terms that the Republic developed in
subsequent sections, hence terms that Book 3 could not have used. “Now that we have
differentiated the soul's eidê,” the danger of imitation becomes more evident (595a–b).
An eidos is a kind, and this phrase “kinds of soul” is most often taken to mean the parts of
the soul that Book 4 distinguished (435b–441c). The Republic's theory of reason, spirit,
and desire can enlarge what had been in Book 3 no more than suspicion about the
impersonation of ignoble people. The new argument, on this reading of eidê, will charge
poetry with upsetting the balance among the soul's parts
n all Plato develops three theses during this first half of Book 10:

1. Poetic mimêsis, like the kind found in a painting, is the imitation of appearance
alone and its products rank far below truth. (596e–602c)
2. Therefore poetic mimêsis corrupts the soul, weakening the rational impulse's
control over the person's other drives and desires. (602c–608b)
3. It should therefore be banned from the good city.
The argument supporting (1) seeks to spell out how badly poetry and painting fare at
grasping and communicating knowledge. Partly because they do so badly, but also for
other reasons, mimetic arts bring moral and psychological ill effects
he words “imitation of appearance” in thesis (1) follow from Plato's three-way
differentiation:

I. Form (of couch, of table) made by a god.

II. Individual things (couches, tables) made by humans.
III. Paintings (of couch or table) made by imitators.
IV. The carpenter works with eyes aiming “toward [pros]” the Form (596b)—
significantly not with eyes on the Form—and the individual couch the carpenter
makes is thus something less than the Form. This shortcoming is an honest failing
after a decent try. If the Form is an object of knowledge, human creators at least
possess true opinion (601e). Without being philosophers, they stand in a legitimate
relationship to philosophical knowledge.
V. Thus category II is not a domain of imitation, and the table in a painting is not the
“imitation of an imitation.” Nevertheless Plato's phrase “imitation of appearance”
does characterize artistic mimêsis as a compounded problem. Imitation intensifies a
weakness present in existing objects; it not only fails but fails twice, or doubly.
Skipping ahead for a moment, the Republic's reader finds a second three-way distinction
(601c-602a) that criticizes imitation from another perspective:

I. User (of a flute or bridle) who knows.

II. Maker (of flute or bridle) who has correct belief.
III. Imitator (of flute or bridle) who is ignorant.