Zeng 1

Jack Zeng

Seamus Murphy

Philosophy

17 April 2020

Topic Proposal

Topics Under Investigation: What is the proper attitude toward art? Is art to be appreciated by its

intrinsic values or not? If so, what are the opinions and their drawbacks?

Why This Topic: I take AP Art History at school, which always stirs in me the question of artistic

appreciation, and I wanted to investigate it by myself.

What Do I Know: There are two basic attitudes towards arts, art for art’s sake or art for moralizing

purposes.

Sources Already Consulted: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Contingency, Irony, and

Solidarity, Republic, Poetics.

Inquiry / Thesis Question: Is it really necessary to preserve such a distinction, the tradition of

diving art into form and values, ecstasy and doctrines, selfhood and universality?

How to do the Research: I will outline different thoughts chronologically, analyze how each one

responds to the demand of its ancestors, and evaluate its impact, and to wrap up with my own idea.

Timeline: About three to four weeks as the project goes for, and read books and sources

chronologically, from Republic to Poetics, and maybe some other introductory sources by Chinese

authors.
 Zeng 2
Essay Outline

1. Introduction—Why Defend Poetry? Or Art?

This part introduces the incipient conflict between art and philosophy from Athenian polis,

through Plato’s dialogues. The structure of the essay is made explicit here: different philosophers’

perspectives and responses to each other, accompanied by my evaluation of their validity. The main

source is Republic.

2. The first fashion in defense of Poetry—“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the

world.”

This part is dedicated to exploring Aristotle’s contribution to the conception of art as of a

moralizing capacity, ready to cleanse degradation in souls and evoke catharsis. The critique of his

approach is also offered. The main source is Poetics.

3. The second fashion in defense of Poetry—“l’art pour l’art” and resistance to hermeneutics

This part is dedicated to exploring Kant’s transcendental conception of art and Nietzsche’s

view of art as expressing life rather than slave morality. Evaluations will be provided, with sources

from The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.

4. Conclusion: The Two Ways of Artistic Expressions—Contradictory and Interdependent

This part is a summary of the two approaches, and evaluate how the second fashion is

problematic. This part will also reveal the central thesis, inspired by Richard Rorty’s philosophy,

that it may be unnecessary to preserve the tradition of distinguishing art from philosophy, form from

content, self-creation from moral messages. The main sources are Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

 Zeng 3

A Defense of Poetry—or Art

Jack Zeng

Seamus Murphy

Philosophy

17 April 2020
 Zeng 4
1. Introduction—Why Defend Poetry? Or Art?

As one of the most renowned philosophers in history, Plato explores the relation between

poetry and city-states (polis) in Socrates’ tongue in Republic and provides a systematic criticism on

poetry. In Book X, he reaches a more or less ghastly conclusion: poetry erodes souls and poets

ought to be exiled (Plato 339). From then on, the struggle between poetry and philosophy in general

have become a great point of interest for intellectual debates, from Aristotle to Nietzsche.

Throughout history, the concept of poetry designates more than the particular format of literature

generally thought of as “poems,” but a wide range of artistic forms, such as novels, drama, and

painting. In fact, Socrates has frequently discussed the dramatic tradition in Athens. This being the

case, nearly all professional writers or art critics have to ponder over this “ancient antagonism” on

art and defend themselves. In this paper, I shall map out different philosophers’ views of poetry to

art in general, such as those of Plato’s scathing critique of arts and Aristotle’s attempt at a

justification for art, and lay out two broadly defined trends in this movement—art for a purpose and

art for art’s sake—and examine how this distinction relates to politics and public space. I would

evaluate these philosophers’ strength and if they failed their mission or appeared clumsy to

criticisms. In the end, I will explain my own view on art, that the split of content and form may be

ineffective and useless, inspired by liberal philosopher Richard Rorty.

In his Theory of Forms, Plato points to our empirical world as fragile, capricious, and

incomplete, a poor duplication of an unchanging realm of Forms. Humanity should follow the guide

of rationality in souls and extricate themselves from lust to reach the highest realm. Clearly, Plato

distinguishes between essence (Idea/Form) and phenomena, rationality and sensation, the former

superior to the latter. Therefore, it is possible that Plato’s despise of art results from its

incompatibility with the perfect realm.

First of all, he recognizes poetry as the appearances of appearances, “two removes from

nature” (Plato 343), from the realm of Ideas. Since the empirical world is already a duplication of
 Zeng 5
the realm of Ideas, poetry, which is inspired by living experiences, is merely an even poorer

duplication. He illustrates this point with the example of a painter: craftsmen create couches based

on the eternal Form of couches, yet painters draw a couch only from a narrow point of view, with

“only a small hold on anything, and an illusory one at that,” and it is only the painters’ techniques

that fool the audience into admiring the “realness” of the couches (Plato 344). In other words, while

poetry, or literature, seem to create whole and complete ideas, they are just creating whole and

complete illusions. For instance, Socrates, or rather Plato, humiliates Homer for poets’ incapacity to

govern with the question: “What about you? Which city credits you for having been a good

lawgiver and brought it benefits” (Plato 346), while despising Homer for distortion of ethics and

holiness in his narration of gods’ sufferings, sins, and conflicts (Plato 354). Plato adds that poems

result from temporal and inexplicable enlightenment or mesmerization, being “a person splitting

into factions” and poets lack genuine wisdom (Plato 351). This is why they bear few disciples and

suffer from touches of senility, while philosophers are admired everywhere for possessing eternal

knowledge of the world (Plato 346).

Most importantly, Plato argues that worship and praise of poems would deteriorate the city.

In Republic, Plato points out that once people are obsessed with tragedies or other emotional forms

of drama and poetry, their souls will be tarnished by excessive sensations and bent to fear and

excitement (Plato 68-69). It should be noted, however, that Plato’s critique of poetry indicates that it

is conducive to democracy—the belligerent forms of poetry rebel against any formal designation

and rules in search for unbounded voices. This is not to say that for Plato democracy is “good”—for

one, it could be this emotional and lively democracy that sends Socrates the hemlock, and Plato

argues for philosopher-kings instead.

Plato sees the best of human life in philosophical meditation, and opposes literature for

deprivation of wisdom and decency, degrading a city’s morality. These two positions stand as the

chief points of debate for later attempts to defend poetry.

 Zeng 6
2. The first fashion in defense of Poetry—“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the

world.”

Plato’s disciple, Aristotle, heralds the defense of poetry. Following Plato’s view of literature

as a form of copy, Aristotle argues for a distinct copy with literature. He writes, “imitation is natural

to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most

imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation” (Aristotle 9). In other words,

imitation is not a lower performance “by nature.” More importantly, Aristotle argues that poetry

demands serious understanding, because poets differ from historians in the sense that they are not

responsible for “the thing that has happened”, but only the thing “that might happen” (Aristotle 14),

so that they are not responsible for collecting or spreading the wisdom present in existent things. In

other words, poetry deals not with particular things but those of general patterns and origins. Poetry

is born into but can be superior to life, and poets freely legislate for their world in imagination. In

Percy Shelley’s words from “A Defence of Poetry,” “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of

the world” (Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”).

As for the Plato’s second objection to poetry on their lack of decency to souls, Aristotle

believes proper selection and arrangement of poetry and drama would be, on the contrary,

conducive to the ethics of souls. This is the Aristotelian concept of “catharsis” in his discussion on

tragedies (Aristotle 12). There is no consensus on the precise definition of “catharsis”—some

translate it into “disclosure,” some “cleansing.” However numerous the interpretations, the essence

of this concept is that when one watches such a tragedy as Oedipus Rex, one experiences emotions

that transcend daily experiences, which Aristotle calls “pity and fear” for characters’ underserved

misfortunes in the play (Aristotle 18). Although this feeling is intense, it is guided not by excess but

by reason: as the audience empathize with Oedipus, they will reflect on the moral responsibilities

and ethical limitations, in the context of Oedipus’s perseverance and courage (Aristotle 18).

Catharsis is essentially the weld of emotional politics, in which the audience meditate upon visual
 Zeng 7
or spiritual artistry and eventually develop or alter their ethical awareness, through a “language with

pleasurable accessories” (Aristotle 12).

It may be said that since Aristotle, missions in defense of art have often followed the

intellectual paradigm that poets are both prophets of the unknown and moralists who provide ethical

guidance in skillful fashion. From Renaissance poet Philip Sydney who sees poetry as the pinnacle

of all civilizations, Marxist critique of ideology in literature, to 19th century structuralist search for

humanity’s shared epistemic fashion, the concept of “pre-established structures” in different forms

of arts, none forgot to appropriate Aristotle’s assumption that poetry bears a shared principle or

purpose. Similarly, theories on the moralizing capacity of literature have developed over time,

bringing literature a sense of sublimity. Richard Rorty, a literary critic, has noted that “pain is

nonlinguistic” (Rorty 109), so that writers should not merely work to “speak for the oppressed,” as

they may essentially lack such a language at all—rather, they should create a language for the

oppressed to diminish their suffering done or ignored by those with the power and desire to act

freely, or “the tendencies to cruelty inherent in searches for autonomy” (Rorty 144). As he notes,

since literary merit should exceed mere fancy redescriptions of what we are told—as sanctioned by

those in power—it must “be parasitic on moral interest” to “break the crust of convention” (Rorty

167).

It seems that following Aristotle, poetry has weathered attacks from philosophical inquiry

for the principles and “pedantic values” it bears, in contrast to Plato’s criticism of its lack of

knowledge and purposes. However, is that so? In Arthur Danto’s The Philosophical

Disenfranchisement of Art, he blatantly notes that from the incipient philosophy in Greece, the

“warfare between philosophy and art is declared” (Danto 5) that results in two philosophical

responses to art. The first is to deny art’s influence over the realm of Ideals or Forms, that “art

makes nothing happen” (Danto 5) when philosophers are “taking art at its own self-estimate” (6).

The second approach is Aristotle’s selective appreciation of art for its reason and purposes.
 Zeng 8
However, Danto argues, this search for rationality in art which seeks to justify it falls exactly into

the critique by Plato—that “good art” is simply when reason “colonizes the domain of feelings” (7),

so that eventually art is either defused in itself as in the first case or considered just another form of

philosophical activity, only uncouthly. Art, in itself, becomes a void. This view of art is in fact

implied by artistic analyses throughout history: for instance, art can refer to “capitalist

consciousness”, to the idea of “totalitarianism ideology”, or “male gaze” under patriarchy. In this

sense, all forms of art, whether poetry, novels, drama, once admitted to critical and rational

analyses, become a means rather than an end, and art can never be “for art’s sake.”

In fact, this pessimistic view of Aristotle’s attempt to avoid Plato’s criticism is not just an

implication: Plato himself has resorted to literary forms or imagery to illustrate his ideas, such as

the Allegory of Cave and Ship of State. In this sense, it is save to argue that maybe Plato does not so

much reject art as domesticate art, so as to let it serve the city. For example, in Book II of Republic,

he proposes to adopt and promulgate epics that cultivate spirit and morality in youth, with deliberate

censorship for the “story-tellers” (Plato 69). Isn’t it the same logic of the Allegory of Cave—when a

caveman directly gazes at the sun, he will be blinded, and the best pedantic approach is to guide him

along impressions, imaginations, and finally the reason. It is also save to say that, therefore, many

great attempts in history to defend poetry for its “values” or “purposes”, may have long ago fallen

into Plato’s trap.

3. The second fashion in defense of Poetry—“l’art pour l’art” and resistance to hermeneutics

Contrary to the rational hermeneutical approach to justify art led by Aristotle, the rise of

modernity has brought up an avant-garde path of defense. It begins with Enlightenment through

Romanticism, through such writers as Kant and Nietzsche, in an attempt either to justify art’s

intrinsic values or to shatter the dominance of rationality, in search for free navigation unchained by

any “central themes.” In other words, it is an attempt to justify l’art pour l’art, “art for art’s sake,”

in contrast to previous search for purposiveness.

 Zeng 9
One approach begins with the dismissal of anything “valuable” in art, explained by Kant. In

coherence with his concept of transcendental categories, Kant characterizes the proper attitude to art

as “disinterest” (Danto 9). It is logical for Kant to posit this attitude given his systematic constraints

in his philosophy: since artistic judgement is assumed to be universal, one’s judgement cannot

therefore be concerned with his or her idiosyncrasy, which sets the best art as general and un-

relatable, therefore “meaningless” for private associations. Kant’s idea is clearly normative, about

what art “should” be, while it can also be argued that Plato, in his dismissal of the majority of

emotional artworks for their distortions and lack of rationality, also factually argues for Kant—since

philosophers only meditate over Forms, they possess no interests in the world of appearances, let

alone a lower one as art. In this sense, precisely because art in general can only be copies of reality

and imperfection as such, and only stupidly and clumsily about itself , philosophers usually find it

meaningless and vulgar, obsessed with itself and not with any associations with empirical or

rational reality.

For Kant, since the highest form of art cannot denote anything of personal interest or

meaning, its “use” lies paradoxically in its uselessness; in Arthur Danto’s words, “its worth consists

in its worthlessness” (10). However, this seemingly negation of art’s practical values doesn’t

indicate that we should then declare an existential crisis for art and discard art once for all. For one,

it’s hard to argue that we can successfully “discard” art, in all possible senses; most importantly, this

is not a negation at all. In other words, Kant’s view, or in fact Plato’s unconscious point, is

extremely enlightening: it means that once something is designated as art, it simply cannot be

useless, for it becomes something uniquely “artistic” that it cannot be so in any other situations. For

instance, the notorious ready-made art by French artist Duchamp has always raised the question of

“what is art.” In 1917, he submitted to an exhibition a urinal he named Fountain (Danto 17). Of

course, the sexual and biological connotation has raised superficial questions on the nature of art,

but most importantly, one could immediately realize the fact that any other urinals, albeit identical
 Zeng 10
in appearance, cannot be art for the very reason that they lack “it,” the mysterious defining “thing”

whose presence makes a thing an artwork. The question Duchamp raised, therefore, is not “what is

art” but “why something is not art” (Danto 18). In other words, as we try to appreciate the urinal

and find ourselves mesmerized by its disturbing appearance that seems to resist absorption into art,

we are already revealing to ourselves the notion that everything else about this object is already

judged by art. The very notion of something as not art begins with the assumption that there is art

itself, whose distance from philosophy is both revealed and mitigated by the study of aesthetics.

In contrast to Kant’s rational approach to account for art’s intrinsic values, Nietzsche does so

as he brutally smacked the chain of rationality in his ridicule of the metaphysical tradition of

western philosophy. He points out that modernity brought about the collapse of Christianity and

Platonic metaphysics, and humanity is mired in its full horror of nihilism which signals the

destruction of faith and ultimate purposes in life. He also notes that the collapse of the two spiritual

skyscrapers didn’t bring humanity to life, but back to enslavement under the yoke of rationality, a

mental nihilism more objectionable and degenerate than religious nihilism (Chen 143). In his

exploration of Greek civilization, he turned his resentment toward Socrates into his admiration of

Dionysus, the Greek God associated with wild religious rites and passionate sexual outbursts (Chen

157). In his banquet, the guests gathered to lash out on their desires until fully overcome by fatigue

and exhaustion. By the time Nietzsche discussed it in The Birth of Tragedy, he hadn’t formulated

the concept of der Wille zur Macht, “the will to power,” but he had clearly stressed that genuine

humanity lies not in metaphysical propositions, but in irrational expressions and the ability at self-

creation (Chen 157). In ferocious banquets, the identities of slaves and masters no longer matter as

they do in Hegel’s dialectical movement of Geist (Spirit), through appreciation of tragedies and

catharsis, with the conviction of the eternal recurrence of the world. This is also Nietzsche’s

conception of art—that “art has a miraculous power of redemption, to be more robust and rich, a

thirst for sexual exhaustion and self-creation” (Chen 157). As Richard Rorty argues, Nietzsche
 Zeng 11
seeks self-justification not through any former philosophical vocabularies, but solely through his

own words, making art and literature essentially both an expression and rationale for itself, a “final

vocabulary” for the author, so that he could declare: “thus I willed it” (Rorty 109).

Indeed, whether it is Kant’s location of art’s essence in its very lack of essence as does

Duchamp, or Nietzsche’s return to art as an expression and final battleground for self-justification,

not relying on any philosophical theories submitted to the yoke of religious or rational domination,

both inspire innovation in decoding art as “art for art’s sake.” In The Sublime Object of Ideology,

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has accurately extricated a combination of two approaches from

Jacque Lacan’s development of literature psychoanalysis. An innovation developed by Jacques

Lacan is his reversal of the traditional structure of semiotics of the signifer and the signified. For

Saussure, who laid the foundation for semiotics and linguistics, the signified is superior to the

signifier (Arnold, “Kumārila”). For instance, the very concept of “dog” as well as its properties—its

bark, color, size—are the signifiers, and the origin of these characteristics is the signified, a dog that

possesses all such qualities. However, Lacan reverses this structure. He argues that signifiers are

superior to the signified. For instance, the very forms of democracy manifested—Senates, Houses,

Legislations, Popular Votes—none of them are really democracy itself, and it is by infinitely

referring to particular forms of politics as democracy that the very imagined “essential” form of

democracy is contrived. As Žižek argues, the notion of democracy “is defined not by the positive

content of this notion (its signified) but only by its positional-relational identity - by its opposition,

its differential relation to ‘non-democratic’” (Žižek 109). In other words, there is no “essential

democracy” in and of itself, and this concept is only sensible when it is thought to be located in

particular political systems which contrast with other “non-democratic systems,” and which are the

signifiers that retroactively posit democracy as their signified. In Žižek’s words, democracy is just a

“self-referential, tautological, performative operation” (Žižek 109). On the one hand, this approach

encapsulates Kant’s point—that there is essentially no “interest” or essence in any form of

 Zeng 12
representation, whether it’s political or artistic. On the other hand, placing signifiers over the

signified is exactly Nietzsche’s view on human life—that the very essence of humanity or art lies in

the activities on the plane, in the wild impulses as well as sexual outbursts, rather than any rational,

internal doctrine that asserts the “right way of living.” An example may explicate this point clearer:

under totalitarian regimes, many people are given to the illusion of inner freedom, some pure

innocent self, rather than resistance. Yet without discussions and speeches with others, where do

you get the ingredients to even think?

This notion of not just locating art’s value in itself, but also arguing for its essential non-

existence developed by 20th century psychoanalysis, is an unprecedented leap beyond Plato’s

haunted antagonism toward art. However, in some sense, this approach doesn’t so much eradicate

Plato’s doubt as clinging on the cliff with a willful justification. For one, its blatant recognition of

art’s function—itself useless, stirring excessive emotions, producing distractions from rational

pursuits—fits exactly Plato’s criticism, and its justification is in some way just a shrug, not taking

Plato’s remarks as offenses.

4. Conclusion: The Two Ways of Artistic Expressions—Contradictory and Interdependent

It’s obvious how the two fashions of defenses of poetry, or art, contradict each other. The

critique of the first is thoroughly discussed, and the second one bears more implications.

“Art for art’s sake” is close to a one-sided self-defense by artists. In fact, any artist is both

the creator and critic of artworks. This view sees an artwork, whether it is an article, an oil painting,

or a sculpture, as something private and non-decipherable, which prevents discussions and any

pedantic explanations. In other words, interpretation of art becomes itself another form of art, and

one can never claim to have “understood” an artwork. Consequently, art both erects itself upon and

collapses into itself.

Still, in my view, even with Plato’s teasing of art’s values, this conclusion is not a suggestion

for desperation. All the criticisms are grounded in the assumption that a distinction must be made
 Zeng 13
between forms and content. However, reading Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, one can hardly resist

the temptation to pity for the ignored beauty in evil, even though this work is known to herald

symbolism, a tradition that stresses form rather than content; reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin,

many critics have noted the inconsistency and logical contradictions in the narrative, yet one is all

too often overcome by the narrator’s eventual surrender to totalitarianism. The very formulations of

“forms” and “content”, perhaps, is a destruction of holistic experiences. Speaking of the possible

reconciliation between the two, Richard Rorty argues that such a distinction takes “forms” as purely

aesthetic, and “content” as able to be reduced into shared understanding or public knowledge (Rorty

167). To draw such a line, he argues, is to mistake individuals’ “idiosyncratic beliefs and desires”

for the distinction between “selfhood” and “others” (Rorty 142). Rather, it is the overlapping of

individual interests that create public space, not the contrary (Rorty 142). Rather than triumphing

content over form, “moral message” over “aestheticism,” I believe we should directly analyze how

a text shapes individual relation to the world and others. Those with implications on cruelty

ingrained in social institutions and practices, such as Tom’s Cabin and Les Misérable, can be read as

a reminder of critical thinking; those telling individual sufferings or ignorance thereof, such as

Middlemarch or Bleak House, should be our personal guide to avoid cruelty to others (Rorty 141).

In the end, however, there will not be the right metaphysical way to read or to act, and all we have

to do is realize the contingency of our claims and beliefs. Art is just as much an interesting activity

as speeches, songs, rants, laughters, and the goal is not to progress in some “right” path to realize

“humanity,” but rather, how to avoid the most basic faculty we share with animals—the ability to

suffer and feel humiliated.

Maybe the boundary between public and private sphere is much more porous, as our social

interactions reinforce our impressions of ourselves, and our individual reflections reshape the

atmosphere of public space. The coexistence of the two fashions to appreciate art mirrors

Nietzsche’s Dionysus and Apollo, who stand as a coin’s two sides of humanity. The only assurance
 Zeng 14
in poets’ defense of themselves is that, whether it’s art considered to cleanse moral degradation, or

art that calls for exhaustive sensation and deigns to rational decoding, they have rendered

themselves worth philosophers’ desperate and somewhat hostile meditation, and earned themselves

dignity and existence.

 Zeng 15
Works Cited

Aristotle. Poetics. Edited by W. Hamilton Fyfe et al. Translated by Stephen Halliwell, Harvard

University Press, 1995.

Arnold, Daniel. “Kumārila.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 7 Feb.

2020, plato.stanford.edu/entries/kumaarila/.

Chen, Jiaming. Xian Dai Xing Yu Hou Xian Dai Xing Shi Wu Jiang 现代性与后现代性⼗五讲

[Fifteen Lectures on Modernism and Post-Modernism]. Bei Jing Da Xue Chu Ban She,

2006.

Danto, Arthur C. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia University Press, 1986.

Plato. Republic. Translated by C. J. Rowe, Penguin, 2012.

Rorty, Richard M. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge U.P, 1999.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry .” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation,

www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry.

Žižek Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2019.