Plato’s Music: Beyond Aesthetics and Art
When invited to contribute a volume on great thinkers in aesthetics to the Literature and Aesthetics series, I initially planned to call it Plato’s Aesthetics or Plato on Art and Beauty. I soon realized, however, that Plato was not motivated to write about art from an interest in aesthetics, at least not in the sense we understand that term today. The words “art” and “beauty” are poor labels for what Plato was actually concerned with. The truth is, Plato deals with a wide range of topics that fall under the umbrella of literature and aesthetics: poetry, drama, myth, music, painting, perspective, attractiveness, organicity, creativity, criticism, truth, and philosophy. The terms “aesthetics,” “art,” and “beauty” cover only a fraction of these.
Chris Janaway had already used the title Images of Excellence for his excellent book on Plato’s critique of the arts. Examining Plato’s interest through the lens of human experience with images captures a fundamental Platonic concern: for Plato, imagination is the most basic form of human cognition, and images are an indispensable feature of communication. Even the most abstract philosophical intuition struggles to set them aside. It follows that Plato would focus on how poetry, myth, painting, and all the arts employ images. Janaway’s choice of “excellence” also reminds us of Plato’s constant orientation toward improvement and perfection. Much of his criticism of the arts arises from his belief that they are not fundamentally directed toward improvement, but at best toward gratification and at worst toward pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Despite these illuminating terms, Images of Excellence does not quite capture what I believe is Plato’s real focus on the arts. It emphasizes artistic products rather than their function and purpose. Moreover, focusing on Plato’s critique, as Janaway does, fails to acknowledge the artistry of Plato’s own writings and how they express what he truly values in this area. I think most of what passes today for Plato’s aesthetics or critique of the arts should be considered under the heading of Plato’s mousike, or music. When Plato examines art, art theory, criticism, or aesthetics, he almost always does so in the context of music. This holds true even when he writes about painting or sculpture, two technai that are not strictly part of ancient Greek music.
What music meant to Plato
For Plato, music encompassed nearly everything we would call “the arts” today. It included epic and lyric poetry, all forms of drama—tragedy, comedy, and choral odes—along with musical accompaniment, dance, and song. Because poetry was always sung and drama always involved singing and dancing suggests that ancient Greek music emphasized what we now call the performing arts, particularly those with a strong musical component. Notably absent from ancient music were the fine arts: prose literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Given that modern aesthetics and literary criticism focus heavily on these fine arts, it might seem odd to discuss Plato’s views on literature and aesthetics at all. That would be overstating, but the distinction between literature-and-aesthetics on one side and music on the other is crucial for understanding what Plato was after in all his writing about the arts, even where his concern is with beauty (to kalon) or aesthetic properties in general.
The boundary between aesthetics and music is not as self-evident as it seems. Superficially, it maps onto our distinction between performing arts and fine arts. But this alignment is partly an accident of Greek cultural development. There is no inherent reason why Greek prose literature, painting, sculpture, and even architecture could not have been absorbed into a concept of performing arts, and therefore into music. Let me briefly illustrate.
Prose literature is more complicated than painting, sculpture, or architecture because its emergence as a distinct genre from poetry was just beginning in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, as historical, philosophical, and rhetorical works were being written. However, prose literature shows clear signs of being linked to performance art. Rhetorical works, for example, were performance pieces in their own right, intended for declamation before large audiences. Early history and philosophy works, including those in verse like those of Parmenides and Empedocles, would hardly qualify as performance pieces in the same sense, but neither would they straightforwardly count as literature in our modern sense. Plato’s dialogues present an entirely different story, and I will return to them. For now, note that Plato himself would likely have associated them with performance. In fact, he uses the delightful irony of metafiction to suggest that his own dialogues should replace poetry in the education of the young. As the Athenian Stranger tells his companions in the Laws:
As I look back on the discourse you and I have been holding ever since daybreak until this moment—and I really believe there has been some divine guiding about the matter—well, be that as it may, our converse has been, to my mind, just like a kind of poem. I dare say there is nothing surprising in my having felt this keen pleasure in reviewing this compact formation of discourse of my own composition. The fact is that of all the many compositions I have met with or listened to, in verse or in plain prose, I find it the most satisfactory and the most suitable for the ears of the young. So I really think I could not direct our curator of law and minister of education to a better standard or bid him do better than instruct his schoolmasters to teach it to their pupils…
Notice how Plato’s dialogue is described as “just like a kind of poem” and as something to be listened to by the “ears of the young.” This strongly suggests that even a Platonic dialogue was a piece of performance art, not literature to be read silently as we do today. With some exceptions, ancient Greek prose literature could fit under the performing arts rather than the fine arts. The same can be said for painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Greek painting, at least the kind Plato seems to have been concerned with, had clear connections to performance art. Scene painting was used predominantly in the theater. Other kinds of painting, such as panel and wall painting, generally depicted narratives. Attic vase painting often used pictorial narrative composition, featuring both monoscenic and synoptic narratives. Much of the content of pictorial narrative aligned with the myths and legends of epic poetry. Painted vases showing symposiasts singing lyric poems, including painted verse, were also common, again pointing to a close link between painting and performance. Sculpture similarly often depicts mythological narratives, with the Parthenon marbles and the Laocoon group as two of the best-known examples. Sculpture also played an important role in religious festivals, providing narrative context for processions like the Panathenaia, and the temple buildings themselves were planned with religious performance in mind.
In this way, practically all the arts of Classical Greece were involved in or associated with performance in one form or another. Poetry may be the primary art, but the rest can be seen as analogous forms. Thus, if “music” were understood simply as “performing arts,” it could incorporate literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture. While a difference in focus between Plato and today would remain—placing greater emphasis on performance over product—we could still discuss Plato’s general views on art without too much distortion. But it turns out that the exclusion of painting, sculpture, and architecture from music is not based on their status as fine arts versus performing arts; we need to look deeper.
Why painting and sculpture stood apart
An examination of Plato’s dialogues reveals that painting, sculpture, and architecture are largely treated as technical rather than musical arts. The reason has more to do with enculturation than with any principle for distinguishing art forms. The essential difference, for Plato, was that music was to be learned and performed by every gentleman (kalos k’agathos), whereas painting and sculpture were only learned professionally, through apprenticeship. From the start of school, Athenian children were sent to poetic grammatists and kitharists to learn music. They learned poetry for character formation, and at an older age they learned to play the lyre and sing lyric poems, all aimed at producing a gracious, cultured, and well-tempered character. In Plato’s Protagoras, the title character goes so far as to say that “rhythm and harmonious adjustment are essential to the whole of human life” (326b5-6). Here we see that accident of Greek culture: we could easily imagine painting and sculpture being required parts of a liberal education, but they were not, and so were not considered part of music.
As far as I can tell, Plato never questions this contingent separation of the fine arts from musical education. He accepts his culture’s basic idea of what music is and includes. When he proposes his educational programs in the Republic and the Laws, he does not radically alter the type of curriculum to be used—I suspect he fully agrees with Protagoras’ statement. What he does alter is the specific content of poetry, drama, and music in general, based on philosophical reasons, some of which are aesthetic ones. Plato’s interest in music—what we now recognize as an interest in education—is more fundamental than his interest in art. Music as a form of education is essentially goal-oriented without discussion of “art for art’s sake.” To the extent that he realizes art can be created solely for sensory delight, he thinks of it negatively, as “harmless.” His focus, however, is always on art for the sake of education: producing genuine nobility or excellence of character, not just aesthetic beauty.
Virtually all of Plato’s discussion of music serves this educational aim. Most of his comments on painting and sculpture relate to it as well, since he regularly uses them as analogies or illustrations for broader points about culture and education. The nobility of character that Plato aims for is not exclusively a moral or aesthetic property; it is the perfection of what it means to be human. To achieve this, philosophy is necessary—to understand what a human being fundamentally is. Thus, philosophy becomes a crucial part of music, indeed its most fundamental part. Plato’s philosophy is music, albeit music in a rare and different key.
This compilation is about what Plato saw in music—including his own—that might help perfect character. Some of these things are properties of the artworks, some belong to makers and performers, some to audiences, and others to the relationships among all three. Nearly all of them lead us back to Plato’s attempts to understand “what is,” whether we mean what is real, true, one, or good. Ultimately, these threads cannot be separated. Readers should keep in mind the connection between “what is” and education in Plato’s thinking. For him, education involves turning the learner’s mind “from the world of becoming … like the scene-shifting periactus in the theater, until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being” (Republic 518c8-10).
A kaleidoscopic view of Plato
Let me warn readers: I did not try to assemble a volume with a single, unified approach to Plato, as I think that would be unfair to him. Instead, I gathered a variety of the best articles on Plato’s music from whatever source I could find, and am proud of the contributions. Some are hard-hitting analyses, some are close readings of the dialogues as drama, some broadly illuminate Plato the person, and others lovingly explore beautiful ideas. The real Plato can be seen through all these lenses; the kaleidoscopic view that emerges, disorienting at first, is necessary for truly appreciating him. An anonymous commentator on Platonic philosophy expresses this well:
Plato himself, shortly before his death, had a dream of himself as a swan, darting from tree to tree and causing great trouble to the fowlers, who were unable to catch him. When Simmias the Socratic heard this dream he explained that everyone would endeavour to grasp Plato’s meaning; none, however, would succeed, but each would interpret him according to his own views
This could be cause for despair only if our goal was to capture Plato and receive knowledge directly into our souls. But Plato’s Republic tells us that education is not like that (518b-c), and if I am right about Plato’s emphasis, his dialogues were never written with that aim. Plato’s music stresses activity over content, performance over product. Listen, enjoy, think. There is wonderful music here.
A final note on this volume’s dedication: I initially asked a promising PhD student, Mairead Costigan, for a contribution on the Republic. Members of the Sydney Society for Literature and Aesthetics may remember her from conference presentations and her article on Seneca’s Medea in this journal from 2000. She had completed her PhD and was awaiting graduation when she died in a tragic accident in 2007. She had only begun to show her potential as a philosopher and teacher. Her loss was devastating to those of us close to her; it is sad to know she cannot now engage in lifelong discussions with the philosophers represented here.
The Laws further specify that the arts must be studied and practiced by all citizens of both sexes (cf. Critias 106c–107a). The complete educational plan for the arts appears in Laws Book VII: though the curriculum begins with a clear directive that every male and female citizen is to receive instruction (788a), the formal program covering musical arts does not start until 797a.[16] [17]
The Laws (667d) also establishes criteria for evaluating artistic beauty; related discussions appear in the Philebus (51b–52a), the Hippias Major (303e), and the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy (1.29–35, as noted by I. Westerink, Amsterdam 1962).[18]
Rare surviving evidence of early Greek painting, such as the Pitsa Panels (National Archaeological Museum, Athens) and the wall frescoes in the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, illustrates the artistic contexts Plato references.[12] Narrative techniques among these works range from monoscenic (as on the Argos Krater fragment, Argos C149) to synoptic (exemplified by the Spartan cup, CabMed 190), both treating the blinding of Polyphemus.[13] Actual vase paintings frequently quote or allude to poetry: for instance, a red-figure cup by Douris (ca. 490, Athens 1357) evokes Theognis 1365–66, and Euphronios’ amphora (Louvre G30) mirrors Sappho fr. 36.[14]