Plato (again) - as seen by Iris Murdoch

Plato (again) - as seen by Iris Murdoch*:

Art, this “fiction-making-process“ has always been, from the very beginning, mankind’s companion. And most of us are grateful for its existence, the solace, inspiration and insights we derive from it.

Which has not prevented some of the world’s finest writers and philosophers to debate the validity and morality of art, to question the principles of this “fiction-making“.

Among the first and perhaps also most vocal critic of art we find, sadly surprising: Plato! He who recommended (The Republic) exiling poets of drama from the “ideal state“ and he who also proposed a thorough program of censorship (The State).

Plato’s views on art and artists in general are one of the subjects of The Fire and the Sun - Why Plato Banished the Artists by Iris Murdoch, the Irish novelist and philosopher (1919 – 1999) best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. The Fire and the Sun - Why Plato Banished the Artists (1978) is an essay that provocatively tries to illuminate the esthetics of Plato and to defend art against his views.

Murdoch introduces us to Plato’s view on life by evoking the famous Allegory of the Cave. In this fable mankind is represented by a group who is held captive in a cave, chained to face the back wall, where all they can see are shadows cast by a fire which is behind them, some sort of laterna magica, and they take these projections for reality.

Eventually the prisoners find out the truth (by turning around) and then even manage to escape the cave and, for the first time, see the daylight in all its glory. Finally they see the sun itself, the form of the Good, in whose light the truth may be devined.

Murdoch explains how Plato saw artists as the creators of illusion, who, willfully or naively, accept the appearances at the walls of the cave for reality instead of questioning them as they should. A writer who portrays a doctor, in Plato's view, does not possess a doctor's skill but simply "imitates doctors' talk." Because of the charm of their work, such artists may be mistaken as authorities, thereby misleading people further. "Surely any serious man would rather produce real things, such as beds or political activity, than unreal things which are mere reflections of reality.“ Plato considers artists to be meddlers, independent and irresponsible critics. 

She further elaborates on Plato’s often shockingly puritanical view on art and ventures the suspicion that his feelings may contain “an element of envy“. "He had been himself a writer of poetry; and when a man with two talents chooses (or at any rate concentrates upon) one, he may look sourly upon the practitioners of the other."

Lastly she concedes that art in itself is not essential to survival, might even be unnecessary. But she argues that, even if we could be saved without having seen all the beauty art has to offer, “great art points in the direction of the good and is at least more valuable to morale than dangerous”. Providing an easy form of escapism is not what art aims for. Art is there to help to communicate and reveal the nature of reality. If art is "jauntily at home with evil and quick to beautify it," it can also "show how we learn from pain."

"The spiritual ambiguity of art," she writes, "its connection with the 'limitless unconscious, its use of irony, its interest in evil, worried Plato. But the very ambiguity and voracious ubiquitousness of art is its characteristic freedom. Art, especially literature, is a great hall of reflection where we can all meet and where everything under the sun can be examined and considered."

*Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. 

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