Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
Art
THE word "art" has a range of meanings which may be obscured by the
current disposition to use the word in an extremely restricted sense. In contemporary
thought, art is most readily associated with beauty; yet its historic connections with
utility and knowledge are probably more intimate and pervasive.
The prevalent popular association reflects a tendency in the 19th century to annex the
theory of art to aesthetics. This naturally led to the identification of art with one kind
of art -- the so-called "fine arts," "beaux arts" or "Schone
Kunste" (arts of the beautiful).
- The contraction of meaning has gone so far that the word
"art" sometimes signifies one group of the fine arts -- painting and sculpture
-- as in the common phrase "literature, music, and the fine arts."
This restricted usage has become so customary that we ordinarily refer to a museum
of art or to an art exhibit in a manner which seems to assume that the word
"art" is exclusively the name for something which can be hung on a wall or
placed on a pedestal.
A moment's thought will, of course, correct the assumption. We are not unfamiliar with the
conception of medicine and teaching as arts. We are acquainted with such phrases as
"the industrial arts" and "arts and crafts" in which the reference is
to the production of useful things. Our discussions of liberal education should require us
to consider the liberal arts which, however defined or enumerated, are supposed to
constitute skills of mind. We recognize that "art" is the root of
"artisan" as well as "artist." We thus discern the presence of skill
in even the lowest forms of productive labor. Seeing it also as the root of
"artifice" and "artificial," we realize that art is distinguished from
and sometimes even opposed to nature.
The ancient and traditional meanings are all present in our daily vocabulary. In
our thought the first connotation of "art" is fine art; in the thought of all
previous eras the useful arts came first. As late as the end of the 18th century, Adam
Smith follows the traditional usage which begins with Plato when, in referring to the
production of a woolen coat, he says: "The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the
woolcomber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the
dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to
complete even this homely production."
In the first great conversation on art--that presented in the Platonic dialogues--we find
useful techniques and everyday skills typifying art, by reference to which all other
skills are analyzed. Even when Socrates analyzes the art of the rhetorician, as in the Gorgias,
he constantly turns to the productions of the cobbler and the weaver and to the procedures
of the husbandman and the physician. If the liberal arts are praised as highest, because
the logician or rhetorician works in the medium of the soul rather than in matter,
they are called arts "only in a manner of speaking" and by comparison with the
fundamental arts which handle physical material.
The Promethean gift of fire to men, which raised them from a brutish existence, carried
with it various techniques for mastering matter -- the basic useful arts. Lucretius,
writing in a line that goes from Homer through Thucydides and Plato to Bacon, Adam Smith,
and Rousseau, attributes the progress of civilization and the difference between civilized
and primitive society to the development of the arts and sciences. "Ships and
tillage, walls, laws, arms, roads, dress, and all such like things, all the prizes, all
the elegancies too of life without exception, poems, pictures, and the chiselling of
fine-wrought statues, all these things practiced together with the acquired knowledge of
the untiring mind taught men by slow degrees as they advanced on the way step by
step."
At the beginning of this progress Lucretius places man's discovery of the arts of
metalworking, domesticating animals, and cultivating the soil. "Metallurgy and
agriculture," says Rousseau, "were the two arts which produced this great
revolution"--the advance from primitive to civilized life.
- The fine arts and the speculative sciences come last, not
first, in the progress of civilization.
The fine arts and the speculative sciences complete human life. They are not
necessary -- except perhaps for the good life. They are the dedication of human leisure
and its best fruit. The leisure without which they neither could come into being nor
prosper is found for man and fostered by the work of the useful arts. Aristotle tells us
that is "why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly
caste was allowed to be at leisure."
THERE IS ANOTHER ambiguity in the reference of the word "art." Sometimes we use
it to name the effects produced by human workmanship. We elliptically refer to works
of art as art. Sometimes we use it to signify the cause of the things produced by
human work--that skill of mind which directs the hand in its manipulation of matter. Art
is both in the artist and in the work of art--in the one as cause, in the other
as the effect. What is effected is a certain ennoblement of matter, a
transformation produced not merely by the hand of man, but by his thought or knowledge.
The more generic meaning of art seems to be that of art as cause rather than as effect.
There are many spheres of art in which no tangible product results, as in navigation or
military strategy. We might, of course, call a landfall or a victory a work of art, but we
tend rather to speak of the art of the navigator or the general. So, too, in medicine and
teaching, we look upon the health or knowledge which results from healing or teaching as
natural. We do not find art in them, but rather in the skill of the healer or teacher who
has helped to produce that result. Hence even in the case of the shoe or the statue, art
seems to be primarily in the mind and work of the cobbler or sculptor and only
derivatively in the objects produced.
- Aristotle, in defining art as a "capacity to make,
involving a true course of reasoning," identifies it with making as distinct from
doing and knowing.
Though art, like science and moral action, belongs to the mind and involves
experience and learning, imagination and thought, it is distinct from both in aiming at
production, in being knowledge of how to make something or to obtain a desired
effect. Science, on the other hand, is knowledge that something is the case, or
that a thing has a certain nature. Knowledge is sometimes identified with science, to the
exclusion of art or skill; but we depart from this narrow notion whenever we recognize
that skill consists in knowing how to make something.
"Even in speculative matters," writes Aquinas, "there is something by way
of work; e.g., the making of a syllogism, or a fitting speech, or the work of counting or
measuring. Hence whatever habits are ordained to suchlike works of the speculative reason,
are, by a kind of comparison, called arts indeed, but liberal arts, in order to
distinguish them from those arts which are ordained to works done by the body, which arts
are, in a fashion, servile, inasmuch as the body is in servile subjection to the soul, and
man as regards his soul is free. On the other hand, those sciences which are not ordained
to any suchlike work, are called sciences simply, and not arts."
The discussion of medicine in the great books throws light on the relation of art and
science, in their origin as well as their development. Hippocrates writes of medicine as
both an art and a science.
In his treatise on Ancient Medicine, he says, "It appears to me
necessary to every physician to be skilled in nature, and strive to know--if he would wish
to perform his duties--what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink, and to
his other occupations, and what are the effects of each of them on every one. And it is
not enough to know simply that cheese is a bad article of food, as disagreeing with
whoever eats of it to satiety, but what sort of disturbance it creates, and wherefore, and
with what principle in man it disagrees .... Whoever does not know what effect these
things produce upon a man, cannot know the consequences which result from them, nor how to
apply them."
As a science, medicine involves knowledge of the causes of disease, the different
kinds of diseases, and their characteristic courses. Without such knowledge, diagnosis,
prognosis, and therapy would be a matter of guesswork--of chance, as Hippocrates
says--or at best the application of rule-of-thumb in the light of past experience.
But the scientific knowledge does not by itself make a man a healer, a practitioner of
medicine. The practice of medicine requires art in addition to science--art based on
science, but going beyond science in formulating general rules for the guidance
of practice in particular cases. The habit of proceeding according to rules
derived from science distinguishes for Galen the artist in medicine from the mere empiric.
- The antithesis of artist and empiric -- suggesting the
contrast between operation by tested rule and operation by trial and error -- parallels
the antithesis between scientist and man of opinion.
IT HAS SELDOM, if ever, been suggested that an art can be originally discovered or
developed apart from some science of the subject matter with which the art deals. This
does not mean that an individual cannot acquire the habit of an art without being taught
the relevant scientific knowledge. An art can be learned by practice; skill can be formed
by repeated acts. But the teacher of an art cannot direct the learning without setting
rules for his pupils to follow; and if the truth or intelligibility of the rules is
questioned, the answers will come from the science underlying the art.
According to Kant, "every art presupposes rules which are laid down as the foundation
which first enables a product if it is to be called one of art, to be represented as
possible." In the case of "fine art," which he distinguishes from other
kinds of art as being the product of "genius," Kant claims that it arises only
from "a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given." Yet
he maintains that a "rule" is still at its basis and may be "gathered from
the performance, i.e., from the product, which others may use to put their own talent to
the test."
Granting that there is no art without science, is the reverse true, and is science
possible without art? The question has two meanings. First, are there arts peculiarly
indispensable to the development of science? Second, does every science generate a
correlative art and through it work productively?
Traditionally, the liberal arts have been considered indispensable to science. This has
been held to be particularly true of logic. Because they were intended to serve as the
instrument or the art for all the sciences, Aristotle's logical treatises, which
constitute the first systematic treatment of the subject, deserve the title Organon
which they traditionally carry. Bacon's Novum Organum was in one sense an effort
to supply a new logic or art for science, and to institute a renovation of the sciences by
the experimental method.
As an art, logic consists of rules for the conduct of the mind in the processes of
inquiry, inference, definition, and demonstration, by which sciences are constructed.
Scientific method is, in short, the art of getting scientific knowledge. In the
experimental sciences, there are auxiliary arts--arts controlling the instruments or
apparatus employed in experimentation. The experiment itself is a work of art, combining
many techniques and using many products of art: the water-clock, the inclined plane, and
the pendulum of Galileo; the prisms, mirrors, and lenses of Newton.
The second question--whether all sciences have related arts and through them productive
power--raises one of the great issues about the nature of scientific knowledge, discussed
in the chapters on PHILOSOPHY and SCIENCE.
For Francis Bacon, and to some extent Descartes, art is the necessary consequence of
science. At the beginning of the Novum Organum, Bacon declares that
"knowledge and human power are synonymous since the ignorance of the cause frustrates
the effect; for nature is only subdued by submission, and that which in contemplative
philosophy corresponds with the cause, in practical science becomes the rule." The
distinction Bacon makes here between the speculative and practical parts of knowledge
corresponds to the distinction between science and art, or as we sometimes say, "pure
and applied science." He opposes their divorce from one another. If science is the
indispensable foundation of art and consists in a knowledge of causes, art in Bacon's view
is the whole fruit of science, for it applies that knowledge to the production of effects.
His theory of science and his new method for development are directed to the establishment
of man's "empire over creation" which "is founded on the arts and sciences
alone."
Just as the present state of the arts accounts for "the immense difference between
men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe, and in any wild and barbarous region
of the new Indies," so further advances in science promise the untold power of new
inventions and techniques.
On Bacon's view, not only the value, but even the validity, of scientific knowledge is to
be measured by its productivity. A useless natural science--a science of nature which
cannot be used to control nature--is unthinkable. With the exception of mathematics, every
science has its appropriate magic or special productive power. Even metaphysics, in
Bacon's conception of it, has its "true natural magic, which is that great liberty
and latitude of operation which dependeth upon the knowledge of forms."
The opposite answer to the question about science and art is given by Plato, Aristotle,
and others who distinguish between speculative and productive sciences. They differ from
Bacon on the verbal level by using the word "practical" for those sciences which
concern moral and political action rather than the production of effects. The sciences
Bacon calls "practical" they call "productive," but under either name
these are the sciences of making rather than doing--sciences which
belong in the sphere of art rather than prudence. But the significant difference lies in
the evaluation of the purely speculative sciences which consist in knowledge for its own
sake, divorced from art and morals, or from the utilities of production and the
necessities of action.
In tracing the history of the sciences, Aristotle notes that those men who first found the
useful arts were thought wise and superior. "But as more arts were invented, and some
were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the
latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because
their branches did not aim at utility. Hence, when all such inventions were already
established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of
life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure . . .
. So that the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any
sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the man of experience, the master-worker
than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of
Wisdom than the productive."
- That the theoretic sciences are useless, in the sense of not
providing men with the necessities or pleasures of life, is a mark of their superiority.
They give what is better than such utility--the insight and understanding which constitute
wisdom.
The Baconian reply condemns the conception that there can be knowledge which is
merely contemplation of the truth. It announces the revolution which, for John Dewey,
ushered in the modern world. The pragmatic theory of knowledge had its origin in a
conception of science at every point fused with art.
THE ANCIENTS, trying to understand the natural phenomena of change and generation, found
that the processes of artistic production provided them with an analytic model. Through
understanding how he himself worked in making things, man might come to know how nature
worked.
When a man makes a house or a statue, he transforms matter. Changes in shape and position
occur. The plan or idea in the artist's mind comes, through his manipulation of matter, to
be embodied and realized objectively. To the ancients a number of different causes or
factors seemed to be involved in every artistic production--material to be worked on; the
activity of the artist at work; the form in his mind which he sought to impose on the
matter, thus transforming it; and the purpose which motivated his effort.
In the medical tradition from Aristotle through Galen to Harvey, there is constant
emphasis upon the artistic activity of nature. Galen continually argues against those who
do not conceive Nature as an artist. Harvey consciously compares the activity of nature in
biological generation to that of an artist. "Like a potter she first divides her
material, and then indicates the head and trunk and extremities; like a painter, she first
sketches the parts in outline, and then fills them in with colours; or like the
ship-builder, who first lays down his keel by way of foundation, and upon this raises the
ribs and roof or deck: even as he builds his vessel does nature fashion the trunk of the
body and add the extremities."
Of all natural changes, the one most closely resembling artistic production appears to be
generation, especially the production of living things by living things. In both cases, a
new individual seems to come into being. But upon further examination, artistic production
and natural generation reveal significant differences -- differences which divide nature
from art.
Aquinas considers both and distinguishes them in his analysis of divine causation. In
things not generated by chance, he points out that there are two different ways in which
the form that is in the agent is passed on to another being. "In some agents the form
of the thing to be made pre-exists according to its natural being, as in those that act by
their nature; as a man generates a man, or fire generates fire. Whereas in other agents
the form of the thing to be made pre-exists according to intelligible being, as in those
that act by the intellect; and thus the likeness of a house pre-exists in the mind of the
builder. And this may be called the idea of the house, since the builder intends to build
his house like to the form conceived in his mind."
- Thus in biological procreation the progeny have the form of
their parents--a rabbit producing a rabbit, a horse, a horse. But in artistic production,
the product has, not the form of the artist, but the form he has conceived in his mind and
which he seeks to objectify.
Furthermore, in generation, and in other natural changes as well, the matter which
undergoes change seems to have in itself a tendency to become what it changes into, as for
example the acorn naturally tends to become an oak, whereas the oaken wood does not have
in itself any tendency to become a chair or a bed. The material the artist works on is
entirely passive with respect to the change he wishes to produce. The artistic result is
in this sense entirely of his making.
The realm of art, or of the artificial, is then opposed to the natural and differentiated
from it. Kant, for whom art is distinguished from nature "as making is from acting or
operating in general," claims that "by right, it is only production through
freedom, i.e., through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action, that
should be termed art." Consequently, art is that which would not have come into being
without human intervention.
- The man-made object is produced by man, not in any
way, but specifically by his intelligence, by the reason which makes him free.
Animals other than man are apparently productive, but the question is whether they
can be called "artists." "A spider conducts operations that resemble those
of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells.
- But," according to Marx, "what distinguishes the
worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality.
"At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in
the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form
in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives
the law to his modus operandi, and to which must subordinate his will."
As indicated in the chapter on ANIMAL, some writers, like Montaigne, attribute the
productivity of animals to reason rather than instinct. Art then ceases to be one of man's
distinctions from the brutes.
- But if man alone has reason, and if the productions of art
are works of reason, then those who refer to animals as artists speak metaphorically, on
the basis of what Kant calls "an analogy with art . . . As soon as we call to
mind," he continues, "that no rational deliberation forms the basis of the
labor, we see at once that it is a product of their nature (of instinct), and it is only
to the Creator that we ascribe it as art."
This in turn leads to the question whether nature itself is a work of art.
"Let me suppose," the Eleatic Stranger says in the Sophist, "that
things which are said to be made by nature are the work of divine art, and that things
which are made by man out of these are the work of human art. And so there are two kinds
of making and production, the one human and the other divine."
If we suppose that the things of nature are originally made by a divine mind, how does
their production differ from the work of human artists, or from biological generation? One
answer, given in Plato's Timaeus, conceives the original production of things as
a fashioning of primordial matter in the patterns set by the eternal archetypes or ideas.
In consequence, the divine work would be more like human artistry than either would be
like natural reproduction. The emanation of the world from the One, according to Plotinus,
and the production of things out of the substance of God in Spinoza's theory, appear, on
the other hand, to be more closely analogous to natural generation than to art.
Both analogies--of creation with art and with generation--are dismissed as false by
Christian theologians. God's making is absolutely creative. It presupposes no
matter to be formed; nor do things issue forth from God's own substance, but out of
nothing.
Thus Augustine asks: "How didst Thou make the heaven and the earth?"
And he answers: "It was not as a human artificer, forming one body from another,
according to the discretion of his mind, which can in some way invest with such a form, as
it seeth in itself by its inward eye . . . Verily, neither in the heaven, nor in the
earth, didst Thou make heaven and earth; nor in the air, or waters, seeing these
also belong to the heaven and the earth; nor in the whole world didst Thou make the whole
world; because there was no place where to make it, before it was made, that it might be .
. . For what is, but because Thou art? Therefore Thou spakest, and they were made, and
in Thy Word Thou madest them." According to this view, human art cannot be
called creative, and God cannot be called an artist, except metaphorically.
The issue concerning various theories of creation, or of the origin of the universe, is
discussed in the chapter on WORLD. But here we must observe that, according to the view we
take of the similitude between human and divine workmanship, the line we are able to draw
the between the realms of art and nature becomes shadowy or sharp.
THE DISCUSSIONS OF ART in the great books afford materials from which a systematic
classification of the arts might be constructed, but only fragments of such a
classification are ever explicitly presented.
For example, the seven liberal arts are enumerated by various authors, but their
distinction from other arts, and their ordered relation to one another, do not receive
full explication. There is no treatment of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (or dialectic) to
parallel Plato's consideration of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy in the Republic;
nor is there any analysis of the relation of the first three arts to the other
four--traditionally organized as the trivium and the quadrivium.
However, in Augustine's work On Christian Doctrine we have a discussion of these
arts as they are ordered to the study of theology. That orientation of the liberal arts is
also the to theme of Bonaventura's Reduction of the Arts to Theology. Quite apart
from the problem of how they are ordered to one another, particular liberal arts receive
so rich and varied a discussion in the tradition of the great books that the consideration
of them must be distributed among a number of chapters, such as LOGIC, RHETORIC, LANGUAGE
(for the discussion of grammar), and MATHEMATICS.
The principles of classification of the fine arts are laid down by Kant from "the
analogy which art bears to the mode of expression of which men avail themselves in speech,
with a view to communicating themselves to one another as completely as possible."
Since such expression "consists in word, gesture, and tone," he finds three
corresponding fine arts: "the art of speech, formative art, and the art of the play
of sensations." In these terms he analyzes rhetoric and poetry, sculpture,
architecture, painting and landscape gardening, and music.
A different principle of division is indicated in the opening chapters of
Aristotle's Poetics. The principle that all art imitates nature suggests the
possibility of distinguishing and relating the various arts according to their
characteristic differences as imitations--by reference to the object
imitated and to the medium and manner in which it is imitated by the
poet, sculptor or painter, and musician.
"Color and form," Aristotle writes, "are used as means by some ...
who imitate and portray many things by their aid, and the voice is used by others ...
Rhythm alone, without harmony, is the means in the dancer's imitations ... There is,
further, an art which imitates by language alone, without harmony, in prose or in
verse." Aristotle's treatise deals mainly with this art--poetry; it does not develop
for the other fine arts the analysis it suggests.
Aristotle's principle also suggests questions about the useful arts. Are such arts as
shoemaking and house-building imitations of nature in the same sense as poetry and music?
Does the way in which the farmer, the physician, and the teacher imitate nature
distinguish these three arts from the way in which a statue is an imitation, or poem, or a
house?
The Aristotelian dictum about art imitating nature has, of course, been as frequently
challenged as approved. Apart from the issue of its truth, the theory of art as imitation
poses many questions which Aristotle left unanswered. If there are answers in the great
books, they are there by implication rather than by statement.
THE MOST FAMILIAR distinction between arts--that between the useful and the fine--is also
the one most frequently made in modern discussion. The criterion of the distinction needs
little explanation. Some of man's productions are intended to be used; others to be
contemplated or enjoyed. To describe them in terms of imitation, the products of the
useful arts must be said to imitate a natural function (the shoe, for example, the
protective function of calloused skin). The imitation merely indicates the use, and it is
the use which counts. But in the products of the fine arts, the imitation of the form,
quality, or other aspect of a natural object is considered to be the source of pleasure.
The least familiar distinction among the arts is implied in any thorough discussion, yet
its divisions are seldom, if ever, named. Within the sphere of useful art, some arts work
toward a result which can hardly be regarded as an artificial product. Fruits and grains
would grow without the intervention of the farmer, yet the farmer helps them to grow more
abundantly and regularly. Health and knowledge are natural effects, even though the arts
of medicine and teaching may aid in their production,
These arts, more fully discussed in the chapters on MEDICINE and EDUCATION, stand in sharp
contrast to those skills whereby man produces the useful things which, but for man's work,
would be totally lacking. In the one case, it is the artist's activity itself which
imitates or cooperates with nature's manner of working; in the other, the things which the
artist makes by operating on passive materials supplied by nature imitate natural forms or
functions.
For the most part, the industrial arts are of the second sort. They transform dead matter
into commodities or tools. The arts which cooperate with nature usually work with living
matter, as in agriculture, medicine, and teaching. The distinction seems warranted and
clear. Yet it is cut across by Adam Smith's division of labor into productive and
non-productive. The work of agriculture is associated with industry in the production of
wealth, but what ever other use they may have, physicians and teachers, according to
Smith, do not directly augment the wealth of nations.
If to the foregoing we add the division of the arts into liberal and servile,
the major traditional distinctions are covered. This last division had its origin in the
recognition that some arts, like sculpture and carpentry, could not effect their products
except by shaping matter, whereas some arts, like poetry or logic were free from
matter, at least in the sense than they worked productively in symbolic mediums.
But by other principles of classification, poetry and sculpture are separated from
logic and carpentry, as fine from useful art. Logic along with grammar, rhetoric, and the
mathematical arts, is separated from poetry and sculpture, as liberal from fine art. When
the word "liberal" is used to state this last distinction, its meaning narrows.
It signifies only the speculative arts, or arts concerned with processes of thinking and
knowing.
The adequacy of any classification, and the intelligibility of its principles, must stand
the test of questions about particular arts. The great books frequently discuss the arts
of animal husbandry and navigation, the arts of cooking and hunting, the arts of war and
government. Each raises a question about the nature of art in general, and challenges any
analysis of the arts to classify them and explain their peculiarities.
THERE ARE TWO OTHER major issues which have been debated mainly with respect to the fine
arts.
One, already mentioned, concerns the imitative character of art. The opponents of
imitation do not deny that there may be some perceptible resemblance between a work of art
a natural object. A drama may remind us of human actions we have experienced; music may
simulate the tonal qualities and rhythms of the human voice registering the course of the
emotions. Nevertheless, the motivation of artistic creation lies deeper, it is said, than
a desire to imitate nature, or to find some pleasure in such resemblances.
According to Tolstoy, the arts serve primarily as a medium of spiritual communication,
helping to create the ties of human brotherhood. According to Freud, it is emotion or
subconscious expression, rather than imitation or communication, which is the deepest
spring of art; the poet or artist "forces us to become aware of our inner selves in
which the same impulses are still extant even though they suppressed." Freud's theory
of sublimation of emotion or desire through art seems to connect with Aristotle's theory
of emotional catharsis or purgation. But Freud is attempting to account for the origin of
art, and Aristotle is trying to describe an effect proper to its enjoyment.
The theories of communication, expression, or imitation, attempt to explain art, or at
least its motivation. But there is also a conception of art which, foregoing explanation,
leaves it a mystery--the spontaneous product of inspiration, of a divine madness, the work
of unfathomable genius. We encounter this notion first, but not last, in Plato's Ion.
THE OTHER MAJOR controversy concerns the regulation of the arts by the state for human
welfare and the public good.
Here, as before, the fine arts (chiefly poetry and music) have been the focus of the
debate. It is worth noting, however, that a parallel problem of political regulation
occurs in the sphere of the industrial arts. On the question of state control over the
production and distribution of wealth, Smith and Marx represent extreme opposites, as
Milton and Plato are poles apart on the question of the state's right to censor the
artist's work. In this debate, Aristotle stands on Plato's side in many particulars, and
Mill with Milton.
The problem of censorship or political regulation of the fine arts presupposes some prior
questions. Plato argues in the Republic that all poetry but "hymns to the
gods and praises of famous men" must be banned from the State; "for if you go
beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law
and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed the best, but pleasure
and pain will be the rulers in our State."
Such a view presupposes a certain theory of the fine arts and of their influence
on the citizens and the whole character of the community. Yet because both Plato and
Aristotle judge that influence to be far from negligible, they do not see any reason in
individual liberty for the state to refrain from interfering with the rights of the artist
for the greater good of the community.
To Milton and Mill, the measure of the artist's influence does not affect the question of
the freedom of the arts from political or ecclesiastical interference. While admitting the
need for protecting the interests of peace and public safety,
- Milton demands: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter,
and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
The issue for them is entirely one of liberty. They espouse the cause of
freedom--for the artist to express or communicate his work and for the community to
receive from him whatever he has to offer.
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