ART, POLITICS AND PLATO

Press, 8 April 1978, Page 15

ART, POLITICS AND PLATO

Tht Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. By Iris Murdoch. Oxford. 89 pp. $6.55. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary)

When Shelley remarked that poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world" he was recognising the close, but diffuse connection which exists between the pol’tical behaviour of a people and the myths and images reflected in its art. In his day, as in our own, the artists were often ahead of oubhc thinking, promoting values and attitudes which had still to be accepted by the community at large. In a society which believes that change is generally for the better, and that men can be persuaded to improve their lo' once they are shown the way, this belief in the efficacy of art can place the poets and their colleagues in a privileged position. But what of a society which is already believed by its rulers to be as perfect as men can make it? Or what of a world in which change is recognised as a random and uncertain business, an affair of cycles in which evil is as likely to result as good from questioning and disruption of the established ways of behaving?

Then change will be resisted and the questionings and probings of the artistic spirit will be met with censorship and even persecution. Artists appear as meddlers, independent and irresponsible critics: even worse, artists, by imitating reality and by extending men’s sense of what is possible, can lure their audience away from justice and truth. Plato recognised this 2500 vears ago when he wrote in the “Republic” that

dramatic poets who visited the ideal state would be politely escorted to the border. As his political thought developed he took the process a stage further and, in the “Laws,” proposed a thorough system of censorship to ensure the continuity of a stable political society.

Later commentators have generally divided sharply between those who attempt to explain away Plato’s authoritarian attitude to some of the highest achievements of the human spirit, and those who take his attitude to the arts as an indication that, for

all his pursuit of the ideals of truth and beauty, justice and good, Plato was at heart the first totalitarian, the begetter of Lenin and Hitler. Even Plato, on occasions, recognised the wry’ paradox set by his attitude to the arts. He saw plainly that his awn writing was among the highest art forms of civilised Greece. He used 'art to condemn artists, even when he wrote in the “Protagoras” that “arguments about poetry remind me of provincial drinking parties.” All this is no more than a prologue tc the intricate, careful examination of Plato’s attitude 10 the arts which Iris Murdoch presented as a public lecture in 1976. That talk, considerably expanded, makes a brilliant, brief examination of Plato’s thought and its significance today. To attempt to summarise her argument would not do justice to its rigorous reasoning. Sufficient to say that she concludes that Plato, like Tolstoy, believed good art was good for us. What looks like an affirmation in Plato of the abuse of power to control human sensitivity turns out to be an affirmation of the enormous power of the’ arts to educate, for good or evil.

Iris Murdoch remains opposed to the totalitarian streak in Plato, as indeed one must be. But try listening to the more vulgar forms of popular music on a commercial radio station today; listen to the words (where they are intelligible), reflect on what they are actually saying, and think again whether Plato was so wrong to propose that those who wrote and performed such rubbish should suffer no worse fate than to be quietly banished.