Life Sentences (34 page)

Appearances are to be saved by being explained, not improved. It is important to the psyche that this world not be understood to be a deliberate lie, rather just a necessary one. Poets, it is true, do not make things up out of whole cloth. There
was
a Troy. It
was
destroyed. But they are song-stitchers of low employ. They make quilts out of scraps and tatters, castoffs, rags, and misfitting sweaters,
which warm as well as the purest wool—a good that frugality might celebrate—if warming were the reason for the sheep.

Plato was, of course, aware, as many now who peruse these texts or attend these tragedies are not, that committees chose the plays that would compete; that money had to be raised for their performance, much as we squeeze uniforms from our local merchants to doll up our children’s soccer teams; that politics was always an issue; that religious implications were rife; and that the aim of the citizens who performed these tasks was principally the reaffirmation of common ideals, and the strengthening of community spirit and purpose. It was important then that the dramas appeal to the public, cause the right sort of stir, and be accounted successes.

In the Athens of this time there was another contest: that between the poets, priests, philosophers, and politicians, for the power that the approval—the applause of the people—might give them. So that they might lead, they claimed to bear the solemn burden of the truth, a burden that many liars are eager to say they carry like an Olympic torch to light the public way. Plato’s complaints about the poets, in this context where the truth of things is at stake, are, I think, entirely appropriate and right, because the truth, in the politician’s oratory, arrives arrayed in rhetoric fit to the public’s fears and wants, while in a poet’s mouth, such truth becomes the sweet taste of the line, not the hard design of science or the rigor of philosophical argument. Rhyme, of the sort I have just employed, might be sugar to the ear and thus agreeable to the mind. Although sophists like Gorgias might make a public show of their rhetorical gifts, it was the mimesis of the drama that most frequently encouraged passion and desire to rule the soul. In the arena of the theater, people sometimes charged the stage, shouted angrily, and even fainted. None of this was known to be a reaction to the premises of an argument.

Plato is critical of the mimesis of the poets and the painters because he has made Truth and Beauty predicates of the Good, as every puritan has since. But he has plenty of positive use for mimesis in his own great contribution to aesthetics (in addition to the
Symposium
,
of course), namely the cosmological dialogue the
Timaeus
. This dialogue, cast in meaningful mythological terms, is a description of the making (the poesis) of the sensible universe. The Demiurge of the dialogue is a creator par excellence—the best, in fact, that could be imagined—and he will be responsible for the existence of appearance as well as its relation to reality.

From the Beginning there existed Being, Non-Being, and the great Receptacle, Space. Being is understood as the realm of Forms, and these are formulas, as I prefer to see them, expressible in mathematical terms. The epistemological essence of Platonism (I shall foolhardily say) is that we shall recognize that we have knowledge in any sphere to the degree we can express it mathematically. In any case, these Forms are arranged in a hierarchy topped by the Good that contains them all. It does not, however, contain them the way Aristotle’s idea of Being contains all that really is, for Aristotle’s formulation is always in terms of genus and species expressed in extensional language—as spaces, or classes, or sets. For Aristotle the widest, the most embracing class is the least informative one, and to say of anything that it has Being is to say the least possible about it; whereas, for Plato, the Good is an integration of other Forms the way flavors blend or colors mix, and we can find in this intentional interpretation remnants of animistic and naively realistic thinking, because Plato’s daring formulae are like recipes interested in the qualitative flavor of ideas rather than classes that can enter a large sphere as dogs might join cats in the realm of pets without altering either their own nature or the habits of cats, or even the defining properties of the class of pets in general. You can’t mix paint with that expectation. The figures in a formula do not alter just because they have been put near one another, nor do the words of common speech become other than they are; but the words in a poem and the colors in a painting are as responsive as flesh is to an amorous touch.

The realm of Forms has Being but it is not alive. Only the soul is alive. It is the moving principle, an intermediary between Being and the created world that it will animate. The Forms are the Demiurge’s
model. His palette is the chaos of sensible qualities Plato calls Non-Being, though it is scarcely nothing. It is called Non-Being because it is a mess, because without order there can be no Being. And what are these qualities? Colors, noises, feelings, I suspect; flavors, pains, probably? Aches wandering around without knees or any other place to inflict; smells that have never known noses, sours apart from their whiskeys, and every adjective as it would be if bereft of its noun—unattached, meaningless, waiting to modify. They are adrift like sea wrack in the Great Receptacle, as Plato calls it. In the womb of things to be. Time will be created as the moving image of eternity, but emptiness has always been, and here it serves as the canvas for the artist, the place the pigments will finally find their regal robes and handsome face.

With every element prepared, the Demiurge makes the Pythagoreans look smart by fashioning the frame of the universe from such simplicities as their treasured right triangle, whose figured image, when flipped so that one shape lies provocatively upon another, causes a rectangle to appear, and when spun creates a cone, and by various whirls around its hypotenuse produces whatever geometry requires, since spheres are cones rolled the right way.

Three important factors in creativity are singled out, and these three remain as resolutely present now as they were then. The Demiurge must suffer some things to come about through sheer Necessity: space is what it is, the qualities are what they are, the mural’s wall is but ten feet high, and there is an oval window in it; the words of any language, its grammar, its historical contexts, are as given as a flaw in the sculptor’s marble, or as the nubble of the canvas that requires it to be sized, or the fact that the blonde the studio has cast in the lead has a lisp more prominent than her notorious chest. On the other hand, many things come about through reason alone, when the Demiurge’s intentions are nowhere impeded. Finally, for most effects, the Demiurge must “persuade necessity,” as Plato puts it. Here the artist’s skill is at its utmost: that flaw in the marble becomes the center of the composition; necessity is not
merely the mother but it is the entire household of invention; and what could not be helped is made a help, or as the formula would later be: for the artist, the arbitrary is a gift to form.

Reality is not alive. It is the Pythagorean world of numbers and as still as the plenum of Parmenides. But think of the plight of the Forms. Put yourself in their place. You are a law of motion yet you do not move, nothing moves, there is no performance. You are the way things would change if anything did but it does not—a falling body would go splat if there were bodies and if they fell, but they do not; or you are the definition of a species extinct before knowing life and have only imaginary members; and though you are an object of knowledge, you will never know what knowing is or, like a castled virgin—flaxen-haired beauty herself—what it is like to be seen, longed for, touched, loved.

Plato never tells us why the Demiurge felt that need … to create an inferior realm, a necessarily imperfect copy of the Forms, a realm of Becoming … but I think I have suggested a reason. The Forms have what Aristotle would later call “second grade actuality”—the kind that things made for a function possess while waiting for that function to be realized: the tool in the box, the book on the shelf, the manuscript at the bottom of a drawer, a talent not yet discovered, young men at puberty before being killed in a war. The realm of Forms will not be perfect if it remains as pure as Plato at first imagines it to be. So its image is required. The Forms have implicit denotations. What does it mean to say that there are theories, laws, explanations, definitions without the heat, movement, makeup, character, or morals they delimit, regulate, and rule? Reality needs appearance to complete it.

The world needs souls if the world would be moved, and souls need poets to move them. Pythagorean formulae that resemble those for the harmonic mean are mixed like ingredients for a Christmas loaf by the Demiurge, and out of these numerals soul stuff is rolled into orbits and raised into spheres: the passage of the planets and the ceiling of the sky with all its stars becomes the soul of the world,
now understood, in purely animistic terms, to be a living breathing animal, within one of whose countless furrows we live like mites, mostly ignored. Such an amazing dream.

The movement of the planets is rational; therefore it is circular, another bit of animistic logic which prefers cycles: the daily sun, those of human generations, the phases of the moon, the periodicity of women, the revivals of the seasons, and the return of past times like comets from a long journey. And while such perfection the circle has suits the planets, who resemble real gods—un-Olympian, unanthropomorphic, undeterrable—it will not do for man or any other living things whose perfection falls far short of even the twirling of a top. Now comes a moment in Plato’s account that is straight out of the atelier. The demiurge may not make man more rational than he is, yet his touch will do just that, so, having created reason, fashioning the lower parts of the soul is left to the planetary gods, subordinate workmen, and from them our vegetable lives and our animal instincts are made, as if the background of a mural were left to the master’s best pupils to practice on. Frank Gehry cannot be expected to have designed everything he signs his name to.

These identical three-part souls are sown throughout the universe and bring to life the bodies they enter, with the curious consequence that a carrot will possess as full a soul as the rabbit who fancies it or the hunter who snares, and it will be the inadequacies of their respective bodies that will determine individuality. Souls have no more individuality than a plastic drinking cup. So if you are smarter than I am, it is because your body (hence the lower orders of the soul) has less influence on your thoughts and actions than mine has.

That is to say: you are better ruled. This is another mimetic element in the Platonic system, and develops from a proportional metaphor: the soul resides in the person as the person resides in the state. The soul, it seems, is a little kingdom that may be run well or badly, depending on whether it is governed by reason or by passions and desires. The political entity that Plato calls the Republic has a soul as well. It is composed of the three classes of citizens in the state:
guardians, functionaries, and workers. Of the cardinal virtues, three are particularly appropriate to the structure of the soul and the ruling organization of the commonwealth: temperance suits the workers, who are mastered by their appetites, as fruits and vegetables are—breeding and feeding; next, two kinds of courage, of body and spirit, are appropriate to the soldiers and administrators; while wisdom, of course, is special to the guardians. Justice, the final virtue of the four, is the harmony in each soul that is reflected in an analogous harmony in the state, each element performing its proper task.

Using this scheme it is possible to describe governments in terms of the balance of the classes in them, and whether the citizens have been properly sorted out. Tyrants, who were as plentiful then as they apparently always are, furnished examples of city-states ruled by the worst rather than the best, and democracies (by which Plato understood a government largely run by tribes or demes, with officials chosen from them somewhat at random) little better run than if they were not run at all.

We have not yet passed through the entire mimetic chain. If the Forms are definitions—definitions of functions—they are also instructions, and the world of appearance participates in the forms (one meaning of
mimesis
) by carrying out these instructions, though how specifically Plato never makes clear. Any bed, for instance, will exhibit the physical laws that make its structure suitable for sleep, a need that human beings have, according to a form’s program for us. But we do not dwell in this world the way trees or stones or beds do, unconscious of their surroundings. Is what we see when we see, and feel when we touch, a copy too?

It would be too much to expect a culture that has just discovered the self, just made the distinction between appearance and reality, located abstract ideas as if they were stars from another hemisphere, and begun the foundations of logic as well as the entire remaining table of contents for philosophy, to have driven its epistemology so quickly into subjectivity as later the Enlightenment would; but in the
Theaetetus
, Plato has put his pedal to the metal. He fashions for
us another amazing sexual metaphor. Such images appear to be his specialty.

He conjectures that when we see, rays emanating from the eyes encounter, as a searchlight might, other rays reflected by or sent forth from objects. These rays intermingle like passionate limbs and from their intercourse are born twins (which, as we know, are a sign their mother has suffered trespass as well as the owner’s tread over his rightful property). Then the eye
sees
. That is one child. And the object
becomes
white. That is the other. After all, what has Plato’s favorite word for our world been but that of Becoming. Perhaps Plato has imagined one too many rays, though today we wallow in frequencies. Still, if I blow the dog’s whistle, his ears hear, and the whistle grows loud. We would probably say: for him; but the Greeks don’t doubt the public nature of appearances. The world is as external, as objective, as the façade of the palace at Thebes. And Oedipus enters for all to see.