I think that is just pure fun, and that is something I want to indulge in. One thing, it makes me want to think of chicken rice. You know, what does chicken rice have to do with this part of the world, in Singapore? And also I think the space is very interesting to look at. The space between the audience and the performers, and when does the audience actually become the performers. The lines between these spaces are very interesting. I have a lot of… It created a lot images in my head now, that I will ponder a little a bit about.
Yes, yes I do! They always have different shows and different ways of doing the shows. That part can be used like this! I just found it very interesting, it was just very funny throughout. I like that part. Even at the end of the piece that was something that was very strongly implied. So I like that. I liked that a lot, the way they built up the tension. The last one that I went for was…actually also with Bernice and Kai Er, also like a moving, walking around kind of thing. A lot of room to play with. Yes, I love the space!
I love love love love love the space. I think that everything is relatable.
I really like the use of the space and lights. And how the piece transits from one section to another. I mean it used to be a warehouse, right? What makes you think I relate to it? No, no, because I relate to quite a few… I think the music video one I was really laughing quite a lot, because they were trying to copy the movements they were seeing. I think as a photographer the speed of the footage really struck me when they kind of failed to imitate the same speed at which the images were sort of changing.
But also because I also try to copy music videos, so I identify with that a lot, I was just laughing. Especially during the rapper part, and they were just doing this imitates movement , and trying to rap, it was so relatable because I do that all the time, so, yeah. I guess what struck me was the beginning, in the scene with the sushi plate. So that part was fun. I think I read a bit of the synopsis, in the sheets that were handed out before the show, and it just said, quite unabashedly, that they just wanted to have fun with each other.
And I guess as a practitioner myself, I think sometimes I forget how to have fun in what I do. Similarly, I think the aspect of fun itself, is big. Then would you be interested in attending more shows by TheatreWorks? I think it invites a very light and improvisational setting, I think the space itself is designed for that. A clear stage, at least. I guess like when they were having fun. This is my first show! What Plato says about imitation when he has set out to define and evaluate it ought to weigh more heavily than a use of the word he makes briefly.
Anyway the later dialogues do not speak as one. The Sophist looks into imitation in order to define what a Sophist is. And although the Sophist 's theory of imitation diverges somewhat from the one in Republic 10, similarities between them preponderate. Like the Republic the Sophist characterizes imitation mockingly as the creation of a whole world, and accuses imitation of misleading the unwary b—c , even if it also predicts more optimistically that people grow up to see through false likenesses d. Most importantly, the representation that Plato charges the Sophist with is fraudulent.
It is the kind that makes not an honest likeness eikasia but an illusory image, a phantasma d—b. In drawing the distinction between these kinds of representations the Sophist does strike a conciliatory tone not found in Republic 10, for it seems that a branch of the mimetic profession retains the power it has in the Laws and Timaeus to produce a reliable likeness of an object. But the consolation proves fleeting. The Eleatic Stranger subdivides the production of illusions to identify a species in which imitators use their own voice and bodies: He recognizes that he has appropriated the general word for the specific act of enacting false images.
Narrowing the process down to impersonation should make clear that Plato finds a Sophist's imitativeness to be much like a poet's. Just as Republic 3's taxonomy made imitation look like a freakish variety of narration, this use of a word both generically and specially excludes good imitation as the exception and the problem case. The ancients did not work hard enough making all relevant philosophical distinctions d. It is as if Plato were saying: Whether Plato should be permitted to juggle words' meanings is another question.
His quest to condemn imitation leaves him open to criticism. But he does not consciously change his theory in the direction of imitation understood positively. The Sophist 's references to divine copy-making invite another worry.
But what could be metaphysically lower than a shadow? Coming back to the Republic one finds shadows and reflections occupying the bottom-most domain of the Divided Line a. Where does poetic imitation belong on that ranking? One can articulate the same worry even remaining with the Republic 's terms. Shadows and reflections belong in the category of near-ignorance. Imitation works an effect worse than ignorance, not merely teaching nothing but engendering a perverted preference for ignorance over knowledge.
Plato often observes that the ignorant prefer to remain as they are Symposium a , but this turn toward ignorance is different. Why would anyone choose to know less? The theoretical question is also a practical one. Plato's attack on poetry saddles him with an aesthetic problem of evil. Republic 10 shows signs of addressing the problem with language of magic. The Republic already said that sorcery robs people of knowledge b—c. Finally the catalog of Homer's kinds of ignorance ends by saying his poetry casts a spell b. Poetry works magically to draw in the audience that it then degrades. References to magic serve poorly as explanations but they bespeak the need for explanation.
Plato sees that some power must be drawing people to give up both knowledge and the taste for knowledge. But what is striking about this deus ex machina that explains poetry's attractiveness is what it does not say. In other dialogues the magic of poetry is attributed to one version or another of divine inspiration. Odd that the Republic makes no reference to inspiration when dialogues as different as the Apology and the Laws mention it and the Ion and the Phaedrus spell out how it works. Odder still, Plato almost never cites imitation and divine inspiration together the lone exception Laws c , as if to say that the two are incompatible accounts of poetry.
Will inspiration play a role ancillary to imitation, or do the two approaches to poetry have nothing to do with one another? At lucky moments a god takes them over and brings value to the poem that it could not have had otherwise. Inspiration of that kind is a common idea. Either a divine source provides the poet with information needed for writing the poem information about past events or the gods' lives, for example ; or more generally the source gives the poet the talent needed for writing anything.
In this case, by contrast with that of imitation, Plato finds a new use for an idea that has a cultural and religious meaning before him Ledbetter , Murray , Tigerstedt Plato's version of the idea, however, has proved to be durable and influential. The topic occurs throughout Plato's corpus. Platonic characters mention inspiration in dialogues as far apart—in date of composition; in style, length, content—as the Apology and the Laws , though for different purposes.
Socrates on trial tells of his frustrated effort to learn from poets. Their verses seemed excellent but the authors themselves had nothing to say about them Apology 22b. The opposition between wisdom and inspiration does not condemn poets. They write by some nature phusei tini , as if inspiration were a normally occurring human instinct. For its part Laws c links the effects of inspiration to the nature of drama and its multiple perspectives:.
As in the Apology , inspiration means the poet has no truths to transmit. When the god's power comes the poet's goes. Lawmakers work differently from that. And this contrast between inspiration and the origin of laws—occurring in a dialogue devoted to discovering the best laws for cities—hardly suggests an endorsement for inspiration. But it is also true that the passage puts the poet on a tripod, symbol of Apollo's priestesses. Whatever brings a poet to write verse brings divine wisdom out of priestesses; and Plato regularly defers to the authority of oracles.
Even supposing that talk of inspiration denies individual control and credit to the poet, the priestess shows that credit and control are not all that matters. She is at her best when her mind intrudes least on what she is saying. Her pronouncements have the prestige they do, not despite her loss of control, but because of it. For more on this passage see Pappas Another passage in the Laws says as much when it attributes even reliable historical information to poets writing under the influence of the Muses and Graces a. The Meno makes inspiration its defining example of ignorant truth-speaking.
In the passages from the Apology , Laws , and Meno , which are his minor or tangential comments about inspiration, Plato seems to be affirming 1 that inspiration is really divine in origin, and 2 that this divine action that gives rise to poetry guarantees value in the result.
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It may remain the case that the poet knows nothing. But something good must come of an inspiration shared by poets and priestesses, and often enough that good is truth. Plato's shortest dialogue, the Ion is the only one that most readers would clearly situate within aesthetics. It does not address poetry alone. Gorgias c, Protagoras d. Nevertheless the Ion belongs in aesthetics by virtue of its focus on artistic inspiration, and the question it provokes of what inspiration implies about poetry's merits. As a rhapsode Ion travels among Greek cities reciting and explicating episodes from Homer.
Plato's Aesthetics
Between the dramatic recitation and the interpretation, these performances offered much latitude for displays of talent, and Ion's talent has won him first prize at a contest in Epidaurus. His conversation with Socrates falls into three parts, covering idiosyncrasy a—c , inspiration c—d , and ignorance d—b. Both the first and the third sections support the claims made in the second, which should be seen as the conclusion to the dialogue, supported in different ways by the discussions that come before and after it.
The idiosyncrasy in Ion's attachment to Homer shows that Homer, and Ion because of him, function thanks to a divine visitation. But because Ion resists accepting a claim according to which he is deranged in his performances, Socrates presents a fall-back argument. Ion is unqualified to assess any of the factual claims that appear in Homer, about medicine, chariot racing, or anything else.
When Socrates compels him to choose between divine inspiration and a very drab brand of knowing nothing, Ion agrees to be called inspired. This is to say that although poets' and their readers' ignorance is indeed a fact for Plato, it is a fact in need of interpretation. Whether it means as in the Ion that gods inspire poetry, or as in Republic 10 that imitative poetry imitates appearance alone, ignorance matters less than the implications drawn from it. Moreover, ignorance alone will not demonstrate that poets are possessed by the gods. The proof of Ion's ignorance supports inspiration but does not suffice to generate that doctrine.
Even if Ion's ignorance takes up the last part of the dialogue, it is not Plato's last word about poetry. The idiosyncrasy treated in this dialogue's opening section, by comparison, is for Plato irrational on its face. The word denotes both a paying occupation and the possession of expertise. In Ion's case Socrates specifies that the expertise for a rhapsode includes the ability to interpret poetry c. Ion rates himself superior at that task to all his competitors but concedes that he can only interpret Homer a.
Even though Homer and other poets sometimes address the same subjects, Ion has nothing to say about those other poets. He confesses this fact without shame or apology, as if his different responses reflected on the poets instead of on his talents. Something in Homer makes him eloquent, and other poets lack that quality. Socrates argues that one who knows a field knows it whole e—a. This denial of the knowledge of particulars in their particularity also appears at Charmides e; Phaedo 97d; Republic a, d.
It is not that what is known about an individual thing cannot transfer to other things of the same kind; rather that the act of treating an object as unique means attending to and knowing those qualities of it that do not transfer, knowing them as nontransferable qualities. This attitude toward particulars qua particulars is an obstacle to every theoretical expertise. It may well be that what Ion understands about Homer happens to hold true of Hesiod. But if this is the case, Ion himself will not know it. Diotima's speech in the Symposium supplies a useful comparison. Ion's investment in Homer, like the lover's lowest grade of attachment, reveals and also causes an unwillingness to move toward understanding.
And so Ion presents Socrates with a conundrum. Although the man's love for Homer prohibits him from possessing expertise, Socrates recognizes how well Ion performs at his job. How to account for success minus skill? Socrates needs to diagnose Ion by means of some positive trait he possesses, not merely by the absence of knowledge. Socrates therefore speaks of poets and those they move as entheous.
Plato's Aesthetics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
He elaborates an analogy. Picture an iron ring hanging from a magnet, magnetized so that a second ring hangs from the first and a third from that second one. Magnets are Muses, the rings attached to them poets, the second rings the poets' interpreters, third the rhapsodes' audiences. Plato's image captures the transferability of charisma. By being made of iron each ring has the capacity to take on the charge that holds it. But the magnetism resides in the magnet, not in the temporarily magnetized rings. No ring is itself the source of the next ring's attachment to it.
Homer analogously draws poetic power from his Muse and attracts a rhapsode by means of borrowed power. The analogy lets poets and rhapsodes appear charismatic without giving them credit for their appeal. Inspiration now additionally means that poets are irrational, as it never meant before Plato.
This superadded irrationality explains why Ion rejects Socrates' proposal, in a passage that is frequently overlooked. He is not unhinged during his performances, Ion says; not katechomenos kai mainomenos , possessed and maddened d. Inspiration has come to imply madness and the madness in it is what Ion tries to reject. The image of rings and magnets is slyer than it appeared. While the analogy rests transparently on one feature of magnetism, the transfer of attraction, it smuggles in a second feature.
Socrates describes iron rings hanging in straight lines or branching: Although each ring may have more than a single ring dependent upon it, no ring is said to hang from more than one. But real rings hang in other ways, all the rings clumped against the magnet, or one ring clinging to two or three above it.
Why does Socrates keep the strings of rings so orderly? Here is one suggestion. Keeping Homer clung only to his Muse,and Ion clung only to Homer, preserves the idiosyncrasy that let Socrates deny expertise to Ion. For otherwise a magnet and rings would show how genuine knowledge is transmitted. Suppose you say that a Muse leads the doctor Hippocrates to diagnostic insights that he tells his students and they tell theirs. That much divine help is all that the image of magnet and rings strictly implies, and it is no threat to a profession's understanding of itself.
But no one would claim that a doctor can learn only from a single other doctor, or that a doctor treats a unique group of adulatory patients. For a contrasting reading of this passage, however, see Chapter 3 of Capra Analogies always introduce new traits into the thing being described. That is in the nature of analogical thinking and no grounds for suspicion. Plato's readers should become suspicious because the feature that slips into this figure, the orderly hanging of the rings, is neither called for by the way iron actually transmits magnetic force, nor neutral in effect.
Plain inspiration is analogized in the magnet's magnetism madness or possession by the straight lines of attraction. Plato has distorted magnetism to make it mean not inspiration simpliciter but something crazy. The combination of possession and madness in the Ion 's version of inspiration makes it hard to decide whether the dialogue implies some approval for inspired poetry or condemns it altogether. Readers have drawn opposite morals from this short work e. As Socrates characterizes enthousiasmos , it denies Ion's professional credibility, not to mention his sanity.
But there is religion to think of. If not traditionally pious, Plato is also not the irreverent type who would ascribe an action to divinities in order to mock it.
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And consider the example of inspired verse mentioned here. Socrates cites Tynnichus, author of only one passable poem, which was a tribute to the Muses d. It's as if the Muses wanted to display their power, Socrates says, by proving that their intervention could elicit a good poem even from an unskilled author. If this is Socrates' paradigm of inspired poetry, then whatever else inspiration also explains, it appears particularly well suited to producing praise of the gods.
And praise of the gods is the lone poetic form that Plato respects and accepts Republic a. That already seems to justify inspiration. So what does the charge of madness mean? The word makes Ion recoil—but what does he know about higher states of understanding? Maybe madness itself needs to be reconceived. The Ion says far from enough to settle the question. But Plato's other sustained discussion of inspiration returns to the language of madness and finds some forms of it permissible, even philosophical. Although other sections of the Phaedrus are relevant to Platonic aesthetics, this is the only part directly about inspiration.
Socrates' speech begins by sorting out mania. Madness comes in two general forms: Divine madness subdivides into love, Dionysian frenzy, oracular prophecy, and poetic composition b—a. All four cases are associated with particular deities and traditionally honored. On reconciling the possession described in the Ion with that in the Phaedrus , see Gonzalez for extended discussion. In abbreviated terms we can say that the madness of the Phaedrus is separated from ordinary madness as the Ion 's version is not, and is classified pointedly as a good derangement.
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Being a god, Eros can't do anything bad d—e. The Ion contains no theological pieties comparable to this claim or to similar statements in Laws, Republic , elsewhere. The greatest blessings flow from divine mania a. Nor is this possessed condition associated with idiosyncrasy in the Phaedrus. To account for the madness of love Socrates describes an otherworldly existence in which souls ride across the top of heaven enjoying direct visions of the Forms c—d. After falling into bodily existence a soul responds to beauty more avidly than it does to any other qualities for which there are Forms.
Accordingly it happens that a beautiful sight, like that of a lovely human form, inspires the turn toward philosophizing as a just law or a self-controlled action do not. Associating beauty with inspiration suggests that poetry born of another kind of inspiration might also have philosophical worth. But before welcoming the lost sheep Plato back to the poetry-loving fold, recognize the Phaedrus 's qualifying remarks about which poetry one may now prize. It cannot be imitative. Indeed the argument of the Phaedrus only identifies a single type of poem that the Muses call forth: But Plato exempts hymns to gods and encomia of heroes even from his harshest condemnation of poetry Republic a.
Quite compatibly with the Republic 's exemption the Ion specifies a hymn to the Muses as its example of inspiration and the Phaedrus describes the praise of heroes. Whenever possible Plato reserves the benefits of inspiration for the poems he does not have reason to condemn. And this restriction on which poems derive a true merit from being inspired leaves inspiration a long way from guaranteeing poetry's value.
A mirror reflection might prompt you to turn around and look at the thing being reflected; an imitation keeps your eyes on the copy alone.
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Imitation has a base cause and baser effects. Recall that while Plato's critique depends on both these claims, he really only substantiates the first one. Beauty by comparison begins in the domain of intelligible objects, since there is a Form of beauty. And more than any other property for which a Form exists, beauty engages the soul and draws it toward philosophical deliberation, toward thoughts of absolute beauty and subsequently as we imagine toward thoughts of other concepts.
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