Plato's Expression Theory of Art

Abstract

It is often claimed that Plato enunciates a mimetic theory of the nature of art (of what art is). This claim has sometimes been criticized on the ground that the Greeks didn't have the relevant concept of art (roughly the concept of the fine arts) that would enable them to theorize about the nature of this class of objects. Another criticism that could be made is that the mimetic theory was no more plausible in Plato's day than it is in ours, and, if Plato had been trying to formulate such a theory, he would have seen this. Even if all the works of art (in our sense) that Plato was acquainted with were representational (and this is by no means obvious when one thinks of such things as architectural works of art), Plato was certainly aware of plenty of representational objects that were not works of art. Plato's famous example of the mirror, which he claims mimics the appearance of objects in the same way paintings do, would constitute a glaring counterexample to a mimetic definition had Plato contemplated one. (It goes without saying that Plato was adept at finding counterexamples to definitions). I would accept both criticisms of the claim that Plato enunciates a mimetic theory of art. Since the first of these criticisms counts against attributing to Plato any theory of art, the reader must be warned at the outset not to take the title of this article too literally. What does seem to be true is that it was not uncommon for philosophers like Plato and Aristotle to group together what we now regard as many of the major art forms (at least those that existed in their day). I will argue that, if one is to look for a germ of a theory of art in Plato's remarks about these objects, one can find hints of an expression theory as easily as one can find hints of a mimetic theory. More importantly, to understand fully what Plato thought about these objects, one must attend to the first sort of hints as least as carefully as the second. Expression in the arts (the expressiveness of art) has been conceived in more than one way. During the heyday of attempts to define art as expres-