Artificial intelligence

« justice to the normativeness that is integral to the judgment.

The issue of the intersubjective validity of a judgmentof artistic value - whether such a judgment can be valid for all people, and, if so, what validates it - has still notbeen adequately resolved. Non-artistic values There are many interesting questions about the relations between artistic value and other kinds of value, especially cognitive value and ethical value.

For example: Is there an inherent link between the kindand degree of artistic value of a work and values of other kinds? Do certain other kinds of value determine artistic value in the sense that they are essential conditions of it? Are works (or works of a certain kind) with a high degreeof artistic value naturally suited to support or enhance certain other kinds of value? Some thinkers have attemptedto establish a particularly close connection between artistic value and certain other kinds of value, especiallyethical value.

For example, Tolstoy defined the activity of art as the transmission of a feeling from artist toaudience by means of the artist's creation of a suitable public vehicle, and he drew the conclusion that the betterthe feeling transmitted - the most valuable feelings being moral-religious ones - the better the work of art thattransmits it.

His attempt to moralize artistic value, however, like other such attempts, proceeds by way of atendentious characterization of the nature of art. Plato's critique of art Plato proceeded in an entirely different manner.

Rather than offering a definition of art from which a favoured criterion of artistic value can be extracted, he merely held up against various artistic practicesand accepted paradigms of good or great art other values, by which standards these practices and works were, he claimed, found wanting.

This was not an unreasonable procedure.

For a justification of the importance of art inhuman life would be best founded on an account of the importance of works that are good as art , and a critique of the value of art must undermine the claims of good and great art to a valuable role in our lives.

But isPlato's famousdismissal of most forms of art from his ideal state, the Republic, well-founded? His attack on art is directed at allthree of the central artistic roles, the artist, the performer and the audience or spectator, and it is based on anumber of grounds.

I shall sketch just one or two of the principal claims.

A central allegation is that the works ofsuch representational artists as the painter and the poet are twice removed from Platonic Reality, for they are mererepresentations of things that are only specimens of what is truly real - namely, the archetypes (Plato's Ideas orForms) of what is represented, which are timeless entities more real than any specimens of them and the objects ofthe highest knowledge.

Furthermore, a picture is only an imitation of the visual appearance of what it depicts - it isdesigned to present to the beholder an appearance similar to that of its subject - and, accordingly, the painter, assuch, is not an expert about the reality whose appearance art imitates: the painter knows only how things look, nothow they really are or whether they are well-suited to their natural or intended function.

Likewise, poets lack theexpertise to perform well in the occupations or roles of the characters they represent in their works.

So artists canproduce only more or less plausible images of the natural and human world: they possess only the art of imitation,not real knowledge; their works do not express or encourage knowledge of the highest Reality, nor do they displayany other knowledge worth having.

Hence works of art are cognitively worthless.

Now this would not matter somuch if works of art were harmless, both cognitively and otherwise.

Plato's most serious charge is that they arenot.

On the contrary, they stimulate and foster the inferior part of the soul at the expense of the superior.

Pictures,being mere imitations of visual appearances, can appeal only to the nonrational element of the soul, and anindulgence of an appetite for pictures weakens the superior, rational element by strengthening the inferior.

Thusalthough pictures are delightful, they are not beneficial, but are indeed harmful.

Likewise, the other main form ofmimetic art, poetry, and especially the art of tragedy, encourages socially undesirable feelings and attitudes inpeople.

It corrupts even the better kind of person by eliciting powerful emotional responses to characters who arenot really present but only artistically represented as being present, and in unleashing these emotions threatens tousurp the governing power of reason in the life of the person outside art.

Accordingly, the appeal of poetry shouldbe resisted; the ideal state will proscribe it, allowing only models of human excellence, hymns to the gods andpraises of good men.

It is clear that Plato's fundamental concern in considering whether art should be welcomed oreven admitted into a just society is the social value of works of art, that is to say, their value in promoting orhindering the development of socially desirable characteristics in members of a society.

This is underscored by hisadvocacy of the censorship of poetic misrepresentation of the nature of gods and heroes.

For it is not so muchfalsehood that he objects to, but rather the power of poetry to engender beliefs and attitudes that are notbeneficial to society.

He is willing even to suppress the poetic expression of the truth if this is necessary topreserve a well-governed society.

Plato's specific criticisms of the social value of representational art areunconvincing.

I believe that his misgivings about the effects of the powerful arousal of emotions in response to thethoughts, feelings, actions and fates of dramatic characters were effectively answered by Aristotle in his Poetics , and that his other charges have little force (see Aristotle §29 ).

But whatever the truth of this, it is clear that Plato's critique suffers from the generality of his claims about the effects of works of art, which he was in noposition to verify.

We should in fact reject altogether the question, 'What is the social value of art?' For there aredifferent social values - qualities that it is desirable for members of a society to possess and value in others - andworks of art have different social values, not only by being variously beneficial or harmful with respect to the samesocial value, but by enhancing or weakening different social values, which themselves are of greater or lesserimportance to society, to a type of society, or to a specific society.

Moreover, whether a work produces a certainsocial effect - one that it produces in some people, say - and the degree to which it does so, depends on thenature of the individual who responds to it, understands or fails to understand it, is moved or unmoved by it, andhow often and in what conditions they interact with it.

And what holds for social value holds, mutatis mutandis , for other kinds of value in so far as these values are determined by the actual effects of works of art on people, in theshort- or long-term.

The great variety of works of art, the different ways in which they achieve artistic value, thedifferent temperaments, personalities, histories and capacities of individuals, make any global connections betweenartistic value and any values not intrinsic to the experience of works unlikely.

A more convincing account thanPlato. »