Plato on Art as Illusion
I was reading Woody Allen's obit for Ingmar Bergman, published today in the NY Times. There's not much in the article that I would call surprising: I love Woody Allen, and as such I know how much he loves Ingmar Bergman, and also, how likely it is that he'll start waxing anxious about mortality - no matter what the topic on hand is, and in this case it actually happened to be death. At one point, Allen goes on at some length about how Bergman did not resemble that brooding intellectual in life that you would presume him to be from his cinema; rather than thinking of his work as a kind of conduit to immortality, Bergman loved life and was caught up in all the trivialities of feelings, and Allen conjectures that he would have traded in each one of his 60 films for an extra day of living...which he would then use to make more films, not because of some artist's dream of lasting forever, but just because making films was what he did.
I forget where I was going with all this. As always, Allen has a way of mesmerizing me. I guess the point I'm driving at is that this picture of Bergman - the contrast between the dark philosopher who confronted us with troubling questions about love and loneliness and religion, on the one hand, the the Woody Allen-esque character who fretted about where to place his camera angle, on the other - this picture got me thinking about how petty and sordid all the details of life appear when you have to concentrate on them one at a time, while all the while you want - and desire! - life to be obscured and glamorous and meaningful, the way it's captured in the movies and in art. Even Bergman, according to Allen, a lofty artist, lived with this double-bind. He would create that philosophical other realm, where knights play chess with Death, but at the end of the day he still had to go home and, I dunno, wonder if he felt like chicken or pasta for dinner.
It's a striking theme for reflection for me because I've often noticed, here these days in my paper-shuffling job, how disappointingly...little the end-products are once you translate the best and noblest ambitions into real-life results. The work done at my firm is actually pretty high up on the ideological ladder of things; we (and by "we" I mean "they") help the working man get his just piece of the pie from the greedy and abusive management. Important, necessary work, without which we couldn't have an equitable society or a strong middle class, and possibly even a democracy. But how does it translate into billable work? We churn out the most boring documents in the world about how this-and-that institution is defined as county property, or how being violently insane is a disability that demands benefits, not discharge. And for me personally, it gets even less glamorous: protecting the working man generally means running photocopies.
I must have shied away toward the arts all my life because they seem to offer a haven from all this sordidness and pettiness of living out the details. That is, they gave me the Big Picture, and suddenly I would marvel at how beautiful and profound life could be. But Allen's thoughts on Bergman's death is making me think that it's all an illusion, and even the profoundest minds inevitably engage with the boring and banaustic, like, 95% of the time. If this is true, then Plato is right in saying that an artist is merely like a magician, who can't reproduce anything true about the world but holds up a mirror, as it were, in order to give us an image that we find delightful.
Plato's relentless, neurotic, Woody Allen-esque insistence on the philosophical life may have blinded me to what could have been his secondary message: maybe we should all be shoemakers. He readily admits that we can't all be philosophers, and he leaves no question that it's better to do something honest and real, like carpentry, than it is to be a politician or a poet. I always interpreted this position in light of Plato's intellectual milieu: that he was merely whining with an unpragmatic perversity and a transparent competitiveness, because he couldn't effect a wholesale intellectual and cultural and political revolution in which philosophers are kings; that it was more a thought exercise about how things would be best, rather than a commentary on how anything actually is. But now I'm considering revising this interpretation. Perhaps Plato isn't as unrealistic as I'm crediting him to be; maybe he is suggesting a "second-best" option that accounts for all the banal and disappointing realities of our non-ideal world - and that option is "shoemaker."
I forget where I was going with all this. As always, Allen has a way of mesmerizing me. I guess the point I'm driving at is that this picture of Bergman - the contrast between the dark philosopher who confronted us with troubling questions about love and loneliness and religion, on the one hand, the the Woody Allen-esque character who fretted about where to place his camera angle, on the other - this picture got me thinking about how petty and sordid all the details of life appear when you have to concentrate on them one at a time, while all the while you want - and desire! - life to be obscured and glamorous and meaningful, the way it's captured in the movies and in art. Even Bergman, according to Allen, a lofty artist, lived with this double-bind. He would create that philosophical other realm, where knights play chess with Death, but at the end of the day he still had to go home and, I dunno, wonder if he felt like chicken or pasta for dinner.
It's a striking theme for reflection for me because I've often noticed, here these days in my paper-shuffling job, how disappointingly...little the end-products are once you translate the best and noblest ambitions into real-life results. The work done at my firm is actually pretty high up on the ideological ladder of things; we (and by "we" I mean "they") help the working man get his just piece of the pie from the greedy and abusive management. Important, necessary work, without which we couldn't have an equitable society or a strong middle class, and possibly even a democracy. But how does it translate into billable work? We churn out the most boring documents in the world about how this-and-that institution is defined as county property, or how being violently insane is a disability that demands benefits, not discharge. And for me personally, it gets even less glamorous: protecting the working man generally means running photocopies.
I must have shied away toward the arts all my life because they seem to offer a haven from all this sordidness and pettiness of living out the details. That is, they gave me the Big Picture, and suddenly I would marvel at how beautiful and profound life could be. But Allen's thoughts on Bergman's death is making me think that it's all an illusion, and even the profoundest minds inevitably engage with the boring and banaustic, like, 95% of the time. If this is true, then Plato is right in saying that an artist is merely like a magician, who can't reproduce anything true about the world but holds up a mirror, as it were, in order to give us an image that we find delightful.
Plato's relentless, neurotic, Woody Allen-esque insistence on the philosophical life may have blinded me to what could have been his secondary message: maybe we should all be shoemakers. He readily admits that we can't all be philosophers, and he leaves no question that it's better to do something honest and real, like carpentry, than it is to be a politician or a poet. I always interpreted this position in light of Plato's intellectual milieu: that he was merely whining with an unpragmatic perversity and a transparent competitiveness, because he couldn't effect a wholesale intellectual and cultural and political revolution in which philosophers are kings; that it was more a thought exercise about how things would be best, rather than a commentary on how anything actually is. But now I'm considering revising this interpretation. Perhaps Plato isn't as unrealistic as I'm crediting him to be; maybe he is suggesting a "second-best" option that accounts for all the banal and disappointing realities of our non-ideal world - and that option is "shoemaker."
posted by Rex at 11:26 AM
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