Thursday, October 10, 2019
Plato, Greek Art and Censorship Essay
It is imperative that we begin the illustration of Plato’s pursuit for censorship with the definition of his times, the context by which his beliefs on music and poetry were formulated. Greece during Hellenic times was distinctively marked by a superior regard to the polis or the city-state. With what the civil wars wrought to its citizens, the Greeks developed a strong inclination towards the attainment of what they believed to be the kallipolis or the ideal state, one that is marked by justice, order and harmony, and will do everything in its power to preserve it. The general concession of its superiority justified acts which would have been highly condemnable in the present times. Acts like infanticide and common life are surely not to arouse the approval of the many. One of the necessary steps that Plato strongly advocated for the attainment of the idea state, was the censorship of the arts, music and poetry alike. In summary he claims that the polis needed to constrain its arts, to mitigate its negative influences and curb the dangerous effect of its mimeric nature if they were to avoid the disruption of the state, more like its demise considering how pervasive arts was during the Hellenic period. Plato’s definition of censorship came in the form of 1) the prohibition of music that was intrinsically bad, and 2) the sanctioning of tales that were weaved from a state of madness, thereby promoting false virtues.            On Music – It was a general belief during those times that there existed some form of music that was intrinsically bad or an aberration to the natural harmony of the universe. These were the songs whose words upheld false virtues and songs whose musical tones were derived from the improper order of interval. There in the sequencing of its notes lay a palpable sense of disharmony and discordance which mathematicians and philosophers went to great lengths to prove.            It is to be said too that the soul is part of a force called Harmonia – a force that brings to union all elements of the universe, good and bad. The soul acts like a sponge, is its modern rhetoric equivalent, absorbing the discordance of the notes and sending the soul to a confused state as it cannot adequately grasps the things it acquires (Republic 78). The faculties of the physical body become misguided and the resulting man is one who is corrupt and unable to discern what is just from not. Hence, guardians, producers and rulers were considered susceptible to music’s negative influences and must be then censored by the polis if it were to protect man’s virtues. Rhythm and harmony penetrate the inner part of the soul and that gracelessness, bad rhythm and disharmony are akin to bad words and character (Republic III)            This was perhaps the first attempt to advance the concept of the subliminal meaning. The Doctrine of Ethos – music’s ability to form one’s character – still remains on solid ground after centuries. I find sense in what these early philosophers claim. How else do we explain the anarchic proclivities of Rock Music and Rap’s inclination towards street violence despite shifts in paradigm of the many generations that have passed.            On Poetry – Here Plato refers to drama, tragedies and words of a song without the musical notes. Unlike the subliminal effect of some music, poetry has a more direct and invasive effect to one’s character.            Plato’s Theory of Forms states that Nature is an imperfect representation of the ideal and perfect reality of Forms; that man ought to take actions that will bring him closer to the reality of Forms. If poetry represents that which is already imperfect, the resulting work ushers man away from the light and further into the shadows. Without the light, man now becomes a slave to the shadows he continuously imitates. Moreover, when exposed to poetic illusions man naturally takes on what he sees and starts to assume the character of the poetic subject, in whole or in parts. This mimeric nature, Plato says, is dangerous as this will distract man from achieving his highest state of being. It is better to stick to one craft and be good at it than to acquire all trades but be good at none. Guardians must be prohibited to learn the trade of the poets. This is to ensure that his optimum self is achieved. Otherwise he starts to neglect his duties to the state. Also, the process of producing poetry sends the artist in a temporal state of divine inspiration or madness, simply that he loses all sense of rationality, he weaves one that is not according to Reason’s dictates but that of his many passions, ignorance and possibly appetites albeit the poetic charm. Anything that is far from Reason is necessarily deemed unhealthy for the kallipolis. Clearly the Hellenic times were defined by their end goals. Plato and others saw censorship, along with many state policies, as a justified means to their end. The present times, however, see a completely different paradigm. People have long shown the world that the morality of the means is just as considerable as the end itself. Censorship to a substantial part of the world is unacceptable. Now, it’s all about rights to freedom of speech and expression. When New Zealand Broadcasting Standards Authority decides to cut off offensive language from the radio, immediately journalists are tagging it as discrimination. In US alone how many controversial lawsuits, to include a high school valedictorian as complainant, have been filed because people have been forbidden to make religious references. Plato would have been shocked, even enraged at this underlying idea of the Individual catching up with the State; or the state policies being subservient to Individual Rights. He would have thought it a narrow insight and I completely agree.            All this talk on Rights and Freedom of Expression is based on the faulty assumption that 1) everyone is capable of responsible and sensible expressions, and 2) everyone is capable of judicious interpretations of these expressions. When truth of the matter is that when people make tirade speeches against a group , they almost always fail to consider the sensibilities of whose who are being attacked. One’s unguarded expression becomes another one’s discrimination. To compound things, people are impressionable. Plato was correct when he said that man naturally adopts the things he sees and hears no matter how unjust and far from virtues. Man doesn’t generally step back and take a moment to carefully weigh what he perceives. To those who can, notice that they don’t go out of their way to educate the public. These educated minds have become an elite preferring apathy. This is what turns expressions into social disturbances. Sooner or later when more people start to believe, these expressions become acceptable truths. Eventually they become imbibed as values. With the advent of the digital age, things are even escalated. The cyberspace contains practically all sorts of information, educated, trash, pornographic and otherwise, which can be accessed by anyone even those who are not in the right minds to discern right from wrong. Censorship, contrary to what people believe as a tyrannical act against freedom, is simply responsible regulation. It is to ensure that information is accessed by the right audience and that the propensity of these expressions to stir and rouse disturbances is curbed. This time it is to preserve not the State but the Society with the Individual at its core and Values at stake. Each processes information or whatever elements one picks up from the cosmos in various ways and degrees. What misguided minds process as motivation for unjust ways may be an educated mind’s trigger for higher knowledge. But if takes only one out of a thousand and perhaps millions of minds to have his virtues corrupted because of unregulated information, that for me, and should so for the progressively liberal states, provide more than enough justification for censorship. It is a rational step to reduce freedom’s excesses especially in a time where the universe presents wider, freer and borderless ways by which man can inflict harm to another, even to himself. Works Cited Plato. â€Å"The Republic†, translated by Benjamin Jowett,
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