[The ultimate end of all education is insight into the harmonious order (cosmos) of the whole world. This earliest stage ends here in the perception of those 'images' of moral or spiritual excellences which, when combined with bodily beauty in a living person, are the proper object of love (eros).]
Then we must not only compel our poets, on pain of expulsion, to make poetry the express image of noble character; we must also supervise craftsmen of every kind and forbid them to leave the stamp of baseness, licence, meanness, unseemliness, on painting and sculpture, or building, or any other work of their hands; and anyone who cannot obey shall not practise his art in our commonwealth. We would not have our Guardians grow up among representations of moral deformity, as in some foul pasture where, day after day, feeding on every poisonous weed they would, little by little, gather insensibly a mass of corruption in their very souls. Rather we must seek out those craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatsoever is lovely and gracious; so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bearing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly falls upon eye and ear from childhood upward, and imperceptibly draws them into sympathy and harmony with the beauty of reason, whose impress they take.
-The Republic of Plato-
translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford
No comments:
Post a Comment