Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image

In the third millennium after his death, the Athenian thinker, Plato, remains controversial. His philosophical legacy, consisting of profound reflections on civics, ethics and governance continue reverberate with incontestable impact.

At the same time, Plato remains the most readily inflammatory philosopher, at least as much because his discourse on aesthetics and artistic representation constitute intolerable provocations of an inherently loquacious, tremendously influential and thoroughly volatile artistic constituency.

Plato developed a fascinating theory of ‘forms', by which he meant that objects we perceive as constituting reality are approximations, or imitations of ideal forms that exist in a transcendent, immutable, abstract domain, and propounded a fundamentally metaphysical explication of the world as a mere imitation of divine perfection that is intelligible yet imperceptible: accessible through reason, not the senses.

In respect of art, Plato's thesis is premised a representational agenda; that art, poetry and drama communicate by depicting imitations of the world. Plato problematises this agenda by pointing out that a priori, the world itself is an imperfect imitation of an ideal, which is not available to our senses, and of which we hardly possess the competence to imagine or reproduce.

As imperfect imitations of imperfect imitations, Plato worries that the entire artistic enterprise is nothing more or less than compounded deception and delusion, which limits the motivation and capacity of citizens to aspire for ‘the good’, undermining civic virtue and endangering ‘the republic’.

Artistic and entertainment industry

In propounding this critique, Plato excoriates the dramatic grandmaster of his time, Aristophanes, whom he basically calls a conman, for composing and staging moving dramas and uproarious comedies which, in his view, intoxicated audiences with delusions and undermined their ability to access an aesthetic through reason.

In our time, the artistic and entertainment industry is a vast, globally influential monolith that dominates our reality not just by appropriating our attention with irresistible works, but also by insistently donating the vocabulary, imagery and the entire mental apparatus by which we attempt to perceive, understand and express our internal and external worlds.

Artists and their audiences recognise the overwhelming power of representation. Although the routine disclaimer that a given work is all fiction, and that “the characters, events and other elements in it are entirely fictional and not based on real events “ is aimed at averting exposure to legal action at the instance of aggravated parties, its necessity nevertheless underscores the undeniable force of artistic representation or imitation in affecting understandings.

For audiences, an excellently performed tragedy rarely fails to elicit sincere sorrow and genuine tears, while its opposite counterpart easily uplifts and motivates. Many not only find inspiration and even guidance in the example of characters depicted in art, and proudly cite the wisdom imparted by many, from Mercutio, Inspector Buckett, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Joseph Tribianni, Reginald Jeeves, Bartholomew J Simpson and King Mufasa, they model their fashion and mannerisms after the most compelling dramatists.

At this point - whether we are imitating, or are witnessing the earnest imitation of a dramatic character - who, per Plato, is an imitation of an imitation of yet another imitation - this much is clear: that a phenomenon of stupendous magnitude invariably occurs when we encounter art.

Utterances of imaginary characters

There is no use in attempting to comfort a weeping spectator who is mourning the tragic passing of their favourite character by pointing out that they are absolute figments and that this horrible calamity never took place, and is utterly impossible in fact, just as there is no point in disputing a proposition in debate merely because it is premised on the fictional utterances of imaginary characters.

The power of art to reconfigure the moral and mental schematics underlying of experience and action is colossal. To that extent, the potential of artistic representation in mobilising attitudes and responses has always been implicit, so much so, that in ages gone by, artists were mandated to deploy their work in championing virtue and the virtuous, and marginalising vice and the evil.

The heroic canon evolved from the political consensus which enjoined cultural institutions to empower good and insure its perpetual dominance at the expense of evil. Less normative artistic constituencies have asserted that strategic suppression of the undesirable is fundamentally dishonest, giving fertile terrain for dark, dreadful and dystopic genres to blossom.

The fact that art’s is wholly unconnected to verity reminds us every day that persons and events do not have to be real at any point in time, to affect us. Technology is taking the power of artificial reality to astonishing new dimensions. We are now well into the age of virtual and augmented reality, telepresence, deep fake technology, and the fake news industry, and the time has come upon us when we truly struggle to tell fact and lie apart.

We must reflect deeply on the platonic exposition of more ancient injunctions against the making of graven images, because it has never been easier to deploy what Shakespeare, in a grand fiction of timeless power, called “airy words” to instigate “civil brawls”.

The writer is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya