Censorship in Utopia: Angie Hobbs at TEDxWarwick

Professor Hobbs talks about Ancient Greek philosophy and its relevance in considering the usefulness or otherwise of art today.

So, I'm going to start,

I'm actually going to talk about
censorship in the arts,

censorship in Utopia,
looking at the experiences

of the ancient and modern world.

But I want to begin
with one of my favourite poems

by the American poet Wallace Stevens,
and this is

'The Man with the Blue Guitar' --
some of you may know it.

I won't give you any introduction to it,
just see what you think,

this is a few stanzas.

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts.

The day was green.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'

The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

And they said then, 'But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.'

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar."

We'll come back to another stanza of that
at the end of this talk.

Now one of the many interesting things
about Wallace Stevens's poem

is that Stevens was fascinated by
the philosophy of the Ancient Greek

philosopher Plato writing
about the 370's, 380's BC.

He's intrigued by Plato's
philosophy of ideas,

which we will come on to you later.

And it seems to me that these lines are
almost certainly a meditation

on the attack on art and artists
made by the character of Socrates

in Plato's dialogue 'The Republic'.

As you know, and this is also
a point we'll come back to,

Plato never writes in his own voice,
but always through various characters

in his dramatic dialogues,
Socrates often being the main one.

It's important, we'll find out,
that they are not the same person.

Now, those who live in this green world
that Wallace Stevens describes

are angry with the man
who has the temerity

to break up this monochrome greenness
and play a blue guitar.

The people who are angry
in Stevens's poems

are those who are voicing
the attacks on artists

which Socrates puts forward,

the man with the blue guitar
is, of course, the artist.

Now, what I propose to do today

is to very briefly run through,
the speed of light,

some of the main arguments

made against art and artists
in the dialogue 'The Republic',

in which Socrates sets up
an ideally just state, or so he claims.

And I want to see
if any of the charges made

have anything to tell us today,
whether we can learn anything from them,

even if we want to reject
the metaphysical basis

on which they're grounded,
as I imagine many of us will,

I doubt if many people here are believers
in Plato's theory of Forms.

I once had a student who began an essay,

'Last night when I saw
the Form of the Good',

which I felt was cheating somewhat.

But I think we have a lot to learn,

and I'm going to say that,
including myself, even those of us

who are wary about the notion
of censorship in the arts,

I think we can still find a lot to gain
from why Socrates is so nervous

about the arts and why he thinks
they are so dangerous.

Now incidentally,
for the sake of brevity,

I'm just going to call the character
of Socrates in 'The Republic' Socrates,

but by that I don't mean
the historical figure of Socrates,

I'm just using that as shorthand.

So, in Books II and III of this dialogue
called 'The Republic',

in which Socrates outlines
the basic foundations for an ideal state,

also called The Republic,

his first attack comes in the context
of a discussion of the education

of the young guardians,
by which he means

both the future rulers of this state

and also the future military force
in this state,

the two guardian classes.

And in Books II and III Socrates
advocates extreme censorship

of Homer and Greek tragedians such as
Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Firstly, he thinks that they,
the poets, then the dramatists,

misrepresent the nature of the divine,

interesting attack,
given recent controversies

about Danish cartoons and the like.

And he says that these artists repeat
the old myths and legends

about Zeus and Aphrodite and Dionysus,
in which, of course, as you know,

the gods behave absolutely appallingly.

They lie, they cheat,
they steal, they get drunk,

they lust after other people's wives,
they kill family members,

and they sleep, of course, with
anyone and anything that moves.

God, says Socrates, is good
and is the cause only of good;

Homer and the others
have got god wrong.

That's his first claim,
he wants to excise all those passages

from Homer and the dramatists
which get god wrong.

Secondly, art needs to be censured,

because it represents,
appeals to and nurtures

dangerous emotions such as lust and greed
and anger and aggression,

which should be left, says Socrates,
to wither and die on the vine,

not fed and nurtured.

There's an interesting contrast here
with Aristotle, of course,

writing a generation after Plato,

with Aristotle's view,
who thinks that by watching

and acting out the darker aspects
of the human psyche,

we can purge ourselves
of such murky desires,

his famous notion of catharsis;

artistic representation is catharsis
or cleansing, purging.

This is a debate we may want to come
back to in the discussion,

and it's interesting
that these two polar views

appear in the ancient world.

Of course, it's impossible to prove,

it's hard enough to ever make a case
that a particular act of violence

is directly caused by, say,
a particular film,

even if the perpetrator of the act
of violence is going around dressed

as the anti-hero of the film.

Of course, it's even harder,
it's impossible

to know how many crimes
have been prevented,

because somebody, through watching
or acting out a certain work of art,

was able to purge themselves

of certain very dangerous desires
that they had.

Now, we may feel
when we are reading Books II and III

that the censorship rules
are too Draconian, of course we may,

but we may still also feel, well,
Socrates has a point.

We're talking about the education
of very young children

with plastic, imitative minds;

he wants to give them
good positive role models,

before their reason has developed
and can start to question and assess

the material they're presented with.

So, we may feel in principle it's not
so terrible to censor the arts,

even if he takes it too far,

given the context, given the age group.

Now, by the time we get
to the next attack on art,

in the final book of 'The Republic',
Book X,

we're into much more disturbing territory,

because here Socrates advocates
not just censoring art,

but banning, almost all art,

just getting rid of art from
the ideal state in almost its entirety.

And it's not just children that are being
considered here, but adults.

And, of course, a charge often made

is that Socrates is treating
adults as children.

Now, the reason for the strengthening
of this attack

is the psychology and metaphysics
that's gone on

in 'The Republic'
in the intervening books, in IV to IX.

And, again, to skip politely through

some of the most important chapters
in philosophy ever written,

very, very briefly in Book IV,

we are told that the human psyche
is composed of three separate parts:

The appetitive part which desires food,
drink, sex, material goods,

the money needed to acquire them;

a spirited part which desires
worldly honours and success and victory;

and a rational part which desires
truth and reality.

Interesting that the rational part has
its own desires;

the distinction is not between
reason and the emotions,

but between rational
and non-rational desires,

and that's important.

And our virtue, but also our flourishing
and our happiness,

consist in the proper balance between
these three parts of our psyche,

in what Plato calls interior harmony
or mental health,

the phrase that Socrates uses.

And this will only occur if our reason

and its desires for truth and reality
are in control.

And then in Books V to VII
we learn a lot more

about the nature
of this truth and reality

that the rational part seeks,
namely the so-called Forms of the Good

and the Beautiful and the Just;
abstract, unchanging, eternal entities

which are both the cause
and the explanation

of all the things on this Earth.

And everything on this Earth, in this
sensible phenomenal world around us,

are merely copies of the Forms --
'Only semi-real', says Socrates.

Now, this provides the basis
for the major attack on art in Book X,

because works of art are now
said to be both untrue,

in the sense that they are merely
copies of copies --

an idea that we could come back to --

and also hugely damaging to the harmony
and health and happiness

of the individual psyche,

in that they represent,
appeal to and nurture

not just dangerous, aggressive emotions

but non-rational emotions
and desires in general.

And that will upset the balance
of the psyche in which reason

and rational desires should rule.

So, by now almost all artists are going
to be escorted politely, but firmly,

to the borders of the state
and sent on their way.

We're left, apparently, we can have
hymns to the gods

and paeans to good men,
it sounds absolutely dire.

Now it's true that Socrates
isn't comfortable about this.

He says that it really pains him
to remove Homer,

and what he calls
the poetry of pleasure

that Homer
and the other dramatists provide,

because, says Socrates,
he has loved and revered Homer

since he was a boy.

And he issues us a challenge.

He says that if anyone can show that this
kind of poetry is not only pleasurable

but also useful and beneficial,
really interesting use of language,

he would gladly welcome it back.

Now, when I first came across this attack
on the arts, when I was about 19,

I was very shocked and disturbed
for two reasons.

One, I had a very romanticized vision

of the artist as an almost holy figure
outside the confines

of normal, moral conventions
and expectations.

I wanted my artists
to live like Baudelaire or whatever.

And in common with this,
this romanticized ideal,

I think, was part
of a more general ethical framework

in which I wanted to defend art
on the basis of freedom of expression,

and I thought that freedom of expression
was so important

because of a basic human right
to freedom of expression.

So my whole language, though
I wasn't really aware of it at the time,

was couched in the notion
of an ethics of rights.

Now, both those visions, and both
those arguments in defence of art,

would not have been available
to an Ancient Greek.

Firstly, at the time Plato's writing,

there was no conception
of fine art as such,

as distinct from cobbling
or weaving or what...,

well, weaving, of course,
we would say can be art,

but there was no distinction
between an art and a craft.

The same word 'techne' is applied to both.

In terms of the technology,
I hope this fulfils

the first of the TED acronyms.

And, as such,
the whole notion of a poet,

the word for poet, poetes,
it just means a maker in Ancient Greece.

And again, a poet is no more
or less a maker than a cobbler.

Secondly, of course, there's no language,
as far as we can tell,

of human rights in Ancient Greece.

They don't phrase their ethics
in that way;

this is a post-Kantian move, in fact.

The closest any Ancient Greek gets
to a notion of a universal right

is Aristotle when he says that
he thinks humans

have a more or less
sort of universal right

to hunt animals for food.

And so in the context
of a modern debate on human rights,

we might say that's rather
missing the point.

The point, you know, we wouldn't
want to say that our sole right

was a right to kill animals for food.

The language they use,
you will have noticed,

is that of usefulness and benefit.

Socrates says, poets, he would welcome
them back, he wants them to come back,

if it can be shown that poetry and art

is beneficial both to the soul
of the individual

and to the community as a whole.

And it's that that I think is the point
I want to pick up on today,

and ask you
whether you think it's worthwhile

reinvigorating the debate in the arts

and asking is this particular art form,
is this particular example of an art form,

is it beneficial, is it going to increase
my quality of life,

the quality of life of my community?

Now, you might feel
that's an illegitimate question,

you might want to be
as I used to be

and think all artists
should be like Baudelaire,

and not worry about such
sort of bourgeois,

middle-aged kind of concerns.

But my challenge is, I think it is
an interesting question;

we're asking at the moment whether banking
ought to be socially useful,

why can't we ask that
of the arts as well?

And I want to conclude with two points;

because I think that actually,
Plato wants us to have this debate,

and I think
Plato might well eventually himself,

Plato not Socrates,
come down on the side of the artist;

because I said at the beginning I wanted
to distinguish the character of Socrates

from Plato the artist.

Plato is a very great artist himself.

His dramatic dialogues
are fabulous to read,

the characterization, the vivid imagery,

the scene setting,

the irony, the wit,
the forward shadowing,

ironically of future events.
He uses every artistic trick in the book.

They're wonderful to read
as a literature in their own right.

And so I think Plato has set us
a deliberate irony.

His work called 'The Republic'
would be banned

from the ideal state set out
by the character of Socrates in that work;

it does not meet the censorship rules
that we've been looking at.

Now, Plato is intelligent enough
to be aware of that irony.

So what I want to suggest here is
that Plato is deliberately giving us

different ideas, provocative ideas,

on the usefulness or uselessness of art
to get a debate going.

He's not necessarily going to agree with
what the character of Socrates says.

He might be more sympathetic to a view
later put forward by John Stuart Mill

in the 19th century
in his famous work on liberty.

Mill there argues
that truth is best served

through the free and open exchange
of ideas and information,

and that this is a process
that needs to be ongoing.

Mill argues that even a true belief

is liable to rigidify
into dead dogma over time

if it's not challenged.

And I think this is exactly
what Plato is trying to do.

We don't have to go down the route

of extreme censorship
or the banning of the arts

to invigorate the debate on whether
a particular work of art is worthwhile.

I want to conclude with another verse
of the Wallace Stevens poem.

The attackers of art say:

Do not speak to us
of the greatness of poetry,

Of [the] torches wisping
in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults
upon a point of light.

There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.

There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.

There are no shadows.

Now, Socrates with his picture
of the Form of the Good,

which he likens to the sun, invites us
to consider a round without shadows in it.

Plato, the artist, however,
paints us a picture

throughout 'The Republic'
and all his works

of a world full of light and shade,

which is much more sympathetic to art

providing it can be shown to be useful
and improve our quality of life.

So what I'd like to say to you
is that I hope

that you will all go away
and treat yourself to some Plato,

if you haven't already done that
in your lives.

But as you're doing this,
I hope you'll also continue defiantly

to strum away on a blue guitar.

Thank you.

(Applause)