Word: plato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thing, as a happy side effect, a "great books" course would provide Harvard students with valuable exposure to the history of our political thought. We should all have to watch it develop in the classroom, from its infancy in the writings of Plato and Aristotle (though neither was a particular fan of democracy, to be sure) to its coming of age in the works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Burke. We should have to observe it as it plays itself out in the Federalist Papers, the Constitutional Ratification Debates and beyond...
...represent something--a face, a body, a landscape, a still life. The idea that art could be unmoored from appearances, that marks on canvas could convey emotions, spiritual states and pleasures quite independently of any reference to the world as we know it, had a long ancestry in theory. Plato, after all, raised the idea that there were certain perfect forms--the square, the circle and so on--that move us in a way free from the itch of desire...
Things would be radically different. In terms of academics, courses on Plato, Aristotle and other "dead white males" would be replaced by studies of the ocuvre of Rigoberta Menchu. In residential life, we would have houses devoted to every possible ethnicity and sexual orientation. The dining halls would serve junk food instead of their nominally healthy offerings. (I admit that this last example may actually undermine my argument...
...perhaps he meant something less Luciferian: that nature, to the artist, is like carnal desire to the saint. It is a trap, a lower substitute for higher ecstasy, an occasion of sin. He knows it is beautiful, but he must still banish it from his art (as Plato urged the banishment of the poet from the ideal republic) because it provokes irrational thoughts and undisciplined emotions...
...Mondrian was the supreme Platonist of modernism. He believed that his grids, representing nothing but themselves and, as Plato said of his perfect solids, "free from the itch of desire," could demonstrate a universal order, an essence that underwrote the mere accidents of the world as it is. Reach that essence, and consciousness would be transfigured. This mystical idea had a long history, running from Plato through medieval Catholicism and thence to the pseudo religion of Theosophy, to which Mondrian adhered in his youth in Holland...