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Galiet & Galiet
Reason, hypothesis and empiricism, Shelley posits, obscures. Were the prisoners of Plato’s cave to behold Aristotle’s immanent theory or Shelley’s mytho-magic mirror,150 they would see all shadows, distortions of reality impregnated with the Form of the Beautiful:
“The story of particular facts [i.e. hypothesis] is as a mirror, which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”151
Expanding on the Platonic sphere of thought, Plotinus, like Shelley, dignifies the place of art as capable of attaining the things-in-themselves, though he never doubts its purely mimetic qualities. Plotinus refutes, in his Enneads V, 8 1-2, Plato’s Phaedrus. “None of our poets,” says Plato, “has ever yet sung of the supra-sensible realm, and none will ever sing of it as it corresponds.”152 He interprets (or corrects) Plato in an aspect that, in the end, becomes essential and that Shelley will defend: the artist “does not simply reproduce the thing contemplated,”153 she directly reproduces the Ideas or Forms. Plotinus, like Shelley, will confront Plato by arguing from the transcendental. From this conviction, art will not only be tolerated as a lesser copy of the real-sensible, but it will be highly valued as the space of mediation between the reality of the Form or Idea and the materiality of the sensible world: “Phidias did not model Zeus beginning from any sensible model, but from the form that Zeus would have taken had he decided to manifest himself.”154
The first consequence of this interpretation by Plotinus, and later by Shelley, is that art (techne) is not essentially different from nature (physis): it is not its deficient and superfluous reproduction, but both have their immediate common ground in the very Ideas or Forms. Art can also beatify and beautify, embellish all-natural elements precisely where beauty lacks. “Poetry,” extols Shelley, “turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed.”155 Consequently, Poetry or Poiesis
150 Plato too speaks of a mirror. ‘The craftsman could make all these things...even you could make it quickly and in lots of places, especially if you were willing to carry a mirror with you, for that’s the quickest way of all. With it you can quickly make the sun, the things in the heavens, the earth, yourself, the other animals, manufactured items, plants, and everything else mentioned just now.’ This mirror differs from Shelley’s, which is the immeasurable mirror of beauty. Plato. Republic. Trans. By G.M.A. Grube. Book X. 596d.
151 Heath, William. Ibid. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. 978. This quote is worthy of serious analysis and comparing it to Plato’s poetic mirror. An entire philosophy dwells in them. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. Shelley. A Defence ofPoetry. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
152 Plato. Phaedrus. 247c. Plato. Complete Works. Phaedrus. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
153 Plotinus. Enneads. V, 8, I. Plotinus. The Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
154 Plotinus. Enneads. V,8, I. Plotinus. The Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
155 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. 527
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