INFLUENCES ON PLATO

We lack the materials for a proper biography of Plato. He hardly refers to himself at all in the dialogues. The ancient “Lives” are infected by gossip, legend, and fiction and the ostensibly autobiographical Seventh Letter is probably spurious. Fortunately, however, Aristotle provides us with important evidence on Plato's intellectual development. He says that Plato was first influenced by Cratylus the Heraclitean, and later by Socrates (Met. 987a32-bio). It is unlikely that Aristotle derived his claim about Craytlus from reading Plato's dialogues;he probably had some independent source. And since he was probably well informed about Socrates and Plato, his statement deserves to be taken seriously.

Aristotle implies that Plato is influenced both by the older, “pre-Socratic” tradition of the “naturalists“ (phusiologoi; cf. Aristotle, De Caelo 289b25-9) and by the more recent application of philosophy to moral and political questions. What, then, did Plato find when he looked at these two movements in Greek philosophy?

Religion permeated life in classical Athens and in classical Greece generally. It is hardly surprising, then, that religious vocabulary - mention of gods, festivals, beliefs, and rites - also pervades Plato's dialogues. These dialogues reveal a man struggling to understand human life and how it ought to be lived, a man engaged in deep reflection about rational inquiry, the human roles in society and in the cosmos, and man's relationship to the divine. Religion, as rite, conception, motif, and vocabulary, is integral to his thinking. By showing how this is so we can illuminate Plato's thinking from the religious side, as it were, and thereby exhibit Plato's relationship to Greek religion and piety.

It is hard to exaggerate the prominence of religion in Greek life. Greek religion was pluralistic and heterogeneous,- there was a host of divinities with overlapping roles and features. A dozen gods formed the conventional core of this pantheon (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, Demeter, Dionysos, Hephaistos, Ares); broadly conceived as Zeus's family, these, and lesser divinities such as the goat-god Pan, are the Olympians, so called after Mount Olympus, site of Zeus's palace. They and other gods, such as Hades and Persephone, were themselves varied and multiple, each present at dozens of places in various guises, serving a variety of purposes and roles. Zeus, for example, manifest as a thunderbolt, was the strongest of the gods and the father of gods and men.

Plato does not have a comprehensive theory of love. Rather, he diverts certain received opinions about love to his own peculiarly philosophic ends. He is not interested in telling us what it would be like to live with someone as a platonic lover. Or so I shall argue, from a reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus. I shall ignore the social regulations for sexuality proposed in the Republic (III 402d-403c, V 459-461) and the Laws (VIII 835c-842a) as not directly relevant to what has most fascinated Plato's readers about his approach to love, and is the topic of this essay: namely, the bridge he constructs between love and philosophy. I shall also ignore the potentially relevant discussion of friendship (against the background of a love affair) in that subtle and complex dialogue, the Lysis, in order to leave room to stretch myself to something worthwhile on the Symposium and Phaedrus. Of these two works, I shall focus on the former, for it alone among the dialogues is concerned exclusively with love.

Although the main topic of the Philebus, the rivalry between pleasure and knowledge as candidates for the dignity of the highest good in human life, is a familiar one from the early Socratic dialogues on, for the wider congregation of Plato's admirers the Philebus to this very day remains largely terra incognita. It is regarded as one of the late and difficult dialogues, an area for the specialist who has mastered the intricacies of the late Platonic doctrine that we find more alluded to than explained in the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, and the Sophist. What frightens the student of Plato's ethics off the territory is most of all the long “dialectico-metaphysical preface” of the Philebus (14c-31b). For the first quarter of the dialogue is filled with a rather complex discussion of dialectical procedure, dealing with “the one and many,” and with a new kind of ontological classification that is, at least at first sight, more bewildering than enlightening and may exhaust the reader's patience before he has even penetrated to the lengthy discussion of different sorts of pleasures that starts at 31b and fills most of the rest of the dialogue.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato expels the poetry of Homer and his followers- “the poetry of pleasure” as he calls it- from his ideal state by observing that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. At the same time, he expresses a willingness to put aside the quarrel. His spokesman, Socrates, throws out a challenge: If the poetry of pleasure or its defenders can show that it is “not only pleasant, but also useful for cities and human life,” they would gladly receive it back (607a-e). Plato returns to this challenge in his last work, the Laws. The tragic poets approach the lawmakers and ask, May we bring our poetry to your city? The lawmakers reply that they, the lawmakers, are “poets” too, rivals and competitors in making the “most beautiful drama.” Their drama is the state, an “imitation of the most beautfiul and best life.” If the tragedians can show them dramas that agree with theirs, they will be allowed to perform; otherwise not (817a-d).

In the Laws, Plato takes the more conciliatory stance of one who admits rather than expels, but the quarrel persists. Only the type of poetry that is politically correct is permitted; the rest is banished. The reason is that poets and lawmakers are rivals in fashioning human life. Both are at once “makers” (the etymological meaning of poiētai, “poets”) and “imitators” of moral values; and in a wellordered society they must speak with one voice. This subordination of poetry to politics has offended many readers of Plato from antiquity to the present. Plato sees the poet primarily as a maker of ethics, and this concern appears strangely one-sided.

Does Plato have a “later” political theory, as distinct from an earlier? It is certainly easy to suppose so. Read the Republic and you confront the most radical political system ever devised. Plato's key argument is that ruling a state is or should be a skill, based on precise knowledge of certain suprasensible, eternal, and unchanging realities called Forms [ideai], notably those of the social and political virtues, but also those of the rest of reality. On the strength of such insight, the rulers of Callipolis (“Splendid City”),a highly trained cadre of Guardians, or Philosopher-Kings, exercise direct and total political control; and lawmaking is accordingly treated by Plato in a decidedly offhand manner, as a humdrum business on which the Guardians will spend little time.

If you are by now gasping with astonishment or even indignation at the audacity of these proposals, you have every justification; for at first sight Plato's thought seems almost unintelligible. For what are Forms, and why ought they to have such a drastic effect on practical politics? The explanation, though full of philosophical problems that cannot be explored here, can be stated quite briefly. A Form, say of virtue, is the essence of virtue, what it really is, as distinct from the individual things or actions or people that instantiate it in this world; for they only share in the Form of Virtue in varying degrees; they are not Virtue Itself. Now the Greek word usually translated “virtue” is in fact better rendered by “excellence” - excellence for something.

Plato's commitment to what has been called “self-predication” that is, to sentences of the form

Bravery is brave

The Large is large

is one of the most evident and characteristic features of his work. This commitment figures in dialogues of all three periods, and is so far from optional as to be at the foundation of Platonism. Yet these sentences immediately produce negative reactions in us. The first one displayed above, for example, seems clearly false. It seems to be attributing a feature to Bravery that it could not have - we can hardly imagine it performing deeds of valor or bearing up under adversity. The characteristic claim that the Large is large without qualification seems ludicrously to take its subject as another thing like an elephant, only bigger. The presence of claims of this type in Plato's text can make us feel that his way of thinking is not merely foreign to us, but seriously confused as well. Aristotle's rude and dismissive outburst “So good-bye to the Forms. For they are nonsense” seems about right.

Our background suspicion that the Platonic Forms may not really be respectable makes the Parmenides especially intriguing to us. For that dialogue owes its fame to the presence, in its first part, of an exchange between a young Socrates and a venerable Parmenides. The utterances of Socrates are reminiscent of statements that are widely regarded as constituting Plato's theory of Forms, as presented in the Republic and the Phaedo. Yet here, when questioned by Parmenides, Socrates fails repeatedly to uphold his views, and falls into perplexity. This passage has seemed to generations of readers to show a sensitivity to the kinds of problems they themselves associated with Platonism (including but not confined to confusion over self-predication).

Can the philosophical views of the historical Socrates be distinguished from those of his pupil Plato? And if so, how do the master's views differ from the pupil's? And do these Socratic views add up to a coherent philosophical position?

In Section I of this chapter, I explain the basis on which, following most modern interpreters, I feel able to divide Plato's dialogues into a group of (earlier) “Socratic” dialogues, where the character Socrates speaks more or less for the historical Socrates; and a group of (middle and later) dialogues in which the main character (now not always Socrates) speaks rather for Plato. I argue that the Plato of the middle and later dialogues, though some of his views remain the same, and though he attacks some of the same enemies and for some of the same reasons, has nevertheless in some ways gone well beyond the master. On some points, I suggest, he even contradicts him. In Section II, I contrast these Socratic dialogues with the other dialogues - first, in their form, method, tone, and subject matter; second, in their attitude to the sciences (arts, crafts, expertises), education, rhetoric, and mathematics; and third, in their theories of virtue, desire, and “weakness of will.” In Section III, I address myself to the question with what right I attribute any views at all to a philosopher who claimed that he knew only that he knew nothing - especially when the Socratic dialogues virtually all end negatively.

Chopin was a master of small forms. Few beliefs more centrally govern modern perceptions of Chopin than this one. It supports not only the myriad manifestations of his high stature in our culture (performances and critical analyses alike can be read as endorsements of the composer's extraordinary skill at miniatures), but also the occasional barbs that are thrown his way (some writers profess a complementary axiom that mastery of large forms eluded him).

But while the centrality of this belief may lend it the appearance of a timeless truth, it seems instead that the meaning of its fundamental term, form, has altered substantially over the past century and a half. When we unreflectively discuss form in Chopin's music as if its intent were self-evident, we therefore at least to some degree misrepresent its significance to his culture. All of us – pianists and amateur enthusiasts as well as musicologists – need to be aware of this disjunction between past and present: before we can probe aspects of form in Chopin's miniatures, we need to explore some of the ways in which the ideas of form and (to a lesser extent) smallness were construed in the first half of the nineteenth century. That these explorations can have very practical applications I hope to show in the second portion of my essay, which will focus on Chopin's smallest forms, the preludes.

Chopin's early music has attracted surprisingly little attention in the scholarly literature on the composer, notwithstanding its vital role in the evolution of his mature style. This comparative neglect can be attributed to certain fundamental problems surrounding the works composed in Warsaw before November 1830 (when Chopin left Poland to embark on his career as a composer-pianist) and in Vienna and Paris in 1830–2. Only a small number of autograph manuscripts from before 1830 survive, making it difficult to ensure the accuracy of modern editions, to determine the music's exact chronology, and to draw firm conclusions as to how Chopin's style gradually took shape. Furthermore, an underlying critical bias in many assessments of the early works inhibits objective evaluation of their significant contribution to Chopin's stylistic development. Most commentators tend to stress the early repertoire's inferior status in comparison with the composer's mature works and thus fail to view music from his ‘apprenticeship’ on its own terms, implicitly succumbing to notions of artistic ‘progress’ which are untenable from both analytical and historiological points of view.

This is not to say that the early pieces are altogether without weaknesses. Many works from the Warsaw period suffer from a somewhat rigid ‘formal’ conception, whereby more or less independent, closed sections were simply juxtaposed to form the whole, rather like separate beads on a string. Imperfect proportions between sections, imbalanced periodic structures, endless sequential passagework and overabundant ornamentation in the large-scale virtuosic compositions further inhibit musical flow, while exact recapitulation in the smaller genres, most of which follow a ternary formal plan, has a similarly stultifying effect, particularly in the early solo polonaises, where section A of the typical ABA CDC ABA form is heard six times in all (taking repeat signs into account).

Every age views musical works in its own way. The study of reception documents the changing functions and meanings attributed to a given corpus of music in particular milieus and at particular times, and in doing so it can enable generalisations about the role that music plays within society. This chapter assesses the part played by Chopin's music in nineteenth-century Polish culture, describing prevailing attitudes to his works and identifying the specific distinguishing features of Polish reception.

Literature on Chopin reception in Poland is exiguous, addressing only small corners of the field and concentrating for the most part on the views of composers and critics. The present study broadens this to consider ‘social’ reception (a historical-aesthetic interpretation of the ways in which the music was received by listeners) as well as ‘artistic’ reception (the influence of the music on the artistic world). Even so the study has certain constraints. From the artistic viewpoint, it will consider only Chopin's influence on other music. And from the social viewpoint, it is hampered by the restricted nature of source materials and by limited opportunities for research.

A study of present-day reception is of course facilitated by modern sociological methods such as questionnaires. These enable us to establish differences among various social circles and to determine the extent to which the reception of a composer's work is uniform at a given time and in a given milieu. Thus one can study fairly systematically the socio-functional aspect of reception in today's world. For earlier periods, however, the possibility of such study is very limited. In this case social reception must rely upon indirect sources such as critical literature and the repertoire performed.

If this were a book on Mozart or Beethoven, one would have needed more than a single chapter to analyse all of the sonatas. Seventy sonatas of Mozart and fiftyfive of Beethoven make up substantial chunks of their output. In fact, almost everything they composed for one or two instruments, except for variation sets and a few trifles, were sonatas.

With the next generation of composers the sonata lost its overpowering dominance. Mendelssohn limited himself to thirteen sonatas; Schumann settled on eight (including the C major Fantasy); Chopin tried one at the age of eighteen, subsequently contributed two great sonatas to the piano literature and later added to them a cello sonata; among Liszt's dozens of instrumental compositions, there are only two sonatas.

One cannot say that Romantic composers lost interest in the sonata. It still remained the most prestigious instrumental genre, an obsession for many composers striving to prove their ability to handle complex structures. In this respect it might be compared with the fugue in the Classical era.

Composers’ uneasy relationships with the sonata were not at all alleviated by the readiness of nineteenth-century music criticism to disparage their attempts at the genre. Traces of this criticism persisted well into the twentieth century. Some writers still consider that sonata forms in Romantic music suffer from a lack of structural continuity, and from composers’ inexperience with large forms or their inability to develop material and to conceive large organic wholes.

It was Oscar Wilde's patrimony as an Anglo-Irish writer which allowed him to combine the detachment of a foreigner with the first-hand experience of a native. This, together with his sharp social observation, unfailing ear for dialogue and biting wit, resulted in characters who were often only just larger than life, and, far from being caricature, the above quotation encapsulates a view of music and musicians in Britain which hardly changed between 1850 and 1930.

The Victorian attitude to music exhibited the compartmentalisation with which we now characterise the era in general. Musical entertainment for the aristocratic and upper-middle classes was largely opera (invariably Italian), together with orchestral and benefit concerts, at which the centre-middle classes were also to be seen. These concerts would include symphonies and other orchestral works as well as concertos and that staple of the British concert, solo vocal items, usually featuring a soprano. The Victorian penchant for public displays of piety was satisfied by frequent oratorio performances in the choral concerts that became fixtures in many parts of the country; the best-known of these, the Three Choirs Festival, still thrives. For the lower-middle and working classes there were the various spa and seaside orchestral concerts and, later, the Music Hall.