Footnote From Our Philosopher

The concept of the Platonic Ideal is a system for understanding and participating in the world. According to this system, there is an ideal Form to both sensible things, such as chairs and houses, and concepts, such as justice and beauty. IT is based on the premise that there are shades, or degrees of reality: what we see to be a chair, for instance, is only the “shadowy” essence of that chair [598c, Republic], and likewise for Truth, Equality and Justice. For Plato, it is the job of the crafter, be it carpenter, thinker or any other skilled person, to engage in their respective craft and attempt to approximate the Ideal Form of their subject matter.

On Imagism

There is a structure which will underlie this sequence of blog entries. When the structure is apparent, the direct relevance of the preceding pieces offered by Gene Fowler and David Moorman with be seen in clear relief. Before we proceed we must examine one more bit of lacunae, the doctrines of Ezra Pound. The underlying quest here is to determine what light Mr. Ezra Pound can shed on the subjects of art, artifice, craft and Truth.

He published an essay in the journal Poetry on a topic he called “Imagism”:

An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time….It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sudden sense of liberation….which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

Cited in Humphrey Carpenter’s 1988

Biography of Pound , A serious Character, p. 197

This concept applies to all branches of the arts. It describes the quest or compulsion of the artist, always on the hunt for the Image. In a more refined way, the Poet David Moorman referred to draft of a manuscript of his poems as ‘almost hitting the Platonic.’ I interpret that to mean that the poems always existed and it was but for the artist to pull them out of the air and realize them in the lesser, material world. The word “Image” is capitalized.

Hans Hoffman, the great teacher of American Painters, himself a great artist remarked that "The physical eye sees only the shell and the semblance--the inner eye, however, sees to the core and grasps the coherence of things."