Let's add to this the concepts that we talked about above. Plato's ideas dance both by themselves and among people, and people dance among ideas. Things and their ideas are in a state of perpetual play, so that all this objective idealism of Plato is a doctrine of a universal ballet, sometimes human, sometimes downright cosmic. And if people are only toys in the hands of the gods, then this is not at all said to belittle gods and people. On the contrary, a whole system of morality is built on this. One of Plato's most striking representations of the connection between the ideas of M things is, as we have seen, the picture of hunting. Man hunts for ideas, including, of course, eternal ideas; And these ideas and, of course, including eternal ideas, hunt for a person. Eternal play, eternal dance, eternal hunting - this is what Plato's relation between eternal ideas and things is.

Nor does Plato neglect the purely artisanal depiction of the connection of ideas with each other, as well as the connection of ideas and things. However complex and difficult the ways in which ideas relate to each other, ideas nevertheless form a kind of fabric, as if a weaver were joining one idea to another, so that they form a common fabric, and dialectics is only a kind of weaving. In Plato, too, the connection of ideas with things is also the result of a peculiar weaving craft: ideas are interwoven with things, and things with ideas, in such a way that a common and continuous and completely indivisible fabric is formed, although it costs nothing for the understanding to distinguish in this fabric the elements that compose it.

And in general, Plato, as a rule, explains the dialectical processes of thought by one or another type of work of a craftsman or a doctor. The activity of an artist is no different from that of a carpenter or a joiner; and the introduction of ideas into matter is no different from the work of a doctor, a baker or a cook, a bricklayer or a stonemason. There is no need to delve into the difficult formulation of absolute light or what Plato calls the "presuppositionless principle." It is simply a house in which everything that exists lives, and an individual soul lives in its body, like a snail in its shell.

In this entire section on the philosophical-stylistic features of Plato's aesthetics, we have already touched upon a sufficiently large number of Plato's texts, where the fundamental somatism cannot be subject to any doubt. But all the texts we have quoted are only a small number of all the somatic images that can be found in Plato. It is worth writing whole dissertations about this, since all this has not yet been brought together and we still cannot draw a final conclusion about Plato's philosophical-aesthetic style. However, any unprejudiced reader must agree that, if not the sheer somatism of Plato's aesthetics, then at least the somatism of most of its sections has been proved textually.

We would now like, however, to characterize Plato's philosophical-aesthetic somatism, not by means of individual images, separate expressions, or even individual arguments in Plato, but by means of that terminology of his which for twenty-three centuries has been considered by everyone to be the most specific to Plato and the most characteristic of him.

Namely, we would like to subject the term "idea" itself to a special study, which has not yet been considered by anyone to be something alien to Plato or something extraneous to him. True, in a strictly philological and in a strict historical-philosophical sense, an analysis of even this term still cannot reveal the entire specificity of Plato's aesthetics. However, we repeat, these are no longer separate images and separate stylistic devices of Plato's language, and not even his separate arguments. Undoubtedly, here we come into contact with something very deep and very intimate for the whole of Plato's aesthetics. Until we examine these two terms, eidos and idea, from this point of view, the somatism of Plato's aesthetics which we assert will still remain unproved. Let some other research be needed to prove Plato's aesthetic somatism. If, however, somatism, or at least some of its deepest elements, are to be proved by us in these two most general terms of Plato's aesthetics, then this circumstance must to a considerable extent overturn the traditional spiritualization of Plato's philosophy and aesthetics. Thus, from the individual and particular manifestations of somatism in Plato's aesthetics, let us turn to its most general terminology.

§7. Elements of somatic terminology in Plato's aesthetics{87}

1. Introductory remarks

The traditional understanding of Plato, and especially of his doctrine of ideas (and, as we know, it is precisely the main kernel of Plato's aesthetics{88} is distinguished by a very sublime, idealistic, and even spiritualistic character. Indeed, this is a very lofty philosophy. However, the sublime everywhere in history had its own character; and if these characters are taken from the Ancient East, then there will be a lot of these characters and it is difficult to combine them with one another. As far as antiquity is concerned, from the time of Winckelmann, if not from the time of the Renaissance, antiquity has usually been regarded as something plastically beautiful, humanly noble, calm, and even majestic. Fr. Nietzsche did very little to shake this general modern European view of antiquity. The "spirit of music" from which he derived Greek classical tragedy itself arose in him not only from Apollo, but also from Dionysus. However, the orgiastic essence of Dionysus, which coincided so deeply with Apollo plasticity, was characterized by blood, insane ecstasies, and in general something pre-cultured, pre-civilized. The sublime character of Attic tragedy not only diminished from this, but, perhaps, became even more significant and spiritual. After Nietzsche, the Greek classics not only did not decline, but even Socrates and his disciples, whom Nietzsche himself regarded as the fall of the classics, began to be considered in an even higher style.

The importance of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle only increased with the passage of centuries, and with the advent of Christianity, after a certain hiccup, these philosophers entered deeply into Christian, Jewish, and Mohammedan theology, received a Neoplatonic deepening, and forever remained representatives of the philosophy of the absolute spirit, who could be compared only with German idealism.

At the same time, they usually forgot absolutely everything that was specific to them. For example, Plato was very rarely and very little characterized as a thinker of antiquity. Of course, his idealism and his spiritualism are difficult to question. But there is its own specificity in ancient idealism (and materialism) and in ancient spiritualism. But it was precisely this specificity that was taken into account the least.

They taught about Plato's ideas. But the fact that Plato's ideas were only a generative model for material things, and that therefore the whole of Platonism was, properly speaking, only a cosmology, was said very little about this.