Simon Critchley is an English Philosopher, the Hans Jonas Professor in New School, New York. He is the founding member of the executive committee of Forum for European Philosophy, the previous program director of College International de Philosophie in Paris, the previous president of British Society for Phenomenology and the research fellow of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. He has held visiting professorship at numerous universities and authored more than twenty books which are translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, etc. In these books, he develops a strikingly independent philosophical voice of western leftist and inquired the increasingly overlapped terrain of aesthetics, politics and ethics. Some of his books such as Very Little… Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007), The Faith of the Faithless (2012) have generated lively intellectual debate in the west, notably with Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Professor Critchley also writes for The Guardian and is moderator of "The Stone", a philosophy column in The New York Times, which has attracted millions and thousands of readers.
In this interview, Professor Critchley traced the ineliminable aesthetic dimension of politics back to the time of ancient Greece, and discussed how the shifting of conceptual and normative center of some pivotal aesthetic paradigms may influence the studies of ethics and politics. Some key concepts like "poetic fiction", "sublimation", "comic paradigm" and the dialectic pair "autonomy / heteronomy" are discussed frequently, acted as the very hinge combining the interacted fields of aesthetics, literature, politics and ethics. This interview, on one hand, explains "the return of aesthetics" in contemporary western liberal studies, on the other, offers us new potentials of social intervention of western critical theories .
Since philosophy term technē in ancient Greece is not exactly the same as the concept of art today, it is inaccurate to say that Plato was for or against art, but, at the same time. Plato actually opposed some kind of technē (mainly poetry and painting), and the influence of this stance remained even today. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify which kind of technē Plato exactly opposed. In ancient Greece, it was Plato who firstly proposed technē as a philosophy term on the basis of Pre-Socratic philosophy. So his thought of technē must relate itself to the thought of phusis in Pre-Socratics, meaning that the aspect which Plato thought was contrary to idea and which Plato criticized was exactly the aspect which was contrary to phusis from Pre-Socratic point of view. So, if we match Plato's concept of technē with the modern concept of art, the concept technē of ancient Greece had already included the main three meanings of art today, namely, Art or the Fine Arts in modern Aesthetics, skills which is already contained in technē, and Kitsch in modern Aesthetics which was indeed criticized by Plato. In Plato's time, all these three meanings were mingled in discriminately, and there had not been a context for Plato to distinguish all these three aspects of technē, but at least, it should be understood that Plato was not actually against Art.
