This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Art and Anarchy, given by Edgar Vint, was originally broadcast in 1960.

Art and Anarchy.

The BBC presents another wreath lecturer by Edgar Vint, professor of the History of Art in the University of Oxford

and Fellow of Trinity College.

Professor Vint discusses the fear of knowledge.

When I spoke about Plato's fear of art

and suggested that he had cause to fear it. It may have sounded as if I were trying

to revive a ghost, for it is certain that the sacred fear of art has left us. We have, however,

another fear, which I believe was unknown to Plato, the fear that knowledge might hurt the imagination, that the exercise

of artistic faculties both in the artist and in the spectator might be weakened by the use

of reason. This is a modern fear, and I am not mistaken, unfamiliar before the romantic period.

But for more than a century and a half,

this fear has dominated our view of art with such force

that we have come to look upon it as a basic truth,

supported by a strong philosophical and literary tradition.

In retrospect, it has seemed to some classical scholars who were still under the spell of

the romantic view that Greek tragedy died of Greek philosophy, that the primitive inspiration

which the tragic poet drew from myth and ritual could not survive the destructive talk of Socrates.

In the Fido, Plato seems to suggest

that Socrates felt a scruple on that account

and sang a poetic swan song before he died,

...