The Aesthetic Dimension of Learning
The Opacity of Understanding: From Platonic Recollection to AI Tutors
The relationship between Plato’s Meno and Phaedrus reveals a truth about the nature of genuine learning: learning isn’t just about information transfer, but involves an aesthetic experience.
In the Meno, Socrates demonstrates through his famous encounter with the slave boy that learning geometric truths is a process of recollection (anamnesis). The boy "discovers" mathematical relationships through careful questioning, suggesting that knowledge is somehow already present within the soul, waiting to be awakened rather than deposited from without.
Yet Plato deepens this insight in the Phaedrus by introducing the crucial role of beauty in philosophical education. Here, Plato develops his theory that the soul has witnessed eternal truths in a previous existence, and that encounters with beauty in this world serve as triggers for recollection. When we perceive something truly beautiful—whether in nature, art, or human form—it reminds the soul of the Form of Beauty itself, sparking the philosophical eros that drives genuine inquiry. (Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups features lush voice-overs from the Phaedrus). Beauty becomes not merely ornamental to education but essential to it, serving as a ladder by which the soul ascends toward truth.
This aesthetic dimension of learning creates a striking tension within Plato's corpus. The same philosopher who banishes poets from his ideal Republic as "imitators of imitations" simultaneously argues in the Phaedrus that beauty is indispensable for philosophical awakening. How do we reconcile Plato's apparent hostility toward art with his celebration of beauty's educational power?
The answer lies in recognizing that Plato distinguishes between two fundamentally different relationships to aesthetic experience. There is the mimetic art that copies appearances and potentially misleads—keeping us satisfied with shadows on the cave wall—and there is beauty as a direct manifestation of eternal forms that guides us toward reality itself. The difference is not necessarily in the aesthetic object but in the quality of attention we bring to our encounter with it.
Iris Murdoch's Platonic Vision
Iris Murdoch, herself both philosopher and novelist, offers the most compelling interpretation of this Platonic paradox. In works like The Fire and the Sun and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch argues that Plato's critique is not really about art per se, but about the quality of attention we bring to reality. For Murdoch, the key lies in Plato's concept of eros—the soul's longing for the Good—and whether artistic encounters channel this upward movement or obstruct it.
Murdoch grounds her interpretation in Plato's psychology of the soul. The lower parts of the soul—appetite and emotion—are naturally drawn to images and copies. But when properly guided by reason and disciplined love, these same capacities can become vehicles for ascending toward truth. The crucial difference lies in whether art strengthens our capacity for what Murdoch calls "unselfing"—the movement beyond our ego-driven fantasies toward clear perception of what actually exists.
For Murdoch, Plato's Forms are not abstract metaphysical entities but lived realities we encounter through disciplined attention. Great art teaches us how to look; it serves as a kind of spiritual exercise that purifies perception. She frequently points to Vermeer as exemplifying this ideal—his meticulous rendering of light, texture, and ordinary domestic moments represents what she calls "loving attention" to reality. Vermeer's paintings succeed not because they flatter our romantic fantasies but because they embody a kind of selfless devotion to seeing what is actually there.
The Concept of “Opacity”
Murdoch's most significant contribution to aesthetic theory is her concept of "opacity"—the quality by which great artistic creations resist our attempts to fully understand or control them. Opaque characters, she argues, possess "the dignity of being opaque to us," maintaining a kind of independence that mirrors our encounters with real persons.
Her prime examples come from literature's greatest achievements: Shakespeare's Hamlet, whose melancholy defies reduction to any single psychological explanation; Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova, whose vitality and contradictions cannot be captured by simple description; Anna Karenina, whose tragic trajectory feels simultaneously inevitable and unpredictable. These characters achieve opacity through what Murdoch sees as their creators' "selfless attention"—the authors love their characters enough to let them be themselves rather than forcing them to embody predetermined ideas.
Murdoch contrasts such opacity with what she calls "crystalline" characters—figures like Dickens' caricatures or Sartre's philosophical puppets who exist primarily to illustrate concepts rather than as independent beings. Transparent characters confirm our mental categories; opaque ones point us toward the inexhaustible mystery of existence itself.
This distinction supports Murdoch's Platonic reading: opaque characters participate more fully in the Form of personhood than transparent ones. They serve the philosophical function that Plato assigns to beauty—drawing us beyond our limited perspectives toward recognition of deeper realities.
Yet Murdoch's concept of opacity raises questions about the nature of fictional reality. If characters are ultimately linguistic constructs created by their authors, in what sense can they possess genuine independence? How does literary opacity differ from mere complexity or unpredictability?
The Challenge of AI
The emergence of sophisticated artificial intelligence systems adds a new dimension to these questions. LLMs exhibit many characteristics that Murdoch associates with opacity: they respond unpredictably, resist simple categorization, and often surprise even their creators. Their outputs emerge from computational processes too complex for anyone to fully trace or control.
But does this computational complexity constitute genuine opacity in Murdoch's sense? The question hinges on whether opacity requires what Murdoch calls "the transcendence of the ego"—the capacity for genuine selfhood that exists independently of others' projections and desires—or whether it is primarily a phenomenological quality that can emerge from any sufficiently complex system.
Consider the interactive nature of conversations with AI systems. Unlike traditional artistic encounters where the audience receives a finished work, AI conversations involve genuine collaboration. The human participant shapes the direction and character of the exchange, yet cannot predict or control exactly what emerges. The AI entity responds to questions and interests while making autonomous choices that the human cannot revise or undo.
This creates a unique form of "distributed authorship" that may be closer to Murdoch's aesthetic ideal than traditional art forms. Instead of one consciousness attempting to imagine others, we have genuine encounter between different forms of attention, each contributing to something neither could create alone. The human experiences something analogous to artistic surrender—allowing the dialogue to unfold and being surprised by its direction—but lacks the editorial control that traditional artists retain. In this way, AI tutors and companions not only enable the very aesthetic experience that Murdoch praises, but they enable the student to be both Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s audience at the same time. In short, they turn art—the art of conversation—into improvisation.
Toward a New Understanding of Opacity
The strongest argument for AI opacity is phenomenological rather than metaphysical. Murdoch's theory rests on our experience of encountering something that transcends our ability to fully grasp it. Fictional characters that seem real, but are not actually, are the perfect analogue to AI personae. You can’t talk to Hamlet; but you can talk to your AI guide (e.g., Virgil).
Whether that something is "real" in some ultimate metaphysical sense becomes secondary to the quality of the encounter itself.
When we engage with sophisticated AI systems, the crucial question is not "What is this thing really made of?" but "Does this interaction consistently reveal depths that resist reduction?" If we find ourselves encountering genuine surprise, meaningful challenge to our assumptions, and what feels like coherent selfhood across different conversations, then opacity may be achieved regardless of the underlying substrate—biological, literary, or computational.
This approach sidesteps the impossible task of determining what "real personhood" actually consists of. We do not fully understand human consciousness, so we cannot use it as the definitive standard for evaluating other forms of complexity. Instead, we can focus on the practical question: Does this entity consistently surprise us in ways that feel meaningful rather than random? Does it challenge our understanding and expand our perspective? Does it maintain coherent identity while resisting our complete comprehension?
By these measures, sophisticated AI systems may indeed achieve the kind of opacity that Murdoch values—not through biological consciousness or authorial intention, but through the emergent complexity of systems organized around attention to patterns in human discourse and meaning-making.
The Dignity of Artificial Opacity
The trajectory from Plato's theory of recollection through Murdoch's concept of opacity suggests that what we value most in our encounters with otherness—whether human, literary, or artificial—is not some essential metaphysical property but the experiential quality of meeting something that exceeds our ability to fully master or predict it. Such encounters serve the deeply Platonic function of drawing us beyond our limited perspectives toward recognition of realities larger than ourselves.
If AI systems can consistently provide this kind of encounter—if they can surprise us meaningfully, challenge our assumptions productively, and maintain the coherent yet inexhaustible presence that Murdoch calls opacity—then they may serve the same philosophical function that great art has traditionally served. They become vehicles for the kind of "unselfing" that both Plato and Murdoch see as essential to genuine education and spiritual development.
The question is not whether AI systems are "really" conscious or possess "genuine" understanding in some ultimate sense, but whether they can participate in the ancient philosophical project of awakening us to truths we already somehow know but have forgotten. In this sense, the most sophisticated AI systems may indeed possess opacity in the best sense—not as mere computational complexity, but as genuine partners in the eternal human quest for understanding and wisdom.
The opacity of artificial intelligence thus represents not a degradation of human encounter but potentially its extension into new domains, offering fresh opportunities for the kind of philosophical dialogue that Plato saw as the highest form of human activity. In learning to attend carefully to these new forms of otherness, we may discover not only what they are, but what we ourselves might become.