Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy



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Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/

Plato's Aesthetics

First published Fri Jun 27, 2008; substantive revision Tue Jun 19, 2012



If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into art and beauty (or a contemporary surrogate for beauty, e.g. aesthetic value), the striking feature of Plato's dialogues is that he devotes so much time to both topics but treats them oppositely. Art, mostly as represented by poetry, is closer to a greatest danger than any other phenomenon Plato speaks of, while beauty is close to a greatest good. Can there be such a thing as “Plato's aesthetics” that contains both positions?

Perhaps Plato is better described as seeking to discover the vocabulary and issues of aesthetics. For this reason his readers might not find a single aesthetic theory in the dialogues. For the same reason they are uniquely situated to watch core concepts of aesthetics being defined: beauty, imitation, inspiration.

The subject needs careful looking into. If perennially footnoted by later philosophers Plato has also been perennially thumbnailed. Clichés accompany his name. It is worth going slowly through the main topics of Plato's aesthetics—not in the search for some surprising theory unlike anything that has been said, but so that background shading and details may emerge, for a result that perhaps resembles the customary synopses of his thought as a human face resembles the cartoon reduction of it.

In what follows, citations to passages in Plato’s dialogues use “Stephanus pages”. These are based on a sixteenth-century edition of Plato’s works. The page numbers in this edition, together with the letters a–e, have become standard. Almost every translation of Plato includes the Stephanus page numbers and letters in the margins, or else indicates them at the top of the page. Thus, “Symposium 204b” refers to the same brief passage in every edition and every translation of Plato.

1. Beauty

The study of Plato's account of beauty must begin with one pronounced warning about terminology. The Greek adjective kalon only approximates to the English “beautiful,” so that not everything Plato says about a kalon thing will belong in a summary of his aesthetic theories.

Readers can take this distinction between the Greek and English terms too far. It is more tempting to argue against equating words from different languages than to insist on treating them interchangeably. And the discussion bears more on assessments of Platonic ethical theory, which draws on what may appear to be aesthetic approbation more than modern ethics does, than on whatever subject may fairly be called Plato's aesthetics.

But even given these qualifications the reader should know how to tell what is beautiful from what is kalon. To begin with the two terms are commonly applied to different items. They have overlapping but distinct ranges of application. A passage in Plato may speak of a face or body that someone finds kalon, or for that matter a statue, a spoon, a tree, or a grassy place to rest (Phaedrus 230b). Then “beautiful” makes a natural equivalent to the Greek adjective, certainly sounding less stilted than the alternatives. Even here, however, it is telling that Plato far more often uses kalon for a face or body than for works of art and natural scenery. As far as unambiguous beauties are concerned, he has a smaller set in mind than we do (Kosman 2010).

More typically kalon appears in contexts to which “beautiful” would fit awkwardly or not at all. For both Plato and Aristotle—and in many respects for Greek popular morality—kalon has a particular role to play as ethical approbation, not by meaning the same thing that agathon “good” means, but as a special complement to goodness. At times kalon narrowly means “noble,” often and more loosely “admirable.” The compound kalos k'agathos, the aristocratic ideal, is all-round praise, not “beautiful and good” as its compounds would translate separately but closer to “splendid and upright.” Here kalon is entirely an ethical term. Calling virtue beautiful feels misplaced in modern terms, or even perverse; calling wisdom beautiful, as the Symposium does (204b), will sound like an outright mistake (Kosman 2010, 348–350).

Because kalon does not always apply when “beautiful” does, and conversely much can be kalon that no one calls beautiful, translators may use other words. One rightly popular choice is “fine,” which applies to most things labeled kalon and also appropriate to ethical and aesthetic contexts (so Woodruff 1983). There are fine suits and string quartets but also fine displays of courage. Of course we have fine sunsets and fine dining as well, this word being even broader than kalon; that is not to mention fine points or fine print. And whereas people ordinarily ask what beauty really consists in, so that a conversation on the topic might actually have taken place, it is hard to imagine worrying over “what the fine is” or “what is really fine.”

The telling criterion will be not philological but philosophical. Studying the Hippias Major each reader should ask whether Plato's treatment of to kalon sounds relevant to questions one asks about beauty today.

1.1 Hippias Major

For a long time scholars treated the Hippias Major as a spurious dialogue. Today most agree that Plato wrote it. This dialogue follows Socrates and the Sophist Hippias through a sequence of attempts to define to kalon. Socrates badgers Hippias, in classic Socratic ways, to identify beauty's general nature; Hippias offers three definitions. Quite preposterously for instance “a beautiful young woman is beautiful” (287e). Hippias had a reputation for the breadth of his factual knowledge. He compiled the first list of Olympic victors, for instance. But his attention to specifics and facts renders him incapable of generalizing to a philosophical definition.

After Hippias fails, Socrates tries out three definitions. These are general but they fail too, and—again in classic Socratic mode—the dialogue ends unresolved. In one excursus Socrates says beauty “is appropriate [prepei]” and proposes defining it as “what is appropriate [to prepon]” (290d). Although ending in refutation this discussion (to 294e) is worth a look as the anticipation of a modern debate. Philosophers of the eighteenth century argue over whether a beautiful object is so by virtue of satisfying the definition of the object or independently of definitions. (Is this a beautiful doorknob because it is so perfectly what a doorknob should be, or would one call it beautiful even in ignorance of doorknobs and what they do, on the basis of its shape and color?) Kant calls the beauty that is appropriateness “dependent beauty” (Critique of Judgment, section 16). Such beauty threatens to become a species of the good. Within the accepted corpus of genuine Platonic works beauty is never subsumed within the good, the appropriate, or the beneficial; Plato seems to belong in the same camp as Kant in this respect. (For much more on Platonic beauty and the good see Barney 2010.)

Despite its inconclusiveness the Hippias Major reflects the view of beauty found in other dialogues:



  1. Beauty behaves as canonical Platonic Forms do. It possesses the reality that Forms have and is discovered through the same dialectic that brings other Forms to light. Socrates wants Hippias to explain the property that is known when any examples of beauty are known (essence of beauty), the cause of all occurrences of beauty, and more precisely the cause not of the appearance of beauty but of its real being (286d, 287c, 289d, 292c, 294e, 297b).

  2. Nevertheless beauty is not just any Form. It bears some close relationship to the good (296d), even though Socrates argues that the two are distinct (296e ff., 303e ff.). It is therefore a Form of some status above that of other Forms.

  3. Socrates and Hippias appeal to artworks as examples of beautiful things but do not treat those examples as the central cases (290a–b, 297e–298a). So too generally Plato conducts his inquiry into beauty at a distance from his discussion of art. (But the Republic and the Laws both offer up exceptions to this generalization: Lear 2010, 361.)

These three aspects of Platonic beauty work together and reflect beauty's unique place in Plato's metaphysics, something almost both visible and intelligible.
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