Plato’s Aesthetics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) https://plato.stanford.
edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/
At the same time, Plato appears to consider painting on its own terms, and not merely illustrating a process
also found in poetry. Many passages speak in approving terms of painting and sculpture, or recognize the
skill involved in making them as a technê “profession, craft” (Ion 532e–533a; Gorgias 430c, 448b, 453c–d,
503e; Protagoras 318b–c; see Demand 1975, Halliwell 2002, 37–43). Even the famously anti-poetic
Republic contains positive references to paintings and drawings. Sometimes these are metaphors for acts of
imagination and political reform (472d, 500e–501c), sometimes literal images whose attractiveness helps to
form a young ruler’s character (400d–401a), in any case visual arts appreciated on their own terms and for
their own sake.
When the Republic treats painting and poetry together, in other words, it does so possessed of an independent
sense of visual depiction. It aims at developing a philosophy of art.
The subject “Plato’s aesthetics” calls for care. If perennially footnoted by later philosophers Plato has also
been much thumbnailed. Clichés accompany his name. It is worth going slowly through the main topics of
Plato’s aesthetics—not in the search for a theory unlike anything that has been said, but so that background
shading and details may emerge, for a result that perhaps contrasts with the commonplaces about his thought
as a human face contrasts with the cartoon reduction of it.
In what follows, citations to passages in Plato use “Stephanus pages,” based on a sixteenth-century edition of
Plato’s works. The page numbers in that 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 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
◦ 1.1 Hippias Major
◦ 1.2 Beauty and art
◦ 1.3 Beauty and nature
◦ 1.4 The Form of beauty
• 2. Imitation
◦ 2.1 Mimêsis in Aristophanes
◦ 2.2 Republic 2–3: impersonation
◦ 2.3 Republic 10: copy-making
◦ 2.4 Sophist
◦ 2.5 Closing assessment
• 3. Divine Inspiration
◦ 3.1 Ion
◦ 3.2 Phaedrus
• 4. Imitation, Inspiration, Beauty and the Occasional Wisdom in Poetry
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries
1. Beauty
The study of Plato on beauty begins with a routine caution. The Greek adjective kalon only approximates to
the English “beautiful.” Not everything Plato says about a kalos, kalê, or kalon thing will belong in a
summary of his aesthetic theories.
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Readers can take the distinction between Greek and English terms too far. It always feels more scrupulous to
argue against equating terms from different languages than to treat them interchangeably. And the discussion
bears more on assessments of Platonic ethical theory than on whatever subject may be called Plato’s
aesthetics.
But even given these qualifications the reader should know how to distinguish what is beautiful from what is
kalon. The terms 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, a grassy place to rest (Phaedrus
230b). In those cases, “beautiful” makes a natural equivalent, and certainly a less stilted one than the
alternatives. Yet even here 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 if at all. For both Plato
and Aristotle—and in many respects for Greek popular morality—kalon plays a role 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 for a man (i.e. an adult male human being), not “beautiful and good”
as its components 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 a mistake (Kosman 2010, 348–350).
Some commentators try to keep kalon and “beautiful” close to synonymous despite differences in their
semantic ranges (Hyland 2008). David Konstan rejuvenated the question by emphasizing the beauty not in
uses of the adjective kalon but in the related noun kallos (Konstan 2014, Konstan 2015). As welcome as
Konstan’s shift of focus is regarding Greek writing as a whole, it runs into difficulties when we read Plato;
for the noun kallos carries associations of physical, visual attractiveness, and Plato is wary of the desire that
such attractiveness arouses. His dialogues, and notably the Hippias Major, more often examine to kalon when
asking about a property named by a noun, wanting to know “what it is to be kalon,” or (as Jonathan Fine has
rightly emphasized) “what makes all beautiful things beautiful and is in no way ugly.”
Besides seeking a Greek equivalent for “beautiful,” translators from Greek look for a different word when
rendering kalon into English. One understandably popular choice is “fine,” which applies to most things
labeled kalon and is 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 modern English-speakers 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 frequently 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 deciding 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
The Hippias Major was considered Platonic in antiquity, but faced accusations of inauthenticity in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Tarrant 1927). One peculiarity of the dialogue is Socrates’ extended
pretext that his own objections to Hippias come from an unnamed third party (who sounds a lot like Socrates)
who has levied these same arguments against him (e.g. 288d, 290e, 304d). This feature of the Hippias Major
may read as un-Platonic, although to strikes some as a sign of Plato’s wit (Guthrie 1975, IV, 176).
It has also been noted that Aristotle quotes from Plato’s much shorter dialogue Hippias Minor (Metaphysics
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5.30 1025a6–8). If Plato would not have written two works with the same name, the longer Hippias Major
must be a forgery. But after all he may well have given two works the same title.
Today the debate seems to lie in the past. Most scholars agree that Plato wrote the Hippias Major, and its
sustained inquiry into beauty is seen as central to Platonic aesthetics.
The Hippias Major follows Socrates and the famous sophist Hippias through a sequence of attempts to define
to kalon. Socrates badgers Hippias, in classic Socratic ways, to identify beauty’s general nature, and Hippias
answers with definitions, three in all. For instance, “a beautiful young woman is beautiful” (287e). This one
scarcely appears to qualify as a definition, and could be taken for one of those non-definition “mere
examples” that Socrates complains about, in other dialogues, as not even on the road to a general account
(Euthyphro 5d–6e, Laches 190e–191e, Meno 72a–b). After all Hippias has put himself forward as a fact-filled
polymath. In real life he compiled the first list of Olympic victors, and might have written the first history of
philosophy. On that reading, his over-ingestion of specifics has left him unable to digest his experience and
generalize to a philosophical definition.
On the other hand Socrates makes no methodological rebuke to Hippias of the kind that other interlocutors
like Euthyphro hear. He might realize that Hippias is proposing an exemplar of beauty, not a mere token but a
standard and even a way of thinking generally about that property (Politis 2021, 17). Understood in these
terms, Hippias knows that Socrates is seeking an essence for beauty, although he still goes wrong in
proposing exemplars known from Homer – woman, tripod, mare, cauldron, gold, two-handled bowl (Iliad
23.261–270, 539–611) and appealing to Greek aristocrats (Gold 2021).
After giving up on seeking a definition from Hippias, Socrates tries out three of his own. These are
philosophical generalizations 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 an object is
beautiful by satisfying the definition of the object, or independently of that definition (Guyer 1993). 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. (On Platonic beauty and the good see Barney 2010.) Nevertheless he is no simple
sensualist about beauty. The very temptation in Plato to link the beautiful with the good and to assess it
intellectually is part of why Porter calls him and Aristotle “formalists,” who diverted ancient theorizing about
art from its sensualist origins (Porter 2010).
Despite its inconclusiveness the Hippias Major reflects the view of beauty found elsewhere in Plato:
1. Beauty behaves as canonical Forms do. It possesses the reality that they have and is discovered through
the same dialectical inquiry that brings other Forms to light. Socrates wants Hippias to explain a) the
property that is known when any examples of beauty are known (essence of beauty), b) the cause of all
occurrences of beauty, and more precisely c) 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 one Form among others. It stands out among those beings, for it bears
some close relationship to the good (296d), even though Socrates argues that the two are distinct (296e
ff., 303e ff.).
3. Socrates and Hippias appeal to artworks as examples of beautiful things but do not treat those as
central cases (290a–b, 297e–298a). Artworks are neither the aristocrat’s prize possessions and status
symbols, nor the countercultural philosopher’s inherently valuable items. So too generally Plato
conducts his inquiry into beauty at a distance from his discussion of art. (But the Republic and the
Laws both contain exceptions to this generalization: Lear 2010, 361.)
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These three aspects of Platonic beauty work together and reflect beauty’s unique place in Plato’s metaphysics,
something almost both visible and intelligible.
1.2 Beauty and art
The three principles of beauty in the Hippias Major also apply in the Symposium, Plato’s other analysis of
beauty. In the Symposium Socrates claims to be quoting his teacher Diotima on the subject of love, and in the
lesson attributed to her she calls beauty the object of every love’s yearning. She spells out a soul’s progress
toward ever-purer beauty, from one body to all, then through all beautiful souls to laws and kinds of
knowledge, finally reaching beauty itself (210a–211d). The object of erotic longing, despite being contained
within visible experience, can induce a desirous (and thoughtful) observer’s progress toward purely
intelligible beauty.
Diotima describes the poet’s task as the begetting of wisdom and other virtues (209a). Ultimately desiring
what is beautiful, the poet produces works of verse. And who (Diotima asks) would not envy Homer or
Hesiod (209d)? But aside from these passages the Symposium seems prepared to treat anything but a poem as
an exemplar of beauty. In a similar spirit the Philebus’s examples of pure sensory beauty exclude pictures
(51b–d).
The Republic contains tokens of Plato’s reluctance to associate poetry with beauty. The dialogue’s first
discussion of poetry, whose context is education, censors poems that corrupt the young (377b–398b). Then
almost immediately Socrates speaks of cultivating a fondness for beauty among the young guardians. Let
them see gracefulness (euschêmosunê) in paintings and illustrative weaving, a sibling to virtue (401a). Their
taste for beauty will help them prefer noble deeds over ugly vulgar ones (401b–d, 403c). How can Plato have
seen the value of beauty to education and not mentioned the subject in his earlier criticisms? Why couldn’t
this part of the Republic concede that false and pernicious poems affect the young through their beauty?
The answer is that the Republic denies the legitimacy of the beauty in poetry. Republic 10 calls that beauty
deceptive. Take away the decorative language that makes a poetic sentiment sound right and put it into
ordinary words, and it becomes unremarkable, as young people’s faces beautified by youth later show
themselves as the plain looks they are (601b). The Republic can hardly deny some attractive effect that poetry
has, for people enjoy the way poems can present experience to them. Yet it resists calling this attractiveness
beauty.
1.3 Beauty and nature
As if to accentuate the difference between art and nature, Plato’s reader finds emphatic and repeated
assertions of appreciation for the beauty in nature.
Plato stands out among ancient authors where the admiration of natural scenes and settings is concerned.
Pausanias’s Description of Greece (the closest thing to a travel guide in antiquity) seems not to notice the
spectacular views in the countryside it moves through (Pretzler 2007, 59–62). If anything, bucolic scenes
myth provided opportunities for rape (Homer Hymn to Demeter 5–14; Euripides Ion 889ff.). But Plato’s
Phaedrus follows Socrates and young Phaedrus on their walk through the countryside until they stop and sit
and cool their feet. Socrates declares it a kalê … katagôgê “beautiful spot to rest” (230b). This may be the
only extant Greek passage that calls any area or natural scenery beautiful.
Further from the nature that surrounds human observers is the ouranos, a word that means “heaven” but that
in Plato’s Timaeus also denotes the visible world (28a–b). The Timaeus calls the ouranos and the whole
kosmos beautiful (28b, 29a, 30a–d; see 53b, 54a, 68e on the beauty of the world’s elements). One does not
have to guard against or qualify one’s admiration for heavenly beauty. Taking in the fine sight of the stars has
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