Plato and the Question of Beauty

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The famous passage toward the end of the Republic where Socrates hints that those over the age of ten must be gotten rid of in order for the Kallipolis to be established might be thought to broach the issue of genocide, but not strictly, since presumably there would be a host of youth left over to be retrained. 2. Indeed, suggests Nietzsche, even for Socrates. See The Birth of Tragedy, where he speaks of ‘‘aesthetic Socratism’’ as embodying the conviction that ‘‘to be beautiful everything must be intelligible’’ (Nietzsche 1967, 83–84). Nietzsche continues this conviction to the end: in Twilight of the Idols, speaking of Socrates’ famed ugliness, he comments, ‘‘But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation’’ (Nietzsche 1982b, 474). 3. See Edelstein 1966. 4. Edelstein 1966, 73√. 5. Reported to me by Stanley Rosen. Strauss expressed this in seminars, but apparently not in his published writing. 6. I am thinking particularly of Jacques Derrida’s questioning of the status of the ‘‘author’’ Plato in his ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy.’’ See Derrida 1981, esp. 129–130. ∞. The Question of Beauty in the Hippias Major 1. I elaborate on the significance of this dramatic situation in The Virtue of Philosophy : An Interpretation of Plato’s Charmides. See Hyland 1981, chaps. 1–2. 2. Nails 2002, 13–14. This volume, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and the Other Socratics, is an excellent source for information of this sort. 138 ⭈ notes to pages 12–25 3. I translate literally but awkwardly to bring out that kalos is Socrates’ first word in response. 4. In addition, at 284a (twice) and at 285c, superlative forms of kallistos, ‘‘most beautiful’’ or ‘‘best,’’ are employed. 5. In addition, Aristophanes’ Clouds, first performed in 423 bc, portrayed Socrates as ugly in soul as well as in body. Socrates’ notorious ugliness is particularly noteworthy in a culture as obsessed with beauty as the Greeks. 6. This issue gets complicated in Kant by his regular emphasis on the core status of the beauty of nature. This Platonic-Kantian contrast is obviously a topic for a subsequent book, but for an excellent discussion both of the Kantian formulation of this issue and its modern consequences—e.g., ‘‘beauty (or its primary instance, art)’’—see Bernstein 1992. 7. A di√erent but related issue: for the Greeks—and this would have to be addressed eventually—even though beauty is not located ‘‘originally’’ in art, it remains that beauty is a virtual requirement for good art. Yet for modernity, which locates the origin of beauty in art, gradually but surely (as in contemporary art) beauty becomes an entirely contingent feature of good art. 8. See Theaetetus 152d √. 9. Martin Heidegger’s classic formulation of this claim (not, however, with regard to Plato) is in The Origins of a Work of Art. See Heidegger 1971, 81. 10. One cannot read this passage without being reminded of Zarathustra’s famous formulation of beauty in part 2 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the section titled ‘‘On those who are sublime’’: ‘‘When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible, such descent I call beauty. And there is no one from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful.’’ (See Nietzsche 1982a.) It should also be noted that Hippias’s immediate response to Socrates’ suggestion is to remove it from the abstract (the beautiful is power) to the particular: in politics, he replies, it is especially beautiful to be powerful in one’s city, and ugly to be powerless (Hippias Major 296a). 11. Made even more provocative if joined with the claim of the Eleatic Stranger that Being is power (Sophist 247e). Thinking through the consequences of a position that suggests that Being is power and that such power is what beauty is would take us through virtually the entire history of philosophy on the topic. 12. This step itself is even more problematic with the Greek aition than the English ‘‘cause,’’ for which the very notion of a ‘‘self-cause’’ would at least be a complication here. 13. To be sure, for entirely di√erent reasons, the Socrates of the Republic will agree that strictly, the beautiful is not the cause of the good, because the good is the cause of the beautiful. (See Republic 505a √.) This possibility, of course, is ignored in the Hippias Major. 14. Though this does not stop either Hippias or Socrates from continuing to...