3.6: Love of the Fine and Beautiful

See 400e-403c. The Greek word kalon (kalos, etc.) is translated differently in the same context by different people, and differently in different contexts by the same people. It is always a term of approbation (except in contexts of irony), but it appears in English sometimes as “beautiful,” sometimes as “fine,” sometimes as “good,” sometimes as “noble,” sometimes as “splendid,” sometimes as “excellent,” sometimes as “acceptable,” and sometimes as “right.” Later in the Republic (in Book V, 475e-476d, an important passage), Socrates is going to ask what it is in virtue of which the many kalon things are one thing, kalon, and it is standard practice to translate his answer as “beauty in itself” or “the beautiful itself.” Why then not consistently translate kalon as “beautiful”? The concern is that modern English speakers associate “beautiful” with what is supposed to be too narrow a class of objects – pretty faces, sunsets, Mozart’s music and the like – whereas the word kalon was used in Plato’s day to indicate appealing aspects of virtually anything: tools, games, approaches to education, religious processions (as in the second sentence of the Republic), dispositions of the soul, mathematical proofs, political arrangements, and so on. But it is debatable whether the refashioning of a single Greek word into several English words is helpful, particularly in this case. If there is something common to all kalos things, as Socrates is going to be arguing, then to split up references to this common property by using a variety of words is to invite the reader to lose track of an important point. Besides, the English word “beautiful” is applied more widely nowadays than is often recognized, roughly as widely as the Greeks applied the word kalon. When a computer makes a difficult task simple we say that it does it “beautifully.” A long touchdown pass in a difficult situation we call a “perfectly beautiful execution.” Well-designed business plans are said to be “beautifully thought through.” Chairs, bowls, and buildings, if elegant and functional, are said to be “beautiful.” And when it comes to persons, we recognize “inner beauty” as well as “outer beauty.” It may seem odd to suppose that so diverse a set of things could have something in common in virtue of which they all deserve to be called “beautiful,” but Socrates evidently believes this to be so and considers it an important truth. In the present passage, he describes how enlightened craftsmen such as painters, weavers, and architects are to join the poets and musicians in creating for the guardians-in-training an ideally beautiful environment; “the influence exerted by those fine works” is to affect the senses “like a healthy breeze,” guiding them “from earliest childhood,” and without their being aware of the fact, “into being similar to, friendly toward, and concordant with the beauty of reason.” The idea is that a person can internalize “the beauty of reason” as a result of growing up in an environment pervaded by it. Having acquired the right tastes and distastes – a certain trained sensitivity to the presence or absence of beauty – while “he is still young, before he is able to grasp the reason . . . he will welcome the reason when it comes and recognize it easily because of its kinship with himself.” Socrates uses an analogy to hint at what he means here by being “able to grasp the reason.” Just as one doesn’t really know how to read until one knows the letters and how they can be combined to make words and phrases, one is not truly educated in music and poetry until one knows “the different forms of temperance, courage, generosity, high-mindedness, and all their kindred, and their opposites too, which are carried around everywhere,” and can “see them in the things in which they are, both themselves and their images.” This is noteworthy as the first statement in the Republic of a distinction that will ultimately be crucial to understanding Socrates’ reply to Glaucon’s challenge. We will have occasion later to consider it in greater detail, when it is set out more fully. For now, it is perhaps enough to see two things: first, that Socrates distinguishes between “forms” of things and “images” of things; and second, that Socrates thinks the knowledge of forms plays a role in the value judgments of a properly educated person similar to the role played in reading by a person’s knowledge of letters, i.e., a fundamental role. But knowledge of the forms is for a later stage of education. At present, the guardians-in-training are to acquire an appreciation of beauty at the level, not of reasoning, but of feelings. They are to be surrounded by beautiful things, and encouraged to love what is beautiful. Socrates describes and commends in this context a kind of interpersonal relationship that has at times been called “platonic love,” a drawing together in love of persons whose bodies and souls “share in the same pattern” of beauty. But it is a love that is not to suffer distortion through the “excessive pleasure” of sexual intercourse. However sexually attractive the lovers may find one another, the point of this kind of love is to direct the soul away from beauty as it appears in the flesh and towards the pattern of beauty itself. Platonic love is described more fully in other dialogues, especially the Lysis, Symposium, and Phaedrus.

• Does acquiring an appreciation for beauty make one a better person?

• When we speak of a person’s “inner beauty,” what is it that we have in mind? Is being morally virtuous what it is for a human soul to be beautiful?

• How are feelings and reason related? Notice that to be interested in something is, in a way, to care about it. Is reasoning a way of caring about things?

• Suppose someone were to object, in the spirit of Thrasymachus, that beauty is whatever the people in power make it. If the king and queen start wearing high-heeled shoes and powdered wigs, then high-heeled shoes and powdered wigs come to be recognized as beautiful. It may be the case that acquiring a taste for beauty typically precedes acquiring an understanding of beauty, but this is only because there is nothing more to understand about beauty than the conventions of the day. All this talk of coming to resemble and enter into harmony with the beauty of reason is a distraction from what’s really going on here – cultural brainwashing. How might Socrates reply?