As I said yesterday, Plato ascribes beauty as the relationship of one thing to the form upon which is it based. The closer it is to the pure form, the more beautiful it is.
I agree with this, but I want to add something as well. It seems to me that beauty is a subjective thing when it comes down to it. Things that I find beautiful are much different than things that other people find beautiful. Additionally, the things that people find beautiful are constantly changing, that is, what people might find beautiful today may not be what they find beautiful tomorrow.
So how do we rectify having beauty be subjective while having a world of forms? I believe that each person has, due to a combination of nature and nurture (i.e. genetics and environment), their own world of forms that they create. Additionally, this world is constantly in flux. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially when you think about childhood development. Children will commonly group things together until told otherwise. For example, a small child might call a cow a dog, because it sees that the cow has four legs and a small tail, just as a dog does. However, once corrected, the child will then understand the difference between cow and dog, and thus the two forms are distinguished in his or her mind.
Of course, Plato could come back and say that beauty is not subjective, that there is only one world of forms, and those who disagree with the beauty of the real world of forms are not actually seeing beauty. But to me this seems poppycock: every single person has different perceptions of beauty, and as much as Plato liked to play up the importance of philosophers, we are not that important and all knowing I have to admit. If there is an objective beauty, it would be extremely difficult to determine what it would be, seeing as in a real world application there are so many different opinions. I do not think that simply because Plato was a philosopher did he know what the real world of forms was like and thus know "real" beauty.
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One thing I forgot to say is that of course there will be those instances where people find the same thing beautiful, but this does not seem to debunk the argument. It simply means that those people who find similar things beautiful either have similar genetic or environmental backgrounds upon which they base their perception of beauty.
ReplyDeleteI fail to see how a world of forms (supernatural/extraplanar) is based on a material world of observation. Correct me if I am mistaken, but I believe Pluto was under the impression we all came from the same place and will wind up in the same place, thusly, world of forms. My true question is this; With which part of forms do you agree and with which part of forms do you argue? (As you cannot say each of our forms is different and then say you are still in favor of forms as a concept)
ReplyDeleteThe definition of beauty that Plato uses is not and cannot coincide with the normal usage of the word "beauty".
ReplyDeleteThe word beauty as it is used now is used as an emotional concept. That is, a "beautiful" movie is one that makes us feel a positive emotion - I am avoiding specifics but that's the general idea. For this reason, beauty is a concept that is defined in terms of individual human beings.
Two problems: One, all humans are different and have a different concept of beauty, and these can't ALL be coinciding with the perfect form of the object. Two, even if everyone had the exact same concept of beauty in every situation, it would still be imperfect. This is because humans themselves live in the realm of the imperfect, so their vision of beauty is imperfect as well.
I think Plato is just defining beauty as a scientific term, or if he's not he's just wrong.