essay about beauty ideals

Essays About Beauty: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Writing essays about beauty is complicated because of this topic’s breadth. See our examples and prompts to you write your next essay.

Beauty is short for beautiful and refers to the features that make something pleasant to look at. This includes landscapes like mountain ranges and plains, natural phenomena like sunsets and aurora borealis, and art pieces such as paintings and sculptures. However, beauty is commonly attached to an individual’s appearance,  fashion, or cosmetics style, which appeals to aesthetical concepts. Because people’s views and ideas about beauty constantly change , there are always new things to know and talk about.

Below are five great essays that define beauty differently. Consider these examples as inspiration to come up with a topic to write about.

1. Essay On Beauty – Promise Of Happiness By Shivi Rawat

2. defining beauty by wilbert houston, 3. long essay on beauty definition by prasanna, 4. creative writing: beauty essay by writer jill, 5. modern idea of beauty by anonymous on papersowl, 1. what is beauty: an argumentative essay, 2. the beauty around us, 3. children and beauty pageants, 4. beauty and social media, 5. beauty products and treatments: pros and cons, 6. men and makeup, 7. beauty and botched cosmetic surgeries, 8. is beauty a necessity, 9. physical and inner beauty, 10. review of books or films about beauty.

“In short, appreciation of beauty is a key factor in the achievement of happiness, adds a zest to living positively and makes the earth a more cheerful place to live in.”

Rawat defines beauty through the words of famous authors, ancient sayings, and historical personalities. He believes that beauty depends on the one who perceives it. What others perceive as beautiful may be different for others. Rawat adds that beauty makes people excited about being alive.

“No one’s definition of beauty is wrong. However, it does exist and can be seen with the eyes and felt with the heart.”

Check out these essays about best friends .

Houston’s essay starts with the author pointing out that some people see beauty and think it’s unattainable and non-existent. Next, he considers how beauty’s definition is ever-changing and versatile. In the next section of his piece, he discusses individuals’ varying opinions on the two forms of beauty: outer and inner. 

At the end of the essay, the author admits that beauty has no exact definition, and people don’t see it the same way. However, he argues that one’s feelings matter regarding discerning beauty. Therefore, no matter what definition you believe in, no one has the right to say you’re wrong if you think and feel beautiful.

“The characteristic held by the objects which are termed “beautiful” must give pleasure to the ones perceiving it. Since pleasure and satisfaction are two very subjective concepts, beauty has one of the vaguest definitions.”

Instead of providing different definitions, Prasanna focuses on how the concept of beauty has changed over time. She further delves into other beauty requirements to show how they evolved. In our current day, she explains that many defy beauty standards, and thinking “everyone is beautiful” is now the new norm.

“…beauty has stolen the eye of today’s youth. Gone are the days where a person’s inner beauty accounted for so much more then his/her outer beauty.”

This short essay discusses how people’s perception of beauty today heavily relies on physical appearance rather than inner beauty. However, Jill believes that beauty is all about acceptance. Sadly, this notion is unpopular because nowadays, something or someone’s beauty depends on how many people agree with its pleasant outer appearance. In the end, she urges people to stop looking at the false beauty seen in magazines and take a deeper look at what true beauty is.

“The modern idea of beauty is taking a sole purpose in everyday life. Achieving beautiful is not surgically fixing yourself to be beautiful, and tattoos may have a strong meaning behind them that makes them beautiful.”

Beauty in modern times has two sides: physical appearance and personality. The author also defines beauty by using famous statements like “a woman’s beauty is seen in her eyes because that’s the door to her heart where love resides” by Audrey Hepburn. The author also tackles the issue of how physical appearance can be the reason for bullying, cosmetic surgeries, and tattoos as a way for people to express their feelings.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about fashion .

10 Helpful Prompts To Use in Writing Essays About Beauty

If you’re still struggling to know where to start, here are ten exciting and easy prompts for your essay writing:

While defining beauty is not easy, it’s a common essay topic. First, share what you think beauty means. Then, explore and gather ideas and facts about the subject and convince your readers by providing evidence to support your argument.

If you’re unfamiliar with this essay type, see our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Beauty doesn’t have to be grand. For this prompt, center your essay on small beautiful things everyone can relate to. They can be tangible such as birds singing or flowers lining the street. They can also be the beauty of life itself. Finally, add why you think these things manifest beauty.

Little girls and boys participating in beauty pageants or modeling contests aren’t unusual. But should it be common? Is it beneficial for a child to participate in these competitions and be exposed to cosmetic products or procedures at a young age? Use this prompt to share your opinion about the issue and list the pros and cons of child beauty pageants.

Today, social media is the principal dictator of beauty standards. This prompt lets you discuss the unrealistic beauty and body shape promoted by brands and influencers on social networking sites. Next, explain these unrealistic beauty standards and how they are normalized. Finally, include their effects on children and teens.

Countless beauty products and treatments crowd the market today. What products do you use and why? Do you think these products’ marketing is deceitful? Are they selling the idea of beauty no one can attain without surgeries? Choose popular brands and write down their benefits, issues, and adverse effects on users.

Although many countries accept men wearing makeup, some conservative regions such as Asia still see it as taboo. Explain their rationale on why these regions don’t think men should wear makeup. Then, delve into what makeup do for men. Does it work the same way it does for women? Include products that are made specifically for men.

There’s always something we want to improve regarding our physical appearance. One way to achieve such a goal is through surgeries. However, it’s a dangerous procedure with possible lifetime consequences. List known personalities who were pressured to take surgeries because of society’s idea of beauty but whose lives changed because of failed operations. Then, add your thoughts on having procedures yourself to have a “better” physique.

People like beautiful things. This explains why we are easily fascinated by exquisite artworks. But where do these aspirations come from? What is beauty’s role, and how important is it in a person’s life? Answer these questions in your essay for an engaging piece of writing.

Beauty has many definitions but has two major types. Discuss what is outer and inner beauty and give examples. Tell the reader which of these two types people today prefer to achieve and why. Research data and use opinions to back up your points for an interesting essay.

Many literary pieces and movies are about beauty. Pick one that made an impression on you and tell your readers why. One of the most popular books centered around beauty is Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon , first published in 1993. What does the author want to prove and point out in writing this book, and what did you learn? Are the ideas in the book still relevant to today’s beauty standards? Answer these questions in your next essay for an exiting and engaging piece of writing.

Grammar is critical in writing. To ensure your essay is free of grammatical errors, check out our list of best essay checkers .

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Plato’s Aesthetics

If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into beauty, or another aesthetic value, and art, then the striking feature of Plato’s dialogues is that he devotes as much time as he does to both topics and yet treats them oppositely. Art, mostly as represented by poetry, is closer to a greatest danger than any other phenomenon Plato speaks of. Beauty is close to a greatest good. Can there be such a thing as “Plato’s aesthetics” that contains both positions?

Strictly speaking the phrase “Plato’s aesthetics” is anachronistic, given that this area of philosophy only came to be identified in the last few centuries. But even those who take aesthetics more broadly and permit the term will still find something exploratory in Plato’s treatments of art and beauty. He might be best described as seeking to discover the vocabulary and issues of aesthetics. For this reason Plato’s readers will not come upon 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 .

There is something more to be said about the label “aesthetics” that is important about Plato. One normally speaks of aesthetics or a philosophy of art when the theory covers more than a single art form. For understandable reasons the Platonic dialogues focus on poetry, with special energy directed toward dramatic poetry. Tragedy and comedy were culturally dominant art forms during Socrates’ lifetime and much of Plato’s. Innovative, memorable, and now long enduring, Athenian drama invited scrutiny. Even so, and tellingly, when the dialogues comment on poetry they also look at it in tandem with the visual arts – not capriciously either, but in keeping with an ancient Greek tradition of comparing art forms – and in this approach toward an overarching theory they deserve to be described as practicing or undertaking the philosophy of art.

James Porter argues that analogizing between art forms characterized a culture of sensualist aesthetic thinking before Plato and so makes possible the early appearance of a general idea “art.” Poetry commented on architecture, drama on rhetoric (Porter 2010, 188). In another fashion tragedy compared itself to sculpture (Pappas 2012b, 325). Even if one finds some of these interpretations of aesthetic analysis controversial, there is no denying that the Homeric “shield of Achilles” passage ( Iliad 18.479–609) implies a parallel between the shield’s presentation of war and peace and the treatment of those subjects in Homer. What Hephaestus depicts on the shield, Homer depicts in his epics (Cunningham 2007, Francis 2009).

The poet Simonides makes analogizing between art forms explicit. “Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting that speaks” (Plutarch The Glory of the Athenians 3.1, 346f-347a). A common element unites the forms of art even though poetry casts itself as the standard that painting fails to achieve (possessing as it does the voice that painting lacks).

Plato’s explication of poetic mimêsis by means of the mimêsis in painting (see below on Republic Book 10) belongs in this analogizing tradition, as Aristotle’s account of mimêsis will after him ( Poetics Chapter 4 1448b4–19; Halliwell 2002, 178). On both theories, painting and poetry belong together as fellow species within a larger artistic genus. However faulty the theory that joins them, it attempts to describe the broader genus.

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.

1.1 Hippias Major

1.2 beauty and art, 1.3 beauty and nature, 1.4 the form of beauty, 2.1 mimêsis in aristophanes, 2.2 republic 2–3: impersonation, 2.3 republic 10: copy-making, 2.4 sophist, 2.5 closing assessment, 3.2 phaedrus, 4. imitation, inspiration, beauty and the occasional wisdom in poetry, other internet resources, related entries.

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.

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.

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 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:

• 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).
• 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.).
• 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.)

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

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.

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 taught human souls number, the inquiry into nature as a whole, and therefore philosophy (47a–b). The pseudo-Platonic Epinomis , which shows Plato’s influence, likewise traces thoughts of number to astronomical observations (977a–978e). The Laws credits the movement of the stars with inspiring belief in gods (966d–e). Any serious person who admires nature’s beauty will learn from it.

It is fundamental to understanding Platonic beauty as part of Plato’s aesthetics that Plato sees no opposition between the pleasures that beauty brings and the goals of philosophy. The Timaeus suffices to make that point when it credits contemplation of the heavens with the origins of philosophy.

More broadly, many passages associate a Form with beauty: Cratylus 439c; Euthydemus 301a; Laws 655c; Phaedo 65d, 75d, 100b; Phaedrus 254b; Parmenides 130b; Philebus 15a; Republic 476b, 493e, 507b. Plato mentions beauty as often as he speaks of any property that admits of philosophical conceptualization, and for which a Form therefore exists. Thanks to the features of Forms as such, we know that this entity being referred to must be something properly called beauty, whose nature can be articulated without recourse to the natures of particular beautiful things. (See especially Phaedo 79a and Phaedrus 247c on properties of this Form.)

Beauty is Plato’s example of a Form as frequently as it is for a pair of reasons. On one hand it bears every mark of the Forms. It is an evaluative concept as much as justice and courage are, and suffers from disputes over its meaning as much as they do. The Theory of Forms seeks to guarantee stable referents for disputed evaluative terms; so if anything needs a Form, beauty does, and it will have a Form if any property does.

In general, a Form F differs from an individual F thing in that the property F may be predicated unambiguously and plainly of the Form. The Form F is F . An individual F thing both is and is not F . In this sense the same property F may be predicated only equivocally of the individual (e.g. Republic 479a–c). Plato’s analysis of equivocally F individuals ( Cratylus 439d–e, Symposium 211a) recalls observations that everyone makes about beautiful objects. They fade with time; require an offsetting ugly detail; elicit disagreements among observers; lose their beauty outside their context (adult shoes on children’s feet). Such limitations of individual things are rarely as clear where other Form properties are concerned as they are for beauty. Odd numbers may fail to be odd in some hard-to-explain way, and large objects may or may not grow small as the years go by, but the ways in which beautiful things fall short of perfection are obvious even to the unphilosophical.

While typical qua Form, physical beauty is atypical in being a Form that humans want to know. The process known as anamnêsis or recollection is more plausible for beauty than it is for most other properties. The philosophical merit of equivocally F things is that they come bearing signs of their incompleteness, so that the inquisitive mind wants to know more ( Republic 523c–524d). Therefore, beauty promises more effective reflection than any other property of things. Beauty alone is both a Form and a sensory experience ( Phaedrus 250d).

So the Phaedrus (250d–256b) and Symposium ignore people’s experiences of other properties when they describe the first movement into philosophizing. Beautiful things remind souls of their mystery as no other visible objects do, and in his optimistic moments Plato welcomes people’s attention to them.

The optimistic moments are not easy to sustain. To make beauty effective for learning, Plato needs to rely on its desirability (as foregrounded in Konstan 2015), but also on the soul’s ability to transfer its desiring from the visible to the intelligible ( Philebus 65e). Plato is ambivalent about visual experience. Sight may be like knowledge metaphorically; metonymically it calls to mind the ignorant senses (Pappas 2015, 49). The sight of beauty must overcome itself to become the higher sight of a higher beauty.

When the transfer of attention and desire succeeds, beauty’s unmatched pedagogical effects show why Plato talks about its goodness and good consequences, sometimes even its identity with “the good” ( Laws 841c; Philebus 66a–b; Republic 401c; Symposium 201c, 205e; but the relationship between beautiful and good, especially in Symposium , is controversial: White 1989). These desirable effects also explain why Plato speaks grudgingly of beauty in art and poetry, lest the dangerous arts find a place in the development of good thinking. Another question matters more than either poetry or beauty does: What leads a mind toward knowledge and the Forms? Things of beauty do so excellently well. Poems mostly don’t. When poems (or paintings) set the mind running along unphilosophical tracks away from what is abstract and intelligible, the attractions they possess will reveal themselves as meretricious. The corrupting cognitive effect exercised by poems demonstrates their inability to function as Plato knows the beautiful object to function.

The corrupting effect needs to be spelled out. What prevents poems from behaving as beautiful objects do? The answer will have to address the orienting question in Plato’s aesthetics, namely: What fosters philosophical enlightenment, and what obstructs it?

2. Imitation

The top candidate for the cause of error (or something worse than mere ignorance) in art is mimêsis , a word most commonly translated into English as “imitation.” Other translations include “representation” and “emulation.” And to make things confusing, the transliterated Greek word sans diacritical mark has come to be accepted as English (“mimesis”).

All the translations capture something of the word’s meaning. As long as “imitation” is used with the awareness that it will not mean everything that mimêsis does, it makes a serviceable translation. “Imitate” functions well enough as the verb mimeisthai ; so does “mimic.” (See Sörbom 1966; also Marušič 2011.)

One may just use the Greek mimêsis , as this discussion will do. For simplicity’s sake some prefer the now-English “mimesis.” But this last choice brings a risk. The English word “mimesis” has begun picking up its own contexts and connotations, becoming English proportionately as it ceases to substitute for the Greek word.

Besides mimêsis Plato sometimes speaks of a mimêma . “Imitation” like mimêsis can refer either to a process or to its outcome. You engage in the act of imitation in order to produce an imitation. A mimêma however is only ever a copy, not also the copying act that produced it.

(Mateo Duque was of much help in thinking through issues in the coming sections.)

Authors before Plato used mimêsis more vaguely than he did, neither attaching the word to a poetic process nor implying its fraudulence —with one important exception. The comedies of Aristophanes, obsessed with Euripides and with all tragedy ( Birds 787, 1444; Clouds 1091; Plutus 423–4), introduce comments about tragic stagecraft that say mimeisthai and mimêsis in pejorative ways.

Although comedy is sometimes identified as antagonist to philosophy in the “ancient quarrel” that Plato speaks of between philosophy and poetry (Most 2011), Aristophanes has also long been seen as Plato’s precursor in the moralistic critique of poetry. The two share conservative sensibilities that outweigh Aristophanes’ slander of Socrates in Clouds (Nussbaum 1980). But Aristophanes’ influence on Plato also extends to the nature of mimêsis . He uses that word in a technical sense that describes what actors do in a play, and with Platonic suggestions of fraud or concealment.

In addition to the face-off between Aeschylus and Euripides in Frogs , one might cite Aristophanes’ Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria , which calls mimêsis a disruption of life and opposes it to nature. Moreover Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria finds an ambiguity in dramatic imitation that anticipates Plato. In that play, as in the Republic , mimêsis mixes together composition and performance, the invention of characters and the portrayal of them (Pappas 1999).

The Aristophanic ambiguity between composition and performance appears, in Plato, in Book 3 of the Republic , which is one of the two dialogues (along with Laws , in Book 4) that investigates mimêsis as a characteristic specific to poetry.

Books 2 and 3 of the Republic assess poetry’s role in the curriculum for the city’s guardian class. At least ostensibly, their purpose is pedagogical. The first part of this argument runs from the final pages of Book 2 through the first part of Book 3, condemning the images of gods and demigods that Homer and the tragedians have produced (377e–392c). Pernicious stories about gods and heroes blaspheme the divine, and set bad examples for young warriors. Socrates focuses on the harmful effect of saying that the gods quarrel (378c), and that Cronus castrated his father and was overthrown in turn by Zeus. Gods are good and should not be said to cause harm (379b).

The emphasis on content and the focus on what children hear make this part of the discussion seem to have only limited relevance to aesthetics. But in the first place, the restrictions on poetry expand as the argument goes on, from what “nurses and mothers” must attend to (377c) to proclamations that some stories “shouldn’t be told” (378b), that no one should hear of a god’s causing evil (380b–c), and that a play asserting such a thing shouldn’t be allowed to train a chorus (383c). What at first should not be heard by the young finally should not be heard at all.

In the second place, strictures on what may be said about the gods goes beyond content to hint at the formal analysis that comes in Book 3. When ruling out tales about divinities in disguise, Socrates says that gods would not change their form. A god would not be a goêtês “sorcerer” (380d). The comment is both the oblique first connection between poetry and sorcery in the Republic , and also the first mention of impersonation. Gods who change their form are playing a dramatic part, and practicing sorcery when they do.

Socrates concludes his criticism of how poetry presents gods and heroes and asks about the lexis “style” of narration. Poetic narration can take place through narration alone, through mimêsis alone, or by combining the two (392d).

Already this way of differentiating among storytelling methods proceeds irregularly, as if one were to analyze walking into pure walking, running, and a combination of the two, and declared that to be an explanation of running . Such an analysis would mark the act of running as deviant walking. Likewise the taxonomy of narrations presumes that mimêsis is deviant.

The subsequent pages continue treating mimêsis as something comprehensible only under the sign of anomaly and failure. Socrates defines imitation, develops two arguments against it, and finally proclaims that no mimetic poetry will be admitted into the city that the Republic is founding.

The defining example establishes mimêsis as impersonation or emulation. Homer’s poems alternate between third-person accounts of events (in which Homer narrates in his own voice) and speeches made by the characters involved in those events. In the latter instances, Homer “makes himself like” the characters speaking, deceptively producing a speech “as if he were someone else” (393b). The poet “hides himself” (393d), thus even losing personal autonomy.

When Homer recounts Agamemnon’s rebuke to the priest Chryses, Socrates says, he uses the abusive language that a warriors’ king would use when such a king refused to show mercy (393a–c).

This passage leaves the presentation of character ambiguous between the act of writing or composing the words of a character like Agamemnon, and the act of reciting (performing, acting out) those words. Epic poets likely put together their works and also performed them, therefore acting out the parts; dramatic poets may well have spoken parts in character as they wrote; such independent dramatic traditions as the Japanese noh featured players who both wrote plays and acted in them (Hare 2008, 40). The ambiguity between writing and reciting (which already appeared in Aristophanes) lets Socrates deploy more than one argument against the presentation of characters.

The main argument is blunt but clear, and it is plausible enough. What the new city really does not want is the presentation of base types, because performing such parts fosters the behaviors that are found in the persons being mimicked (395c–397e). Attempts to read this impersonation as attention to appearance alone (Lear 2011) have the advantage of unifying Book 3 with Book 10, but sacrifice the psychological simplicity behind the argument.

If acting a part does lead to taking on the characteristics of the part, then in one respect the Republic has a powerful point to make, and in another respect generates a misleading argument. The point is powerful inasmuch as it lets the newly formed city ban all portrayals of vicious and ignoble characters but not those of brave soldiers, philosophers, and other wholesome types. Moreover the factual premise is believable. Taking on someone else’s traits and tics can have a more lasting effect than the Republic’s critics sometimes acknowledge. Actors even today comment on how a role changed them. Those who play lovers in movies sometimes fall in love.

Even this most plausible part of the argument runs into trouble. Plato’s list of things unworthy of imitation proves surprisingly commodious. Alongside villains one finds women, slaves, animals, musical instruments, gears and pulleys, and sounds of water. And these last examples beg the question. Sounding like machinery does not make the imitator more like a gear or pulley. Nor do actors start to behave and think as if they were flowing water. The impersonatory act must be a deranged practice only insofar as all impersonation is deranged. But that more fundamental derangement had been what the argument was aiming to prove.

What significantly misleads in this argument amounts to more than the passing hyperbole. The case against mimêsis exploits the ambiguity between impersonation as something a writer does and impersonation as the performer’s task. Eric Havelock (1963) stressed the importance of this ambiguity to Book 3, but understated the degree to which Plato exploited the ambiguity. The most convincing part of Book 3 has to assume that mimêsis is performance, both because such effects as thunder are mimicked in performance, not on the page; and because the bad effects of impersonation on character make more sense when describing young actors’ playing a vicious role than grown playwrights in the act of writing that role.

On the other hand performance does not involve a whole population. It brings about the worst effects to a fraction of the city. The Athenian population mostly did not perform dramatic roles. They may have enjoyed drama in the theater, but banning plays from the city calls for seeing something inherently wrong with dramatic works themselves, whether as performed or just as written, and so with a quality in them that follows from the mimêsis in the composition of them. The conclusion to this passage makes clear that the city will ban all mimetic works:

If a man were to arrive in the city whose wisdom [ sophia ] empowered him to become everything and to mimic all things—together with the poems he wanted to perform [ epideixasthai ]— we would worship him as someone holy [ hieron ] and wonderful and pleasant, but tell him there is no man like him in our city, nor by our traditional law [ themis ] can come to be here; and we would send him off to another city after pouring myrrh on his head and crowning him with wool. (398a)

The religious language is lavish. No ordinary deeds are being excluded but ones that smell of sacred power. And the city fathers running mimetic poetry out of town have broadened their scope from the young guardians’ education to the cultural life of a community. The literary representation of characters will receive no hearing anywhere. It is even doubtful whether the city will permit dramatic poems to circulate in written form, as if their very potential for being performed rendered them toxic. The sins of performance extend to the allegedly performative author of dramatic parts.

The poet is a visitor because mimetic poetry has no natural home in the philosophers’ town. (Maybe Plato is thinking of literal outsiders, like tragic playwrights from Syracuse: Monoson 2012, 163.) Moreover he arrives offering to recite his poems. That they are his makes him a poet , that he comes to recite them makes him a performer . Thus he embodies the ambiguity built into Book 3’s definition of mimêsis . If the fate of imitative composition stands or falls with the fate of imitative performance, a reasonable worry about behaviors that young people experiment with balloons into an argument against a body of literature. The equivocation between performance and composition lets the argument proceed to its grand conclusion.

Book 3 took its assessment of poetry beyond criticism into aesthetics by developing imitation as a formal concept. This is to say 1) that one can distinguish poetic mimêsis from poetic narration by looking for a formal element in the poetry; and 2) that mimêsis may make poetry more deleterious than it would otherwise be, but does not work these bad effects by itself, only when the characters represented are bad to begin with. The definition of imitation in Book 3 entails no general ideas of similarity or likeness, and it remains confined to one art form.

Book 10 will look at imitation from a different perspective. Space does not permit a review of all existing proposals about how to square the two passages. Whether Books 3 and 10 offer compatible accounts of mimêsis , and how one might make them compatible, remains the most controversial question about Plato’s aesthetics. (See Belfiore 1984, Halliwell 1988, Nehamas 1982; and for a superb summary of the main proposals, Naddaff 2002, 136n8. Lear 2011 is a recent argument in favor of the two passages’ agreement with one another.) Still one may trust a few summative statements. Republic 10 revises the formal aspects of mimêsis with an imagistic depiction that entails more than direct quotation. The enhanced concept cannot be understood without reference to the Republic ’s psychological theory. And in its expanded form the term refers to something bad in itself.

If Books 2 and 3 presented an account of the content in poetry and then an analysis of its form, Book 10 may be said to show how form invents content (to use a phrase attributed to the novelist Gilbert Sorrentino). The result is that, where the critique of mimêsis in Book 3 allowed a loophole making representation acceptable if it portrayed virtuous characters, the argument in Book 10 will promise that such an outcome will never happen (605a). Good mimêsis presents bad people.

As the Sophist also does (see below), Book 10 of the Republic treats mimêsis as a process at work in more art forms than drama. The topic in this passage, roughly the first half of Book 10 (595a–608b), is a mimêsis common to painting and poetry and much like picturing or copying. It is a relationship between a visible original and its visible likeness.

As Book 10 begins, Socrates links the coming treatment with what Book 3 had said about imitation and also establishes the difference between the passages. What follows will defend Book 3’s banishment of “imitative poetry” in terms that the Republic developed after Book 3. “Now that we have differentiated the soul’s eidê ,” Socrates says, the danger of imitation becomes more evident (595a–b). An eidos is a kind, and this phrase “kinds of soul” is usually taken to mean the parts of the soul that Book 4 distinguished (435b–441c, 445d). The Republic ’s theory of reason, spirit, and desire can enlarge what had been in Book 3 no more than suspicion about the impersonation of ignoble people. The new argument will charge poetry with upsetting the balance among the soul’s parts. (Daniel Mailick contributed to this discussion of the Republic ’s psychological theory.)

In all Socrates presents three theses during this first half of Book 10:

• Poetic mimêsis , like the kind found in painting, is the imitation of appearance alone, and its products rank far below truth. (596e–602c)
• Therefore poetic mimêsis corrupts the soul, weakening the rational impulse’s control over the person’s other drives and desires. (602c–608b)
• It should therefore be banned from the good city.

The argument supporting (1) seeks to spell out how badly poetry and painting fare at grasping and communicating knowledge. Partly because they do so badly, but also for other reasons, mimetic arts bring moral and psychological ill effects (2).

The words “imitation of appearance” in (1) follow from a three-way differentiation:

• Form (of couch, of table) made by a god.
• Individual things (couches, tables) made by humans.
• Paintings (of couch or table) made by imitators.

The carpenter works with eyes aiming “toward [ pros ]” the Form (596b)—not with eyes on the Form, but looking in that direction—so the individual couch the carpenter makes is something less than the Form: an honest failing after a decent try. If the Form is an object of knowledge, human creators at least possess true opinion (601e).

Thus category II is never referred to as a realm of imitation, and – as a result – the table depicted in a painting does not turn into (in the popular phrase) the “imitation of an imitation.” The argument against art does not focus on what a carpenter or other skilled worker does in making an artifact. Nevertheless Plato’s phrase “imitation of appearance” does characterize artistic mimêsis as a compounded problem. Imitation intensifies a weakness present in existing objects; it not only fails but fails doubly. The good-faith effort at approximating to the Form of the couch produced a visible object. Visible objects represented in artistic imitation possess both intelligible and visible properties, and that imperfection in objects leaves them vulnerable to being imitated only in their visible aspects.

Those visible aspects are the subject matter for a visual representation. When you look at a couch from different perspectives, you are still looking at the same couch, when that object is understood intelligibly. But the couch seen from different perspectives makes for different paintings. Therefore the painting must be not an image of the couch but an image of its appearance (598a).

The same difference applies if the painter depicts a shoemaker (598b–c), erring in that representation of a human professional by dint of lacking the professional’s knowledge. The painter gives us a shoemaker as seen by one who has no idea what shoemakers know, as the dramatic poet represents everything in a character except what that character knows. A full and true account of a doctor must include medical knowledge, or else you are not describing the reality of the doctor.

Skipping ahead for a moment, the Republic ’s reader finds a second three-way distinction (601c–602a) that criticizes imitation from another perspective:

• User (of a flute or bridle) who knows.
• Maker (of flute or bridle) who has correct belief.
• Imitator (of flute or bridle) who is ignorant.

This intriguing new list is hard to make sense of. The three items belong alongside the previous three-part ranking. The carpenter who makes a table resembles the leatherworker making the bridle; both tripartitions put the visual imitator lowest. But why do flautists and jockeys suddenly appear in the top spot, in place of a god so supreme as to create even Forms?

The answer might appear among the particular manufactured objects that these passages refer to. For the reader familiar with Greek religion, both rankings evoke Athena. The couch- and table-making carpenter practices a trade whose patron is Athena, while myths known to Plato depict her as the original user of both flute (Pindar 12th Pythian Ode ) and bridle (Pindar 13th Olympian Ode ). These associations put the imitator at the opposite pole from a god, rendering the products of imitation not only lowly nothings but malevolently profane, even blasphemous. Athena’s technologies permit the forces that would threaten civilized life to find their place within a city, but imitators exist outside the space of these civilizing technologies (Pappas 2013). One need not subject the passage to so much pressure in the effort to make it fit alongside the earlier tripartite hierarchy, but those who see religious lines running through the Republic ’s arguments about art might want to develop this interpretation.

The argument thus far posits painting as the default case of mimêsis (Golden 1975, Nehamas 1982, Belfiore 1984, Moss 2007). But Socrates springboards beyond pictorial art to condemn tragedy and its “father” Homer. Homer was ignorant, never taught a useful thing to anyone (599b–600e). This apparent ad hominem attack is designed to show that poetry too imitates appearance. For that purpose it suffices to show that one esteemed poet writes without knowledge. If great poetry can come out of someone ignorant, then poetry must not require knowledge. Even if ignorance is not necessary for the composition of poetry Homer’s example demonstrates that the two are compatible.

An obvious complaint comes to mind. “Someone can be ignorant and still write great poetry!” Plato nods in glum agreement, for this is exactly the problem. Nothing good will come of an activity that can not only be attempted ignorantly but even succeeded at in ignorance. The success of the ignorant suffices to prove that no knowledge comes into play in poetic imitation. Poetry too imitates no more than appearance.

The pictorial sense of mimêsis now has eclipsed the embodying or role-playing sense that the argument in Book 3 exploited. Aristotle will follow the Republic in conceiving mimêsis in both ways, although he keeps the two separate. When Aristotle identifies two natural grounds for the appeal of mimêsis , one describes enactment ( Poetics 4 1448b6) and the other pictorial depiction ( Poetics 4 1448b12). Book 10 is trying to attack poetry that enacts human characters on the grounds that it thereby resembles pictures.

As if to bridge the gap between the two critiques, Socrates goes on to argue that poetry harms the soul. He says that poetry’s illusions fortify the worst part of the soul and turn it against the best. The first stretch of this argument (602c–603b) uses theoretical language taken from the Republic ’s psychological theory, while the second (603b–608b) appeals to observable phenomena surrounding performances of tragedies.

Socrates returns to his analogy between poetry and painting. If you are partly taken in by a painting’s tricked-up table apparition but you partly spot the falseness, which part of you does which? The soul’s rational impulse must be the part that knows the painting is not a real table. But Book 4 had established a fundamental principle: When the soul inclines in more than one direction at a time, this conflict represents the activity of more than one faculty or part of the soul (436b; recalled in Book 10’s argument at 602e). So being taken in by an optical or artistic illusion must be the act of some part of the soul distinct from reason. Painting and tragedy both inspire reactions that do not come from one’s calculating capacity.

Invoking Book 4’s psychological theory integrates the critique of poetry of Book 10 into the Republic ’s overarching argument. The Republic identifies justice with a balance among reason, spirit or anger, and the desires. This controlled balance is the happiest state available for human souls, and the most virtuous. Because imitation undoes the soul’s justice, it brings both vice and misery.

The Republic does not specify the irrational part in question. Thinking the sun is the size of your hand does not feel like either anger overwhelming you or desires tempting. What do illusions have to do with irrationality of motive?

Again commentaries differ. A complex and fertile debate continues to worry over how perceptual error undermines mental health or moral integrity (Nehamas 1982, Moss 2007). Part of the answer comes from Books 8–9, which sketch four character types graded from best to worst. These are eidê in a different sense of that word, meaning not the parts or separate motives within one soul but the species that one might sort souls into. This taxonomy of soul-types deserves to play a larger role than it has in the discussion of imitation.

The pleasures of the lowest soul- eidos are illusory and feed on illusion. Unreal appearances produce unreliable pleasures, which are all the keener and madder for the ontologically light quality of their instigating images. Book 9 says that desire delights not in true beings but in “idols [ eidôlois ] of true pleasure” and painted images, eskiagraphêmenais (586b). Skiagraphia – the root within this last word – was an impressionistic manner of painting that juxtaposed contrasting hues to create illusionistic shadow and intensify color (Keuls 1974, Demand 1975, Petraki 2018). Plato disapproved specifically of skiagraphia ( Parmenides 165c–d, Phaedo 69b). In fact the Republic ’s attacks on painting are sometimes interpreted narrowly as applying only to skiagraphia .

Thus where Book 9 examines the desirous part of the soul and finds its objects to be mere idols, Book 10 determines mimêsis to be a show of mere idols and concludes that it keeps company with the soul’s desirous part. In that case the pictorial quality of poetic mimêsis might be a distraction, its main fault residing in its illusionistic character.

The terminology in Book 9 underscores the connection between these arguments. The tyrant is “at the third remove” from the oligarch, his pleasure “a third-place idol [ tritôi eidôlôi ]” compared to the truth ( alêtheia ) of the oligarchic soul’s pleasure (587c). Meanwhile the oligarch’s soul stands third below the “kingly man [ tou basilikou ]” (587d). Only ten pages later Book 10 echoes this terminology when it calls the imitator “third from the king [ basileôs ] and from the truth [ alêtheias ]” (597e; cf. 602c). In other words, the language in Book 10 brings Book 9’s equation of base pleasures with illusory ones into its attack on art. If Book 10 can show that an art form fosters interest in illusions it will have gone a long way toward showing that the art form keeps company with irrational desires.

Another essential step in the argument is the recognition that what Book 3 acknowledged as an exception to its critique, namely the imitation of virtuous thoughtful characters, is not apt ever to take place. Socrates has tragedy in mind (comedy secondarily), and observes that playwrights neither know the quiet philosophical type nor profit from putting that nice type on stage before spectators who came to the theater to see something showily agitated (604e–605a). At one stroke Plato intensifies his condemnation of mimêsis , no longer a dangerous technique when it presents the wrong kinds of people but a technique that seldom presents any other kind.

Tragedy’s hero, who is inherently impulsive and impassioned, acts contrary to the dictates of reason. An illusion of virtue guides him. His son dies, and rather than save his tears for a private moment he lets them flow publicly and at length (603e–604a). The spectators’ reason is appalled; their other impulses rejoice (605c–e). They reckon that there is no harm in weeping along with the hero, enjoying an emotional release without the responsibility one feels in real-life situations. We grow accustomed not merely to feeling strong emotions, but to feeling them without the oversight of reason at work. This is how dramatic illusion induces bad habits of indulging the passions. The soul that had spent its life learning self-control sets about unlearning it.

Incidentally this argument turns on an assumption that Plato asserts without discussion, that mimêsis is the presentation or representation of characters (e.g. 603c; 605a, c). Although Book 10 sometimes speaks of mimêsis in other terms ( mimêsis of virtues: 600e), the argument about fostering passions requires that objects of poetic representation be humans. When what we call literary works practice what we call representation , Plato claims that they represent human beings. For him as for Aristotle drama presents prattontas “people doing things,” but where Aristotle emphasizes the things done, for Plato it is the people. Character is the essence of epic and drama. (Halliwell 1988 argues otherwise.)

Plato’s emphasis on character already predisposes him not to find philosophical worth in literature. The reason for mistrusting individual characters becomes explicit in Laws. A character speaks from a single point of view. Bring several characters together representing several idiosyncratic perspectives on the world and the very idea of deriving a general statement from the work becomes impossible ( Laws 719c–d). This situation is as it were the dramatic corollary to a general principle in mimêsis , that it represents plurality or multiplicity and so is forever indeterminate, undeterminable. Seeing the plurality of personages in a work as generative of its illusions might help to explain how poetry resembles paintings. But the analogy remains obscure.

Plato’s Sophist , often called a later work than the Republic , proposes its own account of mimêsis . It pursues imitation for the different purpose of defining what a sophist is. But the sophist—whom the main speaker calls an imitator ( mimêtês ) and sorcerer ( goêtês ) (235a)—is not far removed from the deceiving poet (Notomi 2011, 311–313).

And although the Sophist ’s theory of imitation diverges from the one in Republic 10, similarities between them preponderate. As the Republic does, the Sophist characterizes imitation mockingly as the creation of a whole world, and accuses imitation of misleading the unwary (234b–c), even if it also predicts more optimistically that people grow up to see through false likenesses (234d). Again as in Republic 10 imitation is contrasted with a god’s work—except that in the Sophist gods make all living things (265c–d) and also images, eidôla (266a): dreams, shadows, reflections.

The representation that Plato charges sophists with is fraudulent. It is the kind that makes not an honest likeness ( eikasia ) but an illusory image, a phantasma (235d–236b). Makers of realistic statues are attending not to what a human figure really looks like but to what looking at it is like. In drawing the distinction between these kinds of representations – a distinction that incidentally appears in no other dialogue (Halliwell 2021, 34) – the Sophist does strike a conciliatory tone not found in Republic 10. Here, it appears that a branch of the mimetic profession retains the power to produce a reliable likeness of an object. But the consolation proves fleeting. Reliable imitation plays no role in a definition of sophists, would presumably play no role in talk of poets either, and seems to make an appearance only for the purpose of being shuffled offstage as the excluded mimêsis , that which the imitation being talked about differs from.

The Sophist marginalizes positive imitation when it takes up mimêsis a second time, subdividing the production of illusions to identify a species in which imitators use their own voice and bodies: “This part is called imitation [ mimêsis ]” (267a). The Eleatic Stranger who is speaking recognizes that he has appropriated the general word for the specific act of enacting false images. We also notice that theatrical enactment becomes, on this analysis, a subset of pictorial image-making. “Let’s designate this to be what we call the imitative profession [ mimêtikon ].” Everything else in the large genus can go by some other name (267a).

Narrowing the process down to impersonation should make clear that Plato finds a sophist’s imitativeness to resemble a poet’s. Moreover this development neutralizes suggestions that mimêsis might have a good side. The imitative technê will have many manifestations, including those legitimate practices that the Statesman and other dialogues refer to. But the real work of mimêsis , the one that is worth defining and that applies to dominant art forms, is mendacious impersonation. Where Republic 3’s taxonomy made imitation look like a freakish variety of narration, this use of a word both generically and specially excludes good imitation as the exception and the problem case. Essentially speaking the art of mimêsis is a bad and lying art.

After all, as the Stranger says, there is a shortage of names for types of mimêsis . The ancients did not work hard enough making all relevant philosophical distinctions (267d). It is as if Plato were saying: “Colloquial language being loose, I will sometimes use mimêsis in the broader sense that contains epistemically sound practices, even though the core sense of the word is pejorative.”

This coverage of mimêsis in Plato will seem too strong in one respect and too weak or incomplete in another. It emphasizes core Platonic arguments about mimetic poetry. But the dialogues are far-ranging documents, and a reader discovers these core arguments among passages that argue to opposite effect, or deploying the vocabulary of mimêsis in contradictory ways.

For instance: If mimêsis brings about deceptive effects in the poetry about human beings, it also accounts for the visible universe, which Plato’s Timaeus calls an imitation of its intelligible model (39e; and see 44d) – and which, as already seen, that dialogue calls beautiful. For that matter human learning about the natural world also mimics an intelligible reality (47c, 80b) (Spinelli 2021). In the political domain, the Statesman calls existing constitutions mimêmata of moral truths, with no implication of fraud in them (297c). The funeral speech in the Menexenus urges the young to copy their elders’ virtues (236e). Such passages suggest a rehabilitation for the process that the Republic treats as counterfeiting (Robinson 2016).

Recent studies of Platonic mimêsis take the point further, as in a collection edited by Julia Pfefferkorn and Antonino Spinelli (2021). The contributors to that volume examine the appearances of mimêsis outside the “aesthetic” passages to which thought about the concept is usually confined, and they identify a variety of positive functions for the process. So mimêsis plays a role in recollection (Candiotto 2021), and in the ethical effort to assimilate oneself to the divine nature (Männlein-Robert 2021). Stephen Halliwell argues for the general point that “there is no unified and stable conception of mimesis to be found in Plato, let alone a uniformly negative conception” (Halliwell 2021, 29). The Republic ’s philosophers themselves engage in mimetic work, whether in embodying the spirit of the new city’s laws (485c) or when patterning themselves after what is most real (500c). We even find philosophers symbolically painting the good city (Halliwell 2021, Marrin 2023).

The complexity surrounding mimêsis may be hardest to sort out when humans are said to learn from nature. The beauty that Plato assigns to nature has been noted, and its place in the growth of knowledge. But there too mimêsis enters the picture. The Menexenus ’s speech goes so far as to affirm that women imitate the earth when they bear children (238a). The Timaeus ’s praise for seeing and studying the order in the skies describes the psychic betterment that comes of “copying” stellar movements with similar movements in one’s soul (47b–c).

Even in response to Book 10’s anti-poetic argument, a sympathetic reader might make the case that the poet’s error lies not in imitation per se , but in deploying that appealing technique without also, in the process, representing the true look of virtue.

A reading of the Republic ’s attack on imitation may silence many of the complicating objections by emphasizing that poetry goes wrong (in formal terms) only insofar as it operates not as simple mimêsis , but in particular the mimêsis of persons. Something about performing an individual’s part brings out the great ignorance and potential for corrupting souls, and the desirable types of mimêsis cited in the Republic and elsewhere tend to make the object of imitation something other than individual humans. This reply itself does have to admit objections, though, such as young philosophers’ efforts to act like upright and serious dialecticians (539c; see Menexenus 236e).

But insisting on the mimêsis of persons also invites broader systematic worries. Why should this one narrowly defined act of character-presentation fall prey to charges that it issues in images of appearance, when other mimetic acts avoid that charge? Just how is drama relevantly like painting when (for example) narrative is not?

Suppose that question does find an answer, and that mimetic poetry about individuals remains guilty of generating mere imitations of appearance. The Sophist ’s reference to divine copy-making then invites another worry, in the face of which this discussion of mimêsis can appear too weak. According to the Sophist , the images that gods produce in their kind of imitation are shadows and reflections, and the products of truly bad mimêsis are to be something worse than that. But what could be metaphysically lower than a shadow? Coming back to the Republic one finds shadows and reflections occupying the bottom-most domain of the Divided Line (510a). Where does poetic imitation belong on that ranking?

One may articulate the worry in the Republic ’s language. Shadows and reflections belong in the category of near ignorance. Imitation works an effect worse than ignorance, not merely teaching nothing but worse than that engendering a positive and perverse inclination toward ignorance. Plato observes that the ignorant prefer to remain as they are ( Symposium 204a), but this turn toward ignorance is different from such complacency. It suggests a wish to know less than one does.

The theoretical question also implies a practical one. If mimêsis poisons the soul, why do people swallow it? Plato’s attack on poetry saddles him with an aesthetic problem of evil.

Republic 10 shows signs of addressing the problem with the vocabulary of magic. Socrates begins by promising that insight into mimêsis operates as a countercharm (595b). People need countercharms because the imitator is a “sorcerer [ goêtês ],” therefore a deceiver (598d; cf. 602d). Earlier he said that sorcery robs people of knowledge (413b–c). Finally the indictment of Homer’s ignorance ends by saying his poetry casts a spell (601b). As the English “charm” does, this noun kêlêsis can mean “appeal” but also a conjuration. Poetry works magically to draw in the audience that it then degrades.

References to magic serve poorly as explanations but do indicate a need for explanation. Plato sees that some power must be drawing people to give up both knowledge and the taste for knowledge. What is striking about this deus ex machina explaining poetry’s attractiveness in the Republic is what it does not say. In other dialogues the magic of poetry is attributed to one version or another of divine inspiration. Odd that the Republic makes no reference to inspiration in poetry when dialogues as different as the Apology and the Laws mention it and the Ion and the Phaedrus spell out how it works. The Republic ’s only invocation of such an event pertains to philosophical education (499b). Odder still, Plato almost never cites imitation and divine inspiration together (the lone exception Laws 719c), as if to say that the two are incommensurable accounts of poetry. Will inspiration play a role ancillary to imitation, or do the two approaches to poetry have nothing to do with one another?

3. Divine Inspiration

In simplest form “inspiration” names the claim that poets are aided in producing their own poetry. At lucky moments a god takes them over and brings value to the poem that it could not have had otherwise.

That much is a common idea. Either a divine source provides the poet with information needed for writing the poem (information about past events or the gods’ lives, for example); or more generally the source gives the poet the talent needed for writing anything. The idea is far from original with Plato. Within Greek culture alone there are Homer and Hesiod before Plato, who begin their great works asking a Muse to “speak into” them; after him Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics 1099b9, 1179b20–23) (Büttner 2011). Plato will find new meanings in, and new uses for, an idea that has a cultural and religious meaning before him and a long traditional life after him (Ledbetter 2003, Murray 1981, Tigerstedt 1970).

Plato’s version of the idea has proved durable and influential. The old chestnut about a fine line between genius and insanity is only the best-known legacy of Platonic inspiration, as popularized in one way by Cesare Lombroso’s work on “psychiatric art” (Lombroso 1891, 2); in another way by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who translated the Ion in 1821 believing its account of poetic madness supported his own defense of poetry (Shelley 1840).

The topic occurs throughout Plato’s corpus. Platonic characters mention inspiration in dialogues as different as the Apology and the Laws . Socrates on trial tells of his frustrated effort to learn from poets. Their verses seemed excellent but the authors themselves had nothing to say about them ( Apology 22b). Socrates concludes that poets work instinctively and while inspired, enthousiazontes , as prophets and soothsayers also do ( theomanteis , chrêsmôidoi ), as opposed to writing on the basis of sophia (22c). The opposition between wisdom and inspiration does not condemn poets. They write by some nature ( phusei tini ), as if inspiration were a normally occurring human instinct.

For its part Laws 719c links the effects of inspiration to the nature of drama and its multiple perspectives:

When the poet sits on the Muse’s tripod [ en tôi tripodi tês Mousês ] he is not in his right mind [ emphrôn ] but ready to flow like a fountain; and because his profession [ technê ] is that of imitation [ mimêseôs ], then in creating people [ anthrôpous ] who are set against one another he is compelled to contradict himself frequently, and he does not know [ oiden ] whether these or the other thing of what he says are true [ alêthê ]. But it is not for a lawmaker to make two statements about a single topic in a law. (719c–d)

As in the Republic , mimêsis leaves the spectator bereft of either truths to evaluate or any wish to assess them. (It is, as there, the imitation of human beings.) As in the Apology , inspiration means the poet has no truths to transmit. When the god’s power comes the poet’s goes. Lawmakers work differently from that. And this contrast between inspiration and the origin of laws—occurring in a dialogue devoted to discovering the best laws for cities—hardly suggests an endorsement for inspiration.

But it is also true that the passage puts the poet on a tripod, i.e. the symbol of Apollo’s priestesses. Whatever brings a poet to write verse also draws divine wisdom out of priestesses; and Plato regularly defers to the authority of oracles. Even supposing that talk of inspiration denies individual control and credit to the poet, the priestess shows that credit and control are not all that matter. She does her best when her mind intrudes least on what she is saying. Her pronouncements have the prestige they do, not despite her loss of control, but because of it (Pappas 2012a). Her audience can trust the god speaking through her.

Another passage in the Laws attributes even reliable historical information to poets writing under the influence of the Muses and Graces (682a). Indeed the Laws overtly credit philosophical conversation to such inspiration (811c, with thanks to Kemal Batak for this reminder). The Meno makes inspiration its defining example of ignorant truth-speaking. Politicians, prophets, and soothsayers alike, “when inspired [ enthousiôntes ], speak truly [ alêthê ] about many things, but do not know what they are talking about” (99c). Socrates then calls prophets, soothsayers, and all poets theioi “divine” because of how well they speak without possessing knowledge (99c–d).

In these more tangential remarks, Plato seems to be affirming 1) that inspiration is really divine in origin, and 2) that this divine action that gives rise to poetry guarantees value in the result. It may remain the case that the poet knows nothing. But something good must come of an inspiration shared by poets and priestesses, and often enough that good is truth.

Plato’s shortest dialogue, the Ion may be the only one that all his readers would situate within aesthetics. It does not address poetry alone. The character Ion is a performer and interpreter of Homer’s poems, not a poet. Meanwhile, most of what are classed as arts today—painting, sculpture, music—appear in this dialogue as activities for which the problems of irrationality and knowledge signally fail to arise (532e–533c; for painting as technê cf. Gorgias 448c, Protagoras 312d). Nevertheless the Ion belongs in aesthetics by virtue of its focus on artistic inspiration, and the question it provokes of what inspiration implies about poetry’s merits.

As a rhapsode Ion travels among Greek cities reciting and explicating episodes from Homer. Between the recitation and the interpretation, such performances offered much latitude for displays of talent, and Ion’s talent has won him first prize at a contest in Epidaurus. (For some discussion of the rhapsode’s work see Gonzalez 2011, González 2013.)

Ion’s conversation with Socrates falls into three parts, covering idiosyncrasy (530a–533c), inspiration (533c–536d), and ignorance (536d–542b). Ion likes and understands only Homer; Homer composes, and Ion presents the Homeric composition, in a possessed state; and Homer doesn’t know the subjects he talks about, any more than Ion knows the subjects about which he quotes Homer. Both the first and the third sections support the claims made in the second, which should be seen as the conclusion to the dialogue, supported in different ways by the discussions that come before and after it. The idiosyncrasy in Ion’s attachment to Homer shows that Homer, and Ion because of him, function thanks to a divine visitation. But because Ion resists accepting the claim that he is deranged in his performances, Socrates presents a fallback argument. Ion is unqualified to assess any of the factual claims that appear in Homer, about medicine, chariot racing, or anything else. When Socrates compels him to choose between divine inspiration and a very drab brand of knowing nothing, Ion agrees to be called inspired.

This is to say that although poets’ and their readers’ ignorance – the subject of the dialogue’s final section – does emerge as a fact, it is nevertheless a fact in need of interpretation. The ignorance of poets and in poetry is never Plato’s last word. Whether ignorance means as in the Ion that the gods inspire poetry, or as in Republic 10 that imitative poetry imitates appearance alone, it matters less in itself than in its implications. Nor does ignorance alone demonstrate that poets are possessed. The proof of Ion’s ignorance supports inspiration but does not suffice to generate that doctrine.

The idiosyncrasy treated in this dialogue’s opening section, by comparison, is (for Plato) irrational on its face. The idiosyncrasy appears as soon as Socrates asks Ion about his technê (530b). That essential Platonic word has been mistranslated “art” or “craft.” “Skill” is not bad; but perhaps a technê most resembles a profession . The word denotes both a paying occupation and the possession of expertise. In Ion’s case Socrates specifies that the expertise for a rhapsode includes the ability to interpret poetry (530c). Ion rates himself superior to all his competitors at that task, but concedes that he can interpret only Homer (531a). Even though Homer and other poets sometimes address the same subjects, Ion has nothing to say about those others. He confesses this fact without shame or apology, as if his different responses reflected on the poets instead of on his talents. Something in Homer brings out Ion’s eloquence, and other poets lack that quality.

Socrates argues that one who knows a field knows it whole (531e–532a). This denial of the knowledge of particulars in their particularity also appears at Charmides 166e; Phaedo 97d; Republic 334a, 409d. It is not that what is known about an individual thing cannot transfer to other things of the same kind; rather that the act of treating an object as unique means attending to and knowing those qualities of it that do not transfer, and so knowing them as nontransferable qualities. This attitude toward particulars qua particulars is an obstacle to every theoretical expertise. It is the epistemic analogue to the irrational one-on-one erotic bond that Aristophanes describes in Plato’s Symposium (191c–d).

It may well be that what Ion understands about Homer happens to hold true of Hesiod. But if this is the case, Ion will not know it. He does not generalize from one to many poets, and generalizing is the mark of (what Socrates considers) a professional. Diotima’s speech in the Symposium supplies a useful comparison. She differentiates between love that clings to particular objects and a philosophical erôs that escapes its attachment to particulars to pursue general knowledge (210b). Ion’s investment in Homer, like the lover’s lowest grade of attachment, reveals (and also causes) an unwillingness to move toward understanding.

And so Ion presents Socrates with a conundrum. Although the man’s love for Homer prohibits him from possessing expertise, Socrates recognizes how well Ion performs at his job. How to account for success minus skill? Socrates needs to diagnose Ion by means of some positive trait he possesses, not merely by the absence of knowledge.

Socrates therefore speaks of poets and those they move as entheous . He elaborates an analogy. Picture an iron ring hanging from a magnet, magnetized so that a second ring hangs from the first and a third from that second one. Magnets are Muses, the rings attached to them poets, the second rings the poets’ interpreters, third the rhapsodes’ audiences. (For a recent treatment of this image see Wang 2016.)

Plato’s image captures the transfer of charisma. Each iron ring has the capacity to take on the charge that holds it. But the magnetism resides in the magnet, not in the temporarily magnetized rings. No ring is itself the source of the next ring’s attachment to it. Homer analogously draws poetic power from his Muse or god and attracts a rhapsode by means of borrowed power. Maybe in order to vest the great power in a paternal source superseding the Muses, Socrates shifts in the course of his analogy from casting the magnet-stone as feminine Muse (e.g. 533d–534c, 536a) to speaking of the masculine ho theos “the god,” perhaps to be identified with Apollo (534c–d, 536a). Whatever his source is, Ion once charged with Homer’s energy collects enthusiastic fans, as if to his own person and as if by technê —but, to be clear, only as if. The analogy lets poets and rhapsodes appear charismatic without giving them credit for their own charm.

Socrates takes a further step to pit inspiration against reason. “Epic poets who are good at all are never masters of their subject. They are inspired and possessed [ entheoi ontes kai katechomenoi ]” (533a). Inspiration now additionally means that poets are irrational, as it never meant before Plato. This superadded irrationality explains why Ion rejects Socrates’ proposal, in a passage that is frequently overlooked. He is not unhinged during his performances, Ion says; not katechomenos kai mainomenos , possessed and maddened (536d). Inspiration has come to imply madness and the madness in it is what Ion tries to reject.

What went wrong? The image of rings and magnets is slyer than it appeared. While the analogy rests transparently on one feature of magnetism, it also smuggles in a second. Socrates describes iron rings hanging in straight lines or branching. Although each ring may have more than a single ring dependent upon it, no ring is said to hang from more than one. But real rings hang in other ways, all the rings clumped against the magnet, or one ring clinging to two or three above it. Why does Socrates keep the strings of rings so orderly?

Here is one suggestion. Keeping Homer clung only to his Muse or god, and Ion clung only to Homer, preserves the idiosyncrasy that gave Socrates the excuse to deny expertise to Ion. Otherwise a magnet and rings would show how genuine knowledge is transmitted. Suppose you say that a Muse leads the doctor Hippocrates to diagnostic insights that he tells his students and they tell theirs. That much divine help is all that the image of magnet and rings strictly implies. It poses no threat to a profession’s understanding of itself. But no one would claim that a doctor can learn only from a single other doctor, or that a doctor treats a unique group of adulatory patients. That constraint on medical practice would threaten its status as technê ; and that is exactly the constraint added by the array of rings as Socrates describes it. (For a contrasting and compelling reading of this passage, see Chapter 3 of Capra 2015.)

Analogies always introduce new traits into the thing being described. But Plato’s readers should become suspicious because the feature that slips into this figure, the orderly hanging of the rings, is neither called for by the way iron actually transmits magnetic force, nor neutral in effect. Plato has distorted magnetism to make it mean not inspiration simpliciter but something crazy.

The combination of possession and madness in the Ion ’s version of inspiration makes it hard to decide whether the dialogue registers some approval for inspired poetry or condemns it entirely. Readers have drawn opposite morals from this short work. (On this controversy see Stern-Gillet 2004.) As Socrates characterizes enthousiasmos , it denies Ion’s professional credibility, not to mention his sanity. But there is religion to think of. If not traditionally pious, Plato is also not the irreverent type who would ascribe an action to divinities in order to mock it. And consider the example of inspired verse mentioned here. Socrates cites Tynnichus, author of only one passable poem, which was a tribute to the Muses (534d). It’s as if the Muses wanted to display their power, Socrates says, by proving that their intervention could elicit a good poem even from an unskilled author. If this is Socrates’ paradigm of inspired poetry, then whatever else inspiration also explains, it appears particularly well suited to producing praise of the gods. And praise of the gods is the poetic form that Plato respects and accepts ( Republic 607a).

Finally there is a version of the same problem that arose regarding the Apology , Laws , and Meno , that the Ion calls soothsayers and diviners possessed ( chrêsmôidos, mantis : 534d). That already seems to justify inspiration. Add in that Socrates calls the diviner’s practice a technê (538e; cf. 531b) and this dialogue seems to be saying that an activity can be both professional and the result of divine possession.

So what does the charge of madness mean? The word makes Ion recoil—but what does he know about higher states of understanding? Maybe madness itself needs to be reconceived. The Ion says far from enough to settle the question. But Plato’s other sustained discussion of inspiration returns to the language of madness and finds some forms of it permissible, even philosophical.

When introducing the Phaedrus ’s major speech on erôs (244a–250d), Socrates defines desirous love as a species of mania , madness, in a context that comments on philosophy and poetry with an aside about mimêsis a few pages later.

Madness comes in two general forms: the diseased state of mental dysfunction, and a divergence from ordinary rationality that a god sometimes brings (265a–b). The first is a passing fit of possession, the other the encompassing condition of someone’s soul (with thanks here to Joshua Wilner). The divine latter condition subdivides into love, Dionysian frenzy, oracular prophecy, and poetic composition (244b–245a). In all four cases the possessed or inspired person ( enthousiazôn : 241e, 249e, 253a, 263d) can accomplish what is impossible for someone in a sane state. All four cases are associated with particular deities and traditionally honored.

On reconciling the possession described in the Ion with that in the Phaedrus , see Gonzalez 2011 for extended discussion. Briefly we can say that the madness of the Phaedrus is separated from ordinary madness as the Ion ’s version is not, and is classified pointedly as good derangement. Bad kinds exist too. But, being a god, Eros can’t do anything bad (242d–e). The greatest blessings flow from divine mania (244a).

The Phaedrus does not associate the possessed condition with idiosyncrasy. To account for the madness of love Socrates describes an otherworldly existence in which souls ride across the top of heaven enjoying direct visions of the Forms (247c–d). After falling into bodily existence a soul responds to beauty more avidly than it does to any other qualities for which there are Forms.

Associating beauty with certain cases of inspiration suggests that poetry born of inspiration might also have philosophical worth. But before welcoming the lost sheep Plato back to the poetry-loving fold, recognize the Phaedrus ’s qualifying remarks about which poetry one may now prize. It cannot be imitative. When Socrates ranks human souls depending on how much otherworldly being they saw before falling into bodily form—philosophers come in first on this ranking—the poet or other mimêtikos occupies sixth place out of nine (248e).

Indeed the argument of the Phaedrus only identifies a single type of poem that the Muses call forth: the poem that “embellishes thousands of deeds of the ancients to educate [ paideuei ] later generations” (245a). But Plato exempts hymns to gods and encomia of heroes from even his harshest condemnation of poetry ( Republic 607a). Quite compatibly with the Republic ’s exemption the Ion specifies a hymn to the Muses as its example of inspiration and the Phaedrus describes the praise of heroes. Whenever possible Plato reserves the benefits of inspiration for the poems he does not have reason to condemn. And this restriction on which poems derive a true merit from being inspired leaves inspiration a long way from guaranteeing value for poetry as a whole.

Mimêsis fails, when it does, in two ways. 1) It originates in appearance rather than in reality, so that judged on its own terms the product of imitation has an ignoble pedigree ( Republic 603b). 2) The imitative arts positively direct a soul toward appearances, away from proper objects of inquiry. A mirror reflection might prompt you to turn around and look at the thing being reflected, but an imitation keeps your eyes on the copy alone.

Although the dialogues offer few arguments for the second claim, the perverseness with which mimêsis leads one to prefer appearance partly follows from a contrast between traditional visual art and its later developments. Aeschylus had allegedly praised the religiosity of the rougher old visual forms, by comparison with later visually exciting statues that inspired less of a sense of divinity (Porphyry On Abstinence from Animal Food 2.18). Early votive objects, sometimes no more representational than a plank or oblong stone, were treated as markers of the gods’ presence and points of contact with unseen powers (Faraone 1992, Collins 2003). Stone and wooden figures could serve as surrogates for absent humans, as when mourners buried an effigy in place of an irrecoverable body (Herodotus Histories 6.58; Vernant 2006, 322; Bremmer 2013), or treated a grave marker as if it were the buried person (Euripides Alcestis 348–356; see Burkert 1985, 193–194). Whereas the mimetic relationship connects a visible likeness with its visible original, such objects though visible link to invisible referents.

Plato seems to distinguish between the pious old art and its modernized forms, as he distinguishes analogously among poems. Statues suggest communication with divinities ( Laws 931a, Phaedrus 230b). Wax likenesses participate in the magic of effigies ( Laws 933b). Metaphorically the dialogues imagine a body as a statue that invites comparison with its invisible referent the soul ( Charmides 154c, 157d–158c; Symposium 215b, 216d–e), or as a sêma “tomb” but also “sign” of the soul within ( Cratylus 400b–c, Gorgias 493a). Compared to such referential relations, the mimetic art object’s reference to what is visible can feel like a forcible misdirection of attention to appearances and to delight with visibility as such.

Beauty by comparison begins in the domain of intelligible objects, since there is a Form of beauty. And more than any other property for which a Form exists, beauty engages the soul and draws it toward philosophical deliberation, toward thoughts of absolute beauty and subsequently (as we imagine) toward thoughts of other concepts.

It has been noted that some appearances of mimêsis give it a role to play in philosophizing, as when recollecting the Forms or assimilating oneself to the divine nature. This constructive turn does not seem to be made available to the poems or paintings that imitate individual human beings. If one seeks something in poetry and the arts that would function oppositely to mimetic poetry and would serve philosophical enlightenment, inspiration might offer the most promising possibility.

A significant datum here comes from the Republic , which despite its stance against much poetry still draws from notable poems in its argument. The “noble lie” (414b–415d), by means of which Socrates proposes to teach future citizens the differences among them, reworks the Hesiodic “ages of humanity” from Works and Days (107–179). Hesiod must have understood something important about people that the Republic ’s city will turn into its civic lesson (Van Noorden 2010). And Geoffrey Bakewell has shown how the appearances of verses from Aeschylus progress, as the Republic goes on, to form good advice to the city and its control over music. Seven against Thebes “deserves a place in Kallipolis” (Bakewell 2017, 274).

Where Hesiod is concerned one may multiply examples from the Symposium and Critias, but most of all from Plato’s Timaeus , that show the dialogues engaged with that great archaic poet as interlocutor and source (Boys-Stones and Haubold 2010). Plato could credit the wisdom in such poems to the inspiration that had fallen upon their authors.

Does such wisdom as good poetry contains necessarily come from the domain of Forms? The Phaedrus comes closest to saying so, both by associating the gods with Forms (247c–e), and by rooting inspired love in recollection (251a). But this falls short of showing that the poets’ divine madness likewise originates among objects of greater reality. It might, but does not have to.

It has been argued that because reason plays a role for Plato in predictive dreaming (see Timaeus 71e–72a), reason is therefore also at work in cognitive states that resemble the inspired condition of the soothsayer. Given such resemblance, the function of reason in predictive dreaming would imply a role for reason whenever inspiration comes (Büttner 2011). Yet the dialogues never speak of dreaming on a par with mantic prophecy. Socrates speaks twice of his own dreams in the dialogues and expects to find truth in them ( Crito 44b, Phaedo 60e–61a), but does not equate his dreaming with a possessed condition.

The Ion says less about poetry’s divine origins than the Phaedrus does, certainly nothing that requires an interpreter to discover Forms within the Muse’s magnetism. Laws 682a and Meno 99c–d credit the inspired condition with the production of truths, even in poetry. Neither passage describes the truths about Forms that philosophical dialectic would lead to, but that might be asking too much. Let it suffice that inspiration originates in some truth.

What about the effects of inspired poetry? Could such poetry turn a soul toward knowledge as beautiful faces do? The Phaedrus does say that Muse-made poems teach future generations about the exploits of heroes. Inspired poetry at least might set a good example. But one can find good examples in verse without waiting for inspiration. Even Republic 3 allows for instances in which the young guardians imitate virtuous characters.

A clear opposition between imitation and inspiration, or any clear relationship between them, would suggest a coherent whole that can be titled “Plato’s aesthetics.” In the absence of such a relationship it is hard to attribute an aesthetic theory to Plato as one can straightforwardly do with Aristotle.

If unification is possible for the elements of Plato’s aesthetics, that may arrive from another direction. Religion has not been explored as much as it should in connection with Plato’s aesthetics, even though a religious orientation informs what he has to say about beauty, inspiration, and imitation. The quasi-divine status that beauty has in the Symposium ; the Republic ’s characterization of the imitator as enemy to Athena and other gods; and of course inspiration, which cannot be defined without appeal to divine action: All three subjects suggest that Plato’s aesthetics might come together more satisfactorily within Plato’s theology. The question is worth pursuing now, for scholarship of recent decades has advanced the study of Greek religion, providing the resources for a fresh inquiry into the fundamental terms out of which Plato constructs his aesthetics.

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• –––, 2012b. Review of James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 70: 323–326.
• –––, 2013. “The Impiety of the Imitator in Republic 10,” Epoché , 17: 219–232.
• –––, 2015. “Women at the Gymnasium and Consent for the Republic ’s City,” Dialogos , 98: 27–54.
• Partee, Morriss Henry, 1971. “Inspiration in the Aesthetics of Plato,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 30: 87–95.
• Petraki, Zacharoula, 2018. “Plato’s Metaphor of ‘Shadow Painting’: Antithesis and ‘Participation’ in the Phaedo and the Republic ,” Classical Journal , 114(1): 1–33.
• Pfefferkorn, Julia and Antonino Spinelli (eds.), 2021. Platonic Mimesis Revisited , Baden-Baden: Academia Verlag.
• Philip, J. A., 1961. “Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association , 92: 453–468.
• Politis, Vasilis, 2021. Plato’s Essentialism: Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Porter, James I., 2010. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Spinelli, Antonino, 2021. “ Mimoumenoi tas tou theou periphoras . Die Mimesis des Kosmos als menschliche Aufgabe im Timaios ,” in Pfefferkorn and Spinelli 2021, pp. 291–312.
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• Tigerstedt, Eugene, 1969. Plato’s Idea of Poetical Inspiration , Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
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• Woodruff, Paul (trans.), 1983. Plato, Two Comic Dialogues: Ion and Hippias Major , with introduction and notes, Indianapolis: Hackett.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Fine, Jonathan, 2024. “Of Pots and Plato’s Aesthetics,” unpublished manuscript.
• Taylor Kloha Sandidge, “ What the Poet Doesn’t Need to Know: Another Look at Plato’s Expulsion of Tragedy ,” unpublished manuscript. [A fresh discussion of the issues in Book 10 of the Republic .]
• The Perseus Project , Tufts University; a collection of ancient writings on line. Plato’s works in both Greek in English with any number of linguistic and scholarly tools.
• Maecenas: Images of Ancient Greece and Rome , was formerly hosted at SUNY/Buffalo, now available at the Internet Archive.
• DMOZ Directory , meta-source no longer updated. It’s a guide to over 100 sites in ancient philosophy. These vary in richness but make many resources available, some of them appropriate for beginners and others for advanced scholars.
• Plato and Aristotle on Tragedy , a fine outline of the issues that Plato and Aristotle address in speaking of tragedy; a greater focus on tragedy in particular than in the present entry.

-->aesthetics: and the philosophy of art --> | Aristotle | beauty | Plato | Plato: ethics and politics in The Republic | Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology | Plato: rhetoric and poetry | Plato: shorter ethical works

Acknowledgments

Parts of section 1 were informed and guided by the work of Jonathan Fine. Parts of 2.3 and 2.5 are indebted to arguments made by Taylor Kloha (specifically, on what a full and true account of something requires and how the poet’s error lies not in imitating per se but in doing so without representing the full and true account). I am also grateful to Elvira Basevich, Daniel Mailick, and Andrea Tisano for their help with earlier versions of this entry. And special thanks go to Joshua Wilner for his comments and assistance.

Copyright © 2024 by Nickolas Pappas < nickolaspappas60 @ gmail . com >

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• WOMEN OF IMPACT

The idea of beauty is always shifting. Today, it’s more inclusive than ever.

Whom we deem ‘beautiful’ is a reflection of our values. Now, a more expansive world has arrived where ‘we are all beautiful.’

The Sudanese model Alek Wek appeared on the November 1997 cover of the U.S. edition of Elle magazine, in a photograph by French creative director Gilles Bensimon . It was, as is so often the case in the beauty business, a global production.

Wek, with her velvety ebony skin and mere whisper of an Afro, was posed in front of a stark, white screen. Her simple, white Giorgio Armani blazer almost disappeared into the background. Wek, however, was intensely present.

She was standing at an angle but looking directly into the camera with a pleasant smile spread across her face, which wasn’t so much defined by planes and angles as by sweet, broad, distinctly African curves. Wek represented everything that a traditional cover girl was not.

More than 20 years after she was featured on that Elle cover, the definition of beauty has continued to expand, making room for women of color, obese women, women with vitiligo , bald women, women with gray hair and wrinkles. We are moving toward a culture of big-tent beauty. One in which everyone is welcome. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone’s idealized version can be seen in the pages of magazines or on the runways of Paris.

We have become more accepting because people have demanded it, protested for it, and used the bully pulpit of social media to shame beauty’s gatekeepers into opening the doors wider.

Eye of the beholder

Technology has put the power to define beauty in the hands of the people. Mobile phones allow people greater control of their image, and include apps that come with filters used for fun, appearance, and entertainment.

Wek was a new vision of beauty—that virtue forever attached to women . It has long been a measure of their social value; it is also a tool to be used and manipulated. A woman should not let her beauty go to waste; that was something people would say back when a woman’s future depended on her marrying well. Her husband’s ambition and potential should be as dazzling as her fine features.

Beauty is, of course, cultural. What one community admires may leave another group of people cold or even repulsed. What one individual finds irresistible elicits a shrug from another. Beauty is personal. But it’s also universal. There are international beauties—those people who have come to represent the standard.

For generations, beauty required a slender build but with a generous bosom and a narrow waist. The jawline was to be defined, the cheekbones high and sharp. The nose angular. The lips full but not distractingly so. The eyes, ideally blue or green, large and bright. Hair was to be long, thick, and flowing—and preferably golden. Symmetry was desired. Youthfulness, that went without saying.

This was the standard from the earliest days of women’s magazines, when beauty was codified and commercialized. The so-called great beauties and swans—women such as actress Catherine Deneuve , socialite C.Z. Guest , or Princess Grace —came closest to this ideal. The further one diverged from this version of perfection, the more exotic a woman became. Diverge too much and a woman was simply considered less attractive—or desirable or valuable. And for some women—black and brown or fat or old ones—beauty seemed impossible in the broader culture.

In the early part of the 1990s, the definition of beauty as it applied to women began to loosen thanks to the arrival of Kate Moss , with her slight figure and vaguely ragamuffin aesthetic. Standing five feet seven inches, she was short for a runway walker. The British teenager was not particularly graceful, and she lacked the noble bearing that gave many other models their regal air. Moss’s star turn in advertisements for Calvin Klein signified a major departure from the long-legged gazelles of years past.

Moss was disruptive to the beauty system, but she was still well within the industry’s comfort zone of defining beauty as a white, European conceit. So too were the youthquake models of the 1960s such as Twiggy , who had the gangly, curveless physique of a 12-year-old boy. The 1970s brought Lauren Hutton, who stirred scandal simply because she had a gap between her teeth.

Even the early black models who broke barriers were relatively safe: women such as Beverly Johnson, the first African-American model to appear on the cover of American Vogue , the Somali-born Iman, Naomi Campbell, and Tyra Banks. They had keen features and flowing hair—or wigs or weaves to give the illusion that they did. Iman had a luxuriously long neck that made legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland gasp. Campbell was—and is—all va-va-voom legs and hips, and Banks rose to fame as the girl next door in a polka dot bikini on the cover of Sports Illustrated .

Wek was a revelation. Her beauty was something entirely different.

Her tightly coiled hair was sheared close to her scalp. Her seemingly poreless skin was the color of dark chocolate. Her nose was broad; her lips were full. Her legs were impossibly long and incredibly thin. Indeed, her entire body had the stretched-out sinewiness of an African stick figure brought to life.

To eyes that had been trained to understand beauty through the lens of Western culture, Wek was jarring to everyone, and black folks were no exception. Many of them did not consider her beautiful. Even women who might have looked in the mirror and seen the same nearly coal black skin and tightly coiled hair reflected back had trouble reckoning with this Elle cover girl.

See and be seen

Fashion and beauty magazines present a paragon of aspiration, often setting beauty standards for women across cultures. The magazines also serve as giant advertisements for the industries dependent on selling these ideals to willing customers.

Wek was abruptly and urgently transformative. It was as though some great cultural mountain had been scaled by climbing straight up a steep slope, as if there were neither time nor patience for switchbacks. To see Wek celebrated was exhilarating and vertiginous. Everything about her was the opposite of what had come before.

We are in a better place than we were a generation ago, but we have not arrived at utopia. Many of the clubbiest realms of beauty still don’t include larger women, disabled ones, or senior citizens.

But to be honest, I’m not sure exactly what utopia would look like. Is it a world in which everyone gets a tiara and the sash of a beauty queen just for showing up? Or is it one in which the definition of beauty gets stretched so far that it becomes meaningless? Perhaps the way to utopia is by rewriting the definition of the word itself to better reflect how we’ve come to understand it—as something more than an aesthetic pleasure.

We know that beauty has financial value. We want to be around beautiful people because they delight the eye but also because we think they are intrinsically better humans. We’ve been told that attractive people are paid higher salaries. In truth, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s really a combination of beauty, intelligence, charm, and collegiality that serves as a recipe for better pay. Still, beauty is an integral part of the equation.

But on a powerfully emotional level, being perceived as attractive means being welcomed into the cultural conversation. You are part of the audience for advertising and marketing. You are desired. You are seen and accepted. When questions arise about someone’s looks, that’s just another way of asking: How acceptable is she? How relevant is she? Does she matter?

Today suggesting that a person is not gorgeous is to risk social shunning or at least a social media lashing. What kind of monster declares another human being unattractive? To do so is to virtually dismiss that person as worthless. It’s better to lie. Of course you’re beautiful, sweetheart; of course you are.

We have come to equate beauty with humanity. If we don’t see the beauty in another person, we are blind to that person’s humanity. It’s scary how important beauty has become. It goes to the very soulfulness of a person.

Beauty has become so important today that denying that people possess it is akin to denying them oxygen.

There used to be gradations when it came to describing the feminine ideal: homely, jolie laide, attractive, pretty, and ultimately, beautiful. The homely woman managed as best she could. She adjusted to the fact that her looks were not her most distinguishing feature. She was the woman with the terrific personality. Striking women had some characteristic that made them stand out: bountiful lips, an aristocratic nose, a glorious poitrine. A lot of women could be described as attractive. They were at the center of the bell curve. Pretty was another level. Hollywood is filled with pretty people.

Ah, but beautiful! Beautiful was a description that was reserved for special cases, for genetic lottery winners. Beauty could even be a burden because it startled people. It intimidated them. Beauty was exceptional.

But improved plastic surgery, more personalized and effective nutrition, the flowering of the fitness industry, and the rise of selfie filters on smartphones, along with Botox, fillers, and the invention of Spanx, have all combined to help us look better—and get a little bit closer to looking exceptional. Therapists, bloggers, influencers, stylists, and well-meaning friends have raised their voices in a chorus of body-positivity mantras: You go, girl! You slay! Yasss, queen! They are not charged with speaking harsh truths and helping us see ourselves vividly and become better versions of ourselves. Their role is constant uplift, to tell us that we are perfect just as we are.

And the globalization of, well, everything means that somewhere out there is an audience that will appreciate you in all your magnificent … whatever.

We are all beautiful.

In New York, London, Milan, and Paris—the traditional fashion capitals of the world—the beauty codes have changed more dramatically in the past 10 years than in the preceding hundred. Historically, shifts had been by degrees. Changes in aesthetics weren’t linear, and despite fashion’s reputation for rebelliousness, change was slow. Revolutions were measured in a few inches.

Through the years, an angular shape has been celebrated and then a more curvaceous one. The average clothing size of a runway model, representative of the designers’ ideal, shrank from a six to a zero; the pale blondes of Eastern Europe ruled the runway until the sun-kissed blondes from Brazil deposed them. The couture body—lean, hipless, and practically flat-chested—can be seen in the classic portraits by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Gordon Parks, as well as on the runways of designers such as John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen. But then Miuccia Prada, who had led the way in promoting a nearly homogeneous catwalk of pale, white, thin models, suddenly embraced an hourglass shape. And then plus-size model Ashley Graham appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 2016 , and in 2019 Halima Aden became the first model to wear a hijab in that same magazine , and suddenly everyone is talking about modesty and beauty and fuller figures … and the progress is dizzying.

In the past decade, beauty has moved resolutely forward into territory that was once deemed niche. Nonbinary and transgender are part of the mainstream beauty narrative. As the rights of LGBTQ individuals have been codified in the courts, so have the aesthetics particular to them been absorbed into the beauty dialogue. Transgender models walk the runways and appear in advertising campaigns. They are hailed on the red carpet for their glamour and good taste but also for their physical characteristics. Their bodies are celebrated as aspirational.

The catalyst for our changed understanding of beauty has been a perfect storm of technology, economics, and a generation of consumers with sharpened aesthetic literacy.

The technology is social media in general and Instagram specifically. The fundamental economic factor is the unrelenting competition for market share and the need for individual companies to grow their audience of potential customers for products ranging from designer dresses to lipstick. And the demographics lead, as they always do these days, to millennials, with an assist from baby boomers who plan to go into that good night with six-pack abs.

Hyejin Yun undergoes eyelid surgery in the Hyundai Aesthetics clinic in Seoul. The procedure makes eyes look bigger. South Korea has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world; one in three women ages 19 to 29 has had cosmetic surgery.

Social media has changed the way younger consumers relate to fashion. It’s hard to believe, but back in the 1990s, the notion of photographers posting runway imagery online was scandalous. Designers lived in professional terror of having their entire collection posted online, fearing that it would lead to business-killing knockoffs. And while knockoffs and copies continue to frustrate designers, the real revolution brought on by the internet was that consumers were able to see, in nearly real time, the full breadth of the fashion industry’s aesthetic.

In the past, runway productions were insider affairs. They weren’t meant for public consumption, and the people sitting in the audience all spoke the same fashion patois. They understood that runway ideas weren’t meant to be taken literally; they were oblivious to issues of cultural appropriation, racial stereotypes, and all varieties of isms—or they were willing to overlook them. Fashion’s power brokers were carrying on the traditions of the power brokers who’d come before, happily using black and brown people as props in photo shoots that starred white models who had parachuted in for the job.

But an increasingly diverse class of moneyed consumers, a more expansive retail network, and a new media landscape have forced the fashion industry into greater accountability on how it depicts beauty. Clothing and cosmetic brands now take care to reflect the growing numbers of luxury consumers in countries such as India and China by using more Asian models.

Marked by beauty

We’ve been chasing beauty for millennia, primping and painting our way to a more desirable ideal. Cultures in every era have held different standards of feminine beauty and myriad means of achieving it, from the toxic lead cosmetics of the past to today’s Botox injections. But the standards often serve the same aims: to attract and retain a mate; to signal social status, wealth, health, or fertility; and of course, to simply feel beautiful.

Social media has amplified the voices of minority communities—from Harlem to South Central Los Angeles—so that their calls for representation can’t be so easily ignored. And the growth of digital publications and blogs means that every market has become more fluent in the language of aesthetics. A whole new category of power brokers has emerged: influencers. They are young and independent and obsessed with the glamour of fashion. And fashion influencers don’t accept excuses, condescension, or patronizing pleas to be patient, because really, change is forthcoming.

The modern beauty standard in the West has always been rooted in thinness. And when the obesity rates were lower, thin models were only slight exaggerations in the eyes of the general population. But as obesity rates rose, the distance between the reality and the fantasy grew. People were impatient with a fantasy that no longer seemed even remotely accessible.

Fat bloggers warned critics to stop telling them to lose weight and stop suggesting ways for them to camouflage their body. They were perfectly content with their body, thank you very much. They just wanted better clothes. They wanted fashion that came in their size—not with the skirts made longer or the sheath dresses reworked with sleeves.

They weren’t really demanding to be labeled beautiful. They were demanding access to style because they believed they deserved it. In this way, beauty and self-worth were inextricably bound.

Giving full-figured women greater access made economic sense. By adhering to traditional beauty standards, the fashion industry had been leaving money on the table. Designers such as Christian Siriano made a public point of catering to larger customers and, in doing so, were hailed as smart and as capitalist heroes. Now it’s fairly common for even the most rarefied fashion brands to include large models in their runway shows.

But this new way of thinking isn’t just about selling more dresses. If it were only about economics, designers would have long ago expanded their size offerings, because there have always been larger women able and willing to embrace fashion. Big simply wasn’t considered beautiful. Indeed, even Oprah Winfrey went on a diet before she posed for the cover of Vogue in 1998. As recently as 2012, the designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died last year and who himself was 92 pounds overweight at one point, was called to task for saying that pop star Adele was “a little too fat.”

Attitudes are shifting. But the fashion world remains uneasy with large women—no matter how famous or rich. No matter how pretty their face. Elevating them to iconic status is a complicated, psychological hurdle for the arbiters of beauty. They need sleek élan in their symbols of beauty. They need long lines and sharp edges. They need women who can fit into sample sizes.

But instead of operating in a vacuum, they now are operating in a new media environment. Average folks have taken note of whether designers have a diverse cast of models, and if they do not, critics can voice their ire on social media and an angry army of like-minded souls can rise up and demand change. Digital media has made it easier for stories about emaciated and anorexic models to reach the general public, and the public now has a way to shame and pressure the fashion industry to stop hiring these deathly thin women. The Fashion Spot website became a diversity watchdog, regularly issuing reports on the demographic breakdown on the runways. How many models of color? How many plus-size women? How many of them were transgender? How many older models?

One might think that as female designers themselves aged, they would begin to highlight older women in their work. But women in fashion are part of the same cult of youth that they created. They Botox and diet. They swear by raw food and SoulCycle. How often do you see a chubby designer? A gray-haired one? Designers still use the phrase “old lady” to describe clothes that are unattractive. A “matronly” dress is one that is unflattering or out-of-date. The language makes the bias plain. But today women don’t take it as a matter of course. They revolt. Making “old” synonymous with unattractive is simply not going to stand.

The spread of luxury brands into China, Latin America, and Africa has forced designers to consider how best to market to those consumers while avoiding cultural minefields. They have had to navigate skin lightening in parts of Africa, the Lolita-cute culture of Japan, the obsession with double-eyelid surgery in East Asian countries, and prejudices of colorism, well, virtually everywhere. Idealized beauty needs a new definition. Who will sort it out? And what will the definition be?

In the West, the legacy media are now sharing influence with digital media, social media, and a new generation of writers and editors who came of age in a far more multicultural world—a world that has a more fluid view of gender. The millennial generation, those born between 1981 and 1996, is not inclined to assimilate into the dominant culture but to stand proudly apart from it. The new definition of beauty is being written by a selfie generation: people who are the cover stars of their own narrative.

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The new beauty isn’t defined by hairstyles or body shape, by age or skin color. Beauty is becoming less a matter of aesthetics and more about self-awareness, personal swagger, and individuality. It’s about chiseled arms and false eyelashes and a lineless forehead. But it’s also defined by rounded bellies, shimmering silver hair, and mundane imperfections. Beauty is a millennial strutting around town in leggings, a crop top, and her belly protruding over her waistband. It is a young man swishing down a runway in over-the-knee boots and thigh-grazing shorts.

Beauty is political correctness, cultural enlightenment, and social justice.

In New York, there’s a fashion collective called Vaquera that mounts runway shows in dilapidated settings with harsh lighting and no glamour. The cast could have piled off the F train after a sleepless night. Their hair is mussed. Their skin looks like it has a thin sheen of overnight grime. They stomp down the runway. The walk could be interpreted as angry, bumbling, or just a little bit hungover.

Masculine-looking models wear princess dresses that hang from the shoulders with all the allure of a shower curtain. Feminine-looking models aggressively speed-walk with a hunched posture and a grim expression. Instead of elongating legs and creating an hourglass silhouette, the clothes make legs look stumpy and the torso thick. Vaquera is among the many companies that call on street casting, which is basically pulling oddball characters from the street and putting them on the runway—essentially declaring them beautiful.

In Paris, the designer John Galliano, like countless other designers, has been blurring gender. He has done so in a way that’s exaggerated and aggressive, which is to say that instead of aiming to craft a dress or a skirt that caters to the lines of a masculine physique, he has simply draped that physique with a dress. The result is not a garment that ostensibly aims to make individuals look their best. It’s a statement about our stubborn assumptions about gender, clothing, and physical beauty.

Not so long ago, the clothing line Universal Standard published an advertising campaign featuring a woman who wears a U.S. size 24. She posed in her skivvies and a pair of white socks. The lighting was flat, her hair slightly frizzed, and her thighs dimpled with cellulite. There was nothing magical or inaccessible about the image. It was exaggerated realism—the opposite of the Victoria’s Secret angel.

Every accepted idea about beauty is being subverted. This is the new normal, and it is shocking. Some might argue that it’s even rather ugly.

As much as people say that they want inclusiveness and regular-looking people—so-called real people—many consumers remain dismayed that this, this is what passes for beauty. They look at a 200-pound woman and, after giving a cursory nod to her confidence, fret about her health—even though they’ve never seen her medical records. That’s a more polite conversation than one that argues against declaring her beautiful. But the mere fact that this Universal Standard model is in the spotlight in her underwear—just as the Victoria’s Secret angels have been and the Maidenform woman was a generation before that—is an act of political protest. It’s not about wanting to be a pinup but about wanting the right for one’s body to exist without negative judgment. As a society, we haven’t acknowledged her right to simply be. But at least the beauty world is giving her a platform on which to make her case.

This isn’t just a demand being made by full-figured women. Older women are insisting on their place in the culture. Black women are demanding that they be allowed to stand in the spotlight with their natural hair.

There’s no neutral ground. The body, the face, the hair have all become political. Beauty is about respect and value and the right to exist without having to alter who you fundamentally are. For a black woman, having her natural hair perceived as beautiful means that her kinky curls are not an indication of her being unprofessional. For a plus-size woman, having her belly rolls included in the conversation about beauty means that she will not be castigated by strangers for consuming dessert in public; she will not have to prove to her employer that she isn’t lazy or without willpower or otherwise lacking in self-control.

When an older woman’s wrinkles are seen as beautiful, it means that she is actually being seen. She isn’t being overlooked as a full human being: sexual, funny, smart, and, more than likely, deeply engaged in the world around her.

To see the beauty in a woman’s rippling muscles is to embrace her strength but also to shun the notion that female beauty is equated with fragility and weakness. Pure physical power is stunning.

“Own who you are,” read a T-shirt on the spring 2020 runway of Balmain in Paris. The brand’s creative director, Olivier Rousteing, is known for his focus on inclusiveness in beauty. He, along with Kim Kardashian, has helped popularize the notion of “slim thick,” the 21st-century description of an hourglass figure with adjustments made for athleticism. “Slim thick” describes a woman with a prominent derriere, breasts, and thighs, but with a slim, toned midsection. It’s a body type that has sold countless waist trainers and has been applied to women such as singer and fashion entrepreneur Rihanna who do not have the lean physique of a marathoner.

Slim thick may be just another body type over which women obsess. But it also gives women license to coin a term to describe their own body, turn it into a hashtag, and start counting the likes. Own who you are.

When I look at photographs of groups of women on vacation, or a mother with her child, I see friendship and loyalty, joy and love. I see people who seem exuberant and confident. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to speak with them, I’d find them intelligent and witty or incredibly charismatic. If I got to know them and like them, I’m sure I’d also describe them as beautiful.

If I were to look at a portrait of my mother, I would see one of the most beautiful people in the world—not because of her cheekbones or her neat figure, but because I know her heart.

As a culture, we give lip service to the notion that what matters is inner beauty when in fact it’s the outer version that carries the real social currency. The new outlook on beauty dares us to declare someone we haven’t met beautiful. It forces us to presume the best about people. It asks us to connect with people in a way that is almost childlike in its openness and ease.

Modern beauty doesn’t ask us to come to the table without judgment. It simply asks us to come presuming that everyone in attendance has a right to be there.

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W as never form and never face So sweet to SEYD as only grace Which did not slumber like a stone But hovered gleaming and was gone. Beauty chased he everywhere, In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. He smote the lake to feed his eye With the beryl beam of the broken wave; He flung in pebbles well to hear The moment's music which they gave. Oft pealed for him a lofty tone From nodding pole and belting zone. He heard a voice none else could hear From centred and from errant sphere. The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. In dens of passion, and pits of wo, He saw strong Eros struggling through, To sun the dark and solve the curse, And beam to the bounds of the universe. While thus to love he gave his days In loyal worship, scorning praise, How spread their lures for him, in vain, Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain! He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

T he spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system. 'Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his money value, — his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music, and wine.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention is of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is. The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. He has got all snakes and lizards in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle. Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual health. Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. "See how happy," he said, "these browsing elks are! Why should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?" Returning home, he imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this empire for seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death." At the end of the seventh day, the king inquired, "From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?" He answered, "From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?" But the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant, dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the chicane?

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities; and, though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners , the power of form, and our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts of a science which we study without book, whose teachers and subjects are always near us.

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers: but they all prove the transparency. Every spirit makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life, — we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners , of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed; — on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the death of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him, is the friendly fire which expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him.

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe said, "The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us." And the working of this deep instinct makes all the excitement — much of it superficial and absurd enough — about works of art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind: — yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was all limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature have a new charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament was added for ornament, but is a sign of some better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end, is an increase of beauty.

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research, — namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion: health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the size and of the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can never teach a badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence. Hence our taste in building rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that support nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly to show themselves. Every necessary or organic action pleases the beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the carpenter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is becoming to the wise eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on the sea! but ships in the theatre, — or ships kept for picturesque effect on Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour! — What a difference in effect between a battalion of troops marching to action, and one of our independent companies on a holiday! In the midst of a military show, and a festal procession gay with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and poising it on the top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe the most elegant imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the decorated procession by this startling beauty.

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and curving movements. I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world from her imperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily come to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances may be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for the immortality.

One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, — Beauty rides on a lion . Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with the least weight. "It is the purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of color or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai . In all design, art lies in making your object prominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have nothing casual, but spring from the instincts of the nations that created them.

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about closets and mantel-pieces, for twenty years together, simply because the tallow-man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that they shall not perish.

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced without end. How many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Vesta? These are objects of tenderness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is soon removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful building is copied and improved upon, so that all masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms, whilst the ugly ones die out.

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in the human form. All men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in woman. "To Eve," say the Mahometans, "God gave two thirds of all beauty." A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence , in all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must go with it, since a certain serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and superiorities. Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold.' French memoires of the fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least twice a week, and, as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in England, in the last century, was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says, "the concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered on chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into their chairs, and people go early to get places at the theatres, when it is known they will be there." "Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, "flock to see the Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her get into her post-chaise next morning."

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this magic very well, or can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. Women stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to; we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expression which passes from conversation into habit of style.

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly face on a handsome ground; and we see faces every day which have a good type, but have been marred in the casting: a proof that we are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws, — as every lily and every rose is well. But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi describes a schoolmaster "so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him would derange the ecstasies of the orthodox." Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a record in sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue, and one gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another; the hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a figure, that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. And yet — it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbe Menage said of the President Le Bailleul, "that he was fit for nothing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who have seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who see, after a world of pains have been successfully taken for the costume, how the least mistake in sentiment takes all the beauty out of your clothes, — affirm, that the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence , art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, "he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England." "Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I be bold." Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, "was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and long." Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all; whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This is the triumph of expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of passing our lives with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before. Still, "it was for beauty that the world was made." The lives of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own. If a man can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable meaning; — if a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing, is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a few months, at the perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain lovers of it, only transferring our interest to interior excellence. And it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but also in the world of manners .

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, "it swims on the light of forms." It is properly not in the form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of "a light that never was on sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his countrywomen, that

— "half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die."

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, — sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone, — has in it somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners , which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and justice.

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever give. There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object, there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners , or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, " vis superba formae ," which the poets praise, — under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable and divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral sentiment, — her locks must appear to us sublime. Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character in manners , up to the ineffable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, — the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind.

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say about beauty?

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Where did Emerson find beauty?

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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Beauty Standards and Their Impact Essay

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Introduction

Beauty generally refers to the mixture of aesthetic qualities such as form, shape and color that pleases the eyesight. Beauty is divided into two broad branches, that is, human beauty and beauty in things around us. Human beauty can also be classified into physical beauty and beauty of the soul. Beauty in things around us entails architecture and physical features.

Society at large has always put emphasis that beauty being admired and looked after trait. A good example in a society is a Marketing and Advertisement Industry that sells all everything by showcasing its beauty. Some countries however hold beauty more highly than others. Such countries include The U.S is the leading.

The physical beauty of a person opens ways for the person to get their soulmates without struggle. It is usually the first impression that makes the attraction to a mate much easier. It smoothens the bumps that life gives during the search for a soulmate. However, you should take into account that its importance fades away quickly with time. As you go through life, you realize that what you thought was beauty fades away. During this period, people tend to embark on the other kind of beauty which is the beauty of the soul. The beauty of the soul entails traits such as personality, sense of humor, intelligence and other factors that entail a person’s character.

The beauty of the things around us such as the works of architecture such as unique buildings, bridges and others and physical features such as mountains and water bodies are very important as they bring happiness and joy to our eyesight. They are used as sources of recreational facilities for both children and adults. Children go to places rich in physical features to break class monotony. Adults go to beautiful places while depressed or just while they need some refreshment. They are also used as sources of learning facilities for persons of all ages. Children go to learn new things in their environment and that is the same with adults.

All people need beauty but it depends on which type of beauty is in question. To explain this, children only find beauty in things such as toys and also in places they go. Adults on the other hand see the world clearly and thus they need beauty in everything they do and places they go. Some people however need beauty more than others. Women for example tend to be more obsessed with beauty in almost everything. They always look for perfection in their body and also in everything they do on a daily basis. This has consequently made them turn to cosmetics in order to look more beautiful. Some are now even doing surgery to modify their faces and other parts of their bodies. People always need beauty in their lives. This is always largely contributed by things around them. Take, for example, a beautiful compound with a wonderful house and a beautiful garden in the backyard that will always bring happiness and improve the lives of people living there.

As the say goes, beauty is in the beholder’s eyes. The perception of people on beauty is influenced by cultural heritage. For instance, American culture perceives youthfulness as beauty and European perceives flawless skin as an ideal beauty. In Africa, however, a filled-out large figure is referred to as beauty. In today’s society, beauty is people are beginning to relate beauty to be prosperous and happy. Many cultures have fueled the obsession with women being pretty and that in turn led to the introduction of cosmetics among different cultures. Almost all the cultures in the world value beauty so highly that many quantitative measures of beauty are constructed socially.

There are some types of beauty that the media have long forgotten and no longer classify as types of beauty. These include architecture and music. The media nowadays classify architecture as more of a science than art while the music on the other hand is long forgotten when they talk about those categories. Through the help of the media, our concepts about beauty can be globalized more so through social media networks as almost all the young people in this new generation are using social media networks and the information can travel faster.

There are many controversies about beauty in nature compared to that in human form. It is important that we consider all as having beauty but the one has more beauty than the other. Human being has a beauty that fades away with time while nature has a permanent beauty that never fades away. For example, take a look at the sky, the moon, the river and so on, their beauty last forever. Men are interested in the beauty of other things than that of their own while women always tend to be self-centered when it comes to beauty. Concerning your appearance is normal and understandable. In today’s society, everywhere you go be it at work, school, or interview, your personal appearance will always influence people’s impression of you.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the standards that society has put on women have enabled some women to thrive and become successful. Let’s take America for example, a country that produces many models and enables women to develop their careers in terms of beauty. It has led to many other opportunities such as selling cosmetics and fashion design.

The physical beauty of human beings fades away with time. The beauty of nature and of the soul is permanent. Society has set some unrealistic standards for women in terms of beauty which are vague and should be overlooked.

Skivko, M. (2020). Deconstruction in Fashion as a Path Toward New Beauty Standards: The Maison Margiela Case. ZoneModa Journal , 10 (1), 39-49.

McCray, S. (2018). Redefining Society’s Beauty Standards.

Capaldi, C. A., Passmore, H. A., Ishii, R., Chistopolskaya, K. A., Vowinckel, J., Nikolaev, E. L., & Semikin, G. I. (2017). Engaging with natural beauty may be related to well-being because it connects people to nature: Evidence from three cultures. Ecopsychology, 9(4), 199-211.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 13). Beauty Standards and Their Impact. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-standards-and-their-impact/

"Beauty Standards and Their Impact." IvyPanda , 13 July 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-standards-and-their-impact/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Beauty Standards and Their Impact'. 13 July.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Beauty Standards and Their Impact." July 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-standards-and-their-impact/.

1. IvyPanda . "Beauty Standards and Their Impact." July 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-standards-and-their-impact/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Beauty Standards and Their Impact." July 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/beauty-standards-and-their-impact/.

Social Media

Social media and unrealistic beauty ideals, are social media algorithms perpetuating the beauty ideal.

Posted January 29, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• People feel a lack of control over their social media use.
• Even if we do not engage with beauty content, algorithms still show us ideal beauty images.
• We need to reflect on why we are so obsessed with the beauty ideal in the first place.

Cowritten by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick

How often do you find you’ve lost an hour passively scrolling through social media? You only sat down for a moment, to take a break, and suddenly half the morning has gone. We scroll almost everywhere, on the sofa, lying in bed, on the bus, waiting for a bus, or, when we can get away with it, in boring work meetings or classes. A recent analysis of findings from the Millennium Cohort Study 2019 shows that nearly half of British 17-year-olds (48 percent; n=7022) feel addicted to social media. Girls reported feeling like this (57 percent) far more than boys (37 percent). This is not an accident; to work, social media must eat our attention . Social media is designed to keep us scrolling. Whether it is addictive in the clinical sense is up for debate, but what is clear is that people feel a lack of control over their social media use.

The effects of this out-of-control use are worrying. The Millennium Cohort Study finds that, amongst 14-year-olds, “greater social media use related to online harassment, poor sleep, low self-esteem and poor body image ; in turn these related to higher depressive symptom scores.” 1 This is a pretty extensive list of harms, especially if you take seriously the harms of body image dissatisfaction . The evidence shows that it’s not just teens who are affected. In a study of the relationship between social media addiction and body dissatisfaction, it was found that undergraduate women who had more symptoms of social media addiction were more aware of appearance pressure and more likely to internalise the beauty ideal. 2

With online culture becoming ever-increasingly visual (think Snapchat, TikTok, BeReal, and Instagram) rather than text-based, we are barraged with images and videos of other people and feel the demands to participate by sharing our own selfies and videos. Using social media in these image-based ways can be particularly problematic .

Social media relies on our undivided attention. It works by keeping us scrolling, liking, commenting, and comparing ourselves to others. Much has already been written about the unrealistic beauty and lifestyle standards perpetuated on social media, in part because we only ever put our "best selves" online. Whilst unrealistic beauty standards in media are nothing new, the amount of images and the time we spend looking at them is. We now spend an average of 2 and ½ hours on social media every day—and some recent not yet published studies suggest this is a low estimate.

Our attention has become a valuable commodity, and social media platforms are working hard to maximise their market share. Gone are the days when social media posts are ordered chronologically; AI -assisted algorithms curate and manage our feeds to maximise attention. The algorithms aim to keep us glued to the screen as long as possible; the algorithms sort and target information into our personal feeds by analysing our likes, comments, and shares. The more we look at certain types of images and videos, the more the algorithm delivers similar content back to us. This creates a filter bubble, an echo chamber where we see more and more similar content. Often in the case of young women, the content we receive is of idealised faces and bodies—the Instagram face, the plastically firm Barbie body, If we ever look at a beauty post, or engage with beauty content, very soon we will be bombarded with posts which promote an unachievable beauty ideal.

Even if we do not personally engage with beauty content, social media algorithms still routinely serve up ideal beauty images because this kind of content is generally popular. It is almost impossible to avoid consuming beauty content in the visual world—give it a try and see how successful you are.

But we can’t only blame the social media algorithms for perpetuating the beauty ideal. We have written previously about what the "ideal" body type on social media looks like, how this tracks onto the features of the global beauty ideal (thin, firm, smooth, and young), and what this shows us about our aspirations to be impossibly perfect. 3 Whilst the algorithms’ sole aim is to keep us scrolling, they give us beauty content because we’ve voted with our fingers and thumbs; this is the content we want to see. To tackle the harms of social media and its effects on our body image, we need to reflect on why we are so obsessed with the beauty ideal in the first place. Sure, social media algorithms are exacerbating the problem, but as yet they respond to human desires, desires they commodify and exacerbate, but not desires they create.

1. Kelly, Y., Zilanawala, A., Booker, C., & Sacker, A. (2018). Social media use and adolescent mental health: Findings from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. EClinicalMedicine , 6 , 59–68.

2. Delgado-Rodríguez, R., Linares, R., & Moreno-Padilla, M. (2022). Social network addiction symptoms and body dissatisfaction in young women: exploring the mediating role of awareness of appearance pressure and internalization of the thin ideal. Journal of Eating Disorders , 10 (1), 1–11.

3. Widdows, H. (2018) Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal, Princeton University Press, p.23.

Storm Newton. Almost half of teenagers feel addicted to social media – study . Independent. January 3, 2024.

Hannah Devlin. Revealed: almost half of British teens feel addicted to social media, study says. Guardian. January 2, 2024.

Filippo Menczer. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified that the company’s algorithms are dangerous – here’s how they can manipulate you . The Conversation. October 7, 2021.

Jia Tolentino. The Age of Instagram Face . The New Yorker. December 12, 2019.

Heather Widdows, Ph.D. , is a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick and the author of Perfect Me.

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Beauty Essay Examples

Beauty standards: redefining beauty beyond conventions.

Beauty standards have long been a pervasive influence on society, shaping perceptions of attractiveness and self-worth. This essay explores the evolution of beauty ideals, the impact of media and culture on shaping these standards, the consequences of adhering to unrealistic beauty norms, and the importance...

The Need for Inclusive Beauty Standards: Embracing Diversity and Authenticity

Beauty standards have long been a powerful influence on societal perceptions of attractiveness and self-worth. However, as society evolves, there is a growing recognition of the importance of inclusive beauty standards that reflect the diverse range of appearances and identities. This essay delves into the...

Media's Promotion of Beauty Standards: Analyzing the Impact

The concept of why its wrong for the media to promote beauty standards has garnered significant attention in recent years. The media's portrayal of beauty has a profound influence on society, shaping perceptions of attractiveness, self-worth, and even personal identity. This essay delves into the...

Unrealistic Beauty Standards in Media

The portrayal of unrealistic beauty standards in the media has become a subject of extensive debate and concern. This essay examines the pervasive influence of media on shaping societal perceptions of beauty, the potential harms stemming from these standards, and proposes alternative approaches to foster...

Toxic Beauty Standards: Impacts and Solutions

The concept of toxic beauty standards has gained significant attention due to its pervasive influence on societal norms and individual well-being. This essay delves into the multifaceted reasons behind the propagation of toxic beauty standards, their detrimental effects on mental and physical health, and proposes...

Beauty Beyond Appearances: Celebrating Our Unique Selves

The beauty of women is really fascinating to men in the world and there are so many beautiful women in the world almost all of them are beautiful, but why do so many women say they are not beautiful? Why do so many women grow...

The Endless Beauty: the Profound Impact of Nature, Art and People

Beauty is a concept that has been debated and celebrated throughout history. Whether it's the beauty of nature, art, or people, it has the power to evoke powerful emotions and inspire us in countless ways. In the next 5 paragraph this essay will speculating on...

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder: Exploring Subjective Perceptions

The concept that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" reflects the idea that beauty is a subjective and individualized experience. This essay delves into the complexities of beauty and how it is perceived differently by individuals, exploring the cultural, societal, and personal factors...

Effects of Using Counterfeit Cosmetics

One of the most significant paradigm shifts in science occurred in the 17th century with the invention of the microscope. The new instrument allowed the observation of minute structures present in common objects, which otherwise were hidden from human vision. The controversy took place among...

The Concept of Female Beauty in "The Introduction" by Anne Finch and "Town Eclogues: Saturday; the Small-pox" by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

In both Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Town Eclogues: Saturday; The Small-Pox, ” the concept of female beauty is presented. In the latter, the word “beauty” is used somewhat narrowly to primarily refer to physical beauty; in the former, it is...

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