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What is beauty? And do we need it in art and design?

What is beauty? Is it really in the eye of the beholder? We ask the experts.

What is beauty? Well, beauty is a six-letter word, and a loaded one, especially when it comes to working in the creative industries, but, while there’s the old adage that it’s 'in the eye of the beholder', some argue that what is (and isn’t beautiful) is far from subjective. 

The Oxford Dictionary defines beauty as "A combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight." But we all know it’s more than that: we often say a person is beautiful, or that they have a beautiful soul. 

Beauty, then, is nebulous – it isn’t dependent on certain aesthetic qualities, but has a deeper resonance that’s more about feeling than composition or colour. If it were that simple, we’d all make things that were universally agreed to be beautiful. (If you want to focus on your own creations, see our guide to oil painting techniques , or our how to draw tutorials).

What is beauty?

Maria-Alina Asavei is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in Russian and East European Department at the Institute of International Studies at Charles University in Prague and an independent curator of contemporary art. "We often fail to make clear what we mean by 'beauty', even if we use this word quite frequently, in all kinds of occasions, related to art or not," she writes in the essay Beauty and Critical Art: is beauty at odds with critical–political engagement? . 

Asavei continues: "When we appreciate that something has beauty, we implicitly accept that X is a source of positive aesthetic value or positive aesthetic appreciation. In the history of philosophical aesthetics, there are many theories and definitions of beauty. Despite differences, most of these theories connect the experience of the beautiful with a certain type of pleasure and enjoyment."

Yet many would argue that by our very nature, there’s a certain universal set of indices that inform beauty. Alan Moore, a former designer and typographer who worked under the mentorship of letterpress guru Alan Fletcher and in roles including head of art at Publicis in London, now focuses his entire career on beauty in design, and its role in successful businesses. 

However, his take on beauty isn’t about what something looks like: he often speaks about it in terms of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Dirac’s theorem, spirituality and the laws of nature. "At an atomic level, everything is connected; they dance and are attracted to one another at a nuclear level. The law of nature seeks things to be made of symmetry and harmony, and even in opposites they’re complementary: we have night and day, up and down. We’re all made of the same stuff molecularly, so we intuit beauty – we know it to be the life-enhancing force."

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As a designer, your duty is to only bring good things into the world

As such, Moore sees beauty not just as symmetry, but as regeneration: the first law of thermodynamics, also known as Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another. This is intrinsically related to good design. "It’s about the idea of bringing good into the world and regeneration," Moore says. "People really connect to the idea of beautiful people because it relates to values, it relates to ethics. You have to think about if someone asked you as a designer, 'Is that the most beautiful decision we could make?' If you see that, then as a designer, your duty is to only bring good things into the world."

Is beauty useful?

These are big concepts, but are increasingly ones that designers have to think about in times of climate crisis and political turmoil. They’re as crucial (and as such, as "beautiful") as how good their type looks, or which Pantone they’ll select. 

It’s also about utility: Moore points out that "Mother Nature works with purpose in everything she does." In legendary designer Paul Rand’s 1947 book Thoughts on Design he stated that, "Ideally, beauty and utility are mutually generative"; the combination of both is when you reach the pinnacle of design. "Visual communications of any kind… should be seen as the embodiment of form and function: the integration of the beautiful and the useful." 

While this doesn’t help us to define what is and isn’t beautiful, it does underscore the notion of beauty as being a concept we all understand, but that can be mutable and dependent on context. Asavei echoes this view: "What we know about an event or object and our world-view and moral values always determine our perception about what is beautiful, why it is beautiful, and what is not beautiful." 

It goes without saying that what is and isn’t considered beautiful has changed throughout history, whether in art, design or the human form (for women in particular – think fetishising plumpness when it signified wealth during the Renaissance era; 90s "heroin chic" waifs; today’s Kardashian-esque big ass, little waist, big lips).

At one end of the historical beauty-definition spectrum is the "rational understanding of beauty and the search to boil down the essence into formulae and models for application," as Alan Powers, a design writer and professor of architecture and cultural history at the University of Greenwich puts it in Beauty: A Short History . 

This was seen during the Renaissance when the prevailing belief around beauty was that it was based on numbers "akin to the harmonies of music and the movements of the planets". At the other end is a far more romanticised notion, such as the Middle Ages’ view of beauty as part of the "divine order" or poet John Keats’ "beauty is truth, truth beauty" from his Ode on a Grecian Urn. 

Then Modernism came along: everything was stripped back to its most basic components and that continues to play a huge role in today’s frequently Swiss-leaning, grid-loving design education. It was the far-reaching cultural shifts (at least in the Western world) of the rise of Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that saw the earlier decorative values of pattern and opulent lettering styles in print, or the decorative flourishes of architecture that had formerly dominated, fall out of favour. It also saw a swift shift toward pared-based design and prioritised rigid proportions and functionality. 

This marked the start of an underlying reluctance to embrace beauty as a core value, which continues to this day. The idea of beauty, to many, is (perhaps subconsciously) seen as trite or old-fashioned – an aesthetic principle at odds with the rigid frameworks of 21st century design. The divisive Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones wrote a piece in 2012 about the rejection of beauty in contemporary art, which aligned this view with far older beliefs that "beauty is the most dangerous idea in art… It tantalises and confuses, inspires and crushes", and that "beauty has been worshipped as the highest artistic value and denigrated as a pagan temptation." 

The value of beauty

Yet in design, it’s not so much about "pagan temptation" or danger, but a focus on problem-solving, form-following-function, conceptual rigour and evolutions in technology that drive how interfaces, software and even print design are viewed. As grids and rules came in, beauty in its more traditional sense went out. As Alan Powers puts it, "The ideal of pure geometry remains deeply rooted in western consciousness as the basis of beauty. It sits well with the idea that beauty is an expert business, not accessible to the untrained mind." 

However, one designer who consistently rails against the notion that beauty is unimportant, subjective or "not accessible to the untrained mind" is Stefan Sagmeister. In his talks and the book Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty , created with Jessica Walsh, he uses numerous scientific and cultural examples to point out that beauty is far from being "in the eye of the beholder" (he points out the phrase only came to prominence thanks to a line stating as such in Margaret Wolfe Hungerford’s 1878 novel Molly Bawn.) 

In talks, Stefan has shown his audience a slide with five different colours, another with five different shapes, and asked people to vote for their favourite. The results are almost identical wherever and whenever he does this (turns out circles and blue or purple come out top). Sure, it’s a crude experiment, but it says a lot about how our tastes are not as unique or subjective as we might have thought. Stefan often blames Modernism for the devaluation of beauty, and the suspicion that beautiful work might not be taken seriously, or derided as merely decorative or commercial. 

To avoid this risk, the grid was firmly laid out in design schools as the safe, clean, rational solution, to the point that it became non-expressive to the exclusion of physical beauty. Jan Tschichold – one of the most famous proponents of Modern ideals through his Die Neue Typographie – eventually went back on his espousal of modernist values, describing Modernism as "inherently authoritarian and fascist", and a style that had become a "default" that lacked wit and innovation.

The public will respond to any attempt to rehabilitate beauty Jan Tschichold

Although his text is still a staple in design education, Tschichold went further, saying that a designer doesn’t have to be inventive or innovative to create design work based around the grid. Despite this apparent ongoing renunciation for many designers of beauty as a priority, "there is every reason to work with it again," says Powers. He cites MORI research that showed "the public values beauty and not only wants it in their homes, clothes and other personal belongings, but also in the great outdoors, the public realm and public life… especially in these difficult times, the public will respond to any attempt to rehabilitate beauty." Designers, take note! 

Alan Moore’s views echo this, and make a case for the importance of beauty in commercial design: "Beauty is a powerful quality for a business to have," he wrote in The Business Case for Beauty , originally published in Management Today. "People experience the world qualitatively, not quantitatively… a Temkin survey shows that customers with a positive emotional experience of a company are six times more likely to buy more, 12 times more likely to recommend and five times more likely to forgive a mistake." This, clearly, defies any suspicions that beauty in creative work has no function, or serves a merely decorative purpose. 

Alan Moore’s commitment to preaching the values of the beautiful was born of a "road to Damascus" moment, he says. This arrived after many years working for various organisations and agencies and his view that there was a "form of myopia in the way they were working: making money at any cost until it cost them everything," he says. "I got very angry at the greed across incumbent industries, whether they were TV, radio or print. I thought ‘this is not okay, we’re supplanting the idea that a good life is one born out of material consumption – nothing to do with the wealth of life’." 

If there are so many cases in favour of beautiful design, why then in recent years and even decades have we seen designers move towards not just function over form, but deliberately "ugly" design: the post-ironic clashing of typefaces and so on? We’d suggest that this is because such work isn’t in fact ugly at all when it’s done well, but what we mean by beauty has radically shifted. 

Nature and beauty

Alan Moore points out that if everything in nature is beautiful, and that nature thrives on diversity and regeneration, then how we view what is and isn’t beautiful or aesthetically appealing will patently shift over time. Therefore, the notion of beauty as either a representation of subjective, aesthetic pleasure or something purely aesthetic with little intellectual or conceptual underpinning, is something that the designers who consider their role as simply "problem solving" might want to rethink.

Indeed, Jonathan points out that artwork that shuns beauty may well be in vogue; but once we’ve "look[ed] at it earnestly," we then go and look at gorgeous photos, films, magazines – the true art of our time." With so much of the commercial creative landscape responsible for such imagery, this suggests that a great editorial layout or careful selection of typefaces, a well-art directed campaign, or even a brand film has as much need for beauty as an artwork simply created for art’s sake. 

One newish platform pushing radically new and innovative ideas around what’s beautiful is Dazed Beauty . Launched in late 2018, and art directed by Ben Ditto, who’s also creative director of Ditto Publishing, with creative direction from Isamaya Ffrench, the pair brought a more internet-led, fantasy-like, occasionally gore/horror-inspired look to the platform. 

The platform stated its mission as "celebrating identity, self-expression and creativity through the transformational power of beauty." This means alongside covering faces and products, there’s a considerable focus on art. Pieces range from the sexuality of maternal women to nipple removal and other "extreme body modification" to profiles on creative coders and an artist who claims that we’re "already living in a video game". 

Beauty is personal, and platforms like Instagram have helped people to leverage beauty on their terms Nellie Eden

This idea of creativity and self-expression as integral to beauty has meant the design of the site is thoroughly futuristic, using gloopy metallic type that floats around the pages, lurid neon green lines to break up the site’s grid and sections that are predominantly image-led, clearly taking a cue or two from certain image-sharing platforms. It’s a far cry from the usual look of beauty or fashion publications: all clean, neat layouts; white space, femininity and mastheads set in black, traditional serif capitals. "This is beauty for the social media age," as Ffrench puts it. 

"Beauty is personal, and platforms like Instagram have helped people to leverage beauty on their terms," says Dazed Beauty’s editor Nellie Eden. "Our design is informed by the convergence of the beauty and the tech industries. When we talk about beauty it’s not about products or who’s the face of YSL – it’s what a teenager in Poland is doing with his contact lenses." 

Eden continues: "Dazed Beauty has a distinctive personality: you can put something on Instagram that people find disgusting or appalling or strange, and that’s fantastic, because beauty imagery has become so sanitised and so far from what it means to be human… We always say make it weirder or more digressive or obscure." These presentations of future-facing, deliberately "weirder" or "appalling" takes on what is beautiful doesn’t mean that beauty needn’t be a consideration for designers – quite the opposite – but it does mean they need to dig deep to think about what could make their work more beautiful, and their approach to doing so. 

Beauty, states Powers, is "cultivated through a deeper understanding of what we already have, and by looking after and appreciating the unique characteristics of the places where we live." He adds, "we should commit ourselves to living better on less. Perhaps the key thing is to have the confidence to say beauty matters, and not to be afraid of the reaction." But it’s not just about these deeper philosophies, or trend-bucking. 

In Sagmeister and Walsh's book, they state the case that attention to form (in other words, beauty) in turn makes a design more functional. Beautiful packaging design, for instance, sells better. Moore firmly backs this: "Beauty as a frame, philosophy, language even, shows how to build businesses that are more relevant and needed in the world we all live in today: businesses that build legacy, that go beyond sustainability, that are places the best people want to work for, and that deliver outstanding customer experience, all of which translates into long-term growth and profitability." 

Alan Moore also argues that rather than form making something more functional, "beauty flows from purpose", citing companies such as Patagonia as exemplary in attracting creative talent and effective decision-making and leadership through the sense of purpose embedded across the business. To him, beauty isn’t just about design or even design teams: it’s about a workplace culture built around generosity and positivity. This in turn brings deeper engagement with the tasks at hand, trust and overall better well-being. 

It’s also about sustainability, for both the business and the world: Moore states that "beautiful businesses… take less, make better with less and waste nothing" – they are "regenerative, existing as part of living systems rather than trying to disrupt or destroy them." Moore adds, "Beauty isn’t incompatible with rigour. It won’t hurt your bottom line or your return on equity to have a beautiful business with a beautiful culture, making beautiful products. Indeed, in the long term it could be one of your greatest assets." 

To make more beautiful design runs deeper than the images you put into the world, it’s about the social purpose of what you’re doing and how you’re running your creative business. So if we run with the idea that beauty remains vital to design, but the foundations of what is seen as "beautiful" are more mutable than ever, how as a designer do you make more beautiful work?

Describing beauty as "the sweet spot between order and chaos" (rather than the Modernist designers’ rejection of chaos of any form); Sagmeister and Walsh use the equation M = O/C to decide on something’s beauty (beauty, M, is the ratio of Organization (O) to Complexity (C).) Whether a commission requires simplicity, ornamentation or boundary-pushing image-making, beauty is, and always will be vital. 

In an age where designers increasingly see AI and other tech innovations gradually making gains on the grub work of design, one thing that computers will never be able to do is judge an innate, more nebulous sense of what is beautiful. Beauty is innately related to humanity, and whatever face you put on it, computers will never be truly human.

This article originally appeared in issue 300 of Computer Arts , the world’s leading design magazine. Buy issue 300 or subscribe here .

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Emily Gosling is a freelance art and design journalist currently writing for titles including Creative Review, Eye on Design, Creative Boom and People of Print. She’s previously worked at Elephant magazine, It’s Nice That and Design Week, and was editor of Type Notes magazine. Her book Creative Minds Don’t Think Alike was published by Ilex Press in 2018, and she also plays bass as one-quarter of the eight-titted beast, Superstation Twatville.

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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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What is beauty?

Jul 28, 2014

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What is beauty? . Beauty is an idea. Everybody's idea of beauty is unique. Beauty is a function of culture also. What is ideal beauty? We see it everywhere, from paintings, to magazines to TV. Ideals evolve over time, or they can get stuck in a permanent loop.

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Beauty is an idea. • Everybody's idea of beauty is unique. • Beauty is a function of culture also. • What is ideal beauty? We see it everywhere, from paintings, to magazines to TV. • Ideals evolve over time, or they can get stuck in a permanent loop. • It seems like beauty is all about trying to live up to an ideal.

Aesthetic Refers to someone's personal idea of what is beautiful.

Beauty in art

The Perfect Woman

Money • Historically, looks that implied wealth and status were equated with beauty • Looks that were identified with working-class or poor people were thought to be less beautiful. • As society has evolved, so have the physical traits associated with richness and poorness. This results in a turnaround of beauty ideals. • Example: Skin tone. Approx. 80 years ago, it was more fashionable to be “white.” • By the 1920's more people started spending their workdays indoors in factories, offices etc. Rich people began taking vacations to the beaches, making a suntan the mark of the lady leisure.

Economic Conditions Historically, larger (well-fed) bodies types were the ideal. Now, the wealthy person can show their status by their ability to spend time and money keeping themselves fit

And now on to fashion and color…

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Plato’s Aesthetics

If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into art and beauty (or “aesthetic value”), 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, while beauty is close to a greatest good. Can there be such a thing as “Plato’s aesthetics” that contains both positions?

To the literal-minded the very phrase “Plato’s aesthetics” refers to an anachronism, 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 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, something important about Plato, to be said about the label “aesthetics.” 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, and with special energy on 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. But 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 movement toward an overarching theory they deserve to be described as practicing the philosophy of art.

James Porter has recently argued that analogizing between art forms characterized a whole culture of sensualist aesthetic thinking before Plato and hence the early appearance of a general idea “art.” Poetry commented on architecture, drama on rhetoric (Porter 2010, 188). We may add that in another fashion tragedy compared itself to sculpture (Pappas 2012b, 325). Some of these interpretations of aesthetic analysis are controversial; but there is no doubt 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 same subjects in Homer. What Hephaestus depicts on the shield, Homer depicts in his epics (Cunningham 2007, Francis 2009).

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

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.

At the same time, Plato appears to consider painting on its own terms, not merely as illustrative of 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 with a clear independent sense of visual depiction. It aims at developing a philosophy of art.

The subject calls for care. If perennially footnoted by later philosophers Plato has also been perennially thumbnailed. Clichés accompany his name. It is worth going slowly through the main topics of Plato’s aesthetics— not in the search for some surprising theory unlike anything that has been said, but so that background shading and details may emerge, for a result that perhaps resembles the commonplaces about his thought as a human face resembles 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 the form of beauty, 2.1 mimêsis in aristophanes, 2.2 republic 3: impersonation, 2.3 republic 10: copy-making, 2.4 sophist and other passages, 2.5 closing assessment, 3.2 phaedrus, 4. imitation, inspiration, beauty, other internet resources, related entries.

The study of Plato on beauty must begin with one warning. 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 this distinction between the Greek and English terms too far. It always feels more scrupulous to argue against equating words 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 tell what is beautiful from what is kalon . To begin with 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). Then “beautiful” makes a natural equivalent, certainly less stilted than the alternatives. And 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 has a particular role to play 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, 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 these differences in their semantic ranges (Hyland 2008). David Konstan has 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 this shift of focus is regarding Greek writing as a whole, it runs into difficulties when we read Plato; for kallos carries overtones of physical, visual attractiveness, and Plato is cautious about the desire that such attractiveness arouses.

Rather than seek a Greek equivalent for “beautiful,” translators often choose another English word for kalon . One rightly 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 telling 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.

For a long time scholars treated the Hippias Major as a spurious dialogue. Today most agree that Plato wrote it, and its sustained inquiry into beauty is seen as central to Platonic aesthetics.

The Hippias Major follows Socrates and the Sophist Hippias through a sequence of attempts to define to kalon . Socrates badgers Hippias, in classic Socratic ways, to identify beauty’s general nature; Hippias offers three definitions. Quite preposterously for instance “a beautiful young woman is beautiful” (287e). Hippias had a reputation for the breadth of his factual knowledge. He compiled the first list of Olympic victors, and he might have written the first history of philosophy. But his over-ingestion of specifics has evidently left him unable to digest his experience and generalize to a philosophical definition.

After Hippias fails, Socrates tries three definitions. These are general 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, and of course, he is no simple sensualist about beauty either. 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 in other dialogues:

• Beauty behaves as canonical Platonic Forms do. It possesses the reality that Forms have and is discovered through the same dialectic that brings other Forms to light. Socrates wants Hippias to explain the property that is known when any examples of beauty are known ( essence of beauty), the cause of all occurrences of beauty, and more precisely the cause not of the appearance of beauty but of its real being (286d, 287c, 289d, 292c, 294e, 297b).
• Nevertheless beauty is not just any Form. It bears some close relationship to the good (296d), even though Socrates argues that the two are distinct (296e ff., 303e ff.). It is therefore a Form of some status above that of other Forms.
• Socrates and Hippias appeal to artworks as examples of beautiful things but do not treat those as central cases (290a–b, 297e–298a). 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 features of beauty in the Hippias Major also apply in the Symposium , Plato’s other major 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 the 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).

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 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?

But the Republic takes pains to deny that beauty appears in poetry. Republic 10 calls the beauty of poetic lines 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 fundamental datum in understanding Platonic beauty as part of Plato’s aesthetics is that Plato sees no opposition between the pleasures that beauty brings and the goals of philosophy. Plato mentions no other Form in the Symposium ; the Form of beauty is Form enough. Philosophers meet this beauty in an experience in which they consummate their deepest love while also attaining the loftiest knowledge.

Many passages in Plato 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 so frequently 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 F may be predicated univocally 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 can only be predicated 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). Here beauty does better than most other properties at meeting the criteria for Forms and non-Forms. Odd numbers may fail to be odd in some hard-to-explain way, but the ways in which beautiful things fall short of their perfection are obvious even to the unphilosophical.

But physical beauty is atypical being a Form that humans want to know. This is the second reason Plato makes beauty such a frequent example of a Form. 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). But not everyone can read those signs of incompleteness. Soft or large items inspire questions in minds of an abstract bent. The perception of examples of justice or self-control presupposes moral development before someone can recognize a law’s double nature as just and unjust. By contrast, beautiful things strike everyone, and arouse everyone’s curiosity. 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.

Those 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) while also counting on the soul’s ability to transfer its desiring from the visible to the intelligible (see Philebus 65e). Plato is ambivalent about visual experience. Sight may be metaphorically like knowledge, but metonymically it calls to mind the ignorant senses (Pappas 2015, 49).

Beauty’s unmatched pedagogical effects, when the transfer of desire succeeds, 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. 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 be seen 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

“Imitation” is the commonest English translation of mimêsis . Alternatives include “representation” and “emulation.” 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 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 see Marušič 2011.)

Of course one can use the Greek mimêsis , as this discussion will frequently 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 specially applying the word to a poetic process nor necessarily implying its fraudulence —with one important exception. The comedies of Aristophanes, obsessed with Euripides and with tragedy in general ( Birds 787, 1444; Clouds 1091; Plutus 423–4), introduce comments about tragic stagecraft that say mimeisthai and mimêsis in consistently pejorative ways.

Although comedy is sometimes identified as antagonist to philosophy in the “ancient quarrel” 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. They share conservative sensibilities that outweigh Aristophanes’ slander of Socrates in Clouds (Nussbaum 1980). But Aristophanes’ influence on Plato extends, as commentators do not always recognize, to the nature of mimêsis . He uses that word in a technical sense that describes what actors do in a play, and with suggestions of fraud or concealment.

In addition to Frogs with its face-off between Aeschylus and Euripides there is Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria , which calls mimêsis a disruption of life and opposes it to nature. It can also be argued that Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria finds an ambiguity in dramatic imitation that anticipates Plato; for in that play, as in the Republic , mimêsis combines composition and performance, the invention of characters and the portrayal of them (Pappas 1999).

Plato cites mimêsis as a characteristic of poetry alone in Republic Book 3 and Laws Book 4.

Books 2 and 3 of the Republic assess poetry’s role in the curriculum for the city’s guardian class. The first part of this passage, mainly in Book 2, condemns the images of gods and demigods that Homer and the tragedians have produced, both blaspheming and setting bad examples to the young (377e–392c). After this criticism of content Socrates turns to what he labels the “style [ lexis ]” of narration. Poetic narration can take place through narration alone, through mimêsis alone, or with a mix of the two (392d).

Already this way of differentiating storytelling styles is irregular, as if one analyzed walking into pure walking, running, and a combination of the two, as a method for understanding running . Such an analysis would mark the act of running as failed or deviant walking. Likewise the taxonomy of narrations presumes that mimêsis is deviant.

The subsequent pages continue treating mimêsis as anomalous, or rather as 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. Homer’s poems alternate between third-person accounts of events (in which Homer narrates in his own voice) and speeches of the characters involved in those events. When Homer relates Agamemnon’s rebuke to the priest Chryses he uses the abusive language that a warriors’ king would use when such a king refused to show mercy (393a–c). The presentation of character is, notably, ambiguous between the act of writing or composing the words of a character like Agamemnon, and the act of reciting (performing, acting out) the words. The ambiguity (seen also in Aristophanes) lets Socrates deploy more than one argument against the presentation of characters.

The main argument is blunt but clear, and plausible enough. What the new city really does not want is the presentation of base types, because acting 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 Plato has a powerful point and in another respect is generating a misleading argument. The point is powerful inasmuch as it lets Plato ban all portrayals of vicious and ignoble characters but not the portrayals 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.

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; it must be a deranged practice only insofar as all impersonation is deranged. And that is what the argument was aiming to prove.

But the significantly misleading nature of the argument goes beyond a moment of overstatement. The case against mimêsis misleads in that it exploits the ambiguity between impersonation as something a writer does and impersonation as the performer’s task. In 1963 Eric Havelock stressed the importance of this ambiguity to Book 3; but Havelock 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. Many young male Athenians did participate in choruses for comedy and tragedy. Each year a few dozen future farmers and doctors, generals and gentlemen, spent a season preparing for their time on stage. Even so, the extensiveness of the practice among young people does not justify barring all drama from the city and from the sight of each citizen, and that is what Plato’s concluding ban comes to:

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, and significant. No ordinary deeds are being excluded but ones that smell of sacred power. And Plato’s censorship will be complete. 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. The poet has had to bring his writings with him, and he cannot get his foot in the door.

The poet is a visitor because mimetic poetry has no natural home in the philosophers’ town. 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 mammoth body of literature. In short, the ambiguity in Plato’s definition of imitation does not merely remind us (as Havelock argued) that he is witnessing the transition from oral to written culture. It makes Plato’s grand conclusion possible.

Imitation is a formal concept in Book 3. 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. Mimêsis functions as a technical term with a narrowly literary meaning, no more inherently philosophical than is the distinction one would draw in English today between direct and indirect discourse.

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 a picturing or portrayal that involves 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.

As the Sophist does, Book 10 of the Republic treats mimêsis as a property broader than drama. The topic in this passage (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. He 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 ,” the danger of imitation becomes more evident (595a–b). An eidos is a kind, and this phrase “kinds of soul” is most often taken to mean the parts of the soul that Book 4 distinguished (435b–441c). 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 Plato develops 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 thesis (1) follow from Plato’s 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—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 not a domain of imitation, and the table in a painting is not the “imitation of an imitation.” 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 twice, or doubly.

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 new list is intriguing and hard to make sense of. The three items clearly 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, because 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 ). If these associations stand up under scrutiny, they put the imitator at the opposite pole from a god, rendering the products of imitation not only lowly nothings but malevolently profane, even blasphemous (Pappas 2013).

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.

Modern readers protest: “Someone can be ignorant and still write great poetry!” Plato nods in glum agreement, for this is exactly the problem. What good will come of an activity that can not only be attempted ignorantly but even succeeded at in ignorance? Poetry too therefore imitates no more than appearance.

It remains for Plato 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 established a fundamental principle: When the soul inclines in more than one direction, this conflict represents the work 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 activity of some part of the soul distinct from reason.

Invoking Book 4’s psychological theory integrates the critique of poetry of Book 10 into the Republic ’s overarching argument. The dialogue as a whole 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. Imitation undoes the soul’s justice, it brings both vice and misery.

Plato 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 may undermine 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 “kinds” of soul in a different sense, not the species of motives within a soul but the species that souls may be sorted into. This sorting deserves to play a larger role than it has in the discussion of imitation.

The pleasures of the lowest soul are distinguished by their illusory quality. Desire delights not in true beings but in “idols [ eidôlois ] of true pleasure” and painted images, eskiagraphêmenais (586b). Skiagraphia was an impressionistic manner of painting that juxtaposed contrasting hues to create illusionistic shadow and intensify color (Keuls 1974, Demand 1975, Petraki 2018), and Plato disapproved of it ( 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.

Notice especially the terminology in Book 9. 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). 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 to exist. Socrates has tragedy in mind (comedy secondarily) and observes that playwrights neither know the quiet philosophical type nor profit from putting that 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, inherently impulsive and impassioned, acts contrary to the dictates of reason. An illusion of virtue guides him. His son dies and he doesn’t save his tears for a private moment but 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. Thus does dramatic illusion induce 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. 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.

Plato’s interpreters sometimes play up the passages in which he seems to counter the Republic ’s anti-poetic comments with hopeful assessments of imitation. According to the standard chronology of the dialogues, the relevant passages occur in dialogues written after the Republic . If Plato changed his views over time, these conciliatory remarks could indicate that he ultimately disavowed the censorship of Republic 10.

The Statesman for instance calls existing constitutions mimêmata of moral truths as the philosophical legislators know those truths (297c). Such likeness-making is not fraud, for its outcome remains something worthy of respect. One can say the same for scientific theories in Plato’s Timaeus , whose main speaker Timaeus argues that discourse about the natural world mimics the intelligible world (47c). The Laws sees imitation in music as a potentially accurate process (668b); the hard-to-date Menexenus urges the young to imitate their elders’ virtues (236e, 248e). All these passages suggest, from different angles, a rehabilitation for the process that Plato elsewhere demeans as counterfeiting (Robinson 2016).

Nevertheless these passages do scarcely more than touch on mimêsis . What Plato says about imitation when he has set out to define and evaluate it ought to weigh more heavily than a use of the word he makes briefly. Anyway the later dialogues do not speak as one. Plato’s Sophist , a companion to the Statesman , devotes much of its length to understanding mimêsis , and the context is derogatory.

The Sophist looks into imitation in order to define 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). And although the Sophist ’s theory of imitation diverges somewhat from the one in Republic 10, similarities between them preponderate. Like the Republic 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.

Most importantly, the representation that Plato charges the sophist 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 the Sophist does strike a conciliatory tone not found in Republic 10, for it seems 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 here only for the purpose of being shuffled offstage as the excluded mimêsis , that which the imitation being talked about is not .

The Sophist decisively 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. “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 be much like a poet’s. Moreover this development neutralizes the suggestions that mimêsis has its 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 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.”

Whether Plato should be permitted to juggle words’ meanings is another question. His quest to condemn imitation leaves him open to criticism. But he does not consciously change his theory in the direction of imitation understood positively.

The Sophist ’s references to divine copy-making invite another worry. 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 can articulate the same worry even remaining with the Republic ’s terms. Shadows and reflections belong in the category of near-ignorance. Imitation works an effect worse than ignorance, not merely teaching nothing but engendering a perverted preference for ignorance over knowledge. Plato often observes that the ignorant prefer to remain as they are ( Symposium 204a), but this turn toward ignorance is different. Why would anyone choose to know less? The theoretical question is also a practical one. If mimêsis poisons the soul, why do so many 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 language 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 ]” and thereby a deceiver (598d; cf. 602d). The Republic already said that sorcery robs people of knowledge (413b–c). Finally the catalog of Homer’s kinds of ignorance ends by saying his poetry casts a spell (601b). As the English “charm” does, this noun kêlêsis can mean “appeal” but also something fully magical, a spell or conjuration. Poetry works magically to draw in the audience that it then degrades.

References to magic serve poorly as explanations but they bespeak the need for explanation. Plato sees that some power must be drawing people to give up both knowledge and the taste for knowledge. But what is striking about this deus ex machina that explains poetry’s attractiveness 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 when dialogues as different as the Apology and the Laws mention it and the Ion and the Phaedrus spell out how it works. Odder still, Plato almost never cites imitation and divine inspiration together (the lone exception Laws 719c), as if to say that the two are incompatible 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.

Inspiration of that kind 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, who begin their great works asking a Muse to “speak into” them. In this case, by contrast with that of imitation, Plato finds a new use for an idea that has a cultural and religious meaning before him (Ledbetter 2003, Murray 1981, Tigerstedt 1970).

Plato’s version of the idea has proved to be 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 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 far apart—in date of composition; in style, length, content—as the Apology and the Laws , though for different purposes. 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 with no truths to evaluate or wish to assess them. And, 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, symbol of Apollo’s priestesses. Whatever brings a poet to write verse brings 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 matters. She is at 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).

Another passage in the Laws says as much when it attributes even reliable historical information to poets writing under the influence of the Muses and Graces (682a). The Meno makes inspiration its defining example of ignorant truth-speaking. Politicians are just like “prophets and soothsayers [ chrêsmôidoi, theomanteis ].” All three, “when inspired [ enthousiôntes ], speak truly [ alêthê ] about many things, but do not know what they are talking about” (99c). Removing all doubt about the origin of that truth, Socrates calls prophets, soothsayers, and all poets theioi “divine” because of how well they speak without possessing knowledge (99c–d).

In these more tangential remarks in the Apology , Laws , and Meno , 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 is the only one that most readers would clearly 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 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 dramatic recitation and the interpretation, these 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.)

His conversation with Socrates falls into three parts, covering idiosyncrasy (530a–533c), inspiration (533c–536d), and ignorance (536d–542b). 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 a claim according to which he is deranged in his performances, Socrates presents a fall-back 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 is indeed a fact for Plato, it is a fact in need of interpretation. Whether it means as in the Ion that gods inspire poetry, or as in Republic 10 that imitative poetry imitates appearance alone, ignorance matters less than the implications drawn from it. Moreover, ignorance alone will not demonstrate that poets are possessed by the gods. The proof of Ion’s ignorance supports inspiration but does not suffice to generate that doctrine. Even if Ion’s ignorance takes up the last part of the dialogue, it is not Plato’s last word about poetry.

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 at that task to all his competitors but concedes that he can only interpret Homer (531a). Even though Homer and other poets sometimes address the same subjects, Ion has nothing to say about those other poets. 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 makes him eloquent, 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, 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 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 transferability of charisma. By being made of iron each 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 and attracts a rhapsode by means of borrowed power. Ion charged with Music energy collects enthusiastic fans, as if to his own person and as if by technê —but only as if. The analogy lets poets and rhapsodes appear charismatic without giving them credit for their appeal.

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, the transfer of attraction, it also smuggles in a second feature. 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,and Ion clung only to Homer, preserves the idiosyncrasy that let Socrates deny expertise to Ion. For 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, and it is 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. That is in the nature of analogical thinking and no grounds for suspicion. 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 implies some approval for inspired poetry or condemns it entirely. Readers have drawn opposite morals from this short work. (On the debate 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 lone 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. Although other sections of the Phaedrus are relevant to Platonic aesthetics, this is the only part directly about inspiration.

Socrates’ speech begins by sorting out mania . Madness comes in two general forms: the diseased state of mental dysfunction, and a divergence from ordinary rationality that a god sometimes brings (see 265a–b). Divine madness 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. In abbreviated terms 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. Being a god, Eros can’t do anything bad (242d–e). The greatest blessings flow from divine mania (244a).

Nor is this possessed condition associated with idiosyncrasy in the Phaedrus . On the contrary. 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 inspiration suggests that poetry born of (another kind 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 poetry’s value.

Mimêsis fails 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; an imitation keeps your eyes on the copy alone. Imitation has a base cause and baser effects.

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, they say, already 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 representative 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.

Plato therefore hates to acknowledge that poems contain any beauty. He does not go so far as to call mimêsis beauty’s contrary, accusing poems or paintings of ugliness. He hardly could. It is bad enough for his view that he does not account for an imitative poem’s appeal; to deny the appeal would rob his account of all plausibility.

Nor can a good (philosophical) version of imitation work as opposite to the poetic kind. Plato recognizes a salutary function that imitations sometimes have, even the function of drawing the mind toward knowledge. But he offers no more than hints about positive mimêsis . There is no account of sound imitation that would counterweigh the attacks in the Republic . In any case this is a constructive turn that never seems to be made available to poems or paintings. If good imitation does exist, its home is not among the arts. Still the idea invites a worthwhile question: Is there anything human beings can produce that would function oppositely to mimetic poetry? Inspiration is the most promising possibility.

The cause behind inspiration is unimpeachable, for it begins in the divine realm. Is that a realm 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.

The Ion says less about poetry’s divine origins than the Phaedrus , 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? Would it always do so? Poetry’s defenders will find scant support for that proposal in the dialogues. Inspired poetry has its merits but Plato rarely credits it with promoting philosophical knowledge. In fact the Ion conceives inspiration as the cause of the worst cognitive state, for the poet’s possession by the Muses is what attaches the audience (irrationally, particularly-minded) to that one poet. 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. The educational consequences of inspired poetry do not set it apart from imitative poetry, and they never include philosophical education.

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 unprecedented resources for a fresh inquiry into the fundamental terms out of which Plato constructs his aesthetics.

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• –––, 2011. “Mimesis and Psychological Change in Republic III,” in Destrée and Herrmann 2011, pp. 195–216.
• Lear, Jonathan, 1992. “Inside and Outside the Republic ,” Phronesis , 37: 184–215.
• Ledbetter, Grace, 2003. Poetics before Plato: Interpretation and authority in early Greek theories of poetry , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Lombroso, Cesare, 1891. The Man of Genius , London: Walter Scott.
• Marušič, Jera, 2011. “Poets and Mimesis in the Republic ,” in Destrée and Herrmann 2011, pp. 217–240.
• Moravcsik, Julius, and Philip Temko (eds.), 1982. Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the Arts , Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Moss, Jessica, 2007. “What is Imitative Poetry and Why is it Bad?” in G. R. F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 415–444.
• Most, Glenn W., 2011. “What Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry?” in Destrée and Herrmann 2011, pp. 1–20.
• Murdoch, Iris, 1977. The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato banished the artists , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Murray, Penelope, 1981. “Poetic Inspiration in Early Greece,” Journal of Hellenic Studies , 101: 87–100.
• Naddaff, Ramona, 2002. Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nehamas, Alexander, 1982. “Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10,” in Moravcsik and Temko 1982, pp. 47–78.
• Nehamas, Alexander, and Paul Woodruff (trans.), 1989. Plato: Symposium , with introduction and notes, Indianapolis: Hackett.
• ––– (trans.), 1995. Plato: Phaedrus , with introduction and notes, Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Notomi, Noburu, 2011. “Image-Making in Republic X and the Sophist : Plato’s Criticism of the Poet and the Sophist,” in Destrée and Herrmann 2011, pp. 299–326.
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• Pappas, Nickolas, 1989. “Plato’s Ion : The problem of the author,” Philosophy , 64: 381–389.
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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.

• 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

Special thanks to Elvira Basevich and Daniel Mailick for their comments on earlier versions of this entry. Section 1 has profited from conversations with Jonathan Fine.

Copyright © 2020 by Nickolas Pappas < npappas @ gc . cuny . edu >

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Top 35 Nature PowerPoint Templates to Enjoy the Splendid Beauty of Nature!

Deepali Khatri

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The beauty market in 2023: A special State of Fashion report

The State of Fashion: Beauty

In 2022, the beauty market—defined as skincare, fragrance, makeup, and haircare—generated approximately $430 billion in revenue. Today, beauty is on an upward trajectory across all categories. It has proven to be resilient amid global economic crises and in a turbulent macroeconomic environment. Beauty is now an industry that many people, from top-tier financiers to A-list celebrities, want to be a part of—and with good reason. Following a solid recovery since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the beauty market is expected to reach approximately $580 billion by 2027, growing by a projected 6 percent a year (Exhibit 1). This is in line with or slightly higher than other consumer segments such as apparel, footwear, eyewear, pet care, and food and beverages.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Imran Amed, representing views from the Business of Fashion, and Achim Berg , Sara Hudson , Kristi Klitsch Weaver , and Megan Lesko Pacchia, representing views from McKinsey’s Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail Practices.

A dynamic segment that is ripe for disruption, the beauty industry will have reshaped itself around an expanding array of products, channels, and markets before this decade is over. Consumers, particularly younger generations, will spur this shift, as their own definitions of beauty morph while their perceptions of everything—from the meaning of sustainability and the role of influencers and key opinion leaders to the importance of self-care—evolve. Overall, beauty is expected to be characterized by “premiumization,” with the premium beauty tier projected to grow at an annual rate of 8 percent (compared with 5 percent in mass beauty) between 2022 and 2027, as consumers trade up and increase their spending, especially in fragrance and makeup.

At the same time, we expect the landscape to become even more competitive, as a range of independent brands that successfully came to market over the past decade seek to scale and as new challengers emerge. Intensifying competition will prompt incumbent brands and retailers to change as well. In line with the trend-driven dynamics in the market, 42 percent of respondents to McKinsey’s 2023 survey of consumers across China, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States say they enjoy trying new brands. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly shopping across price points and report that both online and offline stores influence their shopping behavior. Their preference for omnichannel shopping is expected to continue to fuel legacy brands’ shift online and independent labels’ move into a brick-and-mortar presence.

E-commerce in beauty nearly quadrupled between 2015 and 2022, and its share now exceeds 20 percent, with significant runway ahead. This compares with a 2022 e-commerce share of approximately 30 percent in apparel and footwear, and around 65 percent in toys and games.

A number of factors have fueled e-commerce growth in beauty: the expansion of beauty offerings from online giants like Amazon in the United States and Tmall in China; the increased digital sophistication from direct-to-consumer players; the steadily growing significance of online for omnichannel retailers; and the proliferation of social selling, including livestreaming, in Asia. E-commerce is expected to continue to be the fastest-growing sales channel, at 12 percent per year between 2022 and 2027, but growth in traditional channels—including specialty retail, grocery retail, and drugstores—is expected to pick up postpandemic, as consumers’ preference for omnichannel is partly driven by their continued desire for in-store discovery and trial of products (Exhibit 2). Department stores are expected to continue to lose market share globally.

Structural and competitive dynamics are shifting

Where to play will become just as important a question as how to win, given the changing underlying growth tailwinds. The changing dynamics will render the industry’s largely homogenous global playbooks of the past decades less effective and require brands to reassess their global strategies and introduce greater nuance and tailoring.

Geographic diversification will become more essential than ever. It was just recently, for example, that brands could focus their footprints on the industry’s two top countries: China and the United States. Both countries will remain mighty forces for the industry, with the beauty market expected to reach $96 billion in China and $114 billion in North America by 2027 (Exhibit 3).

But in both markets, growth will be harder to come by for individual brands, not least due to fierce local and foreign competition. Meanwhile, other countries and regions, including the Middle East and India, are ready to step into the limelight, offering distinct potential for specific categories and price tiers. The likely upshot is that many brands will align their geographic strategies to this new world order, which will require a variety of localized playbooks.

Across geographies, another growth opportunity will be products and services in the top tier of the pricing pyramid: the true luxury and ultraluxury beauty market has the potential to double, from around $20 billion today to around $40 billion by 2027.

Five disruptive themes

The next few years will be a dynamic time for the beauty industry, filled with opportunities and new challenges. Its high profitability, with EBITDA margins of up to 30 percent, will continue to attract new founders and investors to the space. With limited spots available on the beauty palette, successful brands will adapt to the changing rules of the game and secure a uniquely differentiated value proposition amid a saturated market and increasingly sophisticated consumers. Key dynamics will include the following:

• The redrawing of the growth map.  Slowing growth in China, along with increased local competition, means the country will no longer be a universal growth engine for the industry. As a result, the US market will become even more important, with strong growth, especially over the next few years. This market will become a competitive battleground for established brands and a potential green pasture for new entrants. The Middle East is expected to fuel growth over the same period, with India expected to emerge as a new hot spot in the longer term.
• The rise of wellness.  As consumers are increasingly engaging with beauty products and services to not only look good but also feel good, the lines between beauty and wellness are expected to continue blurring, with the combined opportunity representing close to $2 trillion globally for brands, retailers, and investors. Wellness-inspired products—such as skincare and makeup with probiotic and Ayurvedic ingredients, ingestible supplements, and beauty devices like LED face masks—have already captured the attention of consumers embracing greater self-care and mindfulness in their postpandemic daily routines. The melding of wellness and beauty will only become more pronounced in the years ahead, in line with an expected CAGR of 10 percent to 2027 for the wellness industry. This trend will represent an untapped opportunity for many, with first-mover advantage for the players that get it right.
• The influence of Gen Z.   Gen Zers scrutinize brands as part of their search for value. Nearly half of Gen Z respondents in our survey report conducting extensive research on product ingredients and their benefits before purchase, similar to millennials (and compared with only one-third of Gen Xers and one-fifth of baby boomers). Beyond product efficacy and transparency, Gen Zers demand that brands credibly stand for something. In addition to their focus on sustainability, diversity, and inclusion, Gen Zers greatly value brands that have an authentic and approachable image and a story that goes beyond products, and that welcome consumers into a wider community. Engaging with beauty products and services to feel good and express their authentic selves rather than adhering to specific cultural ideals, this cohort is challenging norms not only around the definition of physical beauty but also around gender and product categories.
• The imperative to scale.  While the past decade has seen a number of new and independent labels benefit from steadily lower barriers to entry, growth beyond a successful initial run to achieve meaningful scale remains elusive for many. Out of 46 brands founded in or after 2005 with global retail sales of $50 million to $200 million by 2017, only five exceeded $250 million in global retail sales five years later, in 2022. Only two achieved global retail sales of more than $750 million. To scale successfully, brands must focus on omnichannel expansion and internationalization. Category expansion appears to be most effective when a brand has grown to a certain size, and when the expansion enhances and protects the brand’s unique value proposition.
• The recalibration of M&A.  Amid continuously increasing interest in the beauty industry from a variety of players—from “strategics” to private equity funds—M&A will continue to play a major role in the industry. As seen in recent years, conglomerates and financial investors alike will pursue deals to invest in promising brands. But dealmaking will not be the same as when cost of capital was low. In the near term, megadeals will likely be few and far between in response to market turbulence. In addition, criteria for M&A targets will shift from a focus on high-growth independent “brands of the moment” to brands with an innovative product pipeline and a demonstrated ability to grow profitably, sustainably, and over the long term.

The years ahead will offer all the right ingredients—from agile channel mixes to consumers eager to explore new products—for the beauty industry’s continued growth. For beauty leaders and challengers alike, there will be plenty of opportunities to flourish, if they develop and execute tailored strategies that reflect the changing world of beauty.

Download the full report on which this article is based, The State of Fashion: Beauty (PDF–10MB).

Achim Berg is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Frankfurt office, Sara Hudson is a partner in the London office, Kristi Klitsch Weaver is a senior partner in the Chicago office,  Megan Lesko Pacchia is a partner in the New Jersey office, and  Imran Amed is the founder, editor in chief, and CEO of the Business of Fashion and an alumnus of McKinsey’s London office.

The authors wish to thank Anita Balchandani, Dimpy Jindal, Natalia Lepasch, Amaury Saint Olive, Alexis Wolfer, Alex Workman, and Andreas Zampouridis for their contributions to this article.

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Orrville City Council approves adding tattoos, body piercing as conditional use downtown

A fter a public hearing Monday, the Orrville City Council approved adding tattoos and body piercing as a conditional use in the downtown Central Business Development District.

The action includes allowing microblading, classified as a tattoo by the Health Department, to be offered in hair salons.

The request came from Genesis Beauty Salon and was reviewed by the Planning Commission before council's approval.

In a presentation about the Orrville Utilities 2023 annual report, Director of Utilities Jeff Brediger highlighted several key aspects.

The total utility expenditure for 2023 was $39.1 million, with a consistent rate of stability observed over recent years. The expenditure was divided into electric ($33.6 million), water ($2.8 million) and wastewater ($2.7 million) categories.

Power outages get a little squirrelly

Electric rates remained steady throughout the year, a stability attributed in part to the sales of wholesale energy. Brediger noted a significant reduction in CO2 emissions, which decreased by 97% since 2010, showcasing environmental progress.

The report included the top five causes of sustained outages for residential utilities. Squirrels are at the top of the list, followed by trees, birds, lighting and wind.

“We spend a lot of money trimming trees to mitigate those problems, but we haven’t come up with a way to keep the squirrels out yet,” he said.

Despite the challenges, Orrville Utilities received recognition for its reliability, earning an award for restoring power quickly during major outage events. The average restoration time was about 90 minutes for major events and less than 60 minutes for non-major incidents.

No room for expansion, two retirements announced

On the economic front, Orrville continued to experience growth in 2023.

The opening of the Jarrett Logistics facility and Bekaert warehouse led to the addition of eight jobs. Furthermore, Wayne County was named among the top 10 micropolitan areas in the country, underscoring a sustained trend of economic strength.

A notable transition in management was announced, with Mike Hedberg retiring from his role as the city’s economic development manager. He will be succeeded by Kristin Endsley, who will continue her duties in Planning and Community Development.

Looking ahead, Brediger outlined challenges for the department. They include addressing climate change policies and regulations affecting the power plant, particularly focusing on environmental impacts on the electric utilities.

The department also plans to explore the development of a third industrial park to support economic growth and respond to economic development opportunities.

“We received 106 economic development opportunities last year, we responded to zero of those either because we didn’t have the property or some of these projects were so big,” he said.

At the end of the presentation, Brediger announced he is looking to retire this year. In preparation for his retirement, he mentioned plans to post an assistant utility director position to ensure a smooth transition in leadership.

Orrville Police Department appointed two new detectives. The new officers, Cory Shane and Ryan Mace, work in the Investigative Bureau under the supervision of Master Sgt. Dave Marks.

The next council meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 6, at City Hall.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Record: Orrville City Council approves adding tattoos, body piercing as conditional use downtown