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Beauty on Display Plato and the Concept of the Kalon

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Beauty on Display Plato and the Concept of the Kalon BEAUTY ON DISPLAY PLATO AND THE CONCEPT OF THE KALON JONATHAN FINE Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Jonathan Fine All rights reserved ABSTRACT BEAUTY ON DISPLAY: PLATO AND THE CONCEPT OF THE KALON JONATHAN FINE A central concept for Plato is the kalon – often translated as the beautiful, fine, admirable, or noble. This dissertation shows that only by prioritizing dimensions of beauty in the concept can we understand the nature, use, and insights of the kalon in Plato. The concept of the kalon organizes aspirations to appear and be admired as beautiful for one’s virtue. We may consider beauty superficial and concern for it vain – but what if it were also indispensable to living well? By analyzing how Plato uses the concept of the kalon to contest cultural practices of shame and honour regulated by ideals of beauty, we come to see not only the tensions within the concept but also how attractions to beauty steer, but can subvert, our attempts to live well. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii 1 Coordinating the Kalon: A Critical Introduction 1 1 The Kalon and the Dominant Approach 2 2 A Conceptual Problem 10 3 Overview 24 2 Beauty, Shame, and the Appearance of Virtue 29 1 Our Ancient Contemporaries 29 2 The Cultural Imagination 34 3 Spirit and the Social Dimension of the Kalon 55 4 Before the Eyes of Others 82 3 Glory, Grief, and the Problem of Achilles 100 1 A Tragic Worldview 103 2 The Heroic Ideal 110 3 Disgracing Achilles 125 4 Putting Poikilia in its Place 135 1 Some Ambivalences 135 2 The Aesthetics of Poikilia 138 3 The Taste of Democracy 148 4 Lovers of Sights and Sounds 173 5 The Possibility of Wonder 182 5 The Guise of the Beautiful 188 1 A Psychological Distinction 190 2 From Disinterested Admiration to Agency 202 3 The Opacity of Love 212 4 Looking Good? 218 Bibliography 234 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament,” Iris Murdoch suggested at the outset of “Of ‘God’ and ‘Good’”. Though mine inclines me to delve first into the words and thoughts of others, I am certain to have been changed as a result; and without wise guidance, inspiring teachers, and loving friends and family along these travels, I could not have discovered through others a voice of my own. Wolfgang Mann helped to develop the ideas throughout this dissertation by providing feedback at all stages but most of all a model of patient and capacious study along with gentle direction. Lydia Goehr taught me to appreciate that the largest of ideas lies in the smallest of details and challenged me never to lose sight of either and how they matter. You have both exemplified in different ways what it means to think big, and for oneself, while having enough good humour not to think oneself big. Many thanks as well to Nickolas Pappas for joining in shepherding this project with characteristically warm encouragement, thoughtful suggestions, and friendly discussion. Taylor Carman generously examined and commented on a complete draft of the dissertation, as did Liz Scharffenberger, whose singular combination of erudition and cheerfulness I can only hope to approximate. Several courses and discussions with Katja Vogt kindled my interest in ancient ethics and its contemporary possibilties, while showing how to think carefully about these. I am indebted also to John Ferrari for discussion and generous comments on a draft of Chapter 2 while visiting the Department of Classics at University of California, Berkeley, and to Leslie Kurke for sponsoring my visit. I would also like to ii acknowledge funding of a Doctoral Fellowship awarded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I have Christina Tarnopolsky to thank for introducing me to Plato’s profundity and artistry; I have returned in one way or another to the power of images because of the indelible impression left by your passionate teaching. Calvin Normore, thank you for showing me what philosophy looks like and that it makes one better. I am grateful to students I have taught at Columbia University and Barnard College for never letting me forget how lively ideas area and how much richer when discussed together. I would like to thank all of the graduate students and faculty at Columbia University and other schools in and out of New York City from whom I have learned much, and friends with whom I have shared much, especially Anuk Arudpragasm, Adam Blazej, Alison Fernandes, Daniel Friedlander, Richard Glisker, Thimo Heisenberg, Lindsey Hendricks-Franco, Emily Jane Perry, Katie McIntyre, Jorge Morales, Elliot Paul, Bryan Quick, Simon Rozowsky, and Porter Williams. Usha Nathan has been a constant companion and conversation partner, not least for ideas in Chapter 5 we originated and presented together, Mateo Duque, a brother in arms. Laura, words could never express how much you have sustained me with your love, inspired me with your joy, brilliance, and courage; I am grateful to share my life with you, my other and better half, dearest and most beautiful. Finally, my deepest and longest gratitude extends to my family: to my brother, for care and laugther; to my father, for unwavering support in all things and in all ways; and to my mother, for nurturing my mind and a love of beauty. Thank you. iii If the concept of beauty is to be more than the parroting of the long-familiar words “the object that is pleasing must be sensuous, must possess no imperfection, must delight us in a manner that is satisfying,” if the concept of beauty shall be fruitful and yield more than flimsy and wretched general propositions, then, my undemanding philosopher, it must be more than a device emblazoned on your title page. Beauty is a difficult, ponderous concept; it must be abstracted from many individual facts and descriptions, all of which cannot be collected, polished, ordered, and refined enough if we are to deliver from them an analysis of beauty in general; and yet precisely such an analysis is the final product of all individual phenomena. Johann Gottfried Herder Critical Forests: Fourth Grove, II.2 iv 1 Coordinating the Kalon: A Critical Introduction And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §19 “Ask a toad what beauty is, absolute beauty, the to kalon,” wrote Voltaire on the subject in his Dictionaire Philosophique of 1764. “He will answer that it is his toad wife, with two large round eyes sticking out of her little head, a large and flat snout, a yellow belly, and a brown back.”1 Such wit, as always, contains wisdom. Where few concepts have inspired abstract metaphysics or idealized psychologies and politics as Beauty, how we experience, feel and talk about beauty proves welcome. If Voltaire emphasized the familiar tendency to judge beautiful whatever one loves, his point was not primarily to espouse some version of relativism. This besotted toad is so parochial, oddly analytic, and, in a word, laughable that disquisitions on the nature of beauty might seem not a little ridiculous. Yet this is only because Voltaire meant to ridicule those philosophers who reinforce their own prejudices about beauty while pretending to a universal theory. “Consult, lastly, the philosophers,” he continued, “they will answer you with gibberish: they have something conforming to the archetype of beauty in essence, to the to kalon.” One such target was Shaftesbury, to whose broadly Platonist and Stoic theory of beauty Voltaire’s Greek to kalon unmistakably alluded; Shaftesbury himself subtitled an essay on “The Beautiful,” now compiled in his Philosophical Regimen, “To Kalon.” Johann Gottfried Herder took more direct aim 1 Voltaire (2010): 53, trans. modified. 1 at how Shaftesbury, like his contemporaries, assimilated the 18th-century ideal of gentlemanly moral beauty to the kalon, locating in antiquity “the taste which in his day held sway at the court of Charles the Second” but which “must always transform the concept of the Greek word.”2 This objection, as well as its target, indicates a long history of wondering how to relate beauty to a similar but distinct concept – the classical Greek concept to kalon. All parties to the worry were united, however, by a conviction that beauty matters centrally to human life and that we might learn something in this regard from ancient Greek concepts. This dissertation analyzes the concept of the kalon in Plato and its primary role in his thinking about ethical development. The kalon is often translated as beautiful, fine, admirable, honourable, or noble. How can these opposing dimensions be brought together? I argue that the concept organizes the social context in which one learns to recognize and aspire to the beauty of virtue – to become and appear beautiful before the eyes of others. Prioritizing aesthetic dimensions of the concept reveals the problem – and insight – which inclines the trajectory of the concept in Plato, that attractions to beauty steer but can subvert our pursuits of a good life. By analyzing how Plato uses the concept of the kalon to negotiate this problem, I maintain, we make perspicuous certain tensions in our own concept of beauty. §1 The Kalon and the Dominant Approach This line of argument opposes some powerful tendencies of classical scholarship and philosophical reflection on beauty over the last several decades. Those of classical scholarship 2 Herder (2002 / 1767): 47. 2 would seem to suggest that earlier worry how to reconcile the kalon with beauty has effectively been resolved, although the conviction which animated such worry is beginning to reemerge.
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