Apophatic Beauty in the Hippias Major and the Symposium (2024)

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION

Plato’s discourse on beauty in the Hippias Major and the Symposium is distinctly apophatic in nature. In both dialogues, Plato describes beauty in terms of what it is not (an approach sometimes referred to apophasis, or the via negativa). In this paper, I argue that Platonic apophatic practise in the Hippias Major and the Symposium depicts beauty as an ally to certain aspirations of philosophical discourse. In the first section, I offer some brief prefatory remarks on the nature of apophasis and its presence in Plato’s thinking. In the second section, I provide some background to the dialogue of the Hippias Major and highlight the apophatic nature of the descriptions of beauty offered therein. In the third and final section, I discuss the Symposium, a dialogue wherein, in addition to representing beauty apophatically, Plato illustrates how we may become able to achieve some positive, or cataphatic, insights into the nature of beauty. I conclude that the purpose of the Platonic apophatic portrayal of beauty in the Hippias Major and the Symposium is to show that, while beauty cannot be reduced to a series of assertive truth statements, it can nevertheless function as an accessory to other dimensions of philosophical thinking.

II. APOPHASIS IN PLATO

Apophatic discourse is a form of written or spoken communication that attempts to describe a thing by speaking of what cannot be said about it. William Franke’s On What Cannot be Said (2007) explains the etymological meaning of apophasis, telling us that it “reads etymologically, moreover, as ‘away from speech’ or ‘saying away’ (apo, ‘from’ or ‘away from’; phasis, ‘assertion,’ from phemi, ‘assert’ or ‘say’), and this points in the direction of unsaying” (2). Apophatic practice is traditionally tied to negative theology, which is based on the view that language is largely or completely incapable of stating what God is. As a philosophical term, apophasis aims to obtain knowledge or understanding of an object by negating concepts or descriptions that might be applied to it, and thus indicates a way of writing, and thinking, about the inexpressible. According to Denys Turner, “the apophatic is the linguistic strategy of somehow showing by means of language that which lies beyond language” (Turner 1995, 34). Apophasis speaks through negation and/or denial and indicates forms of meaning that lie beyond our conscious grasp or ability to rationally describe.

As Franke indicates, several Platonic texts employ the technique of apophasis: “Most influential of all is Republic 509b, which declares that ‘the Good itself is not being but is beyond being in dignity and surpassing power.’ This idea of a Good beyond being, and therefore equally beyond speech and reason (Logos), echoes all through apophatic tradition.” (Franke 2007, 37). Likewise, in Timaeus 28c, Plato declares: “But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out, and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.” In the Seventh Letter, Plato refers to an unnamed subject as intractable to discourse:

I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining. (341c)

In this way, Plato deplores “the powerlessness and inadequacy of language” (Franke 2007, 38), concluding: “Hence no intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated” (343a).

To give another example: in the Parmenides, Plato deduces a series of aporias. In Parmenides 137b–144e, Plato consistently speaks of the One in terms of what it is not: the One will not be many; it cannot have any parts or be a whole; it cannot have a beginning or an end or a middle; it has no shape—it is neither round nor straight; it cannot be anywhere, “for it cannot be either (a) in another, or (b) in itself”; it is neither at rest nor in motion. Indeed: “the one in no sense is. It cannot, then, ‘be’ even to the extent of ‘being’ one, for then it would be a thing that is and has being. Rather, if we can trust such an argument as this, it appears that the one neither is one nor is at all”. It seems that nothing can be said or affirmed of the One per se.

Thus, apophatic discourse, paradoxically, aims to obtain knowledge of an object by negating concepts or descriptions that might be applied to it. While the cataphatic tradition (the “way of affirmation”) emphasizes what is revealed and apparent, the apophatic tradition (the “way of negation”) dwells on that which remains concealed. In apophatic discourse, it is possible to say only what a given thing is not and so apophasis amounts to a series of attempts to devise and, at the same time, to disqualify ways of talking about that thing. As Franke maintains: “In these terms, at the heart of his teaching, Plato recognized something that cannot be communicated in words, but only by direct vision or even inspiration” (Franke 2007, 37). In what follows, I suggest that, according to Plato’s view in the Hippias Major and the Symposium, beauty is just such a thing: beauty cannot be known through language but, rather, must become known through direct experience. It is the rhetoric of apophasis that makes this realization about beauty possible.

III. THE HIPPIAS MAJOR

Allegedly one of Plato’s earlier dialogues, the Hippias Major1 has generally been ignored by contemporary scholarship. There are three main reasons for this. First, opinions on the date of the Hippias Major differ significantly.2 Second, the dialogue features several characteristics that many scholars deem ‘un-Platonic.’3 Third, there is some difficulty articulating Socrates’ primary theme in the dialogue, due to an ambiguity in the word to kalon.4 It is not the intention of the present paper to enter these debates. I propose that we bypass them in the following ways: (1) since the evidence is so conflicting, we might conclude that the question of date is better left open; (2) I defer to the tradition in accepting the dialogue as authentic, because I feel that G. M. A. Grube (1926) has presented the case thoroughly and sufficiently;5 (3) in light of recent studies, such as those conducted by Nicolas Reigel, David Konstan, Drew Hyland, and Jonathan Fine,6 this paper observes principally that the Hippias Major is worth reconsidering due to its philosophical insights about the nature of ‘the beautiful.’7 With these as preliminaries, we can proceed to the dialogue proper.

The Hippias Major is a “what-is-x dialogue,” that is, one of the dialogues that finds itself investigating an idea in the form of a question, that asks “what is such and such,” for example, piety, as in the Euthyphro, friendship in the Lysis, courage in the Laches, and so on. In the Hippias Major, Socrates poses the question: “Could you tell me what the beautiful is?” (Plato 1925, 286d).8 The dialectic is between Socrates and Hippias of Elis. Socrates claims to have been harassed by an acquaintance (whenever Socrates refers to his “acquaintance,” he is in fact referring to himself; I will refer to this man hereby as the “harasser”) who reproached him for not knowing “what beauty as such is” (286e). Ashamed by this exposure, Socrates expresses delight at having found someone as competent as Hippias to explain the nature of the beautiful to him.

Hippias answers Socrates’ question by invoking, as proper answers to the “what is?” question, first a particular girl, then gold, then health, honor, and old age. Having rejected these answers as mere examples of beauty, Socrates then suggests some of his own definitions. Perhaps beauty is that which is appropriate, or that which is useful and beneficial, or that which is pleasing through sight and hearing? However, Socrates provides his own rebuttal to each of these proposals. The conclusion of the Hippias Major dialogue appears to be that, when Socrates and Hippias attempt to define beauty, they can find no common quality and so eventually conclude simply that it is difficult to define. Observe a brief outline of the dialogue.

III.A. A Beautiful Maiden

Hippias’ first response to Socrates’ question, “Could you tell me what the beautiful is” (286d) speaks to whether it is possible to give an account of what beauty is by pointing to examples of it: “Be assured, Socrates, if I must speak the truth, a beautiful maiden is beautiful.” Hippias suggests that the “what is?” question as formulated by Socrates—“What is beauty?”—can be answered by addressing another question “What things are beautiful?” Hippias says that “it makes no difference” (287a) which question is asked: “there is no difference in meaning between these two sentences” (Politis 2021, 18). Socrates disagrees. He dismisses the possibility of definition by example-and-exemplar; that is, the possibility of answering the question “What is beauty?” by “pointing to, or in some way calling to mind, a particular thing that can serve as a standard for anything’s being beautiful” (Politis 2021, 18). This dismissal is evident in Socrates’ reply to Hippias: “How about a beautiful lyre?” he asks, “Is it not beautiful?” (288c). To which he then adds, “how about a beautiful pot? Is it, then, not beautiful?” (288c). Hippias “commits himself to comparisons in beauty between the examples-and-exemplars of beauty themselves” (Politis 2021, 19). He is thus obliged to give up answering this testy ti esti question by example-and-exemplar.

Hippias eventually agrees with Socrates, and they “reject the one-standard-for-all-cases requirement of definition: it is not the case that there is some one thing that is beautiful and is suitable for determining of all things whether they are beautiful” (Politis 2021, 22). In other words, beauty as such, does not reside in a single object.

III.B. Being Golden

Socrates next proposes that there is some sort of essential property, P, according to which something can be said to be beautiful, B. Hippias obliges by providing his second definition. Hippias suggests that it is on account of “being golden” (290d) that any one thing is beautiful. But, Socrates replies, what then to make of the statue of Athena at the Parthenon? This work is made of ivory and precious stones, not of gold. Yet it is beautiful. Additionally, gold only gives rise to beauty if it is used properly. Who is to say whether a wooden spoon or a golden spoon would be better to stir with, or which would be more beautiful? Thus, Socrates’ counterargument, delivered through “the harasser,” follows the same pattern as before. Socrates provokes Hippias into qualifying his answer.

One conclusion we should draw from this exchange is that it is futile to attempt to single out an individual quality and say that it is essentially in this single feature that the beauty of this object resides. Beauty as such, does not have a single property or set of properties.

III.C. Wealth, Health, Honor

By this time, Hippias thinks that he understands: Socrates wants to know what no man will find ugly: “I say, then, that for every man and everywhere it is most beautiful to be rich and healthy, and honoured by the Greeks, to reach old age, and, after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring” (285e). Hippias thus answers that it is beautiful for everyone to live a certain sort of life.

Socrates expresses his fear that he would have been beaten by a stick by his “harasser” if he had given that answer. What of Achilles or Heracles? Was it not beautiful for these two heroes, sons of the immortals, to be buried before their parents, before the gods? Besides from which, “burying their parents, and being buried by their children, is sometimes, and for some people, a disgrace” (293c). Socrates reminds Hippias, in one of the few positive statements about beauty that appear in the dialogue, that “the beautiful is always beautiful” (293a): Beauty as such, is never “beautiful for some and not beautiful for others” (293d).

III.D. Appropriateness

Next, Socrates offers a definition that he holds came from his “harasser”: the beautiful is simply that which is “appropriate” (293e). Hippias seems pleased by this response. But further explanation is required: does appropriateness make things beautiful, or does it simply make them “appear beautiful” (234a)? As Hippias points out, even a ridiculous man will appear more beautiful dressed in nice shoes and clothing that suit him. There is a difference between things that “are thought to be beautiful”—things that “appear so” (294d)—and things that are “actually beautiful” (294d). People are “in ignorance” (294d) about this difference between the essence of beauty and the appearance of beauty, and this ignorance accounts for the “strife and contention among individuals in private, and between cities in public, over these matters” (294d). Thus “since the appropriate has proven to be something other than beautiful, the knowledge of what precisely the beautiful is has departed and escaped us” (294e) once again. If Hippias continues to enjoy “beautiful” speeches disconnected from truth, and “beautiful” dress disconnected from a concern about the beauty of the soul, he will never be able to see the beautiful as it is in itself. Beauty as such, does not dwell in appearance.

III.E. Useful and Beneficial

Socrates proposes a second solution: “let whatever is useful be beautiful” (295c). Eyes that are able to see, Socrates says, are beautiful. But here again problems surface: “What about this capability; and these things that are useful, but are useful for accomplishing something bad, shall we declare that these are beautiful, or do they fall far short?” (296d). “I think they fall short, Socrates,” Hippias replies (296d). The definition needs to be refocused; beauty is only usefulness applied to good ends, or those that are “beneficial” (296e). But equating the beautiful with the beneficial leads to a paradox: the beneficial procreates the beautiful, as a father procreates a son. A cause and an effect are two different things, as a father is different from the son. Thus, Hippias and Socrates must conclude that beauty as such is not the good, and the good is not the beautiful; an assertion that pleases neither of them.

III.F. Pleasures Through Hearing and Sight

Socrates now proposes a final definition: “what makes us pleased is beautiful, not including all pleasures, but those which come through hearing and seeing” (297e). This idea contains, according to Socrates himself, a fundamental flaw: it ignores the beauty of the more noble pleasures, drawn from occupations such as the study of laws. In addition to this, according to Socrates, it seems problematic that only the senses of sight and hearing should be considered. Are smell, taste, and touch, then, somehow baser than the other senses? Finally, it is not simply because pleasure comes from seeing or hearing that it is beautiful, and so there must be something common to both seeing and hearing. Socrates says that in most cases the term that applies to two objects (A and B are beautiful) can apply also to an object taken separately (A is beautiful and B is beautiful). If a pair of two objects is beautiful, it does not stand to reason that each of them is. The definition is flawed. Beauty as such is not that which is pleasing to sight and hearing.

The continued effort to “define our terms” has become futile. Socrates, cornered between Hippias’s admonishments and those of his “harasser,” pretends to feel bad about the situation. His only conclusion, he says with a sense of humor, is that he better understands the Greek proverb “whatever is beautiful is difficult” (304e). Thus, by the end of the Hippias Major, Socrates has effectively described beauty apophatically, by stating (six of) the characteristics that it does not have. Beauty as such:

• 1) does not reside in a single object;

• 2) does not have a single property or properties;

• 3) is never “beautiful for some and not beautiful for others” (293d);

• 4) does not dwell in appearance;

• 5) is not the good; and

• 6) is not that which is pleasing to sight and hearing.

What, if anything, is helpful about a list of apophatic definitions such as this? There are generally three main reasons to employ apophatic definitions and descriptions. The first is moral. Apophatic definitions are oriented towards achieving an ethical transformation. Socrates aims to dispossess Hippias of his arrogance, and so the apophatic approach to the problem of beauty functions as moral corrective. The second is epistemological. Apophasis draws on epistemic considerations in order to free us from our mistakes, misunderstandings, and misconceptions. The third reason we may call “ontological.” Apophatic definitions establish the limit of human knowing, and so prescribe the preconditions required to establish a cataphatic definition or set of definitions, or at least achieve some positive insights into the nature of the topic at hand (in this case, the beautiful).

IV. THE SYMPOSIUM

Let us turn now to the Symposium, wherein, as we shall see, Plato also offers a series of apophatic definitions of beauty.9 In other words, I will argue, Socrates’ account of beauty found in the Hippias Major runs parallel with Diotima’s account of the same in the Symposium.

In his book Ascent to the Beautiful, William Altman calls the Hippias Major the “pons asinorum” of the Ascent to the Beautiful (the “asses’ bridge,” a lesson that must be learned for further progress to be made) (Altman 2020, 236). The culmination of the Ascent to the Beautiful is the Symposium. The Hippias Major thus acts as a preparatory lesson for recognizing the form of beauty, as discussed in the Symposium, which constitutes its apex. In other words, the Hippias Major contains proleptic teaching, meaning that it introduces concepts and themes that a student will not grasp fully on a first reading of the Hippias Major, but which prepare them for future insights in the Symposium. Plato “begins by confusing the student in an ultimately salutary manner, that is, about things that it is pedagogically useful for the student to be confused” (Altman 2020, xxiv). As an “introductory” dialogue, then, the Hippias Major is especially proleptic. Readers, or students, encounter key ideas from Plato’s teaching in the Hippias Major in striking and provocative forms, but they will not understand them fully until later stages of their learning journey, when they read the Symposium. In so far as this is the case, the Hippias Major makes sense as an early expression of Plato’s views on beauty. There is some philosophical kinship between the Hippias Major and the Symposium. Passages from the Symposium contain arguments or situations that mirror and illuminate those that occur in the Hippias Major, and vice versa.

I want to introduce my thoughts on the apophatic dimension of beauty in the Symposium by first offering a brief discussion of the “beauty theme” as it appears in Diotima’s speech. As is well known, the Symposium depicts an interweaving of speeches on love given by a group of men attending a banquet. When it is his turn to speak, Socrates relates a story he was told by a woman named Diotima.

Diotima describes the way in which the lover’s quest for beauty ascends through several stages. This process of initiation is sometimes known as “Diotima’s ladder” or the “ladder of Love” (for writers of Latin, the scala amoris). The initiate into Diotima’s erotic rites begins by contemplating physical beauty and falls in love with “one body” (210a), and they conceive “beautiful ideas” (210a) together. Then, he “should realise” (210a) that physical beauty is similar in everybody and takes an interest in “all bodies” (210b). When he grasps this, he will come to see that beauty of “soul” (210c) is more valuable than beauty of body. He starts to see beauty in other things, such as souls, thus coming to appreciate the beauty of “activities and laws” (210c), “customs and sciences” (210c). In the penultimate step of his ascent, he now gazes upon a “great sea of beauty” (210d) and can conceive “many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories” (210d), until he finds one special “knowledge” (210e), whose object is beauty as “such” (210e), which is the “final and highest mystery” (210a).

We will return shortly to the idea of beauty as such, for in describing it Socrates employs the rhetoric of apophasis. For now, it is worth noting a minor tie between the Hippias Major and the Symposium before moving in to elucidate the major one: in the Hippias Major, Socrates, while searching for the “beautiful itself” and engaging Hippias’s definitions, is simultaneously making an ascent, which in some ways mirrors Diotima’s ascent in the Symposium (Hippias, too, makes an advance, albeit a stilted one; Socrates acts as a guide to Hippias, just as the initiate has a guide in his ascent). Socrates’s questions about Hippias’s definitions “force Hippias to consider the possibility that the beautiful inheres not only in attractive bodies, but also in tools and animals, musical instruments and even noble lives” (Ramos 2015, 80). As Santiago Ramos has observed: “This expansion of Hippias’s horizons is a movement of the soul akin to what we find in the Diotima section of the Symposium” (81). Diotima “speaks of a soul moving from the love of one body, to the love of all bodies, and from the love of all bodies to the love of souls, involving the beauty of laws customs and sciences” (81). Hippias “ascends” to consider the beauty of different types of bodies and even of the notion of a noble life. Thus, “Socrates’s engagement with Hippias’s definitions of the beautiful has the result of broadening the latter’s understanding of what the beautiful might be” (81).

Tracing Hippias’s and Socrates’s dialectical steps illuminates the “ascending” dynamic that they take. Hippias begins by declaring, first, a beautiful maiden to be the definition of the beautiful, second, a “principle (gold), and finally a value (a human life, well-lived)” (Ramos 2015, 82). Each answer corresponds to a different “stair” (211c), “if we accept Diotima’s scheme of placing non-bodily entities above bodies (i.e., maidens), and if we place a value (i.e., human life) above both” (Ramos 2015, 83). Moreover, this ascent is a product of Socrates’s questioning. Much like Diotima prompts Socrates in the Symposium, Socrates prompts Hippias in the Hippias Major, to broaden his mind about what types of objects can be considered beautiful.

We can now return to the question of beauty as such. From our reading of the Hippias Major, we can deduce that Socrates has two desiderata for a definition of beauty: Socrates wants a definition with (1) universal scope and (2) universal validity. Diotima’s description of beauty satisfies both criteria and does so precisely by invoking beauty’s apophatic qualities. At the apex of his journey, the lover reaches his “goal” (211b), which involves complete knowledge of the beautiful itself. Socrates reports that Diotima describes beauty by telling him what it is not:

[Beauty] always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes… it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea of one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or on earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change. (211a–211b, trans. Nehamas and Woodruff)

Here is the most extended description of any form in Plato’s work. Since “the beautiful” is described as a “form,” we know that it is a supreme archetype, an ontological or epistemological model. We are to understand that the material objects we encounter in the empirical world—the world of the senses—are imitations (copies or reproductions) of the form.10 Beauty is described by stating the characteristics it does not have—observe the repetition of the words “neither” “not” and “nor,” which appear twelve times in this one short passage. Socrates’s manner of speaking about the beautiful in the Hippias Major and Diotima’s way of doing so in the Symposium are, in this respect, essentially the same. The Symposium follows the same path as the Hippias Major in depicting the beautiful as an ally to the aspirations of philosophical discourse: in both dialogues, the attempt to define the beautiful itself is also an attempt to know it.

However, the Hippias Major goes about presenting the inquirers’ attempts at knowledge in a way quite different from the visions of Diotima’s discourse in the Symposium. In the Hippias Major the apophatic is procedural or pedagogical. In the Symposium it is substantive. How are these related? By this, I mean that, in the Hippias Major, negative answers for all the proposed definitions clear the air before philosophical inquiry. Socrates seems to be saying, “Beauty is not this thing you thought, and not the other thing either. So, you don’t know how to define beauty. So, let’s go on and discover what beauty is.” In the Symposium, however, the highest knowledge about beauty consists in knowledge that it is not like this or that beautiful thing. This is knowledge, and Diotima seems to possess it. So, she knows that beauty is not-X and not-Y, and so forth. The outcome of the examination in the Hippias Major, by contrast, is that Hippias fails to know that beauty is not X, that beauty is not Y, and so forth. The difference is between not knowing that something is not X, and knowing that it’s not-X.

There is thus an asymmetrical relationship between the inquirer’s failure to determine what beauty is in the Hippias Major, and the inquirer’s declaration in the Symposium that beauty is not X or Y or Z. Call the Symposium’s claim (2). Call the Hippias Major’s discovery of failure by Hippias, Socrates, and that Socratic harasser (1). If (2) is true, it follows that (1) is also true. People would not be able to come up with definitions if the only philosophical account of beauty leaves it inarticulable in terms of experience. But the truth of (1) does not make (2) true. Socrates and Hippias may just be unusually clumsy at thinking about beauty. The Hippias Major is the only “Socratic” dialogue that posits this additional unseen harasser, and thus the only one in which Socrates really puts himself on the spot with an attempt to define the property in question. It’s as if his humbling prepares the way for the Symposium’s apophatic pronouncement. One might ask why Socrates creates this version of himself as harasser. It is both similar to, and anticipatory of, his role in his speech in the Symposium. There he is humbled, in memory, by Diotima, who keeps setting him straight.

Unlike in the Hippias Major, in the Symposium Plato’s apophatic pronouncement is followed by some cataphatic, or positive, remarks about beauty. Thus, the apophatic description in the Hippias Major is both continuous with that of the Symposium, and it is proleptic to a cataphatic description in the Symposium. The apophatic description says what beauty is not, and the Symposium engages in such a description, but the Symposium also defines beauty in positive terms. As F.C. White has observed, according to many scholars, the central theme of Diotima’s speech is that:

[T]he primary or ultimate object of love is the Form of Beauty. Thus, among such scholars, Beauty is variously described as: love’s primary object (Irwin); its final object (Cornford); its final goal (Grube); its final ‘why’ (Morgan); its ultimate objective (Raven); its ultimate object (Teloh); its ultimate goal (Grube). Or it is described more simply as the object of love (Hamilton); as the goal of Eros (Bury) as that reality in which the lover finds his telos (Bury) and so on. (151)

However, as White argues, it may be misleading to describe beauty as love’s final object. Diotima explains that it is not because the life of contemplating beauty is such that nothing is to be sought other than the contemplation itself, but because in the life of contemplating beauty, and in that life alone, the lover will beget true virtue and having begotten that, become dear to the gods and immortal. While beauty is the object of the lover’s ascent, that is quite different from its being the final object of his love: “How would it be in our view,” Diotima says to Socrates, “if someone got to see the beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colours or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form?” (211e). The answer to this, of course, is that:

[W]hen he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen – only then will it become possible for him to give birth, not to images of virtue (because he’s in touch with no images) but to true virtue (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he. (212a)

The immediate point to notice here is that Diotima is not asserting that the object of this highest kind of love is the vision of beauty. Rather, the lover is drawn to embrace and seek union with beauty as a means of begetting true virtue and thus earning the love of the gods.11 However, Diotima also seems to be asserting that “seeing” beauty (“in the only way that Beauty can be seen”) is a necessary—indeed an essential—condition for the begetting of virtue. In other words, without beauty, virtue would not be possible. One might conclude from this that beauty, as an experience, which cannot be communicated through language12 but can only be known through direct vision or even inspiration, uniquely facilitates philosophical living.

V. CONCLUSION

The question seems simple enough: “Come on, can you say what the beautiful is?” (286d). Like most questions, this one seems to presuppose that there is an answer. But beauty is elusive: we may be able to name some things beauty is not, but we do not know what beauty is. However, the apophatic dimension of beauty offered in the Hippias Major is proleptic: it conditions us to be receptive to the positive insights we can have about the nature of beauty in the Symposium, which itself forces us into the realization that seeing true beauty, and only seeing true beauty, is a means to the highest dimensions of experience.

REFERENCES

1

The Hippias Major is also sometimes referred to as What is Beauty? or the Greater Hippias, to distinguish it from the Hippias Minor (or the Lesser Hippias or On Lying), which is shorter and has the same chief character.

2

According to A.E. Taylor, “The presence of Hippias at Athens implies that the time is one of peace, and, as the first visit of Gorgias to the city is referred to as a past event (282b), the supposed date must be after 427 B.C., and therefore during the years of the peace of Nicias” (Taylor 2013, 29). According to Robert ho*rber: “Stallbaum, Conford and Raedar assume it is a youthful composition of Plato, while Ritter, Soreth and K.F. Hermann and Socher believe that the Hippias Major belongs to Plato’s middle period” (ho*rber 1964, 143). David Ross (1953) considers the composition after the Euthyphro and before the Meno. Von Arnim argues that the Hippias Major is later even than the Symposium but before the Phaedo. The appearance of Hippias in the Protagoras sheds little light, because the dramatic date of the Protagoras cannot be established with certainty. The evidence is conflicting.

3

The style, for instance, strikes some as so excessively comic and crude that they reject Plato’s authorship. The Hippias Major was considered genuine until Friedrich Schleiermacher called it into question. Although he ultimately concluded that the dialogue was genuine, his student, Georg Ast, concluded otherwise. Dorothy Tarrant (1927, 1928) is the foremost advocate for the cause of spuriousness. According to Hoeber (1964), Ast’s opinion has attracted such scholars as Ueberweg, Zeller, Horneffer, F.W. Rollig, Zilles, Bruns, Jowett, Windelband, Goedecke-meyer, Gomperz, Pohlenz and Wilamowitz. On the other hand, G.M.A. Grube (1926, 1935) and K. C. Guthrie (1962) argue for its genuineness. The following Platonists also argue on the affirmative side: Socher, Steinhart, Susemihl, Munk, K. F. Hermann, Stallbaum, G. Burges, Diimmler, Apelt, Vrijlandt, Wichmann, Deproel, Adam, Burnet, Mauersberger, Raeder, Ritter, von Arnim, Comford, Shorey, A. E. Taylor, P. Friedlander, D. Ross, and M. Soreth. This debate has led scholars to question the value of the dialogue. For an excellent overview of the debate regarding the authenticity of the Hippias Major, see Woodruff’s commentary in his translation (1984, 94–103).

4

The connotations of to kalon are so broad that choosing an English translation is highly problematic. Scholars are far from unanimous in their views regarding the correct translation, although the current trend has been to prefer “the fine.” In the introduction to his translation of Hippias Major (1982) (which is the most recent), Paul Woodruff writes: “Like beauty, to kalon is splendid and exciting; and in women or boys, it is the loveliness that excites carnal desire. But the use of kalos for that quality is embraced by its use as a general term of commendation in Greek. ‘Noble’, ‘admirable’, and ‘fine’ are better translations, and of these ‘fine’ is best of all in virtue of its great range” (110). This statement is striking in view of the fact that Woodruff consistently translates to kalon as “the fine” before 1989, but after this translates it as “the beautiful.” For instance, in the works Woodruff co-translates with Alexander Nehamas, the Symposium (1989) and the Phaedrus (1995), the authors translate to kalon as “the beautiful” (Woodruff 1978).

5

I hope that the arguments in the present paper also attest to the genuineness of the Hippias Major, and, if so, then doubts about its authenticity should be put to rest.

6

Nicolas Riegel has argued that the evidence for translations of to kalon other than “the beautiful” is not as strong as supposed. Performing close analysis of numerous classical texts, Riegel shows that the translation of to kalon as “the beautiful” is “univocal if we merely open ourselves to the possibility that the Greeks saw beauty in places we no longer do” (Riegel 2011, 89). David Konstan (2014), Drew Hyland (2008) and Jonathan Fine (2018) have also offered compelling arguments to the effect that the word kalós “actually resembles the contemporary use of the English ‘beauty’ in the enormous range of its meaning” (Hyland 2008, 4–5).

7

To this end, I have consulted a long-overlooked translator—W.R.M Lamb (1925)—who translates to kalon as “the beautiful” and kalos as “beauty” throughout his edition of the Hippias Major.

8

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations of the Hippias Major are of the W.R.M Lamb translation.

9

Observing this link between the Symposium and the Hippias Major may lend some weight to the idea that the dialogue is authentic: there is some consensus between the author of the Hippias Major and the author of the Symposium.

10

Plato’s theory of Forms is highly disputed and there are various interpretations of what Plato’s Forms really are. It is impossible for me to do justice to this controversy here.

11

True virtue and its relation to true beauty of course warrants further consideration, but it is not appropriate to offer it now given the limited scope of this paper.

12

In his book, Plato and the Question of Beauty, Drew Hyland (2008) makes the central, but not uncontroversial, claim that one cannot define beauty positively. Hyland’s theme of the non-discursive experience of beauty is friendly to my analysis of the apophatic dimension of beauty.

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Aesthetics.