aesthetics From the 1911 Britanica Encyclopedia Greek Speculations Ancient Greece supolies us with the first important contributions to aesthetic theory though these are scarcely in quality or in quantity what one might nave expected from a people which had so high an appreciation of beauty and so strong a bent for philosophic speculation The first Greek thinker of whose views on the subject we really know something is Socrates We learn from Xenophon s account of him that he regarded the beautiful as coincident with the good and both of them are resolvable into the useful Every beautiful object is so called because it serves came rational end whether the security or the gratification of man Socrates appears to have attached little importance to the immediate gratification which a beauriful object affords to perception and contemplation but to have emphasized rather its power of furthering the more necessary ends of life The really valuable point in his doctrine is the relativity of beauty Unlike Plato he recognized no self beauty auto to kalon existing absolutely and out of all relation to a percipient mind Plato Of the views of Plato on the subject it is hardly less difficult to gain a clear conception from the Dialogues than it is in the case of ethical good In some of these various definitions of the beautiful are rejected as inadequate by the Platonic Socrates At the same time we may conclude that Plato s mind leaned decidedly to the conception of an absolute beauty which took its place in his scheme of ideas or self exisiing forms This true beauty is nothing discoverable as an attribute in another thing for these nre only beautiful things not the beautiful itself Love Eros produces aspiration towards this pure idea Elsewhere the soul s intuition of the self beautiful is said to be a reminiscence of its prenatal existence As to the precise forms in which the idea of beauty reveals itself Plato is not very decided His theory of an absolute beauty does not easily adjust itself to the notion of its contributing merely a variety of sensuous pleasure to which he appears to lean in some dialogues He tends to identify the self beautiful with the conceptions of the true and the good and thus there arose the Platonic formula kalokagathia So far as his writings embody the notion of any common element in beautiful objects it is proportion harmony or unity among their parts He emphasizes unity in its simplest aspect as seen in evenness of line and purity of colour He recognizes in places the beauty of the mind and seems to think that the highest beauty of proportion is to be found in the union of a beautiful mind with a beautiful body He had but a poor opinion of art regarding it as a trick of imitation mimesis which takes us another step farther from the luminous sphere of rational intuition into the shadowy region of the semblances of sense Accordingly in his scheme for an ideal republic he provided for the most inexorable censorship of poets c so as to make art as far as possible an instrument of moral and political training Aristotle Aristotle proceeded to a more serious investigation of the aesthetic phenomena so as to develop by scientific analysis certain principles of beauty and art In his treatises on poetry and rhetoric he gives us along with a theory of these arts certain general principles of beauty and scattered among his other writings we find many valuable suggestions on the same subject He seeks in the Metaphysics to distinguish the good and the beautiful by saying that the former is always in action en praxei whereas the latter may exist in motionless things as well en akinetois At the same time he had as a Greek to allow that though essentially different things the good might under certain conditions be called beautiful He further distinguished the beautiful from the fit and in a passage of the Politics set beauty above the useful and necessary He helped to determine another characteristic of the beautiful the absence of all lust or desire in the pleasure it bestows The universal elements of beauty again Aristotle finds in the Metaphysics to be order taxis symmetry and definiteness or determinateness to orismenon In the Poetics he adds another essential namely a certain magnitude it being desir