Plato on Beauty: Living your best life

Plato said that through love of beauty we fully realise our human potential

Debra Winger and Richard Gere in the iconic end scene of the 1982 classic romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman. The film embodies Plato’s vision of of Ideal Beauty

In the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere plays young navy trainee pilot Zack Mayo, who gives up nihilistic womanising in an attempt to finally make something of himself. He is a competitive, talented, handsome and cocky outsider, a loveable rogue, who also happens to be his own worst enemy. Mayo has grown up motherless and under the malign influence of his drunken and lustful father, who is also in the navy but has no special rank. As a result, Mayo is unable to truly connect with his fellow trainees, plays the system to his own gain at the expense of others and fails to commit to his lover Paula (played brilliantly by Debra Winger). The film tells the story of how Zack eventually overcomes his alienated defensiveness through the discipline and delayed gratification that his navy training demands. The iconic scene at the end in which he walks into Paula’s factory workplace in his pilot’s white uniform and sweeps her off her feet, means that by the end of the film he has succeeded in building a meaningful and committed life. He has sorted himself out. 

The corny ballad theme song that made the film famous narrows into a pop culture slogan a conception of passionate love that dates all the way back to Plato. The line ‘love lifts us up where we belong’ succinctly captures what Plato thought about the power of erotic energy and beauty. It is a philosophy at the root of a whole tradition of prizing beauty and passion as a catalyst for the soul, an idea found in everything from courtly love to renaissance painting to the aesthetic movement in the late nineteenth century. Richard Gere’s character embodies this philosophy for the pre-Reagan, post-Vietnam early eighties. Mayo’s sexual charisma and earthy ambitiousness fuses with Paula’s ideal of the Good Life, and their ultimate marriage mirrors Plato’s view that erotic energy when fused with intellectual contemplation, marks out human life lived at its highest frequency. Despite the legendary status of this film, its theme of Ideal Love and the creative power of beauty could not be any less fashionable in our age of complacent suspicion.

Today, the word ‘beauty’, like all other terms of value, is seen at best as a personal statement of preference, or at worst, a claim to universalism that seeks to establish the interests of the powerful among those that they dominate. What nobody today can allow, is that ‘beauty’ is a term that singles out something ultimate, some feature of the way things are. It is this exact fear of the ‘ultimate’ that creates the biggest barrier for us in understanding what Plato was going on about regarding beauty. If beauty is nothing but our preference to single out some value over another, then claiming that beauty was both a property to be discovered in the world, and that the experience of it is a signal of our coming into contact with a cosmic truth of some kind, seems to us to be positively fascistic. Even the claim that there is some ‘way things actually are’ is becoming increasingly suspicious. In our paranoid modernism, any association between a value claim and a fact of the matter is seen as absolutism through the back door. 

However, even if we give way to this suspicion and view any claim to calling something beautiful as inherently dodgy, we still have to account for the way the term ‘beauty’ is used. We still have to understand the power that such claims have over and above merely saying ‘I like this and you should too.’ And in our obsessive clinging to our own reductive view of beauty, we create an impermeable block between ourselves and the history of the term, a term which has played such an important part of human culture. It is not just western culture that associates beauty with truth and goodness. ‘Beauty’ is a term of esteem in many societies, and built-in to the use of it is the sense of an ultimate value that is by definition not arbitrary. The very use of the word conveys necessity and universalism. 

So it is not enough for us to just scoff at this. It may be true that whatever we call beautiful is just so much ‘superstructure’ to disguise ‘base’ interests. It may be a word powerful people use to convince us all that their claim to power is somehow ratified by natural law. But we are not engaging in a thorough critique of the concept itself if we fail to take seriously what is actually being claimed. Our bias towards reading ideology into everything, or arbitrary meaning, means we fail to truly understand the power that beauty is claimed to have among the most influential thinkers. In doing so, we not only assume what we seek to prove, but we miss something about the basic ideas of what it means to be human that have created the world we live in. So before we barge in with our own suspicions, we should first of all understand the concept that we are dismantling. 

The claim that beauty signals something necessary and ultimate in the way things are merges from Plato’s view of human nature, and his view of what stops us fully realising that nature, and what must be done to correct the things that throw us off course. For Plato, beauty was anything but preference. It was a fundamental property in the world, like size, shape and space. It was a built-in category. And of course this brings with it Plato’s view of the world, a world which was made up of ultimate ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’, with all the individual instances of those abstract ideas being nothing but pale reflections of the ultimate truth. Each horse shares a property of ‘horseness’. Today, in our smug empiricism, the actual individual horse is what is real, and the property is an abstraction from the particular. For Plato, it is the other way round. The ‘Form’, the universal property of ‘horseness’, is what is actual, and each single version of it in the world is a false reflection of the true ‘Form.’ 

One more thing to add on this Platonic view of the way the world is. All philosophers in the ancient world were in some way concerned with discovering what is permanent in a world of change. The world around us is perishable, flowing, unstable and subject to death and dissolution. And yet something is left. There are some things that carry on, that last through the change. The substance of things change, but certain properties remain the same same. A river changes its water constantly, but something about it makes it the same river. So how do we deal with that fact? 

Some philosophers in the ancient world wanted to say that it is all change, and any semblance of stability is what we bring to the world. Plato found this intolerable. Not just because he was that kind of guy, but because new kinds of knowledge were emerging that seemed to make it untenable. Both medicine and mathematics were, in the time Plato was writing, developing into effective systems that offered universal truths about the world and gave human beings laws, principles and methods of finding effective ways of addressing the problems of life. An analogy for our own time might be the emergence of computer engineering. In theory, we are all relativists and postmodernists, but then how do make sense of the way technology has real world and predictable impact upon the world, which seems to give us so much power over our environment? If it is all just a projection, why is this new knowledge so practical?

It is in this context of universals and ultimate principles, and the practical impact that they have, that Plato viewed beauty. Something is beautiful, for Plato, the closer it is to the absolute Form of the property it manifests. Beauty both has its own ultimate Form, and is actually that property a thing has when it manifests its defining Form most purely. 

In a dialogue called the Symposium, Plato has Socrates recall how his teacher Diotima spoke of the experience of beauty as that of an initiation from particular experiences of beautiful people and objects, towards the eventual knowledge of Ultimate Beauty itself. This, Diotima is reported to have said, is to be imagined as a staircase or a ladder. Instances of bauty signal the human soul to discover ultimate reality through contemplation of what all beautiful things share. A beautiful body is the first rung, and a beautiful person’s inner soul is the second, then human beauty as a whole is next, and so on through beautiful institutions and beautiful philosophical truths. Diotima says:

‘Looking now at beauty in general and not just at individual instances, he will no longer be slavishly attached to the beauty of a boy, or of any particular person at all, or of a specific practice. Instead of this low and small-minded slavery, he will be turned towards the great sea of beauty, and gazing on it, he’ll give birth, through a boundless love of knowledge, to many beautiful and magnificent discourses and ideas.’ (210c-d).

So engagement with beauty is a process for initiation and revelation into ultimate truth. Beauty, and the creative, erotic energy that it inspires, refines the human soul to its fullest realisation. The eventual end is a spiritual revelation which we can only grasp indirectly in our imperfect world of objects and passing substances. Diotima adds:

‘Like someone using a staircase, he should go from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and from beautiful practices to beautiful forms of learning. From forms of learning he should end up a that form of learning which is of nothing other than that beauty itself, so that he can complete the process of what beauty really is’ (211c-d).

In another dialogue called the Phaedrus, Plato offers a different metaphor that further elaborates what he sees as the role of beauty in the spiritual development of the human being and the journey of the soul. Here, the metaphor is that of a chariot held by two horses. As Socrates says to Phaedrus: 

‘In my analogy, a soul is like an organic whole made up of a charioteer and his team of horses. Now, while the horses and charioteers of gods and always good, those of everyone else are a mixture. Although our inner ruler drives a pair of horses, only one of his horses is a thoroughly noble and good, while the other is thoroughly the opposite. This inevitably makes driving, in our case, difficult and disagreeable.’ (246a-b). 

The human soul is in a state of turmoil and resistance, and the experience of longing and desire that emerges from its dual nature is always one that is violent and uncomfortable. Plato expands on this awkward and wrenching aspect of the human condition by expanding on his charioteer metaphor: 

‘The one [horse] in the better position has an upright appearance, and is clean-limbed, high-necked, hook-nosed, white in colour, and dark-eyed; his determination to succeed is tempered by self-control and respect for others, which is to say that he is an ally of true glory; and he needs no whip, but is guided only by spoken commands. The other is crooked, overlarge, a haphazard jumble of limbs; he has a thick, short neck, and a flat face; he is black in colour, with grey, blood-shot eyes, an ally of excess and affection, hairy around the ears, hard of hearing, and scarcely to be controlled with a combination of whip and goad.’ (253d-e)

Through this interplay of appetitive urge and detached self-control, we are always in a state of being drawn to beauty and then resistance to beauty in fear of its power. Both are necessary and appropriate actions for beings that are not totally divine and so not capable of direct contact with the ultimate truth without some process of refinement. But it is just this wrestling with bodily appetites and rational self composure that provides this process of refinement, until the soul is able to balance its forward-urging with its restraint. As Socrates continues: 

‘At first, these two get annoyed at being forced to behave in a way that seems dreadfully wrong, and put up some resistance, but eventually, finding no end to their troubles, they let themselves be led forward, and they passively submit to doing as they are told. And so they come close to their beloved and see the lighting-bright beauty of his face. At this sight the charioteer’s memory is taken back to the true nature of true beauty, and he sees it again in place on a holy pedestal, next to self-control’ (254b).  

Eventually then, we are capable enough to be able to gaze upon pure beauty itself. The appropriate balance between the tugging hunger for beauty of the bad horse and cautious self-control of the good horse, is a sense of awe and reverence for the face of our beloved, in whom we see pure beauty itself. 

The first thing to note here is that in both analogies, Plato treats ordinary, worldly lust with seriousness. He does not tell us that we need to avoid it, that it is somehow a distraction from true Beauty, but that we must go through it, that worldly beauty is a necessary part of the path of the soul towards true fulfilment. 

The second thing to note, is that this lust is seen as a primal force in the divine order. Again, it is not to be avoided but simply approached with due reverence. Not only that, this very lust, Eros, is in fact the characteristic momentum of the soul itself, as a soul is exactly that which able to stand outside the causal chain of ordinary events. It is not one link in a chain of causes, like a rock falling down a hill. It’s momentum and impulse are self-sustaining. When it is free from all external causes, it does not cease to live. Here Plato is rather similar to his pupil Aristotle in defining the soul as simply that which marks out a living creature from a mere material object. Living creatures have self-sustained and self-caused momentum. As Socrates says: ‘Every soul is immortal. Because anything that is ever-moving is immortal, whereas anything which causes motion elsewhere and is moved from elsewhere stops living when it stops moving.’ (Phaedrus, 245c). Once we understand this, we can understand better the very distinct approach to lust found in the ancient world. We can see why Aphrodite was regarded as a powerful goddess, why Hippolytus was punished for renunciation of the erotic altogether, why Anchises was filled with terror when he realised he had lain with Aphrodite herself. This self-sustaining life force that fuels and shapes our lives is terrifying and yet inescapable, and so in the ancient world it was treated with due piety. For Plato, and most people in the ancient world, the fear of lust was the beginning of wisdom. 

Here, Richard Gere comes in useful again. In an Officer and a Gentleman, the character of Zack seems to embody a very ancient view of Eros when it has been dislodged from a guiding ideal. He is naturally charming, cocksure, a serial seducer, but a wounded man who has never actually had a relationship and is incapable of commitment. In the Symposium, Diotima says that Eros is a paradoxical force of nature, a daemonic urge that is born from the marriage of Poverty (penia) and Wealth (poros). We love, says Diotima, that which we lack. Beauty is the ideal of our own wholeness, the vision of completeness and belonging that human souls are unable to apprehend in the world of imperfection. It s only when Paula invites Zack to her working class family home and confesses to him her ideal of married life, one based on passion and striving after something better than what she grew up with, that Zack finds himself shaken out of his destructive patterns of purely worldly lust. That scene at the end then, is more than just a romantic, iconic cinema moment, it is captures in moving pictures the paradox of lust that we find in Plato’s philosophy.

The third point to note about Plato’s theory of beauty in general is that what is regarded as ‘Beautiful,’ is not, as modern critical theorists would have us believe, some arbitrary set of ideals which happens to suit those in power. Rather, it is that which is aligned with the true nature of Being itself, with our own human natures and with divine order. Ugliness is the state of being out of alignment. This is why Plotinus could expand on Plato and make the Beautiful, the Good and the True, all part of the same ordered and divine hierarchy. Today, we are quick to see any such hierarchy as politically motivated, all such ladder of values must only be arbitrary and chosen for the agenda of one group over another. What is called beautiful in women by men, is that which maintains women’s subordination. What is called beautiful in paintings of the orient, is only that which reinforces stereotypes of the orient which perpetuate through hidden norms and categories the power-imbalance between oppressed and oppressor. We have gone from the judicious recognition that all value-statements can be abused, to the belief that all claims to value are themselves necessarily politically motivated. This has emerged from the fact that the very metaphysical nature of the ancient view of life is lost to us. We are unable to see any unified, wholistic structure to existence itself, and so we see any such claim as just a reflection of worldly agendas which are trying to ratify themselves through claims to heavenly necessity. 

However, we don’t have to buy the Platonic worldview in order to see its power. It is enough for us simply to make the effort to move beyond our own drab hermeneutics of suspicion and see that what Plato meant by Beauty was just the same as what he meant by Justice or Virtue. That is, it is that quality of being aligned with divine truth, the divine order of things. Returning to the Symposium then, we can see why Plato has Diotima say that beauty is not in fact the end in itself, but that quality of alignment with divine order that is necessary for human creative endeavour. She says:

‘Love’s function is giving birth in beauty both in body and in mind’ (206b).

She uses the language of ‘pregnancy’ here, but the word is at least partially allegorical. As Diotima adds: ‘Reproduction is the closest mortals can come to being permanently alive and immortal’ (206e).

What drives Richard Gere’s journey from loser sex-addict to handsome navy cadet pilot in An Officer and a Gentleman is his own inner sense of wasted potential, his sense that his life could be worth something more. He finds the creative energy of that ‘something more’ in his relationship with Paula. Theirs is a passionate and very erotic love, but the eroticism does not stop at mere sex, it carries them from mutual fascination into creating a new life for themselves. This is what Plato meant when he associated beauty with truth and knowledge. It was not about associating one narrow ideal with the ultimate truth, for some kind of political agenda. It was rather that beauty and love are the catalysing energies that drive us to become better versions of who and what we really are. The Instagram cliche of ‘living my best life’ actually captures Plato’s vision of beauty quite well. Beauty is life lived to max.

We don’t have to accept Plato’s cosmic vision of the world as being made up of Forms and their copies. We don’t need to get bogged down in staircases and chariots and ancient disputes over what makes a river a river even when it is always flowing. The main issue when it comes to beauty is that for Plato it was associated with that state of being that maximised our nature. For Homer, what maximised life was found in ‘glory’, in displays of prowess on the battlefield and in competitive games. For Plato, human life was maximised in striving towards the ultimate Forms, in seeing what was permanent and lasting amid all the change and perishing of life around us. These are very different ideas of what optimises human life, but they both agree that such an optimising is possible. We can disagree with this worldview, and probably should, but what we cannot do is dismiss the idea of beauty as used by Plato as merely arbitrary preference. Once we get beyond our own fixations about agendas and suspicions about absolutes, perhaps we can also come to recognise that Plato was at least onto something when he said that beauty does something to us, something that optimises us and helps us fully realise who we are. 

Works cited:

Plato, Phaedrus, trans by R. Waterfield, 2002, Oxford, Oxford World Classics

Plato, The Symposium, trans by C. Gill, 2005, London, Penguin