QuestionsIs beauty in the eye of the beholder?Beautiful things are beautiful through Beauty itself
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?Beauty is in things

Beautiful things are beautiful through Beauty itself

Beauty itself (the Form of the Beautiful)

Plato c. 428 BC · c. 348 BCBeyond appearances, the eternal Forms.
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What it claims

Beauty is real and objective: beautiful things are beautiful by receiving their beauty from Beauty itself, not because they please the one who looks at them.

Why

Beautiful things change and vanish; they are beautiful only by sharing in a Beauty that itself never changes.

The same idea through history
Plato385 BCSymposium 210e-211b: at the summit of the initiation into love one suddenly sees an eternal Beauty that depends on no time, place or viewer. This is the version presented here.
Plato360 BCPhaedo 100c-d: the same thesis, drier. A thing is beautiful because it partakes of the beautiful, not because of its colour or shape.
Plato380 BCDiotima's ladder, from a beautiful body up to Beauty itself.Plotin253Plotinus takes the idea up: beauty down here is the presence of form in matter. He also refuses to make beauty a matter of proportion.
In short

"Beautiful things are beautiful through Beauty itself" is an argument by Plato (Symposium 210e-211b, Phaedo 100c-d, 385 BC) on the question "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" (answer: beauty is in things). Its claim: Beauty is real and objective: beautiful things are beautiful by receiving their beauty from Beauty itself, not because they please the one who looks at them. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P6). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Symposium 210e-211b, Phaedo 100c-d
Valid with an implicit premise

A face, a poem, a just law: all are beautiful, but they change, age, vanish, and please some more than others. Plato thinks this cannot be the last word on beauty. If these things are beautiful, it is because they receive something from a Beauty that does not change and depends on no one: Beauty itself. On this view beauty is not in the eye of the beholder: the eye discovers it.

P1If anything is beautiful besides Beauty itself, it is beautiful for no other reason than that it partakes of that Beauty.
P2What makes a thing beautiful is neither its bright colour nor its shape: it is only the presence or communion of Beauty itself.
P3Beauty itself always is: it neither comes to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes.
P4It is not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another, nor beautiful at one time and not at another, nor beautiful to some and ugly to others.
P5All other beautiful things partake of it, so that their coming to be and perishing makes it neither greater nor less.
P6 · implicit premiseWhat causes things to be beautiful exists in itself, independently of those things and of the judgements made about them: a beauty that depended on our gaze would not explain why things are beautiful.
Therefore beauty is real and objective: beautiful things are beautiful by receiving their beauty from Beauty itself, not because they please the one who looks at them.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, the computer finds a case where everything is true (a single cause, stable, shared by things) and yet this 'cause' is only a way of feeling in the one who looks: beauty would not be objective.
Without P6, the premises say that Beauty itself is stable and that things partake of it. One must add that this cause exists independently of us to conclude that beauty is objective. Plato assumes this throughout: Beauty itself is 'itself by itself', depending on no body and no gaze.
Analogy. The standard metre does not change when the rulers that refer to it break. For Plato, Beauty is the standard: beautiful things are more or less faithful copies of it, which come and go without affecting it.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

David Hume 1757 · attacks the conclusion

Beauty and deformity, no more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects: they belong entirely to sentiment. So there is no Beauty existing outside the mind that feels.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1757, after the author's death (-348).
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Hume did not answer Plato. In the same text he adds that certain qualities in objects are 'fitted by nature' to produce these feelings, and that there is a standard of taste (see his argument). So he does not fall back on 'anything goes'.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The core disagreement: is beauty a property we discover, or a response of the mind to certain properties? An open point: both camps have serious defenders today.
Aristotle 330 BC · attacks premise 2

The chief forms of beauty are order, symmetry and definiteness. They are properties of ordered things themselves, which the mathematical sciences can demonstrate.

a defender replies
No reply possible: objection raised in -330, after the author's death (-348).
P
Plotinus defender of the argument · 253
The symmetry theory must exclude from beauty everything simple: colours, the light of the sun, which have no parts and so are not beautiful by proportion. Yet they are beautiful. So proportion cannot be the ultimate source of beauty.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: in this passage Aristotle does not speak of Plato's Beauty itself. He only shows that the beautiful can be described through properties of things (order, symmetry, definiteness), which makes a separate Form less necessary. He does not draw that conclusion himself here.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Aristotle and Plato are both 'objectivists': beauty is in things or behind them, not in the gaze. They differ on where beauty lives: in the order of things themselves, or in a separate Form. Plotinus tries to show that order alone is not enough.
Friedrich Nietzsche 1888 · attacks the conclusion

'Beauty in itself' is merely a word, not even a concept. In the beautiful man sets himself up as the measure of perfection: he forgets that he is the cause of the beauty he thinks he finds in the world.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1888, after the author's death (-348).
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Nietzsche explains why one believes in an objective beauty (we project our own image into things). That alone does not prove that Beauty itself does not exist: a defender of Plato would say one can be wrong about the cause of something without the thing being an illusion.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: does human projection explain all beauty, or is there something to recognise beyond us? An open point: no widely accepted answer.