ABOUT BEAUTY.
The first musings about beauty in Greece
Socrates, Sappho and an Unfinished Conversation
Perhaps beauty has always been one of those subjects that reveals itself most clearly when we stop trying too hard to define it. Long before architects, designers, artists or luxury maisons reflected upon beauty, the Greeks were already wondering about it. Not beauty as a trend, nor beauty as decoration, but beauty itself. What is it that moves us in certain faces, certain places, certain objects, certain moments? Why does one thing seem beautiful while another leaves us indifferent? And why does beauty so often resist explanation?
It is curious to think that more than two thousand years ago, Socrates was asking precisely these questions.
In one of Plato’s dialogues, the Hippias Major, Socrates encounters Hippias, a celebrated scholar who appears rather confident in his ability to explain almost everything. The conversation eventually turns towards beauty, and Socrates asks what seems at first a remarkably simple question.
What is beauty?
The discussion that follows is both charming and strangely familiar. Hippias proposes various answers. A beautiful woman. Gold. Noble things. Useful things. Honourable things. One by one, Socrates gently examines each suggestion, and one by one the answers begin to slip away. What seemed obvious suddenly becomes uncertain.
The dialogue continues.
Definitions are proposed, only to collapse a few moments later, while certainties that seemed perfectly solid gradually dissolve beneath Socrates’ questions. And by the end, neither Socrates nor Hippias has discovered the answer they were seeking. In many ways, that is the most fascinating part as the conversation remains unfinished.
Perhaps beauty itself prefers it that way.
After all, most of us have experienced beauty long before we have attempted to define it. We encounter it unexpectedly. In a city glimpsed through a train window. In the proportions of a building. In the atmosphere of a quiet café, perhaps with a moment of magic, I see of beauty, like here in my favorite cafe in Paris when the waiter unexpectedly invited a woman to a dance ?
In a piece of music heard at exactly the right moment. In a landscape. In a face. In a book. The experience arrives first.
The explanation usually follows much later, if it arrives at all. And perhaps this is where another Greek voice enters the conversation.
Sappho lived generations before Plato, she of the island of Lesbos and the sapphic loves. Little survives of her work today, only fragments scattered across time like pieces of a broken mosaic. Yet those fragments continue to possess a remarkable beauty of their own.
Unlike Socrates, Sappho rarely seems interested in defining beauty at all. She observes it instead, quietly and almost incidentally, in a glance, a memory, a beloved presence, the sea, a flower, the passing of youth, or the longing for something absent.
Reading her verses today, one senses that beauty is not an intellectual problem waiting to be solved. It is an experience to be felt, however briefly, before it disappears. There is something rather touching about this contrast.
Socrates spends pages questioning beauty and arrives at uncertainty. Sappho describes a moment and somehow allows us to feel beauty without defining it at all. I feel personally very close to this approach but perhaps both propositions are necessary.
The philosopher reminds us that beauty is deeper than appearances and more elusive than easy answers.
The poet reminds us that beauty lives in experience long before it becomes an idea.
And meanwhile, more than two thousand years later, we continue the same conversation. We still pause before a building whose proportions seem somehow perfect. We still remember certain cities long after we have forgotten their streets. We still return to books, paintings, landscapes and objects that continue to move us for reasons we cannot entirely explain. One begins to wonder whether the Greeks were searching for an answer that does not really exist. Or perhaps beauty was never meant to be captured by a definition.
Perhaps beauty belongs to those rare subjects that remain valuable precisely because they cannot be fully explained ?
The conversation between Socrates and Hippias remains unfinished. Sappho’s fragments remain incomplete. And yet neither feels unsatisfactory. On the contrary, their incompleteness may be part of their enduring charm.
Because beauty itself often appears in much the same way. Briefly. Unexpectedly. And then, just as we think we understand it, it slips gently beyond our grasp, leaving behind only the desire to encounter it once more.
Beauty is not only something we admire.
It is something we continue to search for, a pursuit of beauty ?
Further readings:
The poems of Sappho
Le désir par Sappho
Hippias major. What is beauty. Dialogues of Plato.
What makes a bag beautiful ? ArtDeco and the pursuit of beauty
About Beauty. What Is Beauty? The Ancient Greek Answer | Maison Philippe Montagne