What is Beauty? Plato, Beauty, and Knowledge

Plato’s theory of knowledge – his epistemology – can best be understood through thinking about beauty. We are born with all knowledge, he says, but when our soul became trapped in our body at birth, we forgot this knowledge. Learning, then, is similar to remembering. And here on earth, beauty is the easiest way for us to first do that.

We can all recognize individual beautiful things… flowers, sunsets, music, people. Recognizing these things is the first rung on the ladder to the knowledge of Beauty, which for Plato is the Ideal Form of Beauty. Recognizing these individual beautiful things is the world we all live in most of the time, and staying here is like being trapped in a cave – not ever able to know true reality.

The question then, is whether there is something in common that makes all of these things beautiful?

The next step is recognizing what all beautiful things share in common. What they have in common is the Ideal Form of Beauty. The top rung of the ladder, true wisdom, is knowing Beauty itself.

What’s important here is that beautiful things can be observed by our senses – we can literally see something that is beautiful. This is located in and is part of the world. Knowledge of Beauty can only be known by the mind, by understanding. It doesn’t exist in the world as we understand it. But seeing an imitation of the true Form of Beauty can lead us to that understanding of Beauty.