(In Person Event): Plato on the Love of Beauty and Philosophy

(This is an in person event. An online event is linked here.) Philosophy and the aesthetic way of life have always had an interesting and productive dialogue. Plato, legend has it, originally wanted to be playwright, and the platonic dialogue is of course, an evolution out of dramatic forms. Confucius believed that poetry and music bookended the moral education of a human being. Schopenhauer likewise put music up in the highest pedestal and his own philosophical analysis of it inspired elements of the mature style of Wagner, who likewise inspired the writings and aspirations of the early Nietzsche. Some great poets have made significant contributions to philosophy. Schiller wrote a significant philosophical treatise, and Holderlin’s influence on Hegel is well documented. In the 20th century there have been underappreciated examples of philosophical novelists, Robert Musil and Herman broch being too prominent examples, but also Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. The fact that Dante integrated philosophy and theology into his poetry is equally well known, and many modern poets have also been philosophy students. This raises the question about the relationship of philosophy to aesthetics, to the arts and to fascination we have with beauty. If we wish to understand this issue in its fullness, it may be useful to address it at its point of origin, at the moment where the question of this relationship first to arose in written form in culture, and this is to be found In the works of Plato. Plato's complicated and conflicted relationship with aesthetics, beginning with his own renunciation of dramatic aspirations, seems to arise from the fundamental concern with appearance and reality that drives much of the Platonic corpus. Plato was born into a deeply competitive, contentious and fractious society, and one in which opinions and questions of good and bad were profoundly in question, but also one that…