Aristotle finds (in the Metaphysics) the universal elements of beauty to be order ( taxis), symmetry and definiteness or determinateness (to orismenon). He saw the absence of all lust or desire in the pleasure it bestows as another characteristic of the beautiful. Īn example of Plato's considerations about poetry is: 'For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own.' Aristotle Īristotle, in contrast to Plato, developed certain principles of beauty and art, most clearly so in his treatises on poetry and rhetoric. Accordingly, in his scheme for an ideal republic, he provided for the most inexorable censorship of poets, etc., so as to make art as far as possible an instrument of moral and political training. He had but a poor opinion of art, regarding it as a trick of imitation ( mimesis) which takes us another step further from the luminous sphere of rational intuition into the shadowy region of the semblances of sense. He recognizes in places the beauty of the mind, and seems to think that the highest beauty of proportion is to be found in the union of a beautiful mind with a beautiful body. He emphasizes unity in its simplest aspect as seen in evenness of line and purity of color. So far as his writings embody the notion of any common element in beautiful objects, it is proportion, harmony or unity among their parts. He tends to identify the self-beautiful with the conceptions of the true and the good, and thus there arose the Platonic formula kalokagathia. His theory of an absolute beauty does not easily adjust itself to the notion of its contributing merely a variety of sensuous pleasure, to which he appears to lean in some dialogues. As to the precise forms in which the idea of beauty reveals itself, Plato is not very decided. Elsewhere the soul's intuition of the self-beautiful is said to be a reminiscence of its prenatal existence.

Love ( Eros) produces aspiration towards this pure idea. This true beauty is nothing discoverable as an attribute in another thing, for these are only beautiful things, not the beautiful itself. At the same time we may conclude that Plato's mind leaned decidedly to the conception of an absolute beauty, which took its place in his scheme of ideas or self-existing forms. In some of these, various definitions of the beautiful are rejected as inadequate by the Platonic Socrates.

Of the views of Plato on the subject, it is hardly less difficult to gain a clear conception from the Dialogues, than it is in the case of ethical good. It is therefore absolute and does not necessarily stand in relation to a percipient mind.

Plato, in contrast, recognized that beauty exists as an abstract Form. His doctrine puts forward the relativity of beauty. Socrates rather emphasized the power of beauty to further the more necessary ends of life than the immediate gratification which a beautiful object affords to perception and contemplation. Every beautiful object is so called because it serves some rational end: either the security or the gratification of man. Xenophon regarded the beautiful as coincident with the good, while both of these concepts are resolvable into the useful. When interpreting writings from this time, it is worth noticing that it is debatable whether an exact equivalent to the term beauty existed in classical Greek. The first important contributions to aesthetic theory are usually considered to stem from philosophers in Ancient Greece, among which the most noticeable are Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus.

Art view of pre history