Hippias MajorPlato
About Hippias Major
The is Plato's early dialogue on the fine or beautiful (to kalon). Socrates meets the sophist Hippias of Elis, who has been lecturing on beautiful things, and presses him for a definition of beauty itself rather than a list of beautiful particulars. The conversation is comic as well as philosophical. Socrates pretends to report a harsh third interlocutor who will beat him if he accepts Hippias's answers, and Hippias's vanity is steadily exposed.
Hippias offers three definitions: a beautiful maiden, gold, and a life of wealth, health, honor, long age, and a splendid burial by one's children. Socrates refutes each by showing that it fails to cover the full range of what is called fine, or that it breaks down when applied to gods and heroes. He then advances four proposals of his own: the appropriate, the useful, the beneficial, and the pleasure that comes through sight and hearing. Each collapses under examination. The beneficial produces the good as a cause produces an effect, which would make beauty something other than the good. The account from pleasure of sight and hearing cannot explain why those pleasures alone count as fine, or how a pair of pleasures can be fine together when neither alone is.
The dialogue ends in aporia. Hippias urges Socrates to abandon such talk and seek beauty in public speech before courts and assemblies. Socrates replies that he has learned at least that beautiful things are difficult. The stands with the Euthyphro, Charmides, and as a definitional dialogue that clears the ground. Later aesthetics returns to its questions whenever it asks whether beauty is utility, proportion, pleasure, or something that cannot be reduced to any of these.