Plato And Schopenhaur: The Breach Between Beauty And Morality

Phaedrus and "Plato and Schopenhaur:" The Breach Between Beauty and Morality For Plato, beauty with a capital B can be attained when love begins with a reverential gaze. This reverence is key because it indicates that though love and Beauty may begin with the physical, there is also a reverence which alludes to a potential ascension into an appreciation of something deeper. However, in Alexander Nehamas ' article entitled "Plato or Schopenhaur" he notes a "breach between beauty and morality" (Nehamas 3), and this has taken place as a shift from how philosophers viewed beauty in Plato 's day compared to how people see it now has happened. An important question to ask is how has it happened that there has been a breach between beauty and morality?

Ruskin says: "Does a man die at your feet - your business is not to help him, but to note the color of his lips... Not a specially religious or spiritual business this, it might appear" (Nehamas 3). This quote is related to the previous one from Phaedrus because what Ruskin is commenting on that has happened is what Socrates described that happens when people are ruled by desire for pleasure and do not see beautiful things beyond their aesthetic appearance. Beauty has come to be viewed as nothing more than beauty with a lower case b. There is no longer an ascension to the "place beyond heaven" (Phaedrus 33). Nehamas comments on this very situation. He says: "It preserved the beauty of art and its equivocal satisfactions as its rightful subjects only by means of thinking of them as "aesthetic," a category that obliterated the vision that had once kindled Plato 's imagination" (Nehamas 3). Immediately prior to this statement, Nehamas

Again, it is not desire or pleasure that is necessarily bad, it is people 's lack of understanding of philosophy that has caused the breach between morality and beauty. The phenomenon of pederasty is discussed in Nehamas ' article as it was common in Plato 's day. It is used to describe the proper philosophical way to love and to attain Beauty. Earlier mentioned was how a man will destroy his loved one if he only sees him aesthetically and on the flip side of this is what happens when the lover is philosophically inclined. Nehamas writes: Such a man [one who is philosophically inclined] would want to understand what made the boy beautiful and sparked his desire. Desire for the boy, then, leads to a desire for understanding, and that desire leads to the beauty of the human body in general... a more philosophical man would now want to understand what makes the human body in general beautiful and inspires him to love it and what in turn accounts for the beauty of that, and would go on asking until he reached a full and final answer (Nehamas