3/ The Last Bastion of Aesthetics: The Concept of Form

The concept of form is the last line of defence that aesthetics might invoke to justify its legitimacy.

The (Kantian) argument runs as follows: an object consists of both its matter and its form. These two ontologically distinct aspects give rise to different kinds of pleasure: the pleasure of eating the substance of an apple is quite different from that of admiring its beautiful, round shape.
The unique pleasure derived from the form, rather than the matter, of an object thus justifies the existence of an aesthetic domain and the discipline that studies it: aesthetics.

But does this distinction between matter and form truly hold? Suppose I draw random, meaningless lines on a canvas—what is the form, and what is the matter? Now imagine I am standing before Mont Blanc. I am filled with awe, but I am told I should be moved only by the form. I therefore attempt to strip away everything pertaining to matter, though it is far from clear what that entails. Perhaps I eliminate the colours, leaving only the contours. I am left with a series of lines that rise and fall, not unlike the curve of a company's profit fluctuations. Naturally, I feel nothing—no more than I would when looking at such a graph in a business report.

Furthermore, even if the matter-form distinction were meaningful, it does not govern our responses when we view an object or a painting. We do not experience things by consciously distinguishing between matter and form, any more than we separate the line sung by the brunettes from that sung by the blondes in a chorus. While such distinctions may technically exist (there is indeed a line sung by brunettes, just as there is form and matter in a work), they do not shape our authentic 'aesthetic' experience. Since our aim is to capture real aesthetic experience rather than an abstract one that may never actually occur, the form-matter dichotomy becomes irrelevant.

We have already suggested, moreover, that the viewer does not concern themselves with the ontological status of the contents of meaning they perceive in a work. To assume otherwise would be to intellectualise the viewer, attributing to them questions they are not in fact asking. The aesthete thus engages with the contents of meaning as they present themselves, without pausing to consider whether they pertain to form or matter.

Finally, even if one were to take pleasure in form, we could argue that this pleasure arises from attributing value to that form. Such pleasure would therefore be axiological rather than purely aesthetic. Since both matter and form are capable of yielding axiological pleasure, the distinction becomes unnecessary.

4/ Questioning the Exact Meaning of the Greek 'Kalos'

We must ask whether this hypothesis is consistent with the Greeks' experience of art.

Greek thought presents a certain kind of beauty that deserves serious consideration: the beauty of noble actions and virtuous souls, as conceptualised, for instance, in Plato's Symposium. How are we to understand Socrates' claim in the Gorgias that the useful, the good, and other such qualities are beautiful?¹ Aesthetics, when confined to the matter/form paradigm, cannot address this kind of beauty; that paradigm restricts beauty to things composed of matter and form—that is, to material and sensible objects.

With the emergence of modern aesthetics, beginning with Kant, many realities formerly regarded as beautiful (such as noble actions) were excluded from aesthetic consideration. This shift renders much of the Greek experience of beauty incomprehensible to minds shaped by modern aesthetic frameworks.
As a result, the beauty of reality is impoverished, as many genuine forms of beauty fall outside the 'possibility of beauty'.
This brings us to a key question: what, then, was the Greek experience of beauty?

It has already been noted that the Greeks did not possess the modern concept of value. Nevertheless, addressing the problem of values was a central concern for them. Although they lacked a specific term for 'value', Greek thought was thoroughly imbued with this concept, as seen in their inquiries into the 'supreme good'. As we have observed, Greek terms such as 'agathon', 'ariston', and 'beltistou' came to represent aspects of value, each carrying a range of meanings. The term kalos, most commonly translated today as 'beauty', is, in my view, an anachronistic rendering that falls short of capturing the Greek experience.

I propose instead that kalos and agathon are not words designating two distinct experiences of 'different meanings' (beauty and virtue), but rather different modes of access to a single, unified meaning. For instance, agathon conveys the revelation of a thing's value through our active relationship with it, through praxis, while kalos conveys the revelation of value through contemplation, theoria.
On this hypothesis, the difference between kalos and agathon does not mark a division between beauty and value, or beauty and goodness, as modernity would have it, but rather a distinction in the mode by which value is apprehended—through action as opposed to contemplation. The Greeks may thus have had no notion of 'beauty' as we understand it today; what they possessed was a concept of value, articulated through the notions of agathon and kalos.

The unfortunate modern translation, rooted in the matter/form duality, has led to a loss of the Greek experience of beauty—which is, at its core, an experience of value. This understanding is essential for interpreting the Gorgias formula, 'virtue = useful = pleasant = beauty'. At bottom, this statement conveys that the value of the useful, the pleasant, and kindred qualities becomes apparent through contemplation, affording us axiological pleasure.

The well-known Greek phrase kalos kai agathos, usually translated as 'beautiful and good', might therefore be better rendered as 'that whose value is revealed through both contemplation and action'.
I am not in a position to verify this hypothesis fully; doing so would require a close examination of the many Greek texts in which the terms kalos and agathos appear, with a view to establishing first their ordinary usage in Greek society and then the particular sense in which different philosophers employed them. This task lies beyond my competence. The suggestion should therefore be taken as no more than that, with no claim to scientific validity. I believe it is nonetheless legitimate to venture hypotheses from time to time, provided they are clearly presented as suggestions rather than as conclusions drawn from rigorous study.

If this hypothesis holds, it is worth exploring its implications for aesthetics.

1. For example here: « All laws and practices are beautiful because they are beneficial or pleasant or both » (474e-475b)