Did the Stoics get their Theory of Beauty Wrong? - Massimo Pigliucci

This presentation was part of Stoicon 2023 - Beautiful Stoics: What Beauty can teach us about how to live.
For more information on Stoicon, Stoic Week, and Modern Stoicism, visit modernstoicism.com/.

[@jamesdaltrey4987]

For those speculating, Massimo does not appear to have changed his antipathy towards the Stoics.
He gets this right: quoting Aistė Čelkytė:
"So beauty was understood by the Stoics as symmetria, which means a combination of two things, harmony of parts with each other and functional integration of those parts within the whole."
Primarily because he is quoting somebody else, then continues on a discussion of art, peacock tails, and the perceived elegance of scientific formula"
However entirely ignores the understanding of this idea of beauty as the base, proportionate, measured, balanced, coherent structure from which living things arise, physically from the recombination of base minerals into more complex and intricate structures. It proceeds throughs from seed, through sexual reproduction, which he bizarrely places in contrast to the algorithmic methodical Nature of evolution and inexplicably drags the Christians into the discussion.
"For the Stoics beauty is a property built into the world, as we said, from an emotional perspective. (for Massimo) It's not a property built into the world, and it's a property relative to a particular type of biological beings. "
The first is false; it is not emotional; it is Pythagorean.
The second is his Neo-Cartesian human exceptionalism (again).
The Stoics would say the beauty, harmony, proportion, measure, balance, and coherence comes first, and we come to appreciate it.
How he is going to square the virtue of a human being beautiful, proportionate, measured, balanced, and coherent in Stoic thinking, having chucked out the idea of beauty as guff, I cannot imagine.
“For you yourself are neither flesh nor hair, but prohairesis and if you render that beautiful, then you yourself will be beautiful.”
Discourse 3.1.40
Goodness and beauty are synonymous in Stoicism, pretty much.
Oti monon to kalon agathon.
ὅτι μόνον τὸ καλὸν ἀγαθόν
Only what is beautiful is good.
There are broadly four ideas of the good in Stoicism.
1) Cosmic harmony, order, and beauty;
2) Life in accordance with Nature, the cosmos, the whole.
3) Virtue as excellence of character, a soul in accord with itself and the right reason.
4) Acting unselfishly to the benefit of the common good, humanity as a single community, Cosmopolis
They are all inter-entailing. .unified.
They are all the same idea variously expressed precisely: wholeness, harmony, sympathy, and the intricate and intimate connection between all things and equilibrium between them.
Going forward into a New Stoicism without referencing this fundamental aspect thinking of the Greeks, Socrates, Zeno, Chrysippus, Musonius, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus is going to be problematic

[@unpersonableme1805]

Crummy audio

[@ModernStoicism]

The audio is not as good as we would hope for. The Internet connection for Massimo, calling in from Rome was not ideal.

[@the_prokopton]

horrible presentation