KALOKAGATHIA

For millenia thinkers in cultures and civilizations all over the world have been asking the question: is what is good also beautiful, and is what is beautiful also good. What would you say? Have you ever stopped to think about this? When was the last time you thought or said aloud that something was beautiful? A sunset, a building, a song? Or what did you recently say was good – a film, a dish, a trip? Why? What made those things beautiful? What made them good? And do those two things go hand in hand?

Ancient Greek society had a complex and nuanced word that encapsulated what they thought of this: kalokagathia. It comes from the words kalos (beautiful, pretty/handsome (outwardly), decent, noble (inwardly)) and agathos (honest, good, noble, courageous, worthy of admiration). Kalokagathia was an ideal to be achieved through education and lifestyle, education being something that enhances the whole individual, according to Plato.* Some described kalokagathia as the ideal balance of the bodily, spiritual, physical and moral qualities so that it was not just something you did for yourself, but it had social and moral dimensions as well. It is what the aristocrats of Athens (the kaloi agathoi) strived to embody, and authors have argued that kalokagathia also formed the basis of their politics and economy. Poet Telesilla of Argos (5th century BC) makes a reference to Kalokagathia as the goddess of nobility. In short, a life of nobility meant a life of goodness.

As this idea develops from BC to AD and well into the Middle Ages, as it passes through Christian hands there are some thinkers who begin to separate beauty into inner and outer, emphasising the former and shunning the latter. This means that in great part beauty comes to be feared, because the more beautiful a person or thing is, the more it poses a threat and danger. I will not delve further into this aspect here, but it is worth noting that ideas have their own paths of development, reception and understanding, one we often take for granted. But back to kalokagathia.

The idea that it would be good (!) for a person to cultivate these virtues within them, become this kind of a person, makes sense if the underlying assumption is that you have any worth as an individual. This was not a common assumption in all ancient societies. In many cases in the ancient Near East, only the king and the upper echelons were worthy as individuals.  But the idea that each person is worthy as such is certainly one that is common to ancient Greek society, the biblical worldview and traditionally the Western world. It is because you are of value as the individual you are, that you can bring beauty and goodness to the world. You have something to offer; you are someone valuable to be.

It might be argued that not all beauty is good (all that glitters is not gold, etc.), but that is a debate for another time and place, and this is by no means a simplistic matter or else we would not be debating it for this long! But let me leave you with this utterly philosophical and yet thoroughly practical question if there ever was one. What would the world be like if each of us strived to be kalos agathos? How would it be if we desired to be truly noble, if we consistently aligned ourselves with what is good? What if in seeking good for ourselves we understood that to do so is to automatically seek good for others? What if we opened ourselves to the goodness and beauty of others, and in turn, offered our own beauty and goodness wherever we went? It seems to me that this is seriously something worth pondering.

* Incidentally Plato thinks that music plays an important role in kalokagathia and that kalokagathia is greatly fostered by singing in choirs!

Kalokagathia – The Greek Ideal of the Harmonious Personality (Olivova, 1983)

Kalokagathia – the Ethical Basis for Political Hellenic Economy and Its Influence from Plato to Ruskin (Petrochilos, 2002)

The Social History of Art (Hauser, 2003)

Kalokagathia versus funktionale Erziehung (Lehmhus, 2008)

Telesilla, Fragment 725

 (c) Belinda É. Samari

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