Clarifying The Confusion About Beauty Of Hippias Major

This article focuses on the confusions of aesthetics caused by Plato about Hippias Major, in a more specific and analytical way. From text and dialogue, the author concludes confusions mainly in four aspects:the first aspect, which is more beautiful, "a gold spoon" or "a wooden spoon"? Using the "Whether appropriate or not" argument as the bridge for argument, Socrates confused "pleasure for beauty" with "the pleasure for good"; the second aspect, "is beauty" and "seems to be beauty". Socrates caused the confusion of classification of beauty by the causal argument, and that in this classification, which belongs to Socrates’"seems to be beauty", and which is "real beauty", whether the general rejection of "seems to be beauty" is reasonable or not; the third aspect, whether the beauty is useful. Using the causal argument, Socrates has caused confusion in understanding relationship between beauty and good in two aspect:in one aspect e difference of beauty and good and the other aspect beauty’s convergence to good; the fourth aspect, whether beauty is audio-visual pleasure or not, confusion between aesthetic feeling caused by pleasure and that caused by beauty. According to some principles of Kant’s aesthetics, these four aspects mainly involve three major problems:the classification of beauty, the relationship between beauty and good, and the problem of aesthetic feeling. Prior to this paper, the author eliminated some problems in the introduction, such as the reason of choosing Hippias Major, the reason of using principles of Kant’s aesthetics, the status of related research and so on. In the final chapter, this part argues that of the end of dialogue actually implies great realistic meaning and infinite grief:the summary of "beauty" In Hippias is actually a kind of utilitarian view, which represents the main trend of the Sophists, just as Plato said:"philosophy is just undermined by these smart people". This kind of utilitarian view is still popular today. But Socrates’ self-knowing of ignorance, the pursuit of the "good" is still powerless, because it can neither be concluded from practical experiences, nor showed and guaranteed by realistic success.