Petrozavodsk residents were looking for an ancient code of beauty

In Petrozavodsk launched the project “Code of beauty”, which is going to explore where our ideas about beauty come from and how they change with eras. The first meeting was dedicated to antiquity - an era when beauty ceased to be an external gloss and became a philosophy.

From chaos to space

The Greek word “cosmos” (κόσμος) means not only “peace”, but also “decoration”, “outfit”, “orderliness”. Beauty, according to ancient philosophers, is not what resists chaos, but what is born out of it through measure and proportion, Anna Skoropadskaya, deputy director of the Institute of Philology of PetrSU, candidate of philological sciences, associate professor, specialist in classical philology, explained to the participants.

To show how changeable our ideas about beauty, the speaker showed the audience an unusual visual range: from the ancient busts of Socrates and Aristotle to modern film heroes - Mel Gibson, Pierce Brosnan in the image of James Bond and Bruce Willis. The audience clearly saw how the same question “what is beautiful?” receives different answers in different eras.

Kalocagatia is not a diagnosis

The Greek concept of kalokagatia (καλοκмγαθία) - the ancient ideal of a harmonious combination of external beauty (καλός - beautiful) and internal virtues (мγαθός - good, good) became the main discovery of the evening. “Now this will be our password,” the participants smiled.

Kalocagatia is not just a “beautiful and kind person.” It is a holistic ideal in which the aesthetic and the ethical are inseparable. In it, beauty does not adorn the good, but itself becomes its expression, and the moral principle gives human appearance and actions expressiveness. “Beauty is moral, and good begets beauty,” said philosopher Alexei Losev, Anna Skoropadskaya.

In modern life, Kalokagatia may sound like a reminder that exterior appeal and inner depth are not opposed to each other. In an age when standards of beauty are changing faster than they have time to gain a foothold in the mass consciousness, the ancient ideal offers a different optics: beauty is not a match to a template, but a harmony in which the external and internal are in agreement. Beauty does not begin with a mirror, but with the attitude towards oneself.