The term Kalon Kagathon — the beautiful and the good, or the noble and the excellent — operates in the depth-psychology corpus primarily as a contested nexus inherited from classical Greek ethics, where the aesthetic and the moral were not cleanly separable. The corpus reveals a fundamental tension: whether beauty (kalon) and goodness (agathon) are coextensive, hierarchically ordered, or merely contingently allied. Adkins traces the sociohistorical instability of this pairing through Homer, the elegists, Pindar, and into Aristotle, demonstrating that kalo kagathoi names a social class before it names a moral ideal, and that arete, kalon, and eudaimonia form an uneasy triad whose reconciliation preoccupied the entire arc of Greek ethical thought. Hobbs engages the Platonic resolution most directly, examining how Socrates labors to deny any tragic split between the noble and the beneficial, arguing that the kalon and the agathon must share a single criterion if the heroic choice is to be coherent. Hillman brings the problematic into archetypal psychology by arguing that depth psychology’s pathologizing orientation has inverted the classical pairing — attending to ugliness rather than beauty — while still remaining within an aesthetic logic. Together these voices reveal that the question of whether beauty obligates goodness, or goodness generates beauty, is not merely a philological curiosity but a structuring aporia for any psychology that inherits the Greek soul.
from the second to the ninth book the aretai are described and evaluated not in terms of eudaimonia, but in terms of dei, ‘it is necessary,’ and of ‘the kalon’.
Adkins demonstrates that Aristotle’s ethics operates through the normative authority of kalon independently of eudaimonia, revealing the term’s autonomous evaluative weight within the Greek value system.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
The kalo kagathoi are still a social class; arete still commends courage, and the agathos is still, among other things, the man who lavishes his material goods in the state’s interest.
Adkins argues that even after Aristotle’s ethical refinements, kalos kagathos retains its class-bound, competitive-excellence dimension rather than achieving a purely moral transformation.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
‘it is and will be finely said, that the beneficial is kalon, and the harmful is aischron’. The substitution of ‘beneficial’ for ‘good’ is important: Socrates is well aware that it is the alleged tension between the kalon and, specifically, the good-qua-beneficial that he needs to deny.
Hobbs identifies Socrates’ strategic move of collapsing the kalon into the beneficial as the key gesture by which Plato attempts to dissolve the tragic split between noble and advantageous action.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
‘neither could the good be kalon nor the kalon good, but each of them is different from the other’ (303b3–304a2). This and similar statements elsewhere in Plato on the relationship between the good and the kalon will be examined further.
Hobbs foregrounds the persistent Platonic anxiety that kalon and agathon may be irreducibly distinct, a tension Socrates must overcome to render the heroic ideal psychologically coherent.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis
the unification of the two Forms — however achieved — is a powerful response to Achilles’ assumption that there are painful choices to be made between the noble and the personally beneficial.
Hobbs reads the Platonic unification of the Form of the Good and the Form of Beauty as a direct philosophical counter to the Homeric heroic code’s tragic dilemma between kalon and self-interest.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting
the agathos or kalos kdgathos, the ‘gentleman,’ promises no better: one ‘ought’ in one’s own interest to pursue a course of action which is likely to lead to one’s success.
Adkins shows that the kalos kagathos ideal ultimately grounds obligation in self-interest rather than categorical duty, exposing the ethical limits of the Greek value-cluster.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
by saying ‘if something kalon is achieved with much labour’ he implies that the true kalon is that which results from toil and effort in war or in the games.
Adkins traces how Pindar’s usage restricts the kalon to competitive, agonistic achievement, linking beauty of action to the masculine spheres of war and athletic contest.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
it is hinted that it is kalon for the powerful man to be just to his inferiors — particularly when he is in a position to dispense that justice — not that justice is kalon per se.
Adkins demonstrates that even where kalon appears linked to justice in Pindar and Aeschylus, the connection remains contingent and positional rather than intrinsic, marking a transitional stage in the moral semantics of the term.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Before discussing aischron and kalon, we must draw attention to an aspect of Greek moral thought and practice which is, from this point onwards, of great importance.
Adkins frames the aischron/kalon polarity as a structuring axis of Greek moral psychology, whose analysis is prerequisite to understanding how value terms infiltrate the ethical tradition.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Ou kalon, then, in Homer, since it is not used to decry failure, is not an equivalent of aischron either in usage or in emotive power.
Adkins establishes the Homeric semantic range of kalon as distinct from aischron, showing that the beautiful-noble compound lacks the force necessary to override the demands of competitive arete.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Perhaps, depth psychology has indeed been aesthetic, but in reverse: reversing the old pairings of the good and the beautiful by ‘reconstructing the gibbon,’ rather than Winckelmann’s Apollo Belvedere.
Hillman argues that depth psychology has practiced a negative aesthetics — privileging pathological ugliness over classical beauty — thereby inverting the kalon kagathon ideal without abandoning its aesthetic logic.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
Aphrodite gives an archetypal background to the philosophy of ‘eachness’ and the capacity of the heart to find ‘intimacy’ with each particular event in a pluralistic cosmos.
Hillman grounds the aesthetic perception of beauty in Aphrodite’s archetypal function, implicitly reformulating the classical kalon as a mode of particularized, heart-centered knowing rather than universal form.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992aside
he who ‘does well’ (eu prattonta) is blessed and happy, but this seems an illegitimate play on the ambivalence of eu prattein, which can mean both ‘do well for oneself, fare well’ and also ‘act well’, ‘act in a praiseworthy manner’.
Hobbs notes the semantic ambiguity of eu prattein as a site where the Platonic conflation of the good and the noble is achieved rhetorically rather than philosophically.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000aside
Though the above is certainly the justification for Aristotle’s standard of arete, and determines the form which that standard takes, Aristotle never states explicitly that this is the case.
Adkins observes that Aristotle’s implicit grounding of arete in political-functional necessity shapes his treatment of kalon without being argued for directly, revealing a structural tension in the Ethics.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960aside
arete will be the opposite of it, signifying in the first place ease of motion, then that the stream of the good soul is unimpeded, and has therefore the attribute of ever flowing without let or hindrance.
Plato’s etymological analysis in the Cratylus links arete to unimpeded motion of the soul, providing a functional-aesthetic analogue to the kalon kagathon ideal within a psychological register.
, Cratylus, -388aside