Question About Plato's Republic?

Actually, "absolute beauty" has slowly - perhaps erroneously - replaced his original treatise on understanding "beauty itself" or “archetypal beauty”, which he distills via ideas on forms.

Think of it this way: What constitutes "beautiful" (I prefer "perfection") sans any subjective evaluation?

Ask a million men what their archetypal woman looks like and you'll get a million different answers. However, abstracting "beauty" one level up, one can make the case of "absolute beauty" being the female *idea* and/or the female *form*.

Abstracting higher, one can argue the Idea of Man/Woman is an archetype. Some could go further by abstracting even higher into, say, a five-pointed star, with each point representing the extremeties of the human form.

Now, Plato asserts only the forms really exist, "for they are the 'causes'", but I disagree slightly. The "idea" is the cause, which must somehow be manifested into the physical world. This is what I would consider his "Universals"...not the actual physical form.

On a different note, can "ideal beauty" or "absolute beauty" cover formless constructs like "love", "whiteness", "solace" ? These "ideas" are really states or conditions, semantically speaking, which further complicate a semantic understanding of Platonic forms.

Hope this help...

Beauty is subjective, which is probably why it seems "to be vague metaphysical theistic mumbo jumbo" to you, although I don't know why you would try to make it theistic. What deity did Plato imply?

you must be a complete idiot