The beauty of a tree and classic philosophy

In his dialogue titled ‘The Symposium’ Plato claimed that all trees are imperfect copies of an ideal tree, which exists outside the realm of human perception. He observed that some trees are beautiful and some are not and tried to explain why it is so. He wasn’t very successful, though. The Ancients also found that the concept of beauty itself was impossible to define. Socrates often asked his audience to define beauty and always showed through reasoned argument, that that all proposed definitions lead to paradox or absurdity.