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PLATO'S PHAEDO: ARE THE PHILOSOPHERS’ PLEASURES OF LEARNING PURE PLEASURES?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2020

Georgia Mouroutsou
Georgia Mouroutsou*
Affiliation:
King's University College and Western University
*
gmourout@uwo.ca
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Extract

Though Plato's Phaedo does not focus on pleasure, some considerable talk on pleasure takes place in it. Socrates argues for the soul's immortality and, while doing so, hopes to highlight to his companions how important it is to take care of our soul by focussing on the intellect and by neglecting the bodily realm as far as is possible in this life. Doing philosophy, so his argument goes, is something like dying, if we grant that death is the separation of the soul from the body and notice that genuine philosophers wish nothing else than to be detached from the bodily realm. For indulging into bodily pleasures has detrimental consequences on the soul, impeding the search of truth and distorting reality, and so philosophers should undertake to purify themselves from all bodily concerns and gratifications and love the objects of learning and knowledge without deviation and distraction. On the contrary, ordinary people fall for the bodily realm as the only real domain that should therefore be of priority and of their earnest concern.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , December 2019 , pp. 566 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2020

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Footnotes

This is a substantially revised version of a paper I aired at the Plato Colloquium at Western University Canada (March 2016) and further developed and presented at the International Plato Society Conference at Brasília (July 2016) and at Atelier V, under the aegis of Études Platoniciennes in Paris (June 2017). I am thankful to all discussants, and especially to Luc Brisson, Devin Henry, Rusty Jones, Arnaud Macé, Olivier Renaut, Ravi Sharma, David Sedley and John Thorp, and also to Nicholas Smith for written comments and Cecilia Li for a discussion of the revised paper. I am indebted to the anonymous referee for a most helpful report. I am responsible for any remaining errors. All translations are mine.

References

2 The passages on the critique of bodily pleasure that culminates in a critique of the entire bodily realm are 64c4–67b6 and 80c2–84b8.

3 The critique of their hedonism takes place in the passage immediately following 67b7–69e5.

4 114d8–115a2. Socrates does not say that one should aim at the pleasures of learning themselves as a kind of reward, which would make one a hedonist, be it of a subtle kind. That one should study these pleasures can mean nothing else but that one should be serious about (σπουδάζειν is the verb used) and engaged with the objects that cause these pleasures.

5 See 65c6, 83c5, 83d3 and 84a4. Each time pleasures are coupled with pains in this dialogue, they are bodily and experienced through the body. No argument is given or implied ad loc. that the body has always pleasures mixed with pain or that only the body has them. Though pain is not explicated in the case of intellectual endeavours, I will show that it emerges.

6 See Warren, J., ‘Plato on the pleasures and pains of knowing’, OSAPh 39 (2010), 1–32Google Scholar: he elegantly resolves the discrepancy between the philosopher's life as the most pleasant life in Republic Book 9 and the intellectual pains that are included in such a life.

7 Gosling, J.C.B. and Taylor, C.C.W., The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford, 1982), 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The hedonic calculus (Phd. 68c–69c) has been hotly debated, in its comparison to that of the Protagoras. See R. Weiss's critique of Gosling and Taylor (n. 7), 83–95, in her ‘The hedonic calculus in the Protagoras and the Phaedo’, JHPh 27 (1989), 511–29, and Gosling and Taylor's reply and modification of their initial thesis in their article ‘The hedonic calculus in the Protagoras and the Phaedo: a reply’, JHPh 28 (1990), 115–16. They answer that they have been representing the view that the Phaedo is compatible with hedonism.

9 Olympiodorus (Commentary on the Phaedo 3.5.1–13) and Damascius (Lectures on the Phaedo 1.69.6–9) belong to the Platonists who overlook the mention of pleasures of learning (Phd. 114d–115a) and repudiate bodily pleasures because of their objects.

10 D. Russell, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford, 2005) accommodates both the rejection of bodily pleasures and the promotion of intellectual pleasures without opting for an ascetic or a hedonistic view: pleasure is a conditional good, neither good nor bad in itself, and its goodness depends on the way in which intelligence incorporates it in the entire life. Despite my sympathy to Russell's stress of attitude, the objects of pleasure influence the evaluation of their pleasures, which Russell sidelines. The view that all reality lies in the sensible world arises from being only concerned with bodily pleasures. It is the object of these pleasures, though, and the fact that we do not deal with this object in a detached manner but make it the only reality we dwell on, that cause the inappropriate attitude to the sensible things. Therefore, the object of pleasure and the intercourse with it seem to me to be what is primary—as what causes the attitude—in this context, and not the attitude.

11 Socrates speaks of cleansing the city (καθαρεύειν, 58b5) and purifying of wrongdoings by penalties in the afterlife (καθαιρόμενοι, 113d7); καθαρῶς accompanies verbs that mean to attain knowledge (66d8, 66e5, 68b4). Socrates defines purification as soul's separation from the body (κάθαρσις, 67c5; see 67b5: καθαρεύωμεν ἀπ᾽αὐτοῦ; 69b–c refers to freedom from hedonistic calculations). Sometimes the philosophers, their souls or their minds are characterized as purified (67c3, 69c6, 114c1; for impure souls, see 81b1); moreover, the eternal beings or the ‘place’ to which they belong are called pure (79d2, 80d6) but also earth, stones, ether and wet mud in the final myth (109b7, 110c2, 110e3, 111b6, 111d8).

12 The single instance of κρᾶσις of pleasure and pain (59a) is not sufficient evidence against the above observation. For Plato speaks of mixture instead (μῖξις) in the Philebus, because κρᾶσις is a combination of two or more elements that acquire a completely new nature in their indissoluble connection.

13 Warren (n. 6) offers an insightful analysis of the two conditions under which a lack of knowledge might be painful: a) reflection upon the lack of knowledge and b) recognition of lacking knowledge as needed. He is not interested in discussing what kind of pain in particular makes the pleasure of learning impure. For both conditions might be fulfilled and therefore pain must and does arise: none the less, the existence of pain does not suffice in itself to threaten the purity of pleasures of learning. In the above lines, I am concerned with the kind of pains that jeopardize the purity of pure pleasures and make them impure. The existence of intellectual pain is not sufficient to threaten the pure pleasures of learning and make them impure, because it does not affect their own nature.

14 Phlb. 51e7–52a3. See my analysis of those pure pleasures ‘Placing pure pleasures beyond the chain of hunger: Plato's quest for paradigmatic pleasures in the Philebus’, in Jirsa, J., Karfík, F. and Špinka, Š. (edd.), Plato's Philebus (Prague, 2016), 130–56Google Scholar, especially 136–40.

15 For this I would have to answer the question why bodily pleasures should be avoided according to 64c–69e, 80c–82d and 82d–84b. The explanation culminates in 83c5–8, namely the view that the bodily realm is the only reality is ‘the greatest and worst evil of all’. Two conclusions will follow for the Phaedo: first, the dialogue does not condemn all pleasures, because not all pleasures are bodily pleasures; second, there is no space left for good (or pure) pleasures related in any way to bodily processes, in contrast to the pure pleasures of sensation of the Republic and the Philebus.

16 Plato's project on pleasure concerns both critique of hedonism and critique of pleasure. Though dialogues such as the Phaedo and the Gorgias admittedly offer more on Plato's critique of different types of hedonism than on his critical analysis of pleasure, we can also draw conclusions about the latter aspect of the Platonic project.

17 Crucial topics are frequently introduced at the beginning of Platonic dialogues. That said, we should not overstrain our interpretation by expecting initial statements to be more than hints at what comes up later and even less the philosopher's last word. Given that the dialogue does not analyse bodily pleasures, we should be treading carefully. Gosling and Taylor (n. 7), 86 are right on this.

18 Phd. 60b3–c7.

19 This is confirmed by further reference in 64d3. What people call pleasure is what appears to be pleasure to them: consider φαίνεσθαι in 60c7 and my comments in the main text, which is not real pleasure. Τὸ καλούμενον or τὸ λεγόμενον sometimes neutrally means ‘what is called’ and sometimes attains the undertone of negative evaluation and means ‘the so-called’. In 60b4 and 64d3 we have the latter meaning and the underpinning opposition is between appearance and reality. Although the Phaedo does not analyse bodily pleasures as one type of pleasure among the ones mixed with pain, it shares this understanding of bodily pleasures as mixed with pain with the Philebus, as I hope to show.

20 For a full articulation of the principle of non-contradiction, if compared with the Republic's (see 436b), we would need not only the factor of the same time but also the factors of the same place (or the same part in which something happens), the same respect and the reference to the same thing.

21 Phd. 59a1–7.

22 Socrates entertains the possibility of suchlike simultaneous pain and pleasure in Grg. 496c–497d, in which he argues against the Calliclean identification of pleasure with the good and pain with the bad respectively. This is no contradiction to the Phaedo passage if we read it in my way. I am thankful to Devin Henry and Nicholas Smith for pressing me on the question of compatibility.

23 σχεδόν τι is a qualification (see Phd. 59a8). It is not always that pain follows pleasure and vice versa but pretty much always. I agree with the translations by Ebert, T., Platon: Phaidon (Göttingen, 2004)Google Scholar (‘so gut wie immer gezwungen …’), Fowler, H.N., Plato with an English Translation: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar (‘generally obliged to’), Hackforth, R., Plato's Phaedo (New York, 1952)Google Scholar (‘practically compelled to …’). Gallop, D., Plato: Phaedo (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar, does not capture this detail in his translation, I think: ‘always pretty well bound to …’. Rowe, C., Plato: Phaedo (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, 117 comments helpfully and spot–on.

24 Socrates does not refer to the opposites of pleasure and pain in the first argument for the soul's immortality, which would show, one might think, that pain follows pleasure and pleasure follows pain. But another option is also possible: instead of speaking of the process from the pleasant to the painful and the other way around, Socrates could have spoken of a transition from the more pleasant to the more painful and vice versa, using comparatives, and he could have implicitly accommodated the intermediate state between pain and pleasure, as in the cases of the smaller and the larger (70e7), the stronger and the weaker (71a3–4), and the more just and the less just (71a6).

25 Having put the Socratic claims into the right perspective, I do not read any gaps between the lines and I am left with no mystery in Socrates’ words, pace Gallop (n. 23), 77: ‘the alleged inseparability of pleasure from pain seems a curious moral for Socrates to draw from the state of his leg.’ Readings like Gallop's do no justice to how Plato writes the introductory passages. Also consider D. Frede's critical comments of Gallop's interpretation in her Platons Phaidon (Darmstadt, 1999), 13 n. 8.

26 Socrates distinguishes between the majority of people and philosophers, and makes clear at the very beginning that he and his fellows will be among themselves (πρὸς ἡμᾶς) and the majority of people who are not characterized by the love of learning are excluded (64b7–c3). Therefore, all present interlocutors are philosophers irrespectively of where they stand with respect to knowledge.

27 These are the appropriate passages on which to base positive claims for the philosophers’ attitude to pleasure, whereas it is methodologically inappropriate to exclusively focus on the sections that present the hedonistic calculus that can offer nothing but thin evidence for any positive claims about any alleged openness of the philosophers’ undertaking as in a way hedonistic. Would Plato embrace any kind of hedonism, the philosophers would delve into their measuring business of comparing pains and pleasures—the pain of the disappointment and the anticipatory pleasure of future progress—but there is not a single trace of such a hedonistic comparison in Socrates’ autobiography and his exchange with his students. Learning is pleasant to the philosopher, because learning is pleasant in its own nature.

28 Phd. 78a10–b1.

29 There are more kinds of pleasure beyond the bodily and the intellectual ones in the Phaedo. His pleasures include the anticipatory emotional pleasure based on his hope regarding the afterlife (68a–b). After the completion of the proofs, Simmias says twice that he would pleasantly listen to his account of the afterlife (108d3, 110b4). The real pleasures of learning, though, would accompany a long-winded investigation into the truth of the final myth.

30 For the three aspects of dialectic and any craft in general (μανθάνειν, σκοπεῖν, διδάσκειν), see Phlb. 17.

31 φιλόσοφοι and φιλομαθεῖς are two terms that Socrates uses interchangeably in his speech of defence in the Phaedo.

32 ‘For I was made so intensely blind by this investigation even to what I clearly knew before, as it seemed to me and others, that I unlearned even what I thought I knew before, about many other things and in particular about why human beings grow’ (96c3–7).

33 See Resp. 484c (οἱ τοῦ ὄντος ἑκάστου ἐστερημένοι τῆς γνώσεως) and 508c–d for the comparison of turning the eyes to darkness, which will make them deem, and turning the focus of the soul to the dark realm of becoming, which will result in its being deem and easily changing its judgements.

34 See Resp. 506c.

35 Phdr. 270d–e. Consider the comparison of the instability of opinions to the statues of Daedalus in Euthphr. 11b–c and 15b–c, and Meno 97d–e, and furthermore the passage that clearly speaks of pleasure taken in being defeated, namely Grg. 458a–b. An anonymous referee pointed to the important distinction between a) having an argument for your view defeated, but you have others up your sleeve, and b) having your view defeated and you would not know how to save it. Socrates in the Phaedo is in the former state, but it would be difficult to see why a philosopher would take pleasure in b) and not instead be fretting and distressed. The way in which I answer the referee's question is that b) is complex. There is a learning that one does not really know what he thought one knew, which will always be pleasant to a lover of learning, such as Socrates (see the above passage in the Gorgias and the explanation in the Meno), and a knowing that one does not (yet) know that is painful. What will further distinguish the philosopher from a non-philosopher will be how the former deals with the pain so that it does not block the further intellectual investigation. See later in the main text.

36 This happens paradigmatically in the sun analogy in the Republic (506b–509b).

37 On the sight's impairment for both transitions, see Resp. 516e–517a. The pain involved here is not merely on the level of epistemology. For in the allegory of the cave, one turns from one world, in which one has lived, which one has taken for real, and to which one has been accustomed, to another.

38 Consider the allegory of the cave, especially at 515c, 515e (ἀλγεῖν, ὀδυνᾶσθαι) and 516e (ἀμβλυώττειν), 518a6–7.

39 The soul can be purified and rekindled through the pursuit of astronomy, or be damaged and blinded if getting engaged with other subjects. Compare the second occurrence of becoming blind, Phd. 99e, when Socrates begins to narrate his second voyage. He speaks of the lurking danger that his soul would be blinded if relying only on its senses. For it would become deprived of the only reality, namely the reality of the forms.

40 For the common nature of this first series of puzzles in Phd. 96a–97b and the Presocratic materialistic solutions that did not leave Socrates content, see Menn, S., ‘On Socrates’ first objections to the physicists (Phaedo 95E8–97B7)’, OSAPh 38 (2010), 37–68Google Scholar.

41 He had thought that addition of flesh to flesh explains the increase in the human being's volume, but then was caught up in puzzles about addition and division and lost his trust in the initial explanations: for he wondered, for instance, whether it is the addition of the two things or rather the one of the things that is added or being added that makes them two, and whether opposite causes (addition of two things and division of one) can bring about the same result (being two).

42 Beforehand Socrates had taken for granted he knew why human beings grow but he then unlearned what he knew or, as he corrects, what he had thought he knew (96c).

43 Meno 84b–c is the passage that shows beautifully what the lover of learning is aware of, namely that the transition from double to simple ignorance is necessary in order to desire to learn.

44 τιν' ἄλλον τρόπον αὐτὸς εἰκῇ φύρω (97b6–7).

45 ἐπεκδιηγήσεσθαι τὴν αἰτίαν καὶ τὴν ἀνάγκην (Phd. 97e1–2): consider the repeated occurrence of that verb in the very next lines (97e3–4 and 98b3), which highlights that the explanatory account needed is a story to be narrated about how intelligence has ordered everything in the best possible way, postponed to the Timaeus.

46 98b4–7.

47 99c6–d2.

48 The two conditions for the emergence of pain, as Warren (n. 6) describes them based on Protarchus’ contribution in the Phlb. 52a–b, are fulfilled.

49 To draw from the pleasures of anticipation of the Philebus would complicate things unnecessarily. And I think that we should not do so, because those pleasures are confined to bodily processes of disintegration and restoration and do not provide the model for all anticipatory pleasures, including the pleasures of attaining knowledge.

50 The line of argument does not rest on whether Socrates introduces heavy-duty forms in the second voyage or not, a point that is debated in research.

51 Except for in the commentaries of the Phaedo, researchers have not focussed on the misology passage. Exceptions are Woolf, R., ‘Misology and truth’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium for Ancient Philosophy 23 (2007), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Miller, T., ‘Socrates’ warning against misology’, Phronesis 60 (2015), 145–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Woolf begins with the passage on misology to ask about the value of truth the philosopher strives for. Against the communis opinio, Miller detects Plato's subtle sympathy to the misologists as proto-sceptics. For my part, I focus on how Socrates cured his companions of their depression.

52 Socrates asks Cebes what troubles him (literally what breaks him in pieces: τί ἦν τὸ σὲ αὖ θρᾶττον;). There is absolutely no doubt that the two objectors are in a state of pain.

53 88c1–7. Because ἀηδῶς διετέθημεν (88c1–2) means much more than an unpleasant state, as the sequence of 88c4–7 reveals, I translate it ‘fell into depression’.

54 Socrates’ reaction is characterized by pleasure and mildness, and not distress (88e1–2).

55 I take Socrates and Plato to consider the final argument as sufficiently proving the immortality of the soul, following Frede, D., ‘The final proof of the immortality of the soul in Plato's Phaedo 102a–107a’, Phronesis 23 (1978), 27–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sedley, D., ‘The Phaedo's final proof of immortality’, in Cornelli, G., Robinson, T.M. and Bravo, F. (edd.), Plato's Phaedo (Sankt Augustin, 2018), 212–22Google Scholar. Accordingly, the pleasure Socrates has is well rooted in his having attained the truth. If Socrates would not avail of a valid and sound argument, he would not express contentment, but would be in cognitive pain about this lack of knowledge, as Simmias and Cebes were and any lover of learning would be who does not yet possess knowledge. None the less, he would not be depressed and would try instead to alleviate or distract from the pain so as to further foster his enquiry and not give up.

56 See 89c11, 90d9, 91c3.

57 90c8–d7.

58 Miller (n. 51) is subtler than the text can bear when it comes to the evidence he wishes to find about Plato's sympathy to the ones engaged with ἀντιλογικοὶ λόγοι. Despite the reminiscence to the Heraclitean ‘flux’ view, it is not the sensible world that is in flux in 90c4–6: no mention is made of γένεσις / γιγνόμενα but of ὄντα. Therefore, the μόνοι in 90c2 cannot be implying Plato's agreement (so Miller [n. 51], 160). Plato simply repudiates the so-called wisdom (σοφώτατοι) they boast to possess and their lack of self-knowledge.

59 τῶν δὲ ὄντων τῆς ἀληθείας τε καὶ ἐπιστήμης στερηθείη (90d6–7).

60 If Socrates had considered it to be appropriate, he would have recommended fear of the disease as an evil that might arise in the future, and would have worked with an emotion against another emotion. See Phlb. 47e for fear as an emotion of the soul: a kind of pain that, under scrutiny, proves to be mixed with pleasure.

61 Though not labelled ‘dialectic’ in the interlude, the art of arguments can be no other than that. One clear indication is the opposition between the arguments made by the ones possessing that art and the ones who study contradictory arguments (90b9–c1). For whenever Plato illustrates his view about the nature of philosophy as dialectic, he always contrasts it to sophistry or eristics, both of which especially endanger the youth. Moreover, this is strongly confirmed by the later occurrence of the antilogikoi in contrast to philosophers: 101c9–102a1. For this opposition consider additional contexts—Resp. 537e–539d and Phlb. 15d–16a—as inappropriate method of dealing with unity and multiplicity in arguments, before the introduction of dialectic as the successful method (16b–19b). Thus I cannot agree with Miller that Plato sympathizes with the antilogicians.

62 The art of accounts and arguments is not an art of measuring pleasures aiming at the greatest possible pleasure and least possible pain. If Plato had wanted to opt for any openness toward hedonism in the Phaedo, he would have found the way to do so in the passages that positively propose how the philosopher behaves and learns. But he did not, as he was not a hedonist.

63 Woolf (n. 51), 8 writes about 91a3–91c5: ‘Socrates both advocates a disinterested pursuit of truth (as the mark of the philosopher) and at the same time admits that he might not be practising what he preaches. His partisanship threatens to get the better of him.’ I have not opted for the philosophers’ disinterestedness (as it is a love for wisdom and truth) but for the priority of the realist over the pragmatic concept of truth, and so I do not detect the tension that Woolf points to. Socrates might be interested in the victory, but it is truth's victory.

64 See n. 35 above.