Philebus

Summary

The Philebus begins in the middle of an argument. Philebus, a young hedonist who worships pleasure as the goddess Aphrodite, has grown tired of defending his claim that enjoyment and delight are the good for every living creature, and hands the position to his friend Protarchus. Socrates maintains that wisdom, intelligence, memory, right opinion and true reasoning are better than pleasure for all who can share in them. Before deciding between the two, he insists on a method: pleasure and knowledge are each one and many, and a careful thinker must count the kinds between the unity and the unlimited multitude. This method, he says, was tossed down to mortals by some new Prometheus. The first test is a thought experiment. Would Protarchus choose a life of intense pleasure with no mind, memory or calculation? Without memory he would not know he had been pleased; his life would be that of an oyster. Nor would anyone choose pure thought without pleasure. The good life must be a mixture, and the remaining question is which element deserves the credit for its goodness. To answer it Socrates divides all that exists into four kinds: the unlimited, which admits more and less; limit, which brings number and measure; the mixture of the two; and the cause of mixing, which he identifies with mind, the king of heaven and earth. Pleasure belongs with the unlimited, intelligence with the cause. The long central section examines pleasure itself. Bodily pain is the dissolution of a living creature's natural harmony and pleasure its restoration, as eating answers hunger and drinking thirst. Desire, however, cannot belong to the body alone, since a thirsty man reaches toward a filling he knows only through memory, so desire is of the soul. Pleasures can then be false: the soul is like a book in which a scribe writes opinions and a painter illustrates them, and anticipatory pleasures may depict things that will never be. Pleasures can be mixed with pain, as in scratching an itch, in the craving of fever, in the bittersweet emotions of anger and grief, and in the malice that laughs at a friend's self-ignorance at a comedy. Only a few pleasures are pure: those of clear colours, shapes, tones and smells, and of learning. Knowledge too is sorted, from the rough arts of guessing to exact sciences and to dialectic, the purest. Then Socrates and Protarchus, as cup-bearers, mix a drink from the honey of pleasure and the sober water of wisdom, admitting every kind of knowledge but only the true and harmless pleasures. At the vestibule of the good they find it under three aspects, beauty, proportion and truth, and rank the goods: measure first, proportion and beauty second, mind and wisdom third, sciences and right opinions fourth, pure pleasures fifth. For students the dialogue offers a demanding account of ordered enjoyment: pleasure is real and can be good, but it must be judged and measured by something higher than itself.

Plot or Argument

• Philebus withdraws, Protarchus takes the field (11a-14b)

  Socrates restates the two positions: Philebus' claim that pleasure is the good of all creatures and his own that wisdom and its kin are better. Philebus, who names his goddess Aphrodite, retires; Protarchus agrees to argue, and Socrates warns that pleasures differ from each other as much as colours and figures do.

• The one and the many and the gift of a new Prometheus (14c-18d)

  Socrates explains the method of counting the definite number of kinds between one and the unlimited, illustrated by vowels and consonants and musical intervals, and contrasts it with eristic juggling of one and many that excites the young.

• The oyster and the mixed life (18d-23b)

  A life of pleasure without mind or memory would be an oyster's; a life of mind without pleasure is not desirable for humans either. Neither is sufficient or perfect, so the good life is a mixture, and the contest is now for second prize: which ingredient makes the mixture good.

• The four kinds and mind as cause (23c-31b)

  All things fall under the unlimited, limit, the mixture of both and the cause of mixture. Health, music, temperate seasons and beauty arise when limit masters the unlimited. Mind, which orders the universe as it orders our bodies and heals disease, is the cause; pleasure is of the unlimited kind.

• Pleasure, pain, memory and desire (31b-36c)

  Pain is the dissolution of an animal's natural harmony and pleasure its restoration. Socrates analyses perception, memory and recollection, and shows that the thirsty man's desire for filling depends on memory, so all desire belongs to the soul.

• False pleasures: the scribe and the painter (36c-44a)

  Opinions can be true or false, and so can pleasures. A scribe in the soul writes judgments and a painter illustrates them; the hopes of the wicked are false pictures, and pleasures can be inflated when set beside nearby pains, as distance distorts size.

• Mixed pleasures of body and soul (44a-50e)

  Using the austere 'enemies of Philebus' as diviners, Socrates looks at the most intense pleasures, found in disease and wantonness rather than health and temperance: itching relieved by scratching, fevered thirst, frenzied delight. The soul's own mixtures include anger, longing and grief, and the malicious pleasure we take in the self-ignorance of friends at comedy.

• Pure pleasures and the grades of knowledge (50e-59d)

  Pure pleasures come from clear colours, beautiful shapes, smooth tones, some smells and learning; a little pure white is whiter than much mixed. Knowledge is graded from music and medicine, which rely on guesswork, to carpentry and arithmetic, and up to dialectic, which studies what always is.

• The mixing bowl and the ranking of goods (59d-67b)

  From the fountains of honey and water the speakers admit all knowledge but only true, pure and healthy pleasures. At the vestibule of the good they identify beauty, proportion and truth, and award the prizes: measure, proportion, mind, the sciences, and pure pleasures fifth.

Characters

• Socrates, leader of the inquiry

  Here a patient and systematic teacher rather than an ironist; this is the only one of Plato's late dialogues in which he leads the conversation from start to finish.

• Protarchus, young respondent

  Son of Callias, earnest and willing, who takes over Philebus' cause, presses Socrates to keep his promises, and gradually comes to accept the ranking of goods.

• Philebus, hedonist

  A beautiful youth devoted to pleasure, who speaks rarely, refuses to compromise and is left at the end outvoted but not converted.

Lessons

• The oyster's life is not a human life

  Socrates' thought experiment shows that pleasure without memory, knowledge or foresight cannot even be enjoyed as ours. Human happiness requires a mind that remembers, judges and hopes; the dialogue therefore refuses both the pure hedonist and the bloodless intellectual.

  • Why does Protarchus reject the life of pleasure without mind once he considers it carefully?
  • Why does Socrates also reject a life of thought without any pleasure?
  • What would it mean for a person to live more like an oyster in today's world of constant stimulation?

• Measure as the mark of every good mixture

  Health, music, temperate seasons and beauty all appear when limit governs the unlimited. The Philebus teaches students to look for proportion as the sign of goodness, a theme that classical and Christian writers alike connected with the order of creation.

  • Name the four kinds Socrates distinguishes and give an example of each from the text.
  • Why does pleasure belong to the unlimited kind?
  • Where in music, sport or friendship have you seen that 'more' is not always better?

• False pleasures and the painter in the soul

  Pleasure can be false because it rests on judgments, and the soul writes and paints pictures of what it expects. Students can examine how anticipation, imagination and comparison distort enjoyment, and why disciplining the imagination is part of temperance.

  • Explain Socrates' image of the scribe and the painter within us.
  • How can a pleasure of hope be false even if the feeling is real?
  • What 'pictures' do advertisements or social media paint in the soul, and how could they be tested?

• The cruelty hidden in laughter

  Socrates analyses the pleasure of comedy as a mixture of delight and envy at the self-ignorance of friends who think themselves richer, handsomer or wiser than they are. The passage is an early and searching account of malice in humour and of self-knowledge as the antidote.

  • According to Socrates, what three forms of self-ignorance make a person ridiculous?
  • Why does he call envy an unrighteous pleasure as well as a pain?
  • When is laughing at others a fault, and when is it innocent? Use the text to support your view.

• Pleasure ranks fifth, but it is not excluded

  The final mixing admits true and pure pleasures and keeps out those that bring madness and folly. The ranking places measure, beauty and mind above pleasure without despising it, offering a model of ordered love that students can compare with Augustine's teaching that goods must be loved in their right order.

  • Which pleasures are admitted to the mixture, and which are rejected? Why?
  • What does Socrates mean by the 'vestibule of the habitation of the good'?
  • Is placing pleasure fifth a demotion or a rescue of pleasure? Argue from the dialogue.

Context

The Philebus belongs to a lively fourth-century debate about pleasure. Aristippus of Cyrene and his followers made pleasure the end of life; Eudoxus of Cnidus, a mathematician associated with Plato's Academy, argued that pleasure is the good because all creatures pursue it; and Speusippus, Plato's nephew and successor, is often identified with the austere 'enemies of Philebus' who denied pleasure was anything but relief from pain. These identifications are scholarly conjectures, since the dialogue names none of them. Philebus and Protarchus themselves are otherwise unknown and may be fictional.

Composition

The dialogue is generally counted among Plato's last works on grounds of style, perhaps from the 350s BC, though no external date exists. It has no narrative frame and no fixed setting. The library's text is Benjamin Jowett's translation (3rd ed., 1892), Project Gutenberg #1744, preceded by Jowett's introduction; Stephanus numbers cited here are not printed in that text and are approximate.

Reception

Aristotle's treatments of pleasure in Nicomachean Ethics VII and X engage arguments found in the Philebus and in the Academy debate behind it. Neoplatonist commentators, including Damascius, lectured on it, and Marsilio Ficino wrote a Renaissance commentary. Modern interest has focused on its theory of false pleasures and its late metaphysics of limit and the unlimited. The work was included in the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 6.

Comparisons

• The Nicomachean Ethics

  Aristotle in Books VII and X disputes the Philebus' view of pleasure as a process of restoration, arguing instead that pleasure completes an unimpeded activity, while agreeing that some pleasures are better than others.

• The Republic

  Republic IX argues that the philosopher's pleasures are truer and purer than those of the tyrant and describes pleasures as fillings; the Philebus works out that sketch into a full classification of false, mixed and pure pleasures.

• On Happiness: Letter to Menoeceus and Principal Doctrines

  Epicurus later made pleasure the goal but defined its highest form as the absence of pain, close to the view of the 'enemies of Philebus' that Socrates treats as one-sided.

• Utilitarianism

  Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures, judged by those who have known both, echoes the Philebus' ranking of pure pleasures of learning over intense bodily ones, though Mill keeps pleasure as the final standard where Plato puts measure above it.

• Timaeus

  The Timaeus' divine craftsman imposing number and proportion on disorder is a cosmic version of the Philebus' fourth kind, mind as the cause that brings limit to the unlimited.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The Philebus contains one of the earliest systematic accounts of pleasure and pain in physiological terms: pain as the dissolution of a creature's natural harmony, pleasure as its restoration, with hunger, thirst, heat and cold as examples. It argues that desire depends on memory and so belongs to the soul rather than the body, and it studies the intensified cravings of fever, the mixed sensation of itching and scratching, and the frenzy of excess. Mind is described as the cause that orders bodies and heals disease. Medicine itself appears as a conjectural art below the exact sciences. Readers interested in craving, reward and the psychology of anticipation will find suggestive parallels, but these are modern analogies; Plato's categories are philosophical and Hippocratic, not clinical.

• Stephanus 25e-26b

  Right combination of limit and unlimited produces health in disease and harmony in music; health is listed among the goods that arise from measure.

  Ancient Medicine Mind Body
• Stephanus 30a-b

  The fourth kind, cause or mind, gives bodies souls and is responsible for self-management and the art of healing disease.

  Philosophy AS Therapy Ancient Medicine
• Stephanus 31d-32b

  Pain as dissolution of natural harmony and pleasure as its restoration; hunger and thirst as emptying, eating and drinking as filling; heat and cold as unnatural separation and condensation.

  Pain Starvation Nutrition Mind Body
• Stephanus 34c-35d

  Analysis of thirst as desire for replenishment; since the body is empty, only memory can reach toward filling, so desire belongs to the soul.

  Mind Body Starvation Nutrition
• Stephanus 44b-45e

  The 'enemies of Philebus', said to be skilled in natural science, deny pleasure exists; Socrates notes that the feverish feel thirst and cold more intensely and that the greatest pleasures are found in disease and wantonness.

  Fever Infection Mind Body
• Stephanus 46a-47b

  Itching relieved by scratching, and inner burning treated by fire and cold, as examples of mixed pleasure-pain; excessive pleasure makes a man gasp, change colour and cry out.

  Pain Ancient Medicine
• Stephanus 55e-56b

  Medicine, with music, farming and navigation, is classed among arts that rely on conjecture and practised guesswork rather than exact measurement.

  Physicians Doctors Ancient Medicine

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Philebus says almost nothing. Write the conversation he has with Protarchus the next day, in which he defends pleasure in his own voice and Protarchus answers with the oyster and the mixing bowl.

• Essay

  Explain the final ranking of goods and argue whether Socrates is right to place measure above mind and pleasure fifth.

• Classroom

  Make two columns, pure pleasures and mixed pleasures, using the dialogue's examples. Then add three examples from your own week to each column and defend your choices.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem on the two fountains, honey and water, in which the speaker learns to mix them in the right proportion.

Further Reading

• Plato: Philebus, Dorothea Frede

  Translation with a substantial introduction (Hackett).

• Plato: Philebus, J. C. B. Gosling

  Translation with philosophical notes (Clarendon Plato Series).

• Plato's Examination of Pleasure, R. Hackforth

  Translation of the Philebus with introduction and commentary.

• The Greeks on Pleasure, J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor

  Survey of Greek theories of pleasure that places the Philebus in its Academic context.

• Nicomachean Ethics, Books VII and X, Aristotle

  Aristotle's two discussions of pleasure, partly in reply to the Philebus.