Philebus Notes 2

(Originally written July 16, 2018 in Book 17)

Philebus
Plato
(continued)

Socrates maintains that neither pleasure nor intelligence are identical with the good.

The good must be perfect, must be adequate and when one recognizes the good, one must desire it and go after it.

Socrates shows Protarchus that a life lived in the whole enjoyment of pleasure without intelligence would be impossible. Without intelligence one couldn't even judge that his life was pleasurable. It wouldn't be a human life, but a life of some beast.

Socrates and Protarchus also agree that a life of complete and perfect intelligence without pleasure (or even pain) would not be desireable either.

Since a life devoted to pleasure and a life devoted to intelligence both prove to be inadequate than neither intelligence nor pleasure can be the good.

Socrates points out that while pleasure and his own personal reasons are not the good; it might be that, "the tru, divine, reason, I fancy, is in rather a different position" (Plato, 35).

4 Classes of Existence:

1) Limitless - that which can be more or less, that which is becoming, that which contains a quality of "compared to such-and-such", i.e. a thing is hotter when it is compared to something. it continues on being hotter and hotter (or colder and colder) when compared.

2) The limited - that which posseses a quality of a fixed ratio or is equal to something else.

3) A mix of the limitless and the limited - this is the balance and perfection. By combining pitches in music we arrive at a harmony. "it is here that we find the source of fair weather and all other beautiful things" (Plato, 48).

Socrates uses the example of law and the wickedness of man. Socrates contends that the lawlessness and wickedness of man is due to the limitless nature of man's pleasure and his appetite for it. When Law and Order was instituted then limits were imposed. Thus the limitlessness and the limited were combined to produce balance. Socrates maintains against Philebus that rather than spoiling the capacity for pleasure this imposition of limitedness preserved man.

4) The thing that causes the mixture of the limited and unlimited. This is greather than the thing that is mixed because the caused always comes after the cause.

Socrates claims that mind and soul belong to the category 4, the cause of things.

Socrates points out pain must be discussed in any thought of pleasure. He places both pain and pleasure in the third, combined category.

He describes pain as a disturbance of harmony in any creature and pleasure as the occurrence when that harmony is restored. "When the natural state of a living organism, constituted, as I have maintained, of the unlimited and the limit, is destroyed and that destruction is pain; conversely, when such organisms return to their own true nature, this reversion is invariably pleasure" (Plato, 60).

Socrates argues that all desires come from the soul, not the body. Likewise pain and pleasure are in the soul, not the body.

Socrates points out that feeling a pleasure is on the same level of holding an opinion. Since opinion can be either true or false, pleasures can likewise be either true or false.

If a pleasure has rightness then it is a right pleasure. But if a pleasure has badness, it is a bad pleasure.

Socrates compares our souls to a book. When memories with attached feelings "write" on our souls what is true, then true opinions spring up in us. But when those memories and attached feelings are false, false opinions spring up in us.