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Plato on Pleasure, Intelligence and the Human Good: an Interpretation of the Philebus

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Plato on Pleasure, Intelligence and the Human Good: an Interpretation of the Philebus Plato on Pleasure, Intelligence and the Human Good: An Interpretation of the Philebus by Emily Fletcher A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics University of Toronto © Copyright by Emily Fletcher 2012 Plato on Pleasure, Intelligence and the Human Good: An Interpretation of the Philebus Emily Fletcher Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2012 Abstract The Philebus is devoted to the question what constitutes the good for a human being. Although Socrates initially favors a life of pure intelligence against the hedonist’s life of pure pleasure, he quickly concedes that some pleasures actually enhance the life of intelligence. In order to determine which pleasures deserve a place in the best life, Socrates undertakes a lengthy investigation into the nature of pleasure. Commentators have long been frustrated in their attempt to uncover a single, unified account that explains in a plausible way the extraordinary variety of pleasures analyzed in the dialogue. I argue that this search for a generic account of pleasure is misguided, because one of the main purposes of Socrates’ division of pleasure is to expose its essentially heterogeneous nature. Pleasures can be bodily or psychic, pure or mixed with pain, truth apt or not, healthy or diseased, and inherently measured or unmeasured, and there are no essential properties which all of these diverse phenomena share. The inclusion of some pleasures in the final ranking of the goods at the end of the Philebus represents a dramatic shift in Plato’s attitude towards certain pleasures, and so it is not surprising that many scholars misinterpret the force of this conclusion. Even in the Republic where the pleasures of reason are favorably compared to the pleasures of spirit and appetite, intellectual ii pleasures are judged to be more pleasant and real than other pleasures, but are nowhere judged to be better or praised as genuine goods. In the Philebus, not only are some pleasures unambiguously ranked among the highest goods, but Socrates gives no indication that these pleasures are good only in some qualified or extrinsic way. Instead, certain pleasures make their own positive contribution to the goodness of the best human life, making the mixed life more valuable and choiceworthy than the unmixed life of intelligence. iii Acknowledgments I could not have written this thesis without the advice and support of many people. Most of all I would like to thank my adviser Rachel Barney for her incredible guidance. She has a talent for spotting the most promising ideas, as well as the weaknesses, in my writing, and this thesis would not have been possible without her. A special thanks also to Jennifer Whiting, who served on my committee and invited me to present a paper on the Philebus at the workshop “Time and Consciousness in the Philebus and Related Texts,” which she organized in Toronto in March 2009. In preparation for this workshop, she also organized a year-long reading group on the Philebus. It was during this reading group that I first got hooked on the dialogue, and the paper I presented at the workshop contained the seeds of many of the central arguments contained in this thesis. I would also like to thank Brad Inwood, who has supported me in so many ways from the beginning of my graduate career. He has been a great example of the kind of scholar, teacher and mentor I would like to be. He also served on my thesis committee and always offered sage advice on matters both philosophical and mundane. I also extend my gratitude to my external examiner Verity Harte for her detailed report and challenging questions. I am especially grateful to her for forcing me to think about certain puzzles in a new light and for inspiring me to work on this material further. I would like to thank Victoria Wohl, who served as my internal examiner and also offered me much encouragement and support throughout my time in Toronto, both as a teacher and as the graduate coordinator. I also extend my most sincere thanks to Chris Bobonich, without whom I would never have embarked on this path in the first place. Many thanks to the faculty, staff and graduate students of the Classics and Philosophy Departments, and especially to the faculty and graduate students in the Collaborative Program in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. These supportive and stimulating communities have contributed much to the success and enjoyment of my PhD. I gratefully acknowledge the years of funding I received from the University of Toronto, as well as the teaching opportunities I had with both the Department of Classics and the Department of Philosophy. I would also like to thank the School of Graduate Studies for the crucial final year of support I needed to bring this thesis to completion. Lastly, I would like to thank all my family and friends for their love and encouragement. To my parents, Amy Clifton and Douglas Fletcher, who have always supported me in whatever I have undertaken. And a special thanks to my dear friends, Eran Tal, Kate Gibbons, Debra Adair, Lisa Hems, Margot Nikiforovna, Tera Perez, Yoad Rowner, Tanya Agnew, Marina Swales, Rade Sekulic, Ansley Pierce, Siobhan Searle, Rebecca George, Rebekah Hood, and Georgios Tsirigotis. iv Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: The Choice of Lives and the Nature of Pleasure………………………………...9 Section 1: Overview of the Choice of Lives Thought Experiment………………....10 Section 2: Pleasure and Consciousness……………………………………………..15 Section 3: The Value of Intelligence………………………………………………..19 Section 4: The Nature of Pleasure…………………………………………………..24 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..28 Chapter 2: The Metaphysical Framework…………………………………………………..29 Section 1: Outline of the Fourfold Division………………………………………...30 Section 2: The Two Classes of Pleasure…………………………………………….36 Section 3: The Relationship between the Body and the Soul……………………….48 Section 4: The Role of Human and Cosmic Νοῦς…………………………………..56 Section 5: The Fourfold Division and the Good Life……………………………….58 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..61 Chapter 3: Pleasure and Αἴσθησις …………………………………………………………..62 Section 1: The General Account of Αἴσθησις in Plato’s Late Dialogues…………...64 Section 2: Bodily Pleasure and Pain and Mean-State Αἴσθησις…………………….68 Section 3: Like-to-Like Αἴσθησις and Perceiving External Objects………………..76 Section 4: Pure Pleasures in the Philebus and the Timaeus………………………...91 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..98 v Chapter 4: Pleasure and Φρόνησις …………………………………………………………..100 Section 1: Memory and Recollection………………………………………………..102 Section 2: Desire and Expectation…………………………………………………..108 Section 3: Pleasure and Judgment…………………………………………………...114 Section 4: Pleasure, Knowledge and Virtue………………………………………....126 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...134 Chapter 5: Pleasure and the Good Life………………………………………………………135 Section 1: Challenging the Assumption that Pleasure is a Natural Kind………….....138 Section 2: The Scope of the Genesis Argument……………………………………...147 Section 3: The Necessity of Bodily Pleasure in the Good Life………………………153 Section 4: The Value of Pure Pleasure in the Good Life……………………………..157 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………....164 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………....165 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….168 vi 1 Introduction The Philebus is not an easy dialogue. For one thing, it contains lengthy and obscure discussions of philosophical methodology and metaphysics that have no clear relevance to the ostensible topic of the dialogue, which is the relative contribution of pleasure and intelligence to the best human life.1 Although a large portion of the contemporary scholarship on the Philebus focuses on these discussions,2 which Frede (1993) refers to as a kind of “purgatory” (xiii), it is rare to find even two interpretations which are in even general agreement. Perhaps as a result of the dialogue’s apparent lack of unity and coherence, most of the contemporary scholarship on the Philebus focuses on individual passages in isolation from the text as a whole. For example, a disproportionately large amount of secondary literature attempts to explain Socrates’ notorious claim that pleasures, like judgments, can be false. 3 The study of the Philebus has been aided by a number of good commentaries, 4 but there are very few book length interpretations of the dialogue that attempt to give a unified reading of how all of the pieces of the dialogue fit together. 5 The payoff for such a reading would be substantial, for the Philebus presents some of Plato’s most considered views about crucial issues, such as the relationship between the soul and the body and the nature of the cosmos and a human being’s place in it. In this thesis, I do not aim directly at providing such a comprehensive reading, which would be an ambitious undertaking considering the complexity of the dialogue and the secondary literature it has inspired. Instead, I focus on the analysis and evaluation of pleasure in the dialogue, and in particular the relationship between pleasure and other forms of cognition. However, as will 1 Guthrie (1978) complains that “at places in the Philebus the threads get bewilderingly entangled” and that Plato’s “language seems almost intentionally mystifying” (223). Its choppy character was recognized in antiquity,
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