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Plato the Hedonist? Plato, The Hedonist? by Brooks A. Sommerville A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto © Copyright by Brooks A. Sommerville 2014 Plato, The Hedonist? Brooks A. Sommerville Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2014 Abstract Most moral philosophers agree that a happy life involves pleasure in some way. Some go so far as to claim that pleasure alone is what makes a life happy or worthwhile. In either case, it seems that any complete account of a desirable life owes us an explanation as to what pleasure is. So, what is pleasure? As the history of moral philosophy attests, answering this question turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Although we all experience pleasures of various kinds, it is by no means clear that a unified account can cover all the things we take to be pleasant. This conceptual question about pleasure has clear implications for the distinct ethical question of pleasure’s value. In short, if we don’t know what pleasure is, then it isn’t at all clear why we should value it. Plato appreciates this. Pleasure’s place in the good life is one of Plato’s enduring ethical concerns, and so it should come as no surprise that he also undertakes to develop a unified account of pleasure. My aim in this dissertation is to argue that Plato arrives at a definitive answer as to what pleasure is, and that this helps us to understand his considered view as to pleasure’s role in the happy life. Specifically, Plato develops an account of pleasure as a species of intentional attitude, and that this supports a particular answer to the question of pleasure’s ii Page ii value: while Plato is not a hedonist, he holds rather that pleasure reliably tracks the good, such that the life containing the most pleasure is in fact the happiest life, albeit not because it is the pleasantest life. So while Plato clearly takes the view that certain pleasures lead us astray, he also holds that the wise pursuit of pleasure reliably hits upon the best life. iii Page iii Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………ii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iv Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: The Protagoras………………………………………………………………………22 Section 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………...22 Section 2: Rival Interpretations of the Akrasia Argument……………………………….26 Section 3: Hedonism in the Argument’s Negative Stage?.................................................41 Section 4: Hedonism in the Argument’s Positive Stage?..................................................53 Section 5: Conclusions…………………………………………………………………...58 Chapter 2: Gorgias……………………………………………………………………………….59 Section 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………...59 Section 2: Calliclean Hedonism………………………………………………………….64 Section 3: The Image of the Jars…………………………………………………………72 Section 4: Struggle vs. Homeostasis……………………………………………………..80 Section 5: Dialectic and the Intellectual Virtues…………………………………………83 Section 6: Conclusions…………………………………………………………………...90 Chapter 3: Republic IX…………………………………………………………………………..93 Section 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………...93 iv Page iv Section 2: The Common Interpretation; Philosophical and Textual Objections………...98 Section 3: The Common Interpretation’s Defence; Objections to this Defence……….103 Section 4: Republic IX: A New Puzzle…………………………………………………108 Section 5: The Three Arguments of Republic IX………………………………………113 Section 6: Conclusions………………………………………………………………….127 Chapter 4: Attitudinal Pleasure and the Choice of Lives in Plato’s Philebus………………….134 Section 1: Introduction………………………………………………………………….134 Section 2: The Diversity of Pleasure…………………………………………………...140 Section 3: The Distinction Between Final and Intrinsic Value…………………………146 Section 4: The Philebus’ Criteria for the Good………………………………………...149 Section 5: Protarchus’ Rejection of the Mindless Life in CL…………………………..155 Section 6: Attitudinal Pleasure (AP)……………………………………………………166 Section 7: Conclusions………………………………………………………………….171 Chapter 5: The New Conception of Pleasure: Implications and Results……………………….173 Section 1: Introduction………………………………………………………………….173 Section 2: False Pleasures in the Philebus……………………………………………...176 Section 3: False Pleasures in the Philebus on AP………………………………………183 Section 4: Pleasure and Knowledge on AP……………………………………………..187 Section 5: Divine Pleasures?............................................................................................200 Section 6: Pluralism in the Philebus……………………………………………………211 v Page v Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..217 Section 1: What in the End is the Relationship Between Pleasure and Happiness, On Plato’s View?.............................................................................................................217 Section 2: Proposed Alternative Solution to the Problem……………………………...219 Section 3: Some Closing Remarks About AP…………………………………………..224 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………235 vi Page vi Plato The Hedonist? Introduction Ethics in the eudaemonist tradition aims above all to provide an account of the happy life. Once the eudaemonist establishes that happiness stands as a unique practical goal, it seems the next task is to ‘fill in’ this goal, as it were – to explain in concrete terms what happiness consists in. One common way to go about this is to begin listing the goods that happiness consists in – genres of things, the presence of which in a life makes that life happy. Examples include security, autonomy, social status, romantic love, and friendship. This project usually takes on a reductive character, as the eudaemonist tries to boil happiness down to its basic ‘elements.’ For example, we may want to subsume social status, romantic love, and friendship under the genre of ‘healthy social relations.’ When we can no longer reduce these elements any further, then we have arrived at our list of ingredients for a happy life. Call this the ‘compositional approach’ to happiness. It undertakes to fill happiness in with a list of goods which, while distinct, all seem to share the same sort of value. That is, they have both final value and what I will call ‘compositional’ value. A good has final value if it is valuable for its own sake as a goal. For example, I take autonomy to have final value if I take it to be the sort of thing worth aiming at just because of the kind of good it is, whether or not it gives rise to anything else of value. But there seems to be more we can say about autonomy’s value, for it also stands as a part of a larger good, a good which also has final value, namely happiness. In other words, it seems autonomy’s value can be conceptually split into its status as a goal itself, on the one hand, and its status as a part of the distinct goal of happiness, on the 1 other. Page 1 To this it may be objected that the claim that a good has final value is inconsistent with the claim that it has compositional value. For if autonomy, say, is valuable for the further end of happiness, then it isn’t really final, is it? On this view only happiness itself turns out to have value on a eudaemonist picture, with everything else having value ultimately for its contribution to happiness. But here I think the defining insight of the compositional approach – that happiness can be analysed into distinct goods as component parts – tells against this objection. If this insight is correct, then to aim at happiness as a goal just is to aim at its component parts, in the way that, say, aiming at a delicious omelette just is aiming at a delicious blend of eggs, cheese, and ham. So it seems a mistake to suppose that if I aim at its component parts then I must take those parts to have non-final value. For example, suppose I want a dream vacation. In planning my vacation it seems I must analyse it into its component parts: scuba diving on Monday, sightseeing on Tuesday, etc. It would be odd to take the view that I pursue these activities in some non-final way with respect to my vacation as a whole, as though I want them simply for their contribution to the distinct and truly final good of my vacation. When I adopt a dream vacation as a goal I necessarily adopt these activities as its parts, and to the extent that I am committed conceptually to their status as its parts I desire them as I do the whole. As parts of the whole they are not distinct from it in the way that, say, certain instrumental goods are. Let an instrumental good be a good with instrumental value, such that its value resides in its contribution to some distinct goal. One way of illustrating the difference between compositional value and instrumental value is that for any instrumental good connected to my dream vacation, I cease to desire it if it fails to result in my dream vacation. But since 2 Page 2 scuba diving and sightseeing are parts of my dream vacation, their value operates differently. Suppose you ask me, ‘What if your scuba diving does not result in a dream vacation? Would you still desire it?’ I am likely to find this question a bit puzzling. I might reply that insofar as I am scuba diving, I am having a dream vacation: scuba diving is part of what it is to have a dream vacation. I want to scuba dive because I want a dream vacation, and similarly I want a dream vacation in part because I want to scuba dive. The relationship between the two goods is not identity, since I think my dream vacation consists of other parts as well. Of course, since scuba diving is only a part of a dream vacation I also want the rest of the whole. I might even decide that scuba diving on its own confers such a small and partial share of a dream vacation that if it is unaccompanied by the other parts in the right way, then what I have should not be counted as a dream vacation. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to conclude it has no value for me in this case. It continues to have final value as a goal in its own right – it is the sort of thing I take to be worth pursuing for its own sake.
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