In this dialogue, Socrates debates two Athenian youths, Philebus and Protarchus, on whether pleasure or knowledge is the greater Good. Socrates begins, “Philebus holds that what is good for all creatures is to enjoy themselves, to be pleased and delighted…. We contend that not these, but knowing, understanding and remembering, and what belongs with them, right opinion and true calculations, are better than pleasure and more agreeable to all who can attain them.” Socrates later continues, “Philebus says that pleasure is the right aim for all living beings and that all should try to strive for it, that it is at the same time the good for all things, so that good and pleasant are but two names that really belong to what is by nature one and the same. Socrates, by contrast, affirms that these are not one and the same thing but two, just as they are two in name, that the good and the pleasant have a different nature, and that intelligence has a greater share in the good than pleasure.”
Socrates proceeds to relate the defining quality of the Good. “Any creature that was in permanent possession of it, entirely and in every way, would never be in need of anything else, but would live in perfect self-sufficiency.” Because of this nature, Socrates already conceded that neither pleasure nor intelligence alone, unmixed, can be called the absolute highest Good. “Let him put memory, intelligence, knowledge, and true opinion into one class, and ask himself whether anybody would choose to possess or acquire anything else without that class. Most particularly, whether he would want pleasure, as much and as intensive as it can be, without the true opinion that he enjoys it, without recognizing what kind of experience it is he has, without memory of this affection for any length of time. And let him put reason to the same test, whether anyone would prefer to have it without any kind of pleasure, even a very short-lived one, rather than with some pleasures, provided that he does not want all pleasures without intelligence rather than with some fraction of it…. So neither of these two would be perfect, worthy of choice for all, and the supreme good?… We ought not to seek the good in the unmixed life but in the mixed one.”
Socrates points out that knowledge, in all its degrees, from the highest to the lowest forms, is beneficial to ignorance. “Our love for every kind of knowledge has made us let them all in together.” However, he posits that this is not so with pleasure. He rhetorically addresses knowledge, ““Will you have any need to associate with the strongest and most intensive pleasures in addition to the true pleasures?”…. [Knowledge] might reply, “They are a tremendous impediment to us, since they infect the souls in which they dwell with madness or even prevent our own development altogether. Furthermore, they totally destroy most of our offspring, since neglect leads to forgetfulness. But as to the true and pure pleasures you [Socrates] mentioned, those regard as our kin. And besides, add the pleasures of health and of temperance and all those that commit themselves to virtue as to their deity and follow it around everywhere. But to forge an association between reason and those pleasures that are forever involved with foolishness and other kinds of vice would be totally unreasonable for anyone who aims at the best and most stable mixture or blend.”” Pleasure, unlike knowledge, is unwise to imbibe in to an extreme. “It is obvious that it is in some vicious state of soul and body and not in virtue that the greatest pleasures as well as the greatest pains have their origin.”
Socrates posits that the Good requires three forms. “If we cannot capture the good in one form, we will have to take hold of it in a conjunction of three: beauty, proportion, and truth.” He states how these three are all interrelated, “That any kind of mixture that does not in some way or other possess measure or the nature of proportion will necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself…. But now we notice that the force of the good has taken refuge in an alliance with the nature of the beautiful. For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue.” Finally, Socrates gets Protarchus to compare pleasure to reason using these three forms. “Pleasures are perhaps rather like children who don’t possess the least bit of reason. Reason, by contrast, either is the same as truth or of all things it is most like it and most true…. I don’t think that one could find anything that is more outside all measure than pleasure and excessive joy, while nothing more measured than reason and knowledge could ever be found…. No one, awake or dreaming, could ever see intelligence and reason to be ugly; no one could ever have conceived of them as becoming or being ugly, or that they ever will be…. In the case of pleasures, by contrast, when we see anyone actively engaged in them, especially those that are most intense, we notice that their effect is quite ridiculous, if not outright obscene; we become quite ashamed ourselves and hide them as mush as possible from sight, and we confine such activities to the night, as if daylight must not witness such things.” So while Socrates concedes that knowledge, alone, is not the greatest Good, for it must be mixed with a little bit of pleasure, he posits that it is, nonetheless, far superior as a Good than pleasure ever will be. “Whatever the ingredient in the mixed life may be that makes it choiceworthy and good, reason is more closely related to that thing and more like it than pleasure.”
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