Philebus | Page 9

and
mental, between necessary and non-necessary pleasures. But he is also
in advance of Plato; for he affirms that pleasure is not in the body at all;
and hence not even the bodily pleasures are to be spoken of as
generations, but only as accompanied by generation (Nic. Eth.).
4. Plato attempts to identify vicious pleasures with some form of error,
and insists that the term false may be applied to them: in this he appears
to be carrying out in a confused manner the Socratic doctrine, that
virtue is knowledge, vice ignorance. He will allow of no distinction
between the pleasures and the erroneous opinions on which they are
founded, whether arising out of the illusion of distance or not. But to
this we naturally reply with Protarchus, that the pleasure is what it is,
although the calculation may be false, or the after-effects painful. It is
difficult to acquit Plato, to use his own language, of being a 'tyro in

dialectics,' when he overlooks such a distinction. Yet, on the other hand,
we are hardly fair judges of confusions of thought in those who view
things differently from ourselves.
5. There appears also to be an incorrectness in the notion which occurs
both here and in the Gorgias, of the simultaneousness of merely bodily
pleasures and pains. We may, perhaps, admit, though even this is not
free from doubt, that the feeling of pleasureable hope or recollection is,
or rather may be, simultaneous with acute bodily suffering. But there is
no such coexistence of the pain of thirst with the pleasures of drinking;
they are not really simultaneous, for the one expels the other. Nor does
Plato seem to have considered that the bodily pleasures, except in
certain extreme cases, are unattended with pain. Few philosophers will
deny that a degree of pleasure attends eating and drinking; and yet
surely we might as well speak of the pains of digestion which follow,
as of the pains of hunger and thirst which precede them. Plato's
conception is derived partly from the extreme case of a man suffering
pain from hunger or thirst, partly from the image of a full and empty
vessel. But the truth is rather, that while the gratification of our bodily
desires constantly affords some degree of pleasure, the antecedent pains
are scarcely perceived by us, being almost done away with by use and
regularity.
6. The desire to classify pleasures as accompanied or not accompanied
by antecedent pains, has led Plato to place under one head the pleasures
of smell and sight, as well as those derived from sounds of music and
from knowledge. He would have done better to make a separate class of
the pleasures of smell, having no association of mind, or perhaps to
have divided them into natural and artificial. The pleasures of sight and
sound might then have been regarded as being the expression of ideas.
But this higher and truer point of view never appears to have occurred
to Plato. Nor has he any distinction between the fine arts and the
mechanical; and, neither here nor anywhere, an adequate conception of
the beautiful in external things.
7. Plato agrees partially with certain 'surly or fastidious' philosophers,
as he terms them, who defined pleasure to be the absence of pain. They
are also described as eminent in physics. There is unfortunately no
school of Greek philosophy known to us which combined these two
characteristics. Antisthenes, who was an enemy of pleasure, was not a

physical philosopher; the atomists, who were physical philosophers,
were not enemies of pleasure. Yet such a combination of opinions is far
from being impossible. Plato's omission to mention them by name has
created the same uncertainty respecting them which also occurs
respecting the 'friends of the ideas' and the 'materialists' in the Sophist.
On the whole, this discussion is one of the least satisfactory in the
dialogues of Plato. While the ethical nature of pleasure is scarcely
considered, and the merely physical phenomenon imperfectly analysed,
too much weight is given to ideas of measure and number, as the sole
principle of good. The comparison of pleasure and knowledge is really
a comparison of two elements, which have no common measure, and
which cannot be excluded from each other. Feeling is not opposed to
knowledge, and in all consciousness there is an element of both. The
most abstract kinds of knowledge are inseparable from some pleasure
or pain, which accompanies the acquisition or possession of them: the
student is liable to grow weary of them, and soon discovers that
continuous mental energy is not granted to men. The most sensual
pleasure, on the other hand, is inseparable from the consciousness of
pleasure; no man can be happy who, to borrow Plato's illustration, is
leading the life of an oyster.