The Good Life According to Plato
What would you give to hear perhaps the world’s greatest philosopher share his personal recipe for the good life?
This is exactly what we get in Plato’s The Philebus, one of his final works, and his ultimate say on the question of how an individual can live a good life.
Is knowledge or pleasure more responsible for the good life?
When the The Philebus begins, the characters of Socrates and Philebus have already come to a stalemate in their debate as to whether knowledge or pleasure is most responsible for the good life. Socrates favors knowledge and Philebus favors pleasure. Philebus, however, has already grown bored of the conversation by the time we enter, and he quickly drops out of the conversation, to be replaced by his younger friend Protarchus, who along with Socrates becomes the main character for the remainder of the dialogue.
The lives of pleasure without knowledge and knowledge without pleasure
To further engage the question of whether knowledge or pleasure is most responsible for the good life, they explore what it would look like to live a life of pleasure without knowledge and a life of knowledge without pleasure.
The life of pleasure without knowledge
They find that a life of pleasure without knowledge would essentially be reduced to that of a mollusk or jellyfish: one would have no ability to remember past pleasures, to be aware of current pleasures, or to anticipate future pleasures. One would just simply ‘float along’, albeit in a pleasant state. This, they both agree, is insufficient.
The life of knowledge without pleasure
Then they explore a life of knowledge without pleasure, a life in which one has perfect awareness and recall, along with perfect understanding, but never experiences the faintest trace of good feeling. They find this to be insufficient, too.
The mixed life
This leads them to agree that a ‘mixed life’ of knowledge with pleasure would be preferable to either of the above alternatives. With this point settled, the question becomes: what sort of knowledge and what sort of pleasure should be mixed together for the best result?
Pure and impure knowledge
They identify two types of knowledge; that which is pure and that which is impure. Pure knowledge is theoretical, while impure knowledge is practical.
Theoretical knowledge is “pure” because it has the capacity for absolute precision which cannot be matched by practical knowledge. For example, theoretical knowledge includes the knowledge of a perfect circle, which is something that cannot exist in the physical world – every circle someone draws in the physical world will be at least slightly imperfect in some way. So, theoretical knowledge is pure in the sense that it is ideal, while practical knowledge is impure in the sense that it will inevitably include imperfection.
Pure and impure knowledge
They find an analog to pure and impure knowledge in pleasure, but to understand this analogy we must briefly review Plato’s general theory of pleasure and pain.
Pleasure as replenishment and pain as deterioration
Human health is the natural condition in which all parts of the body and mind are in harmony. When this harmony is disrupted, we experience pain, and when this harmony is restored, we feel pleasure. For example, if we become thirsty, then the pain of thirst has disrupted the harmonious state of our health and as a result we feel pain. When we drink water, we restore our body to its harmonious state and feel pleasure. These pleasures are “impure” because they are preceded by pain, which is pleasure’s opposite. In fact, the larger the preceding pain, the larger the pleasure (e.g. intense thirst or hunger will result in an intense pleasure of restoration).
As physical beings, we are never able to reach a theoretical state of perfect health, for the same reason that we cannot draw a perfect circle – ideals cannot be attained in the physical world. So our health is constantly in flux as our bodies experience various disruptions and restorations. However, many of these disruptions and restorations are so small that they fall below our conscious awareness. We simply don’t notice that we are thirsty, or hungry, etc., until these disruptions reach a certain threshold or ‘largeness’ that draws our attention.
Pure pleasures are unmixed with pain
There are many things that can benefit us that we don’t know we are lacking. For these reasons, there will be times when we can feel a pleasure of a restoration without first experiencing a noticeable pain of disruption. When this happens, we feel a “pure pleasure,” or a pleasure that has not been preceded by or accompanied with a noticeable pain. Often, pure pleasures are intellectual in nature – they include the pleasures of learning, of creating, of practicing, and the like.
These can also include pleasures of sense perceptions such as enjoying a nice fragrance, the sounds and beauty of the natural world, etc., as well as aesthetic pleasures, such as those that arise from participation in or enjoyment of the arts, as long as these experiences are not preceded by a “hunger” of sorts (whether this is a literal hunger or a figurative hunger for information, experience, and the like).
The recipe: deciding the mixture
With the main possible ingredients identified – pure and impure knowledge, and pure and impure pleasure, Socrates and Protarchus are ready to begin creating their recipe for the good life.
The good life, they agree, is a life according to which anyone who has it and has no fear of losing it has everything they need and will not desire anything else. Socrates employs the metaphor of a drink mixer whose task is to determine the right combination of water (knowledge) and honey (pleasure).
All knowledge is good
They first admit pure or theoretical knowledge, but then quickly decide to ‘open the door’ to all knowledge, pure and impure. This includes all of the arts and the sciences. To live a good life, we need theoretical knowledge, which is necessary for understanding things, but we also need practical knowledge to get on in life. Practical or impure knowledge is what allows us to build a house, make a shopping list, learn a musical instrument, etc.
Some pleasures are good
With all knowledge admitted into the good life, they then turn to the question of what to do about pleasure. They quickly allow all pure pleasures into the good life, but pause at the impure pleasures. After some deliberation they admit a select few classes of impure pleasures: the necessary pleasures (e.g. the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sexual reproduction), and the pleasures that accompany acts of virtue (e.g. pleasures of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice).
They toss out the rest.
Why are some pleasures rejected?
The question as to why pleasures — aside from the pure, necessary, and virtuous — are rejected is complex. It comes down to their status as unlimited, which means that pleasure as a felt experience tends to be transient, subject to flux, and addictive, in that we tend to crave more and more of it.
As an example of the transience of pleasure, think of the sports fan who cheers gleefully one minute when his team scores the touchdown, and the sulks the next when the other team scores the touchdown. His pleasure proved to be fleeting and unstable. Pleasure (with the exception of pure pleasures) has no intrinsic limits to define it and therefore provide its stability.
Necessary pleasures can be included in the good life to the extent to which they support our overall health, because we can use health itself as the standard or limit in order to regulate our pursuit of it. This means necessary pleasures are good insofar as they support our health. In the case of necessary pleasures, we externally apply the limit to pleasure that it lacks in itself, and in so doing, we make it good.
The good life
With that, they’ve finished their recipe: the good life is like a glass of water (knowledge) with a few drops of honey (pleasure) in it.
The mixture itself, and not its individual elements, proves to be most important aspect of the good life. The tools that allow for creation of the mixture — that is, our reasoning faculties — prove to be more responsible for the good life than is pleasure, yet pleasure remains an indispensable part of the good life all the same.
Photo Credits:
Photo of water by Anda Ambrosini on Unsplash
Photo of mollusk by Dustin Humes on Unsplash
