Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life

Abstract

This book examines Plato's subtle and insightful analysis of pleasure and explores its intimate connections with his discussions of value and human psychology. The book offers a fresh perspective on how good things bear on happiness in Plato's ethics, and shows that for Plato, pleasure cannot determine happiness because pleasure lacks a direction of its own. Plato presents wisdom as a skill of living that determines happiness by directing one's life as a whole, bringing about goodness in all areas of one's life, as a skill brings about order in its materials. The ‘materials’ of the skill of living are, in the first instance, not things like money or health, but one's attitudes, emotions, and desires where things like money and health are concerned. Plato recognizes that these ‘materials’ of the psyche are inchoate, ethically speaking, and in need of direction from wisdom. Among them is pleasure, which Plato treats not as a sensation but as an attitude with which one ascribes value to its object. However, Plato also views pleasure, once shaped and directed by wisdom, as a crucial part of a virtuous character as a whole. Consequently, Plato rejects all forms of hedonism, which allows happiness to be determined by a part of the psyche that does not direct one's life but is among the materials to be directed. At the same time, Plato is also able to hold both that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and that pleasure is necessary for happiness, not as an addition to one's virtue, but as a constituent of one's whole virtuous character itself. Plato therefore offers an illuminating role for pleasure in ethics and psychology, one to which we may be unaccustomed: pleasure emerges not as a sensation or even a mode of activity, but as an attitude — one of the ways in which we construe our world — and as such, a central part of every character.

Plato's Rejection of Thoughtless and Pleasureless Lives

“…In his comments on an earlier draft of this paper, Richard Patterson proposed a similar view, calling it "the Neo-Conservative Reading." For two broadly similar proposals, see Richardson Lear (2005), 56, and Russell (2005), 169. 21) One possible exception is Carone, who holds both that Plato wants to recommend the mixed life on hedonistic grounds, and that the Choice Argument establishes that some pleasures are goods.…”

“…For an especially influential discussion of the argument's upshot for hedonism, see Moore (1903Moore ( /1993 3) For defenses of this view, see Cooper (1999), 150-164;Irwin (1995), 332-338;Carone (2000); and Cooper (2004), 270-308. For dissenting views, see Gosling (1975) 181-185;Bobonich (1995); Richardson Lear (2005), 53-59;and Russell (2005), 168-171. 4) Cooper (1999), 152.…”

“…Th ese are pressing and interesting questions, but I cannot hope to answer them here. For a comprehensive attempt to credit Plato with the view that some pleasures have final value but no pleasures have intrinsic value, see Daniel Russell (2005). For a more limited attempt to credit Plato with the view that no pleasure has final value because it has intrinsic value, see my (forthcoming).…”

Platonic know‐how and successful action

“…However, one way of attempting to explain (and render plausible) the claim that epistēmē or sophia guarantees success has been to attend to what Plato's Socrates might mean by “success.” It was long ago noted that talk of success or doing well ( eu prattein ) can be used of a favourable outcome or a well performed action (Gifford, : 20)—as noted above, something similar holds of talk of good fortune ( eutuchia ) and of terms like eupragia —and in recent scholarship it is often suggested that in order to understand Socrates's claims in the Euthydemus , we must draw a distinction between different kinds of success and suppose that epistēmē or sophia might guarantee one kind of success, but not another. Two influential expositions of such a view have been put forward by Panos Dimas () and Daniel Russell (). Here is Panos Dimas:

[Socrates] surely knows, as does everyone else, that no action can ever guarantee the delivery of such a product, however knowledgeable the agent standing behind it.

…”

“…Moreover, Plato says that that sort of success is all the success one ever needs, since with such success there is ‘no further need of good luck’ (281b2–3). On Plato's view, success is determined not by the completion of some action, but by how one engages in all action with wisdom and intelligence [...] success at acting wisely must always be available to a wise person, who has no need of further good luck (Russell, : 30–1).…”