Putting the Philebus’s Indispensable Method to Use

Abstract

The Philebus presents a comprehensive epistemological and metaphysical view in two of that dialogue's most difficult passages (15b-18c, and 23c-28c). In particular, the method described in the first passage is used in the second passage to do metaphysics; and the metaphysical picture it uncovers is precisely the one needed to support the epistemological presumptions of the first passage. This 'circularity' is not vicious, but elegant; seeing it so reveals most about Socrates' preferred candidate for the (cause of) good in human life. There is considerable perplexity around the methodological discussion of the Philebus 16a ff. Quite apart from the vexed issues of what the method is, and what it is for, there is the awkward puzzle over why Socrates bothers bringing it up at all. As he introduces it, Socrates claims that this is a "gift from the gods to men...hurled down from heaven" (16c5) and that "everything in any field of art that has ever been discovered has come to light because of this" (16c2-3). 1 This gift is recommended not merely as a useful tool, but as a necessary one: no knowledge except by observing this procedure. Thus, I shall argue, the claim at the heart of this god-given method of inquiry is an epistemological one: knowledge is that state which results from observing these recommendations for inquiry. Less than a page later, however, and as soon as his interlocutors indicate they have grasped the basic points, Socrates declares that the Divine Method, with its demand for an analysis of pleasure and knowledge, is not necessary after all. "Some memory has come to my mind," Socrates suddenly says, which may settle the dispute "so we will not have to worry any longer about the division of the kinds of pleasure" (20c5-6). Why does Plato have Socrates introduce as indispensable a method he immediately abandons? Was he so artless as to find this the only way to slip in a few footnotes to the Sophist and Politicus? To complicate things further, after discussing his dreamy recollection (20c-23b), Socrates seems to revert to the earlier epistemological discussion, after all. The dream interlude prompts Protarchus to concede that the mindlessly pleasant life is not adequate; but Socrates foresees a long and difficult discussion if we subject pleasure to a more exacting PUTTING THE PHILEBUS'S INDISPENSABLE METHOD TO USE Page 2 3/8/07 examination (23a6-b6)-that is, if we try to determine exactly what role, if any, pleasure plays in making a human life good. Protarchus insists on this further examination, and so Socrates appeals to "what we were talking about before" (23c7), a distinction made at 16c10, between limit and unlimitedness (23c1-9). But while the second discussion thus employs some of the same vocabulary as the first-most obviously peras and apeiron (limit and unlimited)-these terms of art seem to mean importantly different things in the two discussions. In the first, methodological or epistemological discussion, 'unlimited' and 'limit' describe how we divide things-or at least, so it is often rea...