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OXFORD STUDIESIN ANCIENTPHILOSOPHY

EDITOR: BRAD INWOOD

VOLUME XXXIX

3

PLATO ON THE PLEASURESAND PAINS OF KNOWING

JAMES WARREN

P often assures us that it is pleasant to acquire knowledge. Inthe Republic the philosopher is said to live the most pleasant life be-cause only he experiences the true and pure pleasures to be had fromacquiring knowledge of the special objects that are the Forms. Simi-larly, in the Philebus Socrates claims that learning is a good exampleof a pure pleasure, namely a pleasure that is essentially neither pre-ceded nor followed by pain. But Plato is also well aware that the pro-cess of coming to know something is not always pleasant. Indeed,in matters that would seem to be for Plato of the utmost impor-tance, he is quite clear that our progress towards knowledge can beaccompanied by a variety of affective experiences, and it can oftenbe difficult and painful.

The claim in Republic that the philosophers life is the mostpleasant possible has often been thought problematic, not least be-cause of the various passages which appear to depict philosophicallife and philosophical progress as painful. I investigate this prob-lem first by considering a stretch of argument at Philebus in which Socrates tries to give an account of the nature of the plea-sures of learning and which includes a specification of the condi-tions under which certain kinds of learning might be painful ora mixture of pleasure and pain (Section I). Teasing out the pre-cise implications of what is said there will allow us to reconsiderthe pleasures and pains of the philosophers life outlined in the Re-public, since Protarchus suggestion of the conditions under whichlearning might not be a pure pleasure but will instead be a relieffrom pain turns out to be directly applicable to the experience of

James Warren

I would like to thank Brad Inwood, David Sedley, Frisbee Sheffield, and GeorgiaMoroutsou for comments on an earlier version of this essay.

James Warren

the prisoner released from the cave in the allegory in Republic (Section II). However, there remain some important obstacles inthe way of producing a fully satisfying account of the hedonic lifeof the philosopher. One of these problems stems from an objectionsometimes raised against the portrayal in book . This objectionholds that the understanding of the nature of pleasure presumedin that argument should force Socrates to claim that only the ac-quisition of new philosophical knowledge and not the continuedpossession and exercise of philosophical knowledge is wonderfullypleasant (Section III). I canvass some possible answers to this prob-lem (Section IV) and conclude that the analysis of various pleasuresof learning in the Philebus can usefully be brought to bear on thisquestion (Section V).

I

At Philebus Socrates and Protarchus discuss the plea-sures associated with learning and try to give an account of theirnature:

. Then let us also add to these the pleasures of learning, if indeed weare agreed that there is no such thing as hunger for learning connectedwith them, nor any pains that have their source in a hunger for learning.

. Here, too, I agree with you.. Well, then, if after such filling with knowledge, people lose it again

through forgetting, do you notice any kinds of pain?. None that could be called inherent by nature, but in our reflections

on what we undergo whenever, deprived of something, we are painedbecause of the usefulness of what was lost [ , , ].

. But, my dear, we are here concerned only with the natural affectionsthemselves, independently of our reflection on them [ ].

. Then you are right in saying that the lapse of knowledge never causesus any pain [ ].

. Then wemay say that the pleasures of learning are unmixed with painand belong, not to the masses, but only to a few?

. How could one fail to agree? (trans. D. Frede, modified)

Socrates is looking for another example of a pure pleasure, that is apleasure which is neither necessarily preceded nor necessarily fol-lowed by a pain. His first example was the pleasure of smell. The

Plato on the Pleasures and Pains of Knowing

pleasure of learning is the second example. It too, Socrates thinks,is a process of filling a lack, but since simply not-knowing-X is notpainful and having-forgotten-X is not painful, then the pleasure oflearning X is a pure pleasure.

A brief comment specifies that these pleasures of learning that areunmixed with pains belong to the few and not the many ( ), which suggests that Socrates has in mind cases of learning thatare not mundane examples of simply coming-to-know something.Most likely, the sort of learning intended is to be connected with thedialogues later discussions of the various special epistmai. Thereare, of course, important differences between how the Philebus andthe Republic imagine epistm and its objects. Nevertheless, in bothdialogues there is an evident commitment to the idea that certainkinds of special cognitive achievement are to be associated witha particular and superior form of pleasure. Furthermore, in bothcases the dominant model for understanding the pleasure of thisform of achievement is the filling of some kind of lack which mayor may not be recognized or painful.

However, it seems quite implausible to think that a philosopherscognitive progress is unaccompanied by pains, frustrations, and thelike, which are connected with the fact that there is a consciousdesire to know or understand something as yet ungrasped. Platohimself is acutely aware that philosophical understanding is oftenhard-won. In fact, the Philebus passage is very careful to clarify theprecise sense in which the pleasures of learning are unmixed withpain. Protarchus voices an important qualification at whenhe notes that, although the simple fact of forgetting is not itself pain-ful, the fact of having forgotten can perhaps be said to be painful justin cases when a person comes to reflect upon his lack of previousknowledge and on occasions when that knowledge is needed. Soc-rates swiftly brushes aside Protarchus concern as irrelevant to theprecise point he wishes to make. As he reminds Protarchus, whatthey want to grasp is the nature of these experiences in themselves,shorn of any further complicating factors. Socrates is right. Thereare lots of things I do not know for which it is true that I am entirelyindifferent about not knowing them; the fact of my not knowing

Cf. S. Delcomminette, Le Philbe de Platon: introduction lagathologie platoni-cienne (Leiden, ) [Le Philbe], .

Cf. D. Frede (trans. and comm.), Platon: Philebos [Philebos] (Gttingen, ),; Delcomminette, Le Philbe, and .

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them causes me no distress. There are lots of things I did know andno longer know for which it is also true that I am entirely indiffer-ent about not knowing them. To be sure, if I think that somethingI do not know (or used to know) is something that I ought to knowor ought still to know, then that secondary thought might be some-thing that causes me distress. But the first-order fact of simply notknowing is not painful. So learning something need not be a relieffrom something painful.

And yet, Protarchus has pointed to something important. He hasgiven an important set of conditions under which a lack of know-ledge (whether the result of forgetting something previously knownor, we might add, the simple lack of a piece of knowledge neverpreviously possessed) might be rightly thought to be painful. Theconditions are twofold: (i) the lack of knowledge must be noticed orreflected upon, and (ii) the knowledge that is lacking must be recog-nized as needed or necessary in some way. Each of the two is neces-sary but insufficient for the state to be painful: I might recognizeI do not know the capital city of Botswana but feel no pain at thatrealization so long as I have no need to know it. Similarly, I mighthave a genuine need to know some important philosophical truthsin the sense that my life will be miserable unless I come to acquirethat knowledge. But so long as I remain unaware of this need, thesimple fact of not knowing will not of itself be painful to me. Whencombined, however, the two conditions will be sufficient to gener-ate pain attendant upon a desire to know. While the first of theseconditions is often noted, the second is often missed. Yet both areobviously necessary since it is the second which is required to ge-nerate in the person concerned a desire to know whatever it is thathe does not know and it is crucial for the presence of some kind ofnegative affective response.

The full psychological commitments of Protarchus comment at are worth further thought. Clearly, he is distinguishingbetween something we undergo (a pathma), which we can pre-sume is what is later glossed as a kind of deprivation (the stateof lacking some piece of knowledge), and something additional,which we have already identified as a further necessary conditionfor this pathma to be painful. Protarchus refers to this additional

e.g. Delcomminette, Le Philbe, : En effet, pour quil y ait dsir, il faut quily ait non seulement manque, mais encore manque conscient, si du moins le dsir doitavoir une direction, un objet.


factor as logismoi. The Philebus can provide a satisfying accountof what logismos amounts to in this context if we look back to its ini-tial stipulation that the best human life must consist in some kindof combination of both pleasure and reason ( ). Socratesand Protarchus consider two extreme cases: on the one hand, a lifewhich contains pleasure but is devoid of any cognitive capacitiessuch asmemory, knowledge, opinion, and wisdom and, on the otherhand, a life which retains all those capacities but is without even theleast experience of pleasure. Neither alternative seems to them tobe choiceworthy, and the remainder of the dialogue proceeds withthis conclusion taken as its basis. In outlining the life of a mollusc,the life of pleasure without reasoning, Socrates explains his pointas follows: Having no true opinion, nor believing that he is exper-iencing pleasure when he does so and, being deprived of reasoning[ , ], not being able to reason how hewill experience pleasure at some later time, he lives not a humanlife but the life of some jellyfish or crustacean ( ). From thisit seems that logismos is, first of all, something that is an essentialpre-requisite for living a recognizable human life and, more speci-fically, is related to what we might call a capacity for self-awarenessand for considering ones well-being or hedonic state at non-presenttimes. Such a capacity might not exhaust the range of what logismosmay do, but it is the important characteristic for present purposes.

In Protarchus proposal at too, an important condition offeeling the pain of an absence of understanding is the human ca-pacity to reflect upon or notice that condition and perhaps also tocompare it with some previous or hoped-for future state. It is pos-sible, in that case, to give an account of the conditions under whichan absence of knowledge is painful by making use of a distinctionbetween first- and second-order knowledge according to which thepresence or absence of the first-order knowledge can be the object ofa second-order form of knowledge and in which this second-orderknowledge will be the exercise of the human capacity here referredto as logismos. Take a case in which I come to know that I do notknow X. Imagine also that coming to know that I do not know X ispainful to me. It is true that I do not know X, of course, so what Ihave acquired in coming to know that I do not know is a different

The plural form is clearly not significant since Socrates immediate reply re-places it with the singular logismos ( ) with no apology; the replacement does notseem to bother Protarchus.

James Warren

truth. I know more than I did when I simply did not know X anddid not know that I did not know X. We noted, remember, that forsuch a second-order knowledge of an absence of first-order know-ledge to be registered as painful there would need in addition to besome awareness of the first-order knowledge that is lacking beingsomething worth having. There must, in other words, be a recog-nized need for that first-order knowledge. The Philebus analysis ofhuman psychological capacities can also supply that additional re-quirement, once again by referring to the capacity of logismos.

The prospective and retrospective faculties associated with logis-mos at are not only stressed as essential characteristics of humanpsychology; they are both also involved in what might at a cursoryglance seem to be solely future-directed attitudes such as desire.Later in the dialogue, Socrates is preoccupied with arguing for adivision between the roles of the body and of the soul in desire, butwhile he is doing so he states clearly that he thinks all desires andimpulses which initiate a drive for the removal or replenishment in-volve some sort of memory ( ). Specifically, the memory in-volved in desire is a memory of the opposite state to that in whichthe desirer currently finds himself. The desire involved when a per-son is thirsty, for example, involves the memory of the state of notbeing thirsty which supplies the drive and impulse towards findingsomething to drink. Presumably, the drive to find a drink to removea thirst involves the conjuring from memory of some appropriaterepresentation of the proper state of that desire being fulfilled. Soc-rates then goes on to distinguish two cases involving a person whois in pain but can remember the pleasant things he lacks. In thefirst, he has a clear hope or expectation of attaining what he lacks.In that case, the memory provides some pleasure while he is alsoexperiencing pain ( ). In the second, he is both in pain andalso aware that there is no hope of replenishment. In that case hissuffering is twofold ( ). We should note, then, that hopes anddesires all involve some activity ofmemory since it ismemorywhichprovides the store of experiences that can be drawn upon to generatethe appropriate objects of pursuit in any given situation and whichallows the animal to bring to mind some state (which it has experi-enced in the past) which is the opposite of its present condition.

See D. Frede, Rumpelstiltskinss Pleasures: True and False Pleasures in PlatosPhilebus, Phronesis, (), at ; D. Russell, Plato on Pleasure andthe Good Life [Plato on Pleasure] (Oxford, ), . Delcomminette, Le Philbe,


We can now offer a full account of the painful cases of coming-to-knowwhich Protarchusmentions at : these are cases in whicha first-order ignorance is recognized as a result of second-order re-flection on a persons own cognitive state. This ignorance might besimply something that the person has never known or it might bethe result of a loss of memory. The same capacity for second-orderreflection that can recognize present ignorance, logismos, is also re-sponsible for the person being able either to reflect upon a prior stateof knowledge or imagine a future state of comprehension, and incases where the possession of the relevant piece of knowledge wouldserve some recognized end, this will generate a desire to know. Thatdesire can be painful. Indeed, if it is to motivate the person suffi-ciently, its painful nature might itself be something instrumentallyuseful. In such a way we can imagine the possibility of knowledgecausing pain. This is a possibility which might initially be surpris-ing but which on reflection is something that is only to be expec-ted, particularly when the knowledge concerned is of a certain sort,namely the knowledge of an important personal failing.

II

Republic contains the longest sustained account of the pleasure as-sociated with a life of philosophy and also presents themost difficultproblems for anyone trying to claim that the life of a fully fledgedphilosopher is pleasant while holding on firmly to the analysis ofpleasureeven an intellectual pleasureas the process of fillingsome kind of lack. Before we apply to this problem the analysis inthe Philebus of the pleasures of learning and the pains of some kindsof ignorance, we should first consider the most famous Platonic ac-count of the experience of radical and transformative cognitive pro-gress, namely the story of the prisoners release from bondage andascent from the cave into the sunlight at the beginning of Repub-lic . The description of the ascent from the cave emphasizes notthe pleasures of discovery and the satisfaction of intellectual lackbut quite the opposite: the dizzying and startling effect producedby the taxing and disorienting acquisition of a new perspective on

, has a good account of the sense in which philosophy itself in the Philebus isimagined as a kind of desire (see , ), an image familiar from otherdialogues such as the Symposium or Phaedrus but present also in the Republic.

James Warren

reality and value. Indeed, Socrates repeatedly notes the pain anddiscomfort felt by the student on his way up out of the cave as thebright light and the journey take their toll.

We might also relate his experience to the analysis offered byProtarchus. The release of the prisoner from his bonds and his ig-norance (, ) is painful perhaps because it makes thatignorance obvious to him. The first stage of his education reveals tohim the truth of his situation: although he previously thought thathe was viewing real objects, in fact he was viewing only shadowscast by the fire behind the puppeteers. Such a realization is hardto endure and the prisoner may well prefer to return to his previ-ous comfortable acceptance of mere shadows. Indeed, the prisonerwill be confused if he is told that, despite his struggles to cope withthe glaring light, his eyesight is in fact now working better ( ). Socrates notes that when presented with new and more realobjects for consideration the prisoner will become confused or ata loss and will perhaps even initially refuse to consider them, pre-ferring instead to turn back towards the objects with which he ismore familiar; a degree of compulsion is therefore needed to forcehim to persist through the uncomfortableindeed painfulinitialtransition. We might also note that the freed prisoner feels pain notonly when he emerges from underground into the light outside butalso when he first turns round and looks away from the shadows tothe fire within the cave. In that case, if the first stage of the conver-sion might plausibly be likened to the unsettling effects of a Socra-tic elenchus and the undermining of the passive acceptance of merecultural norms, then this tooas well as the eventual first encounterwith the dazzling realities of genuinely intelligible objectsis saidto be a painful process. The prisoner is confronted with his ownignorance about things which he previously thought that he knew,but also, we are to assume, acquires a need or desire to know some-thing of which he now realizes he is ignorant: just the two conditions

Cf. , ; , ; , . There is a helpful account ofthe experience of the freed prisoner in M. Schofield, Metaspeleology, in D. Scott(ed.), Maieusis: Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honour of Myles Burnyeat (Oxford,), at , which does not, however, ask specifically why it is painful.

A similar phenomenon is illustrated by the case of what Socrates calls sum-moners of thought (, ; cf. , ). Faced withconflicting appearances, the soul is forced into an aporia and is compelled to find aresolution to its confusion by summoning the intellect ( ). Socratesmakes no reference there to the possibility that the confusion might be painful.


noted by Protarchus as sufficient to make a case of acquiring know-ledge only a mixed pleasure.

The overall portrayal of the prisoners experience might there-fore be thought to pose a problem for what Socrates will eventuallyclaim for the great intellectual pleasures of philosophical enlighten-ment. The budding philosopher-ruler will certainly turn his gazetowards new and more knowable objects, and he too might have tocome to realize a prior ignorance. In some passages any pleasurethat the philosopher will eventually experience from finally acquir-ing the truth does indeed seem to be connected to a kind of pain,presumably closely linked to the philosophers tremendous desire toacquire the truth. Socrates refers, for example, to the philosophersbirth pangs as he struggles to grasp each things nature ( )and, once the philosopher has achieved the goal of his intellectualdesire, Socrates says that he then would understand and truly liveand be nourished and, in this way, be relieved of his pain ( ). Such comments invite us to think that any pleasure involvedis mixed rather than pure. Perhaps the students intense desire toknow that is often associated with the life of a philosopher, coupledwith the realization that there are some terribly important thingsthat he does not know, will always make philosophical progress arather mixed affair in hedonic terms; the final hoped-for under-standing will then be experienced not merely as a great pleasure,but also as a kind of relief. Such comments might be combined withthe account of the prisoners difficult ascent from the cave to raiseconcerns about the plausibility of the claim in book that the phi-losophical life is most pleasant in so far as it contains episodes inwhich the philosopher learns important truths. There are evidentlycases in which learning the truth can also be associated with signi-ficant pain.

B. Gibbs, Pleasure, Pain and Rhetoric in Republic [Rhetoric], in D. Baltzly,D. Blyth, and H. Tarrant (eds.), Power and Pleasure, Virtues and Vices (Prudentiasuppl.; Auckland, ), , comments at : In Bk Socrates appears to haveforgotten his own warnings about the toils and pains and hardships involved in be-coming a philosopher and living the philosophical life. I see no reason to think thereis an inconsistency.

The use of psychic pregnancy, labour, and birth as a metaphor for intellectualprogress and production is prominent also in the Symposium. At Diotimaassociates any pain that might be felt on this account specifically with the experienceof those who are pregnant in the soul but faced with ugliness. When such people ma-nage to associate with beauty instead, their pains recede, and they can produce theiroffspring. The message seems to be that intellectual progress (here: the bringing to

James Warren

Those concerns can be set aside, fortunately, once we understandproperly the reasons for the prisoners pain. The prisoner is painedat being forced suddenly to view objects of increasing brightness.We can distinguish three aspects here: (i) the glare of the new ob-jects of his sight, (ii) the fact of his being forced to view them, and(iii) the fact of this being a sudden turn from familiar to unfamiliarobjects. The first aspect is presumably part of Socrates demonstra-tion that the prisoner is being asked to turn his cognitive apparatusto objects that are more and more realthat is, have a greater shareof being, are more purely just, beautiful, and so onand aretherefore more and more knowable. The cognitive apparatus, theeye of the soul, that had previously been dealing only with thedimmest objects is now being presented with objects that activateits powers of cognition more and more effectively. But such thingstake some getting used to, particularly when they occur by compul-sion: it is difficult to adjust when moving from a dark room out intothe light even though it is true to say that out in the daylight is wherea persons powers of sight work best. It is not therefore simply thefact of being faced with these more knowable objects that generatesthe pain; rather, the prisoner is pained at being compelled all of asudden to turn from his previous and familiar objects of attentionthe shadowsand being forced to keep his gaze on these new andsurprising things.

A life of philosophical progress and understanding is not per sepainful, but it is so in the case of the prisoner in the cave becauseof the necessary compulsion and the shocking revelation involvedin effecting a rapid transition from the prisoners dreadful initialstate. When Socrates goes on to describe the education of the bud-ding philosophers, in contrast, he makes it clear that they have toundergo a lengthy process of careful preparation that begins very

fulfilment of psychic potential) is not per se painful, but can be so if undertaken inthe wrong circumstances or for the sake of the wrong kind of object. See furtherF. C. C. Sheffield, Platos Symposium: The Ethics of Desire (Oxford, ), .Socrates special form of midwifery described in the Theaetetus is also dedicated tofirst bringing on birth pangs and then, ideally, allaying them (Theaet. ).Pain, in that case, is associated with the initial possibly confused or inchoate state ofa persons thoughts before Socrates can coax out a viable intellectual offspring. Thepain of this intellectual labour may be generated by a kind of aporia, perhaps similarto the prisoners confusion at Rep. .

For more discussion of Platos use of imagery and metaphor in describing thephilosophical life see A. Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philo-sophy (Cambridge, ), .


early in life (see e.g. ). We can therefore be more opti-mistic about the experience of philosophical students in the idealcity, since there is a significant difference between the tremendousinvoluntary cognitive upheavals experienced by someone pluckedout of the cave and dragged into the light and the altogether lesshorrific experience of a young person educated in the ideally organ-ized city and led willingly and slowly through a carefully construc-ted programme of philosophical education which has an assuredlevel of success. Unlike the various people who complain of dis-tress as a result of talking with Socrates and unlike the dazzled andpained prisoner escaping the cave at the beginning of Republic ,a philosopher-in-training in the ideal city will be making intellec-tual progress inmaximally beneficial circumstances. As thePhilebusnotes, there is a great difference between cases in which a desireincluding presumably a desire to know somethingis coupled withthe realization that its satisfaction is extremely unlikely and a desireaccompanied by the assurance that it will be fulfilled ( ). Thepainful experience of the prisoner may resemble the discomfort feltby people in Socrates own Athens struggling to make intellectualheadway, but that should not generate a general pessimism aboutintellectual progress itself nor about the great pleasures which it willideally produce.

In short, philosophical progress may never be entirely straight-forward, but we should be able to grant to Socrates the concessionthat, under ideal circumstances, the pain involved will be, at thevery least, significantly lessened. And, in any case, elsewhere in thedialogue Socrates is often very upbeat about the pleasures of in-tellectual discovery. Consider, for example, his description of thephilosophical natures at ff., especially . Thesefortunate people, fitted with all the traits of character necessary toallow them to be potential philosopher-rulers, desire the pleasureof the soul itself by itself ( ),a description very reminiscent of book s characterization of thepure and true pleasures at ff. There is no mention here of thepleasure of the soul by itself always being accompanied by pain,nor is there any need for such qualifications.

See M. Lane, Virtue as the Love of Knowledge in Platos Symposium and Re-public, in D. Scott (ed.), Maieusis: Essays on Ancient Philosophy in Honour of MylesBurnyeat (Oxford, ), , esp. .

James Warren

III

There are also, no doubt, distinctions to be drawn between theexperiences of someone progressing towards philosophical under-standing and a fully qualified philosopher-ruler, and those distinc-tions will be important in what follows. Still, Socrates is clearlyinterested in explaining the affective aspects of the philosophical lifeas a whole, and is also interested in explaining them in part by refer-ence to the specific kinds of knowledge and ignoranceincludingknowing that one is ignorant or that one knowsthat are involvedin acquiring and possessing philosophical understanding. We cannow approach directly themost significant difficulty which has beenraised both for the characterization of the pleasures of learning inthe Philebus and also for the account of the philosophers pleasuresin Republic . In both works the emphasis is squarely on the plea-sures of the process of coming-to-know something previously un-known or previously known but now forgotten. In that case it mightremainmysterious how the philosophermight be said to continue tolive a pleasant life once the necessary and previously lacking know-ledge has been acquired.

The difficulty begins with the closest Socrates comes in the Re-public to an explicit statement of what he thinks pleasure and painare. In the course of an argument intended to secure the conclusionthat pleasure and pain are both to be distinguished from an inter-mediate state of calm or rest (), he clearly states that pleasureand pain are both changes or motions: kinseis ( , ). That comment is left without further expansionuntil he comes some two pages later to give a more elaborate ac-count of the different pleasures of the body and the soul. At Socrates begins a new argument for the superiority of the philoso-phers life by offering two premisses. They deal with first the bodyand then the soul and assert an analogous relationship between theirrespective states of need.

(i) Hunger, thirst, and the like are emptyings () of thestate () of the body ( ).

(ii) Ignorance () and foolishness () are empty-ings of the state of the soul ( ).

He then infers:


(iii) Someone taking in nutrition ( ) andsomeone having understanding ( ) would be filled( ).

By this, he presumably means that the ingestion of food and drinkwould remove the emptying identified in (i) and the acquisition ofunderstanding would remove that in (ii). One of the fundamentalproblems in interpreting this argument is the question whetherSocrates exploits an ambiguity in the terms emptying ()and the associated fulfilment () since they can both referboth to a state (of being empty, of being fulfilled) and to a pro-cess (of emptying, of fulfilling). From what we have seen of theargument so far, it is difficult to think that anything other thanthe state of being empty is intended in (i) and (ii). Certainly, itis not easy to imagine that the ignorance in (ii) is meant to be onlya process of becoming less knowledgeable. On the other hand, thepresent participle in (iii) might suggest a process ofingestion rather than a state of being free from e.g. hunger, whereas might rightly be thought to suggest a continued possessionof understanding. Despite such uncertainties, the most satisfyingoverall interpretation holds that the states of ignorance or hungerare painful but the processes of eating or learning are pleasant.

The question whether pleasures are always kinseis becomesacute, of course, when we glance forward to the intended con-clusion of the argument, which holds that the philosopher is theone most truly fulfilled since he grasps objects which are them-selves most pure and true, and are without qualification. If thisrefers merely to the process of acquiring understanding, then wemight now agree only that the process of becoming a philosopheris exquisitely pleasant, but also infer that the resulting state ofunderstanding is not. (Much as we might think that the processof eating when hungry is present while the state of feeling nohunger is not.) Socrates does offer some more information about

N. Pappas, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic (London,), , mistakenly detects an inconsistency here: [W]hereas the first half ofthe argument shrank from praising any pleasure that follows from the relief of pain,the second half endorses the relief from ignorance as though it could raise a personhigher than the middle state of calm ( ). Nothing in the argument prepares forthis claim, which feels like a gratuitous insistence on the pleasure of philosophy. Theinconsistency disappears when we note that Socrates nowhere claims that ignoranceis painful per se. Rather, it is often a painless lack and so the pleasure of learning isnot necessarily preceded by pain.

James Warren

how he understands the pleasures of the philosophical life, butwhen it comes to the specific question whether these pleasuresare associated entirely with the process of acquiring knowledgeor may also include pleasures associated with the possession ofknowledege, there is unfortunately only limited help to be foundin the immediate context of this argument.

A survey of the various references in the surrounding discus-sion to the sorts of pleasure said to characterize the philosophicallife proves to be frustrating. In the description of the discussionbetween three spokesmen for the three kinds of life, each dedicatedto the cultivation of one of the three parts of the soul, Socrates hasvarious ways of describing the pleasures characteristic of the lifededicated to reason: the life of the lover of wisdom, the philosophos.Sometimes these expressions point in the direction suggested by theargument thus far, namely that intellectual pleasures are associatedwith the process of acquiring knowledge, that is to say, with learn-ing. For example, when Socrates imagines the attitude of the othertwo sorts of peoplethe profit-lover and the victory-loverto thephilosophers life, he often puts it emphatically in terms of theirattitude to the pleasures of learning (e.g. , , ; ,). This lends support to the conception of philosophi-cal pleasures as primarilyand perhaps exclusivelythe pleasuresof coming-to-know special objects. But this manner of expressionis not applied consistently. Elsewhere, Socrates is prepared to talkabout the pleasures of knowing ( , )or about the pleasures of contemplating what is ( , , ).

There are also occasions on which Socrates refers in the samesentence both to the pleasures of learning and also to the pleasureof knowing. For example, at he wonders how the phi-losopher will think of other pleasures in relation to his own pre-ferred intellectual pleasures. He compares the other pleasures withthe pleasure of knowing how the truth stands ( [sc. ] ) and always being in such a state [sc. ofpleasure] when learning ( ).It is hard to be sure whether Socrates means in this case to refer

The phrasing echoes an earlier description of the special characteristic of therational part of the soul, being that with which we learn and which quite evidentlyis entirely focused upon knowing how the truth lies [ ], and is least of all of them concerned withmoney and reputation( ).


to two different kinds of pleasure that the philosopher may exper-ience and to contrast both with the pleasures of the spirit or theappetites, and it is unclear whether the adverb always () is sup-posed to show that the philosopher is always learning or that he isalways experiencing pleasure when he learns. But it certainly sug-gests that there is pleasure associated with knowing the truth, ofhaving acquired knowledge, whatever it may or may not then claimabout that state.

In short, the problem is that much of the argument so far is plau-sible only on the understanding that pleasure is the replenishing ofa desire or lack. On the other hand, Socrates is apparently happyto talk as if there are also pleasures to be had from knowing, ratherthan learning, the special objects of the philosophers expertise. Tobe sure, we might understand ignorance as a state of cognitive lackmuch as hunger is a state of bodily lack, but if pleasure is asso-ciated with the process of making good that lack, there seems noother conclusion possible than that the pleasures of replenishingthe soulexquisite and intense though they may be since they aretrained on pure and true objectswill be experienced only whilethe philosopher is acquiring knowledge. What pleasures can be leftfor the philosopher once he has the understanding he requires? Ifpleasure ceases when the process of replenishing ends, then themore successful a philosopher is, the sooner his life will cease tobe pleasant. It is essential for the overall political project of theRepublic that the ruling philosophers take up their role in the pos-session of a kind of knowledge that makes them experts in the areasrelevant for political decision-making. Readers of the Republic arefamiliar with the concern that once they have acquired the requiredexpertise the philosophers may bemade to live a worse life by beingobliged to give up their intellectual pursuits, descend back into thecave, and rule. The present worry is that the fully fledged philoso-phers may also be made to live a less pleasant life simply becausethe ascent out of the cave comes to an end.

For more on this somewhat opaque and contested sentence see below, pp. and n. .

J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure [Pleasure] (Ox-ford, ), .

See also C. C. W. Taylor, Platonic Ethics, in S. Everson (ed.), Ethics (Cam-bridge, ), , who objects to Socrates argument on the grounds that () nodoubt a truth once discovered does not have to be rediscovered, but ameal once eatendoes not have to be eaten over again, and an intellectual life will require repeated acts

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We have already seen that the Republic contains a complex andvaried story of the affective aspects of intellectual advancement,beyond the arguments concerning pleasure in book . And we haveseen indications that Socrates wants to say that even the accom-plished philosophers intellectual life would display a similarlycomplex affective aspect. Such considerations might alleviate someof the worries about the hedonic life of the philosopher-rulers or,less charitably, they might be taken merely to demonstrate a riftbetween what Socrates evidently wishes to claim about their plea-sant lives and the inadequacy of the model of pleasure in Republic to support such a claim. It would be far more satisfying if we couldconstruct an account that will allow this expanded sense in whichthe philosopher, even once he has attained the knowledge requiredfor being a ruler, will continue to live a life characterized by greatintellectual pleasures and which also remains consistent with Soc-rates explicitly professed account of the nature of those intellectualpleasures in terms of a process of satisfying some kind of cognitivelack. But we are hampered in the construction of such an accountby the fact that although Socrates spends rather a lot of time ondescribing the various epistemological and psychological, not tomention ethical, aspects of someones progress towards philoso-phical understanding and the comprehension of the Good itself,what that persons life might be like after that point is left relativelyunderexplored. Perhaps this is excusable in the sense that Soc-rates major task is to persuade us that such an understanding ispossible for a human to acquire and that, once properly installed asthe rulers of a city, such rulers would set things up so as to be thebest they could possibly be. Quite what it would be like to be sucha ruler is not such a pressing concern. We are told, of course, thatthey will desire and endeavour to enact whatever is good and just,and we can extrapolate something about them having no desirefor certain things the rest of us might hanker aftermoney, fame,familiar familial relationships, and the likebut that is about it.

of thought (whether new discoveries or the recapitulation of truths already known)no less than a life of bodily satisfactions will require repeated episodes of bodily plea-sure. See also Gibbs, Rhetoric, ; Russell, Plato on Pleasure, n. .

For a discussion of the various psychological, epistemological, and ethical as-pects of dialectic, see M. M. McCabe, Is Dialectic as Dialectic Does? The Virtueof Philosophical Conversation, in B. Reis (ed.), The Virtuous Life in Greek Ethics(Cambridge, ), .


IV

A recent attempt by Sylvain Delcomminette to resolve the problemseems to me to be ultimately unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, it de-serves serious consideration since it points the way to what I think isa more promising solution. Delcomminettes overall interpretationaims to show that for Plato knowing (connaissance) and learning(apprentisage) are regularly held to be one and the same, or, per-haps better, that for Plato human knowledge always consists in theregular relearning of previously known things. Delcomminettesprincipal piece of textual evidence comes from the immediate con-text of Republic . He notes the following question from earlier inSocrates defence of the superior pleasures of the philosophers life,a question which we have already considered briefly above:

, , ; ; ( )

I said, How are we to think the philosopher considers the other pleasuresin comparison with that of knowing how the truth is and always being insuch a state when learning? Will he not think them greatly deficient?

Delcomminette argues that Socrates here refers to the plaisir deconnatre le vrai tel quil est et dtre toujours dans un tel tat enapprenant (Le Philbe, ). If that is indeed how the second halfof the sentence must be understood, then it would appear to lendexplicit support to his proposal that the philosophers life is bestunderstood as a kind of apprentisage permanent. He further sup-ports this interpretation by appealing to the Symposiums famousaccount at of human psychological flux, in which Dio-tima claims that

. . . not only does one branch of knowledge [] come to be in uswhile another passes away and . . . we are never the same even in respect ofour knowledge, but . . . each single piece of knowledge has the same fate.For what we call studying [] exists because knowledge is leaving us,because forgetting is the departure of knowledge, while studying puts backa fresh memory in place of what went away, thereby preserving a piece of

Delcomminette, Le Philbe, : En ralit, tant dans la Rpublique que dansle Philbe, le plaisir pur rsulte bien du processus dapprentissage, mais en tant pr-cisment quil est identique la connaissance (emphasis original).

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knowledge, so that it seems to be the same. (Trans. A. Nehamas and P.Woodruff)

I have already noted that the passage at Republic isnot entirely clear in its commitments. The text itself is debated, andit is therefore understandable that different translators render thesentence differently. In that case, it is prudent not to rely heavilyon a particular interpretation of a controversial passage. In addi-tion, the reference to the Symposiums notion of psychological fluxis not consistent with the most plausible interpretation of the con-trast between the pleasures of the body and those of the soul asoutlined in Republic . To make that inconsistency clear, it is neces-sary to return to the argument we left at with Socrates havingjust set out an initial analogy between fillings and emptyings of thebody and the soul.With a full account of Socrates conception of thenature of the philosophers pleasures, we might then be able to givean informed answer to the question of the pleasures of a philoso-phers life after he has come to know the Forms. Socrates continues:

(iv) A filling with what is to a greater degree is more truly a fillingthan a filling with what is to a lesser degree ( ; , ).

The central difficulty here is in making good sense of the notion ofdegrees of being and then applying it to the intended analogue of de-

J. Adam (ed. and comm.), The Republic of Plato, vols. (Cambridge, ),devotes appendix of his commentary on book to the discussion of how to con-strue these lines and, in particular, whether they contain one or two questions. Ihave cited them, following Slingss Oxford text, with two questions. Burnet punc-tuates similarly, bracketing , which appears in some manuscripts after. Adam thinks there is only one question and retains , to read: ; . . ., trans-lating: compared with that [pleasure] of knowing how the truth stands and alwaysenjoying a kindred sort of pleasure while he learns? Will he not think them very faraway and . . .? Recent translations reflect the difficulty of fixing the precise intendedmeaning. For example, Griffiths translation has the pleasure of knowing where thetruth lies and always enjoying some similar sort of pleasure while he is learning it?Wont he regard them as far inferior?; Grubes translation has [pleasure] of knowingwhere the truth lies and always being in some such pleasant condition while learn-ing.

Literally, the filling with what is is a truer filling. The idea is presumably thatfilling a body with food is less of a filling than filling a soul with knowledge. J. Annas,An Introduction to Platos Republic [Introduction] (Oxford, ), , complains ofan illegitimate slide from being filled with what really/truly is to being really/trulyfilled.


grees of filling. Socrates himself helps only a little with the first ofthese problems, since he merely reminds Glaucon in a brisk fashionof a previously agreed distinction between things which share inpure being and those which do not. Even so, there is enough speltout in these lines for us to be fairly confident about Socrates view.The general contrast he invokes is between bodily nutrition andthe means of caring for the soul ( ); the former obviouslymakes use of food, drink, and the like, while the latter makes useof true opinion, knowledge, understanding, and every virtue ( ). The question of degrees or categories of what is is then ex-plained by a contrast between two kinds of filling, their objects, andtheir proper location, which is spelt out in the next few exchangesbetween Socrates and Glaucon. The contrast is complex, but worthexploring carefully because it holds the key to the remaining argu-ment. There is both a kind of filling related to what is always thesame, what is immortal, and the truth, which is itself of such a kindand comes to be in such a thing, and, in contrast, another whichis related to what is never the same, is mortal, is itself of such akind, and comes to be in such a thing. It emerges, therefore, thatthere are three variables involved in the complex set of associationswhich Socrates wishes to use. There are what we might call (a) thesubject of the filling or thing to be filled, (b) the method of filling,and (c) the object of filling, viz. whatever is used to fill (a).

Learning, for example, is a method of filling which is taken tobe a means of seeing to the care of the soul, and knowledge is ne-cessarily related to objects which are changeless and true. Throughlearning, we fill the soul with knowledge of these changeless andtrue objects. Eating, on the other hand, is a means of seeing to thecare of the body but is related to objects which are changeable andinconsistent. Socrates insists that the character of the kind of fillingis determined by the character of its object, so learning itself is of akind with its objects. He also insists that the kind of filling comesto be in something which is also of such a kind as it and its objects,so knowledgewhich is stable and unchangingcomes to be in a

Cf. S. Rosen, Platos Republic: A Study (New Haven and London, ), . Annas, Introduction, , is unhappywith this section. She wonders () howwhat is changeless can come about in what is changeless and is also concerned be-cause () it is not clear how this passage should be related to claims elsewhereabout the Forms. For the contrast drawn here is not one between Forms and otherthings, since it has as much application to soul and body as to other things ( ),and the soul is not a Form.

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soul which is also immortal and, in important ways, unchanging.The fulfilment of the bodys needs, in contrast, has as its objectsperceptible items, bits of food and so on, is itself only temporarybecause it has to be constantly repeated using always new itemsand comes to be in something equally temporary and changeable,namely the body.

A chain of explanation is set in place. The important determin-ing factor is the nature of the ultimate object used for the filling ineach case. The nature of the object then determines the nature of thefilling itself, which must in turn be related to an appropriate subjectto be filled. It remains only for Socrates to spell out the distinctionsbetween the two sets of relations and to rank them. Unfortunately,the text of has been transmitted in a corrupt state, so it isnot easy to see how the argument begins. The conclusion, how-ever, at is what we might have expected, namely that theforms of care for the body have a lesser share in being and truththan the forms of care for the soul. And at it is added thatthe body differs from the soul in the same way, namely because thebody shares less in being and truth than the soul. Something thatis always the same shares more in being and truth than somethingwhich is not always the same. And if that is the case for the objects ofthe fillings, then it must also be the case for the fillings themselves.

It should be clear why the thrust of this argument sits poorly withthe idea that Socrates here holds the view that the philosophers soulis in a state of permanent learning of the kind suggested by Diotimaat Symposium . The argument as a whole rests on theassumption that the filling appropriate for the soul is the filling ofsomething that is always alike, immortal, and true with somethingthat shares those characteristics. The central contrast is between thestability and permanence of the filling appropriate to the soul andthe impermanence and changeability of the body and the objects inwhich it takes pleasure. The upshot of this argument in book isthat filling a bodily need is less truly a filling than filling a psychicneed. The subject being filled (the body), the means of filling (eat-ing), and the items used for the filling (food) are all changeable andinconstant. Hunger is sated only temporarily. The body and thefood used to feed it are such that the filling cannot be permanent andis at best only ever partial. As he later comments, those who are try-

Slings ad loc. comments: locus desperatus. See Adam ad loc. and his appen-dix to book for further discussion and for his own preferred solution.


ing to satisfy their bodily desires fail to do so because they are fillingsomething which neither is, nor is water-tight, with things whichare not ( ). Socrates tellingly compares their state to that ofthe Danaids of myth, who were condemned to toil fruitlessly tryingto fill a leaky vessel by carrying water in a sieve, reusing an image heexploits to good effect in his conversation with Callicles at Gorgias . It would be very surprisingnot to say unhelpful tohis argumentif Socrates simultaneously holds that the intellec-tual pleasures he is praising for the stability of their objects and thestability and permanence of the soul which they fulfil in fact alsodisplay a similar kind of impermanence. And, what is more, Soc-rates stipulated back at that a philosophical nature wouldhave to display an excellent memory. It is therefore very unlikelythat the kind of psychological fluidity emphasized in theSymposiumis something we are invited to bring to bear on the understandingof intellectual pleasures in the Republic.

As the discussion progresses, there are more reasons offered insupport of the view that the intellectual pleasures are thought of asbeing provoked by a change that has a permanent and stable resultand, moreover, that they are associated with that part of us that isalso permanent and unchanging. At ff. Socrates brings allof the complicated discussion about different kinds of filling of dif-ferent kinds of vessel with different kinds of object finally to bearon the question of pleasure.

(v) Fulfilment by what is appropriate to our nature is pleasant( ).

(vi) That which is to a greater degree filled really and with thingsthat are generates to a greater degree the enjoyment of truepleasure really and more truly. That which receives thingsthat are to a lesser degree would be filled less truly and se-curely and would receive more untrustworthy and less truepleasure ( ).

Critical attention has focused on (vi), but premiss (v) is un-doubtedly just as important. When Socrates considers the plea-sures enjoyed by those who are focused on bodily delights, it is

Cf. Gosling andTaylor,Pleasure, : The thought seems to be that a firm last-ing container filled with firm lasting contents can truly be said to be filled, whereaswhen one has a non-stable container and volatile contents it is only in a dubious senseto be called a filling at all: can one fill a hair-sieve with liquid?; see also C. Bobonich,Platos Utopia Recast (Oxford, ), .

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not coincidental that he casts such people and their pleasures indecidedly bestial terms. They are like cattle, always looking downand bent over towards the ground, feeding at the table, grow-ing fat, and mounting one another ( ). The metaphorof rutting herd animals continues as these people are describedas butting one another with iron horns and weapons ( ).Clearly, Socrates is encouraging us to disown such behaviour asnot appropriate to our proper, human and rational, nature. It isa mere bestial nature which such pleasures fulfil, to the extent towhich they can fulfil anything at all. The strong implication isthat this vignette sketches the state of people who are focused onenjoying the pleasures produced when they try to satisfy the desiresof the appetitive part of the soul. They have become misled bythese impure and false pleasures and have created for themselvesa misinformed conception of the good life. Tragically, the sub-sequent constant pandering to the desires of the appetitive part ofthe soul merely compounds their misfortune and further distortstheir conceptions of value. Socrates goes on to refer explicitly tothe elements familiar from the tripartition of the soul when heturns at ff. to consider the pleasures of the spirited, money-and victory-loving part of the soul. The discussion of pleasure is,after all, part of a much more extensive discussion of the relativehappiness of different character types, an enquiry which has takenup much of this and the previous book and in which Socrates hasmade extensive use of the three parts of the soul to explain theorigin and nature of various kinds of life.

The question of the precise account of our human nature offeredby Socrates in the Republic is complicated and controversial. But,in general terms, Socrates appears to be committed to an accountof our nature which encourages us to identify ourselves, first andforemost, with the rational part of our soul which should take careof the other two parts. That is the overall message of the concludingsections of book and their depiction of a person as composed of ahuman, a lion, and a many-headed beast (see ). The ful-filment of the needs of the rational soul is what best fulfils the bestpart of our nature and produces the most and finest pleasure. (It

Gibbs, Rhetoric, , cannot be correct in reading this passage as merely rhe-torical.

For discussion see Annas, Introduction, ; D. Scott, Platos Critique ofthe Democratic Character, Phronesis, (), .


is impossible, at least while the soul is incarnated, to rid ourselvesentirely of the desires and associated pleasures of the appetites andof spirit, but they ought at least to be controlled and reined in as faras possible: .) Such an identification with the rationalpart of the soul is necessary for the proper harmony of the soulsparts and also, apparently, for the proper functioning of each in-dividual part of the soul. Certainly, in the coda to this argumentwhich once again surveys the various character types distinguishedby the prominence of each one of the three parts of the soul, Soc-rates notes that in the absence of proper guidance by reason eventhe pleasures of the spirited or appetitive parts are not maximized.Only the philosophical and just soul, ruled by reason, properly en-joys the pleasures of the appetitive and spirited parts, since onlywith the guidance of reason will each enjoy the best and truest ofits own pleasures, in so far as it is possible ( ). Aglutton, for example, will not enjoy the pleasures of the appetiteas much as the philosopher, since he is not controlled by reason.Socrates spells out this view in the case of the money- and victory-loving character: his constant irascibility and overwhelming desirefor victory prevent the successful satisfaction of his predominantdesires ( ).

Premiss (vi) says very little that has not been explained or, at thevery least, discussed already; it adds only the association of pleasurewith the degree of fulfilment attained and the kind of object beingused for the fulfilment. If we have by now accepted the notion out-lined and explained at that bodily fulfilment is less afulfilment than proper intellectual fulfilment, then this new pointfollows without much trouble. We might still imagine a staunchsupporter of the pleasures of eating and drinking objecting that hesees no particular reason to think that his preferred pleasures areany less intense than those of his more intellectually inclined coun-terpart. And, indeed, perhaps Socrates would agree with him; theproblem with bodily pleasures, after all, is that they are based insuch violent fluctuations and contrasts between satiety and empti-ness that they can mislead people into concentrating on them tothe detriment of the health of their souls ( ). The ob-stinate hedonist might also claim that his preferred pleasures are no

Cf. Russell, Plato on Pleasure, . Compare also Socrates diagnosis of theconstant futile toils of the tyrannical man, trying desperately to satisfy his uncon-trolled and changing appetites: .

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less truly pleasures than the more intellectual varieties. Socrates re-sponse to this objection is not so clear. He describes the pleasuresin dispute here not only as mixed with pain but also as copies andshadow-pictures of true pleasure ( ). It is not immedi-ately clear what the precise connotations are of such a metaphor,which is evidently meant to resonate with other related passages ofgeneral epistemological and metaphysical importance elsewhere inthe work. It might be wondered whether Socrates means to say thatsuch shadow-pictures of true pleasure are not really pleasures atall. Alternatively, he might mean only that they are pleasures of adeficient and unsatisfying sort: pale imitations of the rich and de-veloped true intellectual pleasures. It is hard to be sure because,throughout this section of the book, Socrates sets out to distinguishbetween kinds of pleasure using a variety of criteria without paus-ing always to make clear their precise significance or the preciseconnections between them, although they are evidently connected.We hear, for example, about pleasures which are pure (),true (), or really () pleasures and those which are not.We are also told that the more true a pleasure is, the more realit is (e.g. ), and Socrates is prepared to praise those plea-sures whose objects share in pure being ( , ). It is unsurprising, therefore, that it is sometimes sug-gested that in the Republic Plato fails to distinguish satisfactorilybetween claiming that some pleasures are not genuine pleasures atall and that some pleasures, although still pleasant, are false in thesense that their object or the content of the pleasure is somehowfalse.

That particular problem can be left aside for our present pur-

, ; Compare shadows as an object of ( );shadows in the cave ( ); painters as imitators of things that are themselvesonly ( ); as a form of deceptive appearance ( ).

See D. Frede, Disintegration and Restoration: Pleasure and Pain in PlatosPhilebus, in R. Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge, ), at ; and cf. Gosling and Taylor, Pleasure, and . It is alsosometimes claimed that the necessary distinction is found more properly articulatedin the Philebus. (Much discussion of the Philebus has concentrated on the properunderstanding of the characterization of a pleasure as true or false, but on thequestion of the relationship between the categories of true/false and pure/impurepleasures in that dialogue see Frede, this note, and also J. Cooper, Platos Theoryof Human Good in the Philebus, Journal of Philosophy, (), . Note theclose assimilation of the purity and truth of pleasure at Phileb. .) There is agood discussion of the shadow-pictures of pleasure of Republic in M. M. Erginel,


poses since, whatever we finally decide about the precise nature ofthese shadow-pictures of true pleasure, we are still faced with theproblem of what to say about the hedonic life of the fully fledgedphilosopher and his true and genuine pleasures. The argument sofar, after all, strongly implies that the true pleasure to be had is as-sociated with the kinsis that is learning, filling up the cognitive lackthat is ignorance, and that this filling is something which takes placein a stable and everlasting container, uses stable and everlasting ob-jects, and therefore does not have to be repeated. Indeed, the factthat, unlike the bodily pleasures with which it is contrasted, suchtrue pleasure is not in constant need of repetition is one of the rea-sons why Socrates thinks it is a superior form of pleasure.

There are a number of ways in which Socrates can respond tothe concern that the philosophical life will contain great and ex-quisite pleasures while the philosopher is in the process of acquir-ing knowledge but, after that point, will seem to have many feweropportunities for continued enjoyment of those same pleasures. Afirst general point to bear in mind is that Socrates nowhere pro-mised to show that the philosopher is at every moment of his lifeexperiencing the greatest pleasures; we are not to imagine him in aconstant state of intellectual ecstasy. Rather, the demonstrandum isthat the philosophers life, taken as a whole, is most pleasant. Thislessens the need for us to show that the philosopher is at all timesexperiencing the greatest pleasures, since we might well agree thatthe philosophers life will contain at some point in it the greatest,most true, and purest pleasures.

Second, the life of a fully fledged philosopher will neverthelesscontain a great variety of pleasures and,moreover, will contain plea-sures which are still superior to those found in any other possiblelife. Socrates asserts at that only in the light of therule of reason in the soul is a person able to experience appetitiveand spirited pleasures of the best and truest variety available. Ofcourse, these pleasures are never going to be pure and true in thesense that the intellectual pleasures are, but nevertheless this pas-sage serves as an important reminder that the philosopher will alsocontinue to enjoy the pleasures of eating and so on and, more to thepoint, we are assured that because of the harmonious arrangementof his soul, free from internal conflict ( ), and the fact that

Pleasures in Republic IX [Pleasures] (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin,), ch. .

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therefore his desires are all marshalled and arranged by reason subspecie boni, he will be able to do so to the greatest extent possible forany person. In contrast, when one of the other parts of the soul isdominant, it forces its fellow soul-parts to pursue pleasures whichare alien to them ( ).

This observation remains unsatisfying to the extent that it con-cerns pleasures that are not related directly to the philosophers spe-cial emphasis on living a life identified with the activities of reason.A philosophermight well take great pleasure from eating his healthydiet, perhaps evenmore pleasure than the glutton or gourmand takefrom theirs, because he eats in a way that is ultimately guided by aconception of the good. But that still falls short of the hoped-for ac-count of why a philosophical life remains most pleasant, and Socra-tes himself seems most interested in locating the superiority of thephilosophers hedonic life in its being related closely to the exper-ience of pleasures that are both true and alsoas we have seenappropriate to our best nature.

Another possibility is that Socrates has in mind a wider con-ception of intellectual pleasures than just those concerned withForms. Perhaps the fully qualified philosopher will continue hisintellectual development by acquiring various true beliefs, findingout various facts about the world, reading literature or history, evendoing some mathematics or revisiting his old harmonic theory text-books and trying out some new problems. There is some textualsupport for such a view since at Socrates groups notonly the pleasures of knowledge and understanding but also truebeliefs and generally all virtue against those concerned with food,

This is important additional support for the earlier contention ( )that the philosophers life is the most pleasant because only he has experienced trueand pure intellectual pleasures and, as an expert in all pleasures, he would judge hislife to be the most pleasant. C. C. W. Taylor, Plato and Aristotle on the Criterionof Real Pleasures, in his Pleasure, Mind, and Soul: Selected Papers in Ancient Phi-losophy (Oxford, ), , does not note this important point and perhaps asa result rejects Socrates claim that the philosopher excels other types of men in hisexperience of pleasure. Erginel, Pleasures, ch. , has a wide-ranging discussion ofthis argument.

An interpretation of this kind is developed by Erginel, Pleasures, ch. , whichhe further supports by relying on a scalar interpretation of the being and truth ofvarious objects of pleasure: there are, in other words, objects that stand betweenthose that are always the same, immortal, and the truth and those that are neveralike and mortal ( ). In J. Warren, Pleasure, Plutarchs Non posse, andPlatos Republic, forthcoming in Classical Quarterly, I argue that Plutarch uses asimilarly expanded notion of the pleasures of reason in his criticism of Epicureanhedonism.


drink, and nutrition as a whole. All of the former types, it seems,will produce pleasures that are superior to those of the latter type.This is a further important reminder that the philosopher-rulerwill not be a disembodied soul; he will continue to live and take en-joyment in various pursuits and activities beyond the special case ofacquiring knowledge of perfect, intelligible, and everlasting Forms.But yet again, the proposed pleasures that are said to characterizethe philosophers life are not obviously of a kind that cannot alsobe enjoyed by those less fortunate people who cannot be said tolive a philosophical life. A rather wide group of people, we mightimagine, can come to acquire and perhaps enjoy acquiring truebeliefs or a grasp of empirical facts, even if we grant the possibilitythat such learning would be transformed significantly by a propergrasp of the nature of the good.

V

A better answer can be given if we allow ourselves to work with aricher conception of the workings of the reasoning part of the soul.We have already seen signs in the discussion of the pleasures andpains involved in the philosophers ascent from the cave that theRepublic must be using something like the conception of first- andsecond-order knowledge that Protarchus expresses in more explicitterms in the Philebus and that in both cases there is an evident in-terest in the pleasure and pain to be associated with a kind of reflex-ive knowledge. My further claim is that the analysis taken from thePhilebus can be used to alleviate the problem of the philosophersintellectual pleasures in Republic by pointing to a set of pleasuresthat the philosopher will be able to experience after the point ofcoming to know the Forms and that are not accessible in any wayor to any degree by someone who has not similarly come to knowthe Forms. It is certainly wrong to say that the philosopher, oncehe has acquired knowledge of the Forms, will continue to experi-ence the pleasures of that initial and extremely satisfying discoverybecause he will in one way or another forget what he has learnt.It is hard to square such a proposal with the evident emphasis inRepublic on the stability and permanence of not only the objectof philosophical knowledge but also the rational soul with whichthat knowledge is acquired, not to mention the insistence that phi-

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losophers will have excellent powers of memory ( ). However,Delcomminettes proposal points in the right direction because itis true that the philosophers life will continue to be characterizedby various changes in the soul that might reasonably be said to beexamples of coming-to-know of the sort that would qualify as po-tential pleasures. We do not, on the other hand, need to posit somekind of constant state of learning and forgetting of any first-orderknowledge, since any psychological changes necessary can be re-stricted to the second-order kinds of knowing.

Protarchus drew our attention to the possibility of there being asecond order of reflection on what a person knows and the connec-tions this might have to experiences of pleasure or pain in comingto know something, since it allows a distinction between coming-to-know in some cases in which one does and in other cases inwhich one does not also know that one does not know that some-thing. There are cases in which this second-order knowledge thatone does not know something is coupled with the fact that one pre-viously did know that something, in which case we are right to talkin terms of forgetting or remembering. But this is not true ofall cases. There is surely, we might insist, an important distinctionbetween having forgotten something andmerely not having tomindsomething that we still know. That distinction is brought out mostforcefully by the fact that in the case of something forgotten butnow recognized as necessary to know, the previously held piece ofknowledge is not easily remembered. Indeed, the difficulty of re-membering that previously held piece of knowledge coupled withthe recognized need for it is precisely the combination of factorsthat would make it plausible to say that the experience is a pain-ful one.

Once again we can turn to the Philebus for a more explicit expres-sion of an idea that I want to suggest is relevant to Socrates claimsinRepublic . In his discussionwith Protarchus, Socrates articulatesa distinction between remembering something that has been for-gotten and calling to mind something that has not been forgottenbut has simply not been the focus of attention. At he distin-guishes between two forms of recollection, anamnsis: one inwhichthe soul takes up (, ) a memory, which is some-

And there is also the further question whether the person concerned knowsthat he has forgotten, which is a complicated combination of (i) not knowing X, (ii)knowing that he does not know X, and (iii) knowing that he previously did know X.


thing originally experienced together with the body, and another inwhich the soul unearths or recovers (, ) a memorywhich it previously had lost (, ) of a perception ora piece of learning. Both, he says, can rightly be called examplesof anamnsis, although it is evident that we are not meant to thinkon this occasion of the special kind of recollection considered in theMeno and Phaedo: both forms of anamnsis in the Philebus deal withperceptions or things learnt during a persons life. This distinc-tion between the two forms is embedded in a longer section thattries to clarify what memory is ( ), since Socrates wishes touse the pleasures belonging to memory as an example of pleasureswhich belong only to the soul and not to the soul and body together.His principal concern, therefore, is to show that even in cases wherewhat is being recalled is something that originally involved the body(a perception or some other kind of experience) the recollection ofit involves only the soul. But whatever the other subtleties of thepassage, it is reasonable to identify here a recognition on Socratespart that there is an important difference between the soul remem-bering something that has been forgottenthat is, a memory thathas been lost ( )and the soul recovering something storedin the memory. Calling a piece of latent knowledge to mind canhardly be called learning, of course, nor can it really be called re-membering. But the Socrates of the Philebus apparently thinks itmight still be called a case of anamnsis, and what matters for ourpurposes is that he does identify a psychological capacity involvingthe taking up of things stored in the memory.

At this point we might be put in mind of not only Aristotles dis-cussion of anamnsis in De memoria , but also his useful distinc-tion between the first and second actualities of knowing. Of course,Aristotle has his own account of how it can be both pleasant tolearn and also pleasant to possess and use already learnt knowledge.And that account is in turn related to a more general disagreementbetween him and Plato on the necessity of thinking of pleasure asa kind of kinsis. That disagreement is already well known and fur-ther consideration of it would be a distraction from the main pointat hand. Still, it seems that the distinction between two species ofanamnsis atPhilebus offers something that will do the same jobas Aristotles useful distinction. It provides a distinction between

There is a helpful discussion of this passage in Delcomminette, Le Philbe,.

James Warren

the kinsis that is the remembrance of knowledge that has been for-gotten and a kinsis that is the bringing to mind of knowledge thathas become somehow latent but can be activated at will and withouteffort when it is found to be necessary.

We can now return to the Republic. Philosopher-rulers will notspend all of their time ruling. Indeed, we are told explicitly thatfor the most part they will be able to spend their time in philo-sophy ( ). Socrates does not say much about what kind ofphilosophy a philosopher-ruler will do, nor does he give a detailedaccount of what a philosopher-ruler will do as he rules, but someof what he does say will allow me to illustrate some of the plea-sures which will characterize the fully fledged philosopher-rulerslife. When the philosopher is not ruling but instead doing philo-sophy, we can assume that either he is acquiring more philosophi-cal knowledgewhich is pleasant in an uncontroversial wayorhe is reviewing and revisiting philosophical knowledge he alreadyhas. The latter activity is neatly characterized as the first kind ofanamnsis canvassed in the Philebus: the soul takes up somethingstored in the memory. The philosopher will turn his attention backto this or that Form or consider how the Forms are related to oneanother. Whatever he does, precisely, it is reasonable to think thatit involves a change of a kind in his soul, the bringing to mind oflatent knowledge, and is therefore something we can readily classifyas an intellectual pleasure. These pleasures are both most plausiblyimagined as kinseis and, furthermore, are related directly to his be-ing a philosopher-ruler.

When the philosopher-ruler is actually ruling, although it is evi-dently not his preferred activity, it too presents opportunities forintellectual pleasures. At Socrates likens the activity of thephilosophers in constructing the ideal city to that of a painter. Justas the painter will work by looking back and forth between hispicture and the original that he is attempting to depict, so too thephilosophers will turn their attention first to the Forms they are at-tempting to instantiate as best they can, then to their city, then backto the Form, and so on. Throughout this process they of courseknow what Justice is, for example, but the constant movement backand forth between the model and the original might rightly be saidto correspond to a psychological shift of attention from the percep-tible construction to the ideal model and back again. They call tomind the original and then, in the light of that, they turn their at-


tention back to the city. And the process goes on, not stopping whenthe city is complete but also being called into action whenever thephilosophers are called to make a judgement about a specific ques-tion of the citys affairs.

To borrow the apparatus of Protarchus observation, we mightsay that the philosopher-ruler will continue to use his faculty of lo-gismos and in doing so call to mind and reconsider various thingsthat he knows both when he is doing philosophy and when he isruling. He needs to do this not because he has in any reasonablesense of the term forgotten the nature of the Just or the Fine but be-cause, although he does know these things, his attention is movingto and from these intelligible objects. It is not at all implausible toimagine that on each occasion when he turns once again to consider,for example, the Just, this will involve a coming-to-know that, whilenot of the significance of the first time he came to know its nature,will share enough of the characteristics of that first occasion to bethought of as a kinsis that fills a kind of lack in the soul. And, assuch, it can be thought of as a true and pure pleasure. Finally, it isa kind of pleasure that is entirely unavailable to anyone who is nota philosopher-ruler.

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

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