Philebus

Plato · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

SOCRATES: Now look here, Protarchus — think about what position you're about to take up on Philebus's behalf, and what position of ours you mean to dispute, in case the way I state it doesn't suit you. Shall we sum up each side? PROTARCHUS: By all means. SOCRATES: Philebus, then, says that the good for every living creature is enjoyment, pleasure, delight, and whatever else belongs to that same family. Our counter-claim is not about these things at all, but that thinking, understanding, remembering, and their relatives — correct judgment and true reasoning — turn out to be better and more excellent than pleasure for every creature capable of sharing in them, and that for those capable of it, this sharing is the most beneficial thing there is, for everything that exists now or ever will. Isn't that roughly how each of us puts it, Philebus? PHILEBUS: Exactly so, Socrates, more than anything. SOCRATES: Do you accept this statement as it's now been given, Protarchus? PROTARCHUS: I have no choice but to accept it — our fine friend Philebus has thrown in the towel. SOCRATES: Then we need to bring the truth about all this to some sort of conclusion, by every means available? PROTARCHUS: We certainly do. SOCRATES: Come then, let's also agree on this further point. PROTARCHUS: Which point? SOCRATES: That each of us will now try to show some state and disposition of soul capable of providing every human being with a happy life. Isn't that right? PROTARCHUS: That's right. SOCRATES: So you two point to the state of enjoyment, and we in turn point to the state of thinking? PROTARCHUS: That's how it stands. SOCRATES: But what if some other state turns out to be better than both? If it shows itself more akin to pleasure, don't we both lose to whoever holds firmly to that life, and the life of pleasure defeats the life of thought? PROTARCHUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And if instead it's more akin to thinking, then thought defeats pleasure, and pleasure loses. Do you both agree these are the terms, or how do you put it? PROTARCHUS: That's how it seems to me, at least. SOCRATES: And what about you, Philebus? What do you say? PHILEBUS: To me it seems, now and always, that pleasure wins outright. You, Protarchus, will have to decide that for yourself. PROTARCHUS: Philebus, once you've handed the argument over to us, you no longer have authority over whether we agree with Socrates or not. PHILEBUS: True enough. But I hereby wash my hands of it, and I call the goddess herself to witness. PROTARCHUS: And we'll gladly serve as your fellow witnesses on that point — that these are indeed the things you said. But now, Socrates, let's try to carry the argument forward from here, whether Philebus joins in willingly or however he pleases. SOCRATES: We must try, starting from the goddess herself — the one our friend here says is called Aphrodite, though her truest name, he claims, is Pleasure. PROTARCHUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: My own reverence, Protarchus, toward the names of the gods has always gone beyond anything human — beyond even the greatest fear. And so now I'll address Aphrodite by whatever name pleases her. But pleasure itself I know to be a many-sided thing, and as I said, we need to start from her and consider carefully what her nature really is. To hear the word spoken plainly, it sounds like some single thing, yet it has taken on all sorts of shapes, some of them, in a way, quite unlike one another. Look at it this way: we say the undisciplined man feels pleasure, but we also say the self-controlled man feels pleasure precisely in being self-controlled. Again, we say the fool feels pleasure, full of foolish opinions and hopes, and yet we also say the wise man feels pleasure precisely in being wise. Wouldn't anyone who called these two kinds of pleasure alike to each other rightly look like a fool? PROTARCHUS: Well, Socrates, they do arise from opposite conditions, but they aren't opposite to one another as pleasures themselves. How could pleasure fail to be, of all things, most like pleasure — itself like itself?

SOCRATES: Yes, my good man, and color is like color too — on that very point, no color differs from being color at all. And yet we all recognize that black, compared to white, is not only different but in fact the most opposite thing there could be. And the same holds for shape compared to shape: as a class it's all one thing, but its parts can be the most opposite to one another, while others show endless variety, and we'll find many other things behave the same way. So don't trust that argument — the one that turns all the most opposite things into one. I'm afraid we'll find some pleasures that are opposite to other pleasures. PROTARCHUS: Perhaps — but how does that damage our argument? SOCRATES: Because, we'll say, you're calling things by a shared name even though they're unlike one another. You claim all pleasant things are good. Now, no argument disputes that pleasant things are pleasant. But many of them are bad, as we maintain, while others are good — and yet you call all of them equally good, even though you'd admit, if someone pressed you logically, that they're unlike one another. So what is it, exactly, that's present alike in the bad ones and the good ones, that makes you call all pleasures good? PROTARCHUS: What do you mean, Socrates? Do you think anyone who has laid it down that pleasure is the good will put up with you saying that some pleasures are good and others among them are bad? SOCRATES: Well, at any rate you'll admit they're unlike one another, and some of them opposite. PROTARCHUS: Not insofar as they're pleasures. SOCRATES: Here we are again, back at the same point, Protarchus — so then pleasure doesn't differ at all from pleasure, but we'll say they're all alike, and the examples just given don't wound our position in the least, and we'll end up experiencing and saying exactly what the shallowest people say, the ones who are new to argument. PROTARCHUS: What sort of thing do you mean? SOCRATES: That if I imitate you and defend myself by daring to claim that the most unlike thing is, of all things, most like the most unlike thing, I'll end up saying the very same things you say, and we'll both look younger than we should, and our argument will fall apart and be lost. So let's row it back again, and perhaps, going by way of like cases, we might somehow come to agreement with each other. PROTARCHUS: Tell me how. SOCRATES: Suppose, Protarchus, that you're questioning me again. PROTARCHUS: About what? SOCRATES: About thought and knowledge and understanding and all the things I named as goods at the start — if you ask me what the good is, in each case, won't they suffer the very same fate as your own account? PROTARCHUS: How so?

SOCRATES: The sciences taken all together will turn out to be many, and some of them unlike one another — and if some of them even turn out to be opposite in some way, would I deserve to go on discussing this at all, if out of fear of that very fact I refused to say that any science is unlike any other, and our argument then vanished and was lost like an old tale, while we ourselves survived by clinging to some piece of nonsense? PROTARCHUS: Well, that mustn't happen — except insofar as it's needed to survive. Still, I do like the idea of treating your case and mine on equal terms: let there be many unlike pleasures, and many different sciences. SOCRATES: Then, Protarchus, let's not hide the difference between your good and mine, but set it out in plain view and be bold — in case, being tested, they reveal to us whether we should call the good pleasure, or thought, or some third thing. For surely we're not competing right now just so that my position wins, or yours does — rather, we both need to fight on the side of whatever is truest. PROTARCHUS: We certainly must. SOCRATES: Then let's secure this principle even further by agreement. PROTARCHUS: Which principle? SOCRATES: The one that gives everyone trouble, willing or not, and at various times. PROTARCHUS: Speak more plainly. SOCRATES: I mean the one that just came up, a strange thing by its very nature: that the many are one and the one is many — a strange thing to say, and easy for anyone to dispute, whichever side of it one takes. PROTARCHUS: Do you mean, for instance, when someone says that I, Protarchus, though born one by nature, am also many — calling me both large and small, heavy and light, the same person, and countless other things besides? SOCRATES: You, Protarchus, have named the well-worn examples of these puzzles about the one and the many — things that pretty much everyone already agrees shouldn't even be touched anymore, since they're considered childish, easy, and a serious hindrance to real argument. And no better is it when someone, having divided each thing into its limbs and parts by argument, and having gotten everyone to agree that all these parts together are that one thing, then mockingly refutes them by forcing them to say monstrous things — that the one is many, indeed infinitely many, and the many are only one. PROTARCHUS: But what other kind of case do you mean, Socrates — ones not yet worn out and settled concerning this same puzzle of one and many?

SOCRATES: I mean, my boy, whenever someone posits a one that doesn't belong among things that come to be and perish, the way we just did a moment ago. In that case — the sort of oneness we were just discussing — everyone agrees there's no need to press the point. But when someone tries to posit one man, one ox, one instance of beauty, one instance of goodness, then, concerning these unities and things like them, there arises great and careful dispute, along with the business of dividing them up. PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: First, whether we ought to suppose that such units truly exist at all; then, how each of them, always being one and the same thing, admitting neither coming-to-be nor perishing, can nonetheless remain, with utter stability, this single one; and after that, whether, among things that come to be and are unlimited in number, it should be posited as scattered and having become many, or as remaining whole and separate from itself — which would seem the most impossible thing of all, the same single thing existing at once in one thing and in many. These, Protarchus, are the real puzzles about the one and the many in cases like this — not those other ones — and if not properly agreed upon, they're the source of every difficulty, and if properly agreed upon, of every way forward. PROTARCHUS: Then shouldn't this, Socrates, be the first thing we work hard at now? SOCRATES: That's what I would say, at least. PROTARCHUS: And you can take it that all the rest of us here agree with you on such matters. As for Philebus, perhaps it's best not to stir him up right now while he's questioning us, and just let him lie quiet where he is. SOCRATES: Very well. Where, then, should one begin, given how vast and varied this battle is over the disputed points? Shall it be here? PROTARCHUS: Where? SOCRATES: We say, don't we, that this same thing, one and many, comes to be through our statements and runs riot everywhere, in connection with everything ever said, both long ago and now. And this will never stop happening, nor did it just start now — it is, as it seems to me, something deathless and ageless that belongs to our very arguments themselves, built into us. And whichever young person tastes it first, each time, is delighted, as if he'd discovered some treasure of wisdom, and in his pleasure he's practically carried away, and sets every argument in motion with glee — sometimes rolling things around and mashing them together into one, sometimes unrolling them again and pulling them apart — throwing first and foremost himself into confusion, and after that, whoever happens to be nearest, whether younger, older, or the same age, sparing neither father nor mother nor anyone else listening, and hardly even sparing the other animals, let alone human beings — since he wouldn't spare even a foreigner, if only he could get hold of an interpreter from somewhere.

PROTARCHUS: Socrates, don't you see how many of us there are, and that we're all young men? Aren't you afraid that Philebus and I might gang up on you if you abuse us? Still, since we understand what you're saying, if there's some way or device to see this kind of confusion pass gently out of our discussion, and to find some finer road than this one toward our argument, then go ahead and try, and we'll follow along as best we can — this discussion before us isn't a small one, Socrates. SOCRATES: No indeed, my boys — as Philebus calls you when he addresses you. There is no finer road, nor could there be, than the one I've always been a lover of, though it has often slipped away from me and left me stranded and at a loss. PROTARCHUS: What is it? Just tell us. SOCRATES: One that isn't very hard to point out, but extremely hard to use — for everything that has ever been discovered in any art has come to light through it. Look at what I mean. PROTARCHUS: Just say it. SOCRATES: A gift from the gods to men — or so it appears to me — was flung down from somewhere among the gods, through some Prometheus, together with a most brilliant fire. And the ancients, who were better than us and lived closer to the gods, handed down this account: that the things that are ever said to be come from one and many, and have limit and unlimitedness bound up in their very nature. Since things are arranged this way, they said, we must always assume one form for each and every thing we investigate and search for it — for it will be found present — and once we have grasped it, we should look, after the one, for two, if there happen to be two, and if not, for three or some other number, and treat each of those units again the same way, until one sees not merely that the original one is one and many and unlimited, but exactly how many it is. And we must not apply the character of the unlimited to plurality until we have seen the whole number of it that lies between the unlimited and the one; only then may we release each single one of all these into the unlimited and let it go.

SOCRATES: The gods, then, as I said, handed down to us this way of investigating, learning, and teaching one another. But the clever men of today make their one — and their many — however it happens to turn out, faster or slower than they should, and jump straight from the one to the unlimited, letting the intermediate steps escape them; and it's exactly these steps that mark the difference between our conducting arguments with each other dialectically and doing so eristically. PROTARCHUS: I think I follow some of what you're saying, Socrates, but there are parts I need to hear stated more clearly. SOCRATES: Well, Protarchus, what I mean is clear enough in the case of the letters — take it from that very training you yourself received. PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: The sound that passes through our mouths is, in one sense, single, and yet again unlimited in multitude, both taken all together and each one by itself. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And we're not yet wise in virtue of either of those facts alone — neither in knowing that it is unlimited nor in knowing that it is one; rather, it's knowing how many sounds there are and of what kind that makes each of us literate. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: And indeed what makes a person musical is the very same thing. PROTARCHUS: How do you mean? SOCRATES: Sound, considered in that art too, is one thing in itself. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: But let's posit two — high and low — and a third, the even pitch. Is that right? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: But you still wouldn't be wise in music just by knowing these alone — without that knowledge you'd be worth nothing in the subject, so to speak. PROTARCHUS: No, indeed. SOCRATES: But, my friend, once you grasp how many intervals there are in sound with respect to high and low pitch, and of what kind, and the boundaries of the intervals, and all the systems that arise from them — which those before us discovered and handed down to us who follow them, calling them harmonies — and once you notice other affinities of the same sort present in the movements of the body, which they say must likewise be measured by numbers and called rhythms and measures — and once you grasp, too, that this is how one must investigate every case of one and many — then, when you have grasped these things in that way, you have become wise; and whenever you lay hold of any other single thing by examining it this way, you have become intelligent about that thing. But the unlimited multitude in each and every case, taken by itself, leaves you each time without understanding, without a reckoning, without a number, since you have never looked to any number at all in anything. PROTARCHUS: Philebus, what Socrates has just said seems to me excellently put.

PHILEBUS: I think so too. But why in the world has this speech been addressed to us now, and to what end? SOCRATES: Protarchus, Philebus has asked us exactly the right question. PROTARCHUS: He certainly has — so answer him. SOCRATES: I will, once I've gone through a bit more on this very topic. Just as, if someone should ever grasp some one thing, we say he ought not look straight to the unlimited nature of it, but to some number; so too, conversely, when someone is forced to take the unlimited first, he should not look straight to the one, but rather work out some number belonging to each plurality that has some multitude, and end by arriving at the one out of them all. Let's take up again what was just said, in the case of the letters. PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: When someone — whether a god or a godlike man, as the story goes in Egypt about a certain Theuth — noticed that sound is unlimited, he was the first to notice that the vowels within that unlimited range are not one but several, and again that there are others that share not in sound but in a kind of noise, and that these too have some number, and he marked off a third class of letters, which we now call mute. After that he divided up the voiceless and the mute down to each single one, and did the same with the vowels and the intermediate sounds, until, having grasped their number, he gave the name 'element' to each one individually and to all of them together. And seeing that none of us could learn even a single one of them by itself apart from all the rest, he reckoned this bond as being itself one thing, running through them all and making them all in a sense one, and so he pronounced there to be a single art over them, and called it the art of letters. PHILEBUS: I've grasped these points, Protarchus, more clearly than the last ones, at least in how they relate to each other; but the very thing I want from the argument is still missing now, just as it was a little earlier. SOCRATES: Philebus, do you mean, what does all this have to do with the point at hand? PHILEBUS: Yes, that's exactly what Protarchus and I have long been searching for. SOCRATES: But surely you've already reached it, as you say you've long been searching. PHILEBUS: How so? SOCRATES: Wasn't our discussion from the start about wisdom and pleasure, and which of the two is to be chosen? PHILEBUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And we do say that each of the two is a single thing. PHILEBUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: That, then, is exactly what our earlier argument demands of us — how each of these two is one and many, and how neither becomes unlimited straightaway, but each possessed some number even before becoming unlimited in its instances. PROTARCHUS: Philebus, it's no small question that Socrates has, I don't know quite how, led us round in a circle and dropped on us. Consider which of us is to answer what's being asked now. Perhaps it would be ridiculous for me, having taken over the argument from you entirely, to hand it right back to you again just because I can't answer what's now asked; but it would be far more ridiculous, I think, if neither of us could answer. So consider what we should do. It seems to me Socrates is now asking us whether there are kinds of pleasure, and if so how many and of what sort; and likewise, in the same way, concerning wisdom. SOCRATES: Very true, son of Callias — for if we're unable to do this for every case of one, alike and the same, and its opposite too, as the argument just now made clear, none of us would ever be worth anything for anything at all. PROTARCHUS: That does seem pretty much to be the case, Socrates. But while it's a fine thing for the prudent man to know everything, the second-best course, it seems, is not to be ignorant of oneself. Why do I say this now? I'll tell you. You have granted this whole gathering of ours, Socrates, yourself included, to the task of determining what among human possessions is best. For when Philebus said it was pleasure, delight, enjoyment, and everything of that kind, you objected that it isn't these but rather those other things which we so often remind ourselves of, and rightly so, so that, laid up together in memory, each may be put to the test. You claim, it seems, that the thing that ought rightly to be called better than pleasure is mind, knowledge, understanding, skill, and everything akin to these — that these are what we should acquire, not those other things. Since these claims were made on both sides in dispute, we threatened you, half in jest, that we wouldn't let you go home until some sufficient conclusion had been reached settling these arguments; and you agreed and gave yourself over to us for this purpose. Now we say, as children do, that there's no taking back what has been rightly given. So stop meeting us in this manner regarding what's now being said. SOCRATES: What manner do you mean?

PROTARCHUS: Throwing us into perplexity and asking us questions we can't give you an adequate answer to at the moment. Let's not imagine that the goal of our present efforts is simply to leave all of us at a loss — rather, if we're unable to do this, then you must do it, since you promised. So make up your own mind about this: whether you must divide the kinds of pleasure and of knowledge, or whether you can let that be, in case you're able and willing to make clear, in some other way, the points now disputed among us. SOCRATES: Well then, there's nothing terrible left for me to expect, once you've put it that way — for the phrase 'if you're willing' removes all fear about anything. Besides, I think some god has just given me a kind of memory. PROTARCHUS: How so, and of what? SOCRATES: I recall now something I once heard long ago, in a dream perhaps, or perhaps while awake, concerning pleasure and wisdom — that neither of the two is the good, but something else, a third thing, different from both and better than either. Yet if this now becomes clear to us, pleasure is at once relieved of the claim to victory — for the good could no longer be identical with it. Is that right? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And in my opinion we'll no longer have any need at all for dividing pleasure into its kinds. The course ahead will make this still clearer. PROTARCHUS: An excellent point — now finish working it through that way. SOCRATES: Well then, let's first agree on a few small things. PROTARCHUS: Such as? SOCRATES: Must the portion belonging to the good be necessarily complete, or not complete? PROTARCHUS: The most complete of all things, surely, Socrates. SOCRATES: And is the good sufficient? PROTARCHUS: Of course — and indeed it surpasses all things that exist precisely in this respect. SOCRATES: And this too, I think, must most certainly be said of it: that everything that recognizes it hunts after it and longs for it, wanting to catch it and possess it for itself, and cares nothing for anything else except what comes along with good results. PROTARCHUS: There's no contradicting that. SOCRATES: Let's then examine and judge the life of pleasure and the life of wisdom by looking at each separately. PROTARCHUS: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: Let there be no wisdom in the life of pleasure, and no pleasure in the life of wisdom. For if either is really the good, it must need nothing else at all — and if it turns out to need something, then it is no longer, for us, the truly good thing. PROTARCHUS: How could it be? SOCRATES: Then shall we test this by trying it out on you? PROTARCHUS: Absolutely. SOCRATES: Answer me, then. PROTARCHUS: Ask. SOCRATES: Would you choose, Protarchus, to live your whole life enjoying the greatest pleasures? PROTARCHUS: Of course I would. SOCRATES: And would you think you still needed anything else, if you had that completely? PROTARCHUS: Not at all. SOCRATES: But look — would you need any share of thinking, understanding, reasoning out what's needed, and all the kindred faculties? PROTARCHUS: Why would I? I'd have everything, I suppose, if I had enjoyment. SOCRATES: So living that way, you would enjoy the greatest pleasures throughout your whole life? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: But without possessing mind, memory, knowledge, or true judgment, you would first of all be forced not to know whether you were enjoying yourself or not, since you'd be empty of all wisdom — isn't that so? PROTARCHUS: It must be so. SOCRATES: And likewise, without memory, you couldn't even remember that you'd once enjoyed something, and no memory at all could survive of a pleasure that struck you a moment ago. And without true judgment you wouldn't judge that you were enjoying yourself even while enjoying it, and lacking reason you couldn't even calculate that you would enjoy things in time to come. You'd be living not a human life, but the life of some jellyfish or one of those shellfish creatures of the sea. Is that so, or can we think of it some other way? PROTARCHUS: How could we? SOCRATES: So is such a life something we'd choose? PROTARCHUS: This argument has struck me utterly speechless for the moment, Socrates. SOCRATES: Well, let's not go soft yet — let's take up the life of mind in turn and look at that. PROTARCHUS: What sort of life do you mean? SOCRATES: Whether any of us would choose to live possessing wisdom, mind, knowledge, and complete memory of everything, but sharing in no pleasure, great or small, and no pain either — entirely unaffected by anything of that kind. PROTARCHUS: Neither of those two lives looks choiceworthy to me, Socrates, nor, I imagine, would it to anyone else.

SOCRATES: What about the combined life, Protarchus, the one blended and made common out of both? PROTARCHUS: You mean of pleasure and mind and wisdom? SOCRATES: Yes, that's what I mean, and things of that sort. PROTARCHUS: Everyone, surely, would choose this over either of those on its own — no question of some choosing it and others not. SOCRATES: Do we see, then, what follows for us from what we've said so far? PROTARCHUS: Certainly — that three lives were proposed, and of the two, neither is sufficient or choiceworthy for any human being or any animal. SOCRATES: Then isn't it already clear that neither of those two held the good? For if it did, it would be sufficient, complete, and choiceworthy for every plant and animal capable of living that way permanently. And if any of us chose something else, we would be taking it against the nature of what is truly choiceworthy, unwillingly, out of ignorance or some unhappy necessity. PROTARCHUS: That does seem to be the case. SOCRATES: I think enough has now been said to show that Philebus's goddess should not be identified with the good. PHILEBUS: Neither is your mind the good, Socrates — it will face the very same charges. SOCRATES: Perhaps my mind will, Philebus — but not, I think, the mind that is truly divine; that stands on some other footing. For the moment I'm not contesting the first prize for mind over the combined life, but we must look at and consider the matter of second prize. For each of us might attribute this combined life to a different cause — one of us to mind, the other to pleasure — so that though the good would be neither of these two, one might still suppose one of them to be its cause. On this point I would contend even more strongly against Philebus that whatever it is that, once present in this mixed life, makes it choiceworthy and good, it is mind, not pleasure, that is more akin and more similar to that thing — and by this reasoning pleasure could truly be said to have no claim on either first or second prize; it stands further off yet from even the third, if my own mind is at all to be trusted just now.

PROTARCHUS: Well, Socrates, it does seem to me now that pleasure has fallen, as if struck down by the arguments just made — for it lies there, still fighting for first prize. But mind, it seems, must be said to have been too sensible to claim first prize itself, for it would have suffered the same fate. But if pleasure is deprived of second prize too, it will suffer a real loss of honor among its own admirers — for it will no longer look so beautiful even to them. SOCRATES: Well then — isn't it better to let it rest now, rather than distress it by applying the most rigorous test and exposing it further? PROTARCHUS: That's nonsense, Socrates. SOCRATES: Because I said something impossible — distressing pleasure? PROTARCHUS: Not only that, but because you don't realize that none of us will let you go until you've carried this argument through to the end. SOCRATES: Good heavens, Protarchus — that means a long discussion still ahead, and not even an easy one at this point. It seems we need a different approach — that in going after second prize on mind's behalf, I'll need other weapons than the ones used before, though perhaps some will be the same. Must we, then? PROTARCHUS: How could we not? SOCRATES: Then let's try to secure the starting point carefully. PROTARCHUS: What sort of starting point do you mean? SOCRATES: Let's divide everything that now exists in the universe into two — or rather, if you like, three parts. PROTARCHUS: On what basis? Tell me. SOCRATES: Let's take up some things from what we said just now. PROTARCHUS: Such as? SOCRATES: We said, didn't we, that the god revealed one part of what exists as the unlimited, and another as limit? PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Let's posit these as two of the forms, and a third as one thing mixed together out of both. But I seem to be a ridiculous fellow, dividing things into forms and counting them up this way. PROTARCHUS: What do you mean, my friend? SOCRATES: It seems I need yet a fourth kind as well. PROTARCHUS: Tell me which one. SOCRATES: Look at the cause of the mixing of these with one another, and set this down as a fourth alongside those three. PROTARCHUS: Won't you need a fifth as well, one capable of separating them? SOCRATES: Perhaps — though I don't think so just now. But if it turns out I do need one, you'll forgive me for chasing after a fifth life. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: First, then, having distinguished three of the four, let's try — seeing that each of two of them is split and scattered into many things — to gather each back together into one, so as to grasp how each of them was both one and many. PROTARCHUS: If you could put it to me still more clearly about them, I might be able to follow.

SOCRATES: I say, then, that the two I set out are the same as just now — the one the unlimited, the other having limit. That the unlimited is, in a certain way, many things — that I'll try to show. Let what has limit wait for us. PROTARCHUS: It waits. SOCRATES: Consider, then — what I'm asking you to examine is difficult and contested, but examine it anyway. Take hotter and colder first — see whether you could ever conceive any limit in them, or whether the more and the less, dwelling within these very kinds themselves, would not, for as long as they dwell there, allow any end to come about. For once an end came about, they themselves would be ended. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: And we say the more and the less are always present in the hotter and the colder. PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: So our argument keeps signaling to us that these two have no end — and being endless, they become altogether unlimited. PROTARCHUS: Emphatically so, Socrates. SOCRATES: Well said, dear Protarchus — you've caught the point and reminded me that this word "very," which you just uttered, and "gently" too, have the same force as "more" and "less." For wherever they occur, they don't allow a thing to have a definite quantity — they always import into every action a more and a less, making the vehement stand against the mild or the reverse, and thereby wipe out the definite quantity. For, as I just said, if they didn't wipe out the quantity, but instead let quantity and the measured settle in where the more and less, the vehement and the mild, reside, these very qualities would be driven out from the region they occupied. For once they took on quantity, they would no longer be hotter or colder — since the hotter and the colder are always advancing and never staying still, whereas quantity stays put and does not advance. By this reasoning the hotter would become unlimited, and its opposite likewise. PROTARCHUS: So it appears, Socrates — though, as you said, these things are not easy to follow. Perhaps repeated statement, again and again, would bring questioner and answerer into sufficient agreement. SOCRATES: Well said — that's the way we should try to proceed. But for now, look and see whether we should accept this as the mark of the nature of the unlimited, so as not to draw things out by going through everything. PROTARCHUS: What mark do you mean?

SOCRATES: Whatever appears to us to become more and less, and to admit the vehement and the mild, and the excessive, and all things of that sort — all these we must place into the class of the unlimited as into one thing, in accordance with what we said earlier: that whatever is scattered and split apart must be gathered together and marked, so far as we can, with a single nature — do you remember? PROTARCHUS: I remember. SOCRATES: Then whatever does not admit these, but admits instead all their opposites — first the equal and equality, and after the equal the double, and whatever is as number to number or measure to measure — if we reckon all these into the limit, we would seem to be doing well. What do you say? PROTARCHUS: Very well indeed, Socrates. SOCRATES: Good. Now what shape shall we say the third thing has, the one mixed out of these two? PROTARCHUS: You'll tell me that, I think. SOCRATES: Rather a god will — if indeed any god will hear my prayers. PROTARCHUS: Pray, then, and look. SOCRATES: I am looking — and it seems to me, Protarchus, that one of the gods has just now turned out to be our friend. PROTARCHUS: What do you mean by that, and what's your evidence? SOCRATES: I'll tell you plainly — just follow the argument with me. PROTARCHUS: Only speak. SOCRATES: We spoke just now of something hotter, and something colder, didn't we? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Add to these the drier and the wetter, the more and the less, the faster and the slower, the greater and the smaller, and all the things we put earlier into the single nature that admits more and less. PROTARCHUS: You mean the nature of the unlimited? SOCRATES: Yes. Now mix into it, after this, the offspring of limit in turn. PROTARCHUS: Which offspring? SOCRATES: The one which we failed to gather into one just now, though we should have, just as we gathered the nature of the unlimited into one — that of the limit-bearing kind. But perhaps it will still do the same thing now, if, once both are gathered together, that one too becomes visible. PROTARCHUS: Which one, and how do you mean? SOCRATES: The nature of the equal and the double, and whatever puts a stop to opposites being at variance with one another, making them commensurate and harmonious by introducing number into them. PROTARCHUS: I understand — you seem to mean that mixing these produces certain kinds of generation in each case. SOCRATES: Yes, that's right. PROTARCHUS: Go on, then.

SOCRATES: Now in the case of diseases, isn't it the correct combination of these elements that produces the nature of health? PROTARCHUS: Absolutely. SOCRATES: And in the sharp and the low, the fast and the slow — which are unlimited in themselves — doesn't the same thing happen: this combination both produces a limit and puts together the whole of music in its most perfect form? PROTARCHUS: Beautifully put. SOCRATES: And again, when it occurs in frost and stifling heat, it removes the excessive and unlimited, and produces instead what is measured and proportionate. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: So it's from these things that the seasons and everything beautiful in our lives has come to be, from the mixing of the unlimited things with the things that have a limit? PROTARCHUS: How could it be otherwise? SOCRATES: And there are countless other things I'm leaving out — beauty and strength that come along with health, and a great many other beautiful things in souls as well. For this goddess, my dear Philebus, looking upon outrage and the wickedness of everything — seeing that there is no limit in pleasures or in the desire for satisfaction — established law and order, which have a limit. You say she wears things down, but I say, on the contrary, that she preserves them. What does it seem like to you, Protarchus? PROTARCHUS: Very much in line with my own thinking, Socrates. SOCRATES: So I've now named the three, if you're following. PROTARCHUS: I think I understand — one thing you seem to mean is the unlimited, and a second is limit among the things that are; but I don't quite grasp what you want to call the third. SOCRATES: That's because the sheer abundance of it startled you, my friend, at the birth of the third kind. And yet the unlimited too supplied many kinds, but once they were stamped with the mark of the more-and-less family, they appeared as one. PROTARCHUS: True. SOCRATES: And limit, too, didn't have many kinds, nor did we have trouble accepting that it was naturally one. PROTARCHUS: How could we? SOCRATES: Not at all. So take it that I mean by the third the single offspring of these two — the coming-into-being that results when things are measured and worked into limit. PROTARCHUS: I understand. SOCRATES: But besides these three, we said there was some fourth kind to examine — and this examination is shared work. Consider whether it seems necessary to you that everything that comes to be, comes to be through some cause. PROTARCHUS: It does to me — how could it come to be otherwise? SOCRATES: And the nature of that which makes differs from the cause in nothing but name — so that what makes and the cause could rightly be said to be one? PROTARCHUS: Rightly said.

SOCRATES: And likewise that which is made and that which comes to be will turn out, as we just said, to differ in nothing but name. Isn't that so? PROTARCHUS: Just so. SOCRATES: Then does what makes always lead by nature, while what is made follows along, coming to be after it? PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: So the cause and that which is enslaved to the cause in the process of coming-to-be are different, not the same thing. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: So the things that come to be, and the things out of which they come to be, gave us all three kinds together? PROTARCHUS: Indeed. SOCRATES: And what we call the fourth is that which produces all of these — the cause — since it has been shown clearly enough to be distinct from the others? PROTARCHUS: Yes, distinct. SOCRATES: Now that the four have been distinguished, it's proper, for the sake of remembering each one, to count them off in order. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: So first I name the unlimited, second the limit, then third the mixed being that comes to be out of these; and would I be making any mistake if I called the cause of the mixture and of its coming-to-be the fourth? PROTARCHUS: Not at all. SOCRATES: Well then, what comes next for us, and what did we want when we arrived at all this? Wasn't it this: we were asking whether second prize would go to pleasure or to thoughtfulness. Wasn't that it? PROTARCHUS: Yes, that was it. SOCRATES: So now, perhaps, since we've made this division, we can carry out the judgment about what's first and what's second more elegantly than we did when we first disputed about it? PROTARCHUS: Perhaps. SOCRATES: Come then — we set down as the winner the mixed life of pleasure and thoughtfulness together. Was that it? PROTARCHUS: It was. SOCRATES: Then don't we see what this life is and what kind it belongs to? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And we'll say it's a part, I think, of the third kind — for that mixture isn't a mixing of just any two things, but of everything unlimited bound by the limit, so that this victorious life would rightly turn out to be a part of that. PROTARCHUS: Quite rightly. SOCRATES: Very well then — what about your candidate, Philebus, pleasant and unmixed as it is? In which of the kinds we've named could it rightly be placed? But answer me this before you declare yourself. PHILEBUS: Just ask. SOCRATES: Do pleasure and pain have a limit, or do they belong among the things that admit of more and less? PHILEBUS: Yes, among the things that admit of more, Socrates — pleasure wouldn't be wholly good if it weren't unlimited by nature, both in quantity and in degree.

SOCRATES: Nor, Philebus, would pain be wholly bad — so what we need to look at is something else: how the nature of the unlimited supplies some part of good to pleasures. So let these two of yours belong to the class of the unlimited. But thoughtfulness, knowledge, and mind — into which of the classes we've named could we place them, Protarchus and Philebus, without impiety? For I think the risk we run here is not small, whether we get this right or miss the actual question. PHILEBUS: You're glorifying your own god, Socrates. SOCRATES: And you, my friend, are glorifying yours — but we still have to answer the question. PROTARCHUS: Socrates is right, Philebus, and we must yield to him. PHILEBUS: Well then, haven't you, Protarchus, taken over the job of speaking for me? PROTARCHUS: Certainly — though now I'm rather at a loss, and I ask you, Socrates, to become our spokesman yourself, so that we don't blunder in representing our contestant and strike some false note. SOCRATES: I must obey, Protarchus — and indeed what you ask isn't difficult. But did I really, as Philebus said, upset you by glorifying you in jest, when I asked what class mind and knowledge belonged to? PROTARCHUS: You certainly did, Socrates. SOCRATES: But it's easy enough — for all the wise agree, in truly glorifying themselves, that mind is king of heaven and earth for us. And perhaps they're right. Shall we, if you like, examine the nature of this class at greater length? PROTARCHUS: Say whatever you like, Socrates, without worrying at all about the length, since you won't wear out our patience. SOCRATES: Well said. Let's begin, then, somewhere like this, by asking further questions. PROTARCHUS: How? SOCRATES: Shall we say, Protarchus, that the sum of things, this so-called universe, is governed by the power of the irrational and the random, however it happens to fall out — or on the contrary, as those before us said, that mind and some wondrous thoughtfulness arrange and steer it? PROTARCHUS: These aren't remotely the same thing, my dear Socrates. What you're now suggesting doesn't even seem reverent to me. But to say that mind orders all things is worthy of the sight of the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the whole revolving heaven — and I could never say or think otherwise about them.

SOCRATES: Do you want us, then, to agree with the view held before us, that this is how things are, and not merely think we should state other people's views without any risk, but actually share the risk and take our part of the blame, whenever some formidable man says that things are not so, but disordered? PROTARCHUS: Of course I want that. SOCRATES: Come then, consider the argument now approaching us on this subject. PROTARCHUS: Just speak. SOCRATES: In the bodily nature of all living things we see, I think, fire and water and air, and earth too — as those caught in storms say — present in their makeup. PROTARCHUS: Very much so — we really are caught in a storm of confusion in our present argument. SOCRATES: Come then, take the following point about each of these elements as they exist in us. PROTARCHUS: What point? SOCRATES: That each of these is present in us only in small measure, and poor quality, and nowhere pure in any way, and possessing a power unworthy of its true nature. Take one case and think the same about all: fire exists in us, but it also exists in the universe. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And the fire in us is something small, weak, and poor, while the fire in the universe is wondrous in quantity, beauty, and every power that belongs to fire. PROTARCHUS: What you say is quite true. SOCRATES: Well then — is the fire of the universe nourished, generated, and increased from the fire in us, or is it rather the reverse — that mine and yours and every living thing's fire gets all these from that greater fire? PROTARCHUS: That question doesn't even deserve an answer. SOCRATES: Right — for I think you'll say the same about the earth here in living things and the earth in the universe, and about all the other elements I asked about a moment ago. Is that how you'll answer? PROTARCHUS: Who could answer otherwise and still seem sane? SOCRATES: Hardly anyone. But follow along to what comes next. Seeing all these things just mentioned gathered into one, didn't we name it a body? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Take the same view of what we call the universe — for by the same reasoning it too would be a body, being composed of the same elements. PROTARCHUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: Then does our body draw nourishment from that body, or does that one draw from ours, receiving and possessing everything we just described about them? PROTARCHUS: That too, Socrates, isn't worth asking.

SOCRATES: Well, is this worth asking, or how will you answer? PROTARCHUS: Just say what it is. SOCRATES: Won't we say that our body has a soul? PROTARCHUS: Clearly we will. SOCRATES: And where would it have gotten it from, dear Protarchus, unless the body of the universe happened to be ensouled too, possessing the same things as ours, and even more beautiful in every way? PROTARCHUS: Clearly from nowhere else, Socrates. SOCRATES: For surely, Protarchus, we don't imagine that those four things — limit and the unlimited and the common thing and the class of cause present as fourth in everything — this last, present in the things within us, providing soul and instilling bodily training, and when the body stumbles, providing medicine, and combining various things in various ways and setting them right, being called all wisdom in its every form — while these same things, existing in the whole heaven and in its great regions, and moreover being beautiful and pure — that in these it hasn't contrived the nature of what is most beautiful and most precious? PROTARCHUS: But that could make no sense at all. SOCRATES: Then if not that, following the other argument we'd do better to say, as we've said many times, that there is much of the unlimited in the universe, and limit enough, and some cause over them, of no small account, ordering and arranging years and seasons and months, which would most justly be called wisdom and mind. PROTARCHUS: Most justly indeed. SOCRATES: And wisdom and mind could never come to be without soul. PROTARCHUS: No, indeed not. SOCRATES: So in the nature of Zeus you'll say a kingly soul and a kingly mind come to be, through the power of the cause, while in other gods other beautiful qualities arise, whichever each is fittingly said to have. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: Don't imagine, Protarchus, that we've said this argument in vain — it's an ally to those who declared long ago that mind always rules the universe. PROTARCHUS: So it is. SOCRATES: And it has supplied an answer to my own inquiry — that mind belongs to the class of that which was called the cause of all things, being one of our four. You have our answer now, I think. PROTARCHUS: I have it, and quite sufficiently — though you slipped an answer past me without my noticing. SOCRATES: Well, Protarchus, play is sometimes a rest from serious effort. PROTARCHUS: Well said.

SOCRATES: Now then, my friend, we've shown fairly well what kind of thing knowledge is and what power it has. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And likewise we saw earlier what kind of thing pleasure is. PROTARCHUS: Indeed. SOCRATES: Let's keep this much in mind about both: that intellect was akin to cause and belongs more or less to that class, while pleasure is itself unlimited, and belongs to the class of things that have no beginning, middle, or end in themselves and never will. PROTARCHUS: We'll remember; how could we not? SOCRATES: Now we need to see, next, in what condition each of them occurs and what happens to produce them whenever they do occur. Pleasure first — just as we tested its class first, so let's take these questions about it first too. But we could never adequately test pleasure apart from pain. PROTARCHUS: Well, if that's the road we must take, let's take it. SOCRATES: Does it look to you the way it looks to me, regarding how they come about? PROTARCHUS: How do you mean? SOCRATES: It seems to me that pain and pleasure arise together, naturally, within that common class. PROTARCHUS: Remind us, dear Socrates, which of the classes we mentioned before you mean by 'common.' SOCRATES: I'll do my best, my good man. PROTARCHUS: Well said. SOCRATES: Let's understand by 'common' the third of the four we spoke of. PROTARCHUS: The one you placed after the unlimited and the limit, in which you put health, and harmony too, I believe? SOCRATES: Exactly right. Now pay the closest attention. PROTARCHUS: Just tell me. SOCRATES: I say that when the harmony in living things is broken up, at that very moment there occurs both a breakdown of their nature and the birth of pains. PROTARCHUS: That's quite plausible. SOCRATES: And when it's restored again, returning to its own nature, we should say pleasure occurs — if we're to state the greatest matters briefly and as quickly as possible. PROTARCHUS: I think you're right, Socrates, but let's try to state the same things still more clearly. SOCRATES: Well, isn't it easiest to think through the common, obvious cases? PROTARCHUS: Which ones? SOCRATES: Hunger, I take it, is a breakdown and a pain? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And eating, which restores the fullness again, is pleasure? PROTARCHUS: Yes.

SOCRATES: And thirst, again, is a wasting away and a pain and a breakdown, while the power of moisture that refills what's been dried out is pleasure. And separation and dissolution against nature — the experience of suffocating — is pain, while the return to nature, the cooling, is pleasure. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And with cold, the freezing of the creature's moisture against nature is pain, while the return to sameness and the loosening again, the natural path, is pleasure. Consider, in one word, whether it's a fair account to say that whenever the form that's naturally composed of the unlimited and the limit, as we spoke of before, is alive and this composite is destroyed, the destruction is pain, while the path back to its own being is pleasure — the return, that is, of all things to themselves. PROTARCHUS: Let it stand; it seems to me to have a certain outline of truth. SOCRATES: Shall we then set this down as one form of pain and pleasure, occurring in each of these conditions? PROTARCHUS: Let it be set down. SOCRATES: Now set down this too: within the soul itself, in anticipation of these conditions, there's a pleasant and confident feeling before pleasant things, and a fearful, painful feeling before painful ones. PROTARCHUS: Yes, this is indeed another form of pleasure and pain, the one that arises in the soul itself, apart from the body, through expectation. SOCRATES: You've grasped it rightly. For in these cases, I think — when each occurs pure, as it seems, and unmixed with the other, pain with pleasure — it will become clear about pleasure whether the whole class is welcome, or whether this should be assigned to one of the other classes we mentioned, while pleasure and pain themselves, like hot and cold and all such things, are sometimes to be welcomed and sometimes not, since they aren't good in themselves, though some of them do at times take on the nature of good things. PROTARCHUS: You're quite right that this is the direction in which our present pursuit must be worked through. SOCRATES: First, then, let's see this together: if what's been said is really true, that when things are being destroyed there's pain, and when they're being restored there's pleasure, let's think about those things that are being neither destroyed nor restored — what condition must each living thing be in at that time, when it stands that way? Pay very close attention and tell me: isn't it absolutely necessary that every living thing, at such a time, feel neither pain nor pleasure, whether great or small? PROTARCHUS: It is necessary.

SOCRATES: So then there's a third condition of ours, distinct from that of the one feeling joy and that of the one feeling pain? PROTARCHUS: Indeed there is. SOCRATES: Come now, try hard to keep this in mind. For it makes no small difference, in judging pleasure, whether we remember this or not. Let's work through it briefly, if you're willing. PROTARCHUS: Tell me what you mean. SOCRATES: You know that nothing prevents someone who has chosen the life of thought from living in just this way. PROTARCHUS: You mean the life of neither feeling joy nor feeling pain? SOCRATES: Yes — it was said, in that comparison of lives, that the one who chose the life of understanding and thinking need feel no joy at all, great or small. PROTARCHUS: Yes, that was indeed said. SOCRATES: Then that condition would belong to him; and perhaps it's not at all strange if his is the most godlike of all lives. PROTARCHUS: It's certainly not likely that the gods feel joy, or its opposite either. SOCRATES: No, not likely at all — either one would be unseemly for them. But we'll look into this further another time, if it's relevant, and credit it toward intellect's claim to second prize, if we can't credit it toward first prize. SOCRATES: Now, the other form of pleasure, the one we said belongs to the soul itself, comes about entirely through memory. PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: We need to first take up what memory actually is — and it looks like we need to go back even further, to perception, if these matters are going to become clear to us in due course. PROTARCHUS: What do you mean? SOCRATES: Consider that, of the states our body undergoes each time, some are quenched in the body before reaching the soul, leaving it unaffected, while others pass through both and set up a kind of disturbance peculiar to each and shared by both. PROTARCHUS: Let that stand. SOCRATES: If we say that the soul fails to notice those that don't pass through both, but does notice those that do, would we be speaking most correctly? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Now don't suppose for a moment that by 'failing to notice' I mean some coming-into-being of forgetting here; for forgetting is the departure of memory, and in the case we're now discussing, memory hasn't yet occurred. It would be absurd to speak of the loss of something that neither exists nor has yet come to be. Isn't that so? PROTARCHUS: Indeed. SOCRATES: Then just change the names. PROTARCHUS: How?

SOCRATES: Instead of 'the soul failing to notice,' when it remains unaffected by the body's disturbances, call what you're now calling forgetting by the name insensibility. PROTARCHUS: I understand. SOCRATES: And when the soul and body are jointly affected by one experience and jointly moved, if you name this movement perception, you wouldn't be speaking off the mark. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: So we now understand what we want to call perception? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Then one would be right to call memory the preservation of perception, in my judgment at least. PROTARCHUS: Yes, rightly so. SOCRATES: But don't we say that recollection is different from memory? PROTARCHUS: Perhaps. SOCRATES: Isn't it this? PROTARCHUS: What? SOCRATES: When the soul, without the body, recovers within itself, as fully as it can, what it once experienced together with the body — that, we say, is when it recollects. Isn't that so? PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And also when it has lost the memory of some perception or piece of learning and then recovers this again within itself, by itself — all these cases too we call recollections and memories. PROTARCHUS: You're right. SOCRATES: The reason all this has been said is the following. PROTARCHUS: What is it? SOCRATES: So that we might grasp the pleasure of the soul, apart from the body, as clearly and distinctly as possible — and desire along with it; for it's through these, it seems, that both are somehow made evident. PROTARCHUS: Let's move on then, Socrates, to what comes next. SOCRATES: It seems we must, in discussing the origin of pleasure and its whole form, examine a good many things. And now, even before that, it appears we must grasp what desire is and where it arises. PROTARCHUS: Then let's examine it — we'll lose nothing by it. SOCRATES: On the contrary, Protarchus, we will lose something — we'll lose, once we've found what we're now seeking, the puzzlement surrounding these very questions. PROTARCHUS: A fair rebuttal. Let's try to say what comes next. SOCRATES: Didn't we just say that hunger and thirst and many other such things are desires? PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: What in the world do we have in view, that we call things so different by one name? PROTARCHUS: By Zeus, that's perhaps not easy to say, Socrates, but it must be said all the same. SOCRATES: Let's take it up again from the same starting point. PROTARCHUS: From where? SOCRATES: We say, on each occasion, that someone is thirsty? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And this means he is being emptied? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Is thirst, then, a desire? PROTARCHUS: Yes, a desire for drink.

SOCRATES: For drink, or for the filling that comes with drink? PROTARCHUS: For the filling, I'd say. SOCRATES: So it seems that whichever of us is being emptied desires the opposite of what he's undergoing — being emptied, he longs to be filled. PROTARCHUS: Perfectly clear. SOCRATES: Well then: can someone who is being emptied for the first time somehow lay hold, whether by perception or by memory, of fullness — a thing he isn't experiencing now and never experienced before? PROTARCHUS: How could he? SOCRATES: And yet we say the one who desires, desires something. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: So he doesn't desire what he's undergoing; for he's thirsty, and that's emptiness, while what he desires is fullness. PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Then something belonging to the thirsty man must somehow lay hold of fullness. PROTARCHUS: It must. SOCRATES: But the body can't; for it's being emptied. PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: So it remains that the soul lays hold of the fullness — clearly by memory; for by what else could it lay hold of it? PROTARCHUS: By hardly anything else. SOCRATES: Do we now understand what follows from this argument? PROTARCHUS: What? SOCRATES: This argument tells us that desire doesn't arise in the body. PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: Because it shows that every living thing's effort is always directed against its own bodily condition. PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: And the impulse that leads toward the opposite of that condition surely reveals a memory of the opposite of what it's undergoing. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: So by showing that it's memory that leads us toward the objects of our desire, the argument has revealed that the whole impulse, the desire, and indeed the very origin of every living thing, belong to the soul. PROTARCHUS: Perfectly right. SOCRATES: So the argument allows in no way that our body thirsts or hungers or undergoes anything of that sort. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: Now let's notice something further about these same matters. For the argument seems to me to want to reveal to us some particular form of life in just these cases. PROTARCHUS: In which cases, and concerning what sort of life do you mean? SOCRATES: In being filled and being emptied, and everything that has to do with the preservation and destruction of living things — and whether any of us, finding himself in either of these, feels pain at one time and joy at another, according to the changes. PROTARCHUS: That's so. SOCRATES: What about when he's in between these two?

SOCRATES: Because of what he's suffering he feels pain, but he remembers the pleasant things that would end his pain once they came about, and yet he isn't filled with them yet. What do we say then? Should we say he's in the middle of these two experiences, or not? PROTARCHUS: We should say that. SOCRATES: Is he in pain altogether, or feeling pleasure? PROTARCHUS: No, by Zeus—rather he's pained by a kind of double pain: in his body from the actual affliction, and in his soul from a longing tied to expectation. SOCRATES: What do you mean, Protarchus, by this doubling of pain? Isn't it true that sometimes one of us, in a state of emptiness, stands in clear hope of being filled, while at other times he's without hope of it? PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: And don't you think that when a man hopes to be filled, the very remembering gives him pleasure, while at the same time, being empty in that period, he feels pain? PROTARCHUS: That must be so. SOCRATES: So then a human being, and the other animals too, feels pain and pleasure at the same time. PROTARCHUS: It seems likely. SOCRATES: And what about when a person is without hope of achieving fulfillment while empty? Isn't it then that the double condition regarding pains arises—the one you just now noticed and thought was simply double? PROTARCHUS: Very true, Socrates. SOCRATES: Well then, let's put this consideration to use for these experiences. PROTARCHUS: What consideration? SOCRATES: Shall we say these pleasures and pains are true, or false—or that some are true and others not? PROTARCHUS: But Socrates, how could pleasures or pains be false? SOCRATES: And how, Protarchus, could fears be true or false, or expectations true or not, or opinions true or false? PROTARCHUS: Opinions I'd grant you, perhaps, but not those other things. SOCRATES: What do you mean? We're likely stirring up a rather substantial argument. PROTARCHUS: True. SOCRATES: But we must examine whether this is relevant to what came before, son of that man. PROTARCHUS: Perhaps it is. SOCRATES: Then we must dismiss anything long-winded, or anything else said out of place. PROTARCHUS: Rightly said. SOCRATES: Tell me then—I'm continually amazed at the very same puzzles we just now set out. How do you put it? Are some pleasures false and others true, or not? PROTARCHUS: How could that be? SOCRATES: Neither in dreams, you say, nor waking, nor in madness or derangement, is there ever anyone who seems to feel pleasure but doesn't feel it at all, or seems to feel pain but doesn't. PROTARCHUS: We've all assumed things stand just that way, Socrates. SOCRATES: Is that assumption correct, then? Or must we examine whether it's said rightly or not? PROTARCHUS: We must examine it, I'd say.

SOCRATES: Let's mark out still more clearly what we just said about pleasure and opinion. There's such a thing as forming an opinion for us, isn't there? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And feeling pleasure? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And there's also something that is opined? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And something by which the one who feels pleasure feels pleasure? PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Now the one forming the opinion, whether he opines rightly or not, never loses the actual act of opining. PROTARCHUS: How could he? SOCRATES: And likewise the one feeling pleasure, whether rightly or not, clearly never loses the actual feeling of pleasure. PROTARCHUS: Yes, that's how it stands too. SOCRATES: So we must examine in what way opinion tends to become both false and true for us, while pleasure has only the true kind—though the actual opining and the actual feeling of pleasure are allotted equally to both. PROTARCHUS: We must examine it. SOCRATES: Is it because falsity and truth attach themselves to opinion, so that it becomes, through this, not merely opinion but opinion of a certain quality—is that what you say needs examining? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And besides this, we must also agree whether, generally, some things have qualities while pleasure and pain are only what they are, without ever becoming qualified. PROTARCHUS: Clearly so. SOCRATES: But it's not at all hard to see that they too have qualities—we said long ago that pains and pleasures alike come in great and small, and in intense degrees. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And if badness attaches itself to one of these, Protarchus, shall we say the opinion becomes bad in that way—and the pleasure bad too? PROTARCHUS: Well, what else, Socrates? SOCRATES: And what if rightness, or its opposite, attaches to one of them? Won't we call the opinion right, if it has rightness—and the pleasure the same? PROTARCHUS: Necessarily. SOCRATES: And if what's opined turns out to be mistaken, must we agree the opinion, erring then, is not right, nor rightly opining? PROTARCHUS: How could it be? SOCRATES: But what if we observe that a pain or a pleasure is mistaken about the very thing it's pained or pleased over—shall we attach to it the word 'right' or 'good' or any of the fine names? PROTARCHUS: That's not possible, if the pleasure will indeed be in error. SOCRATES: And yet it does seem that pleasure often arises in us not accompanied by right opinion, but by falsehood.

PROTARCHUS: Of course. And in such a case, Socrates, we do call the opinion false—but no one would ever call the pleasure itself false. SOCRATES: You're eagerly defending pleasure's case just now, Protarchus. PROTARCHUS: Not at all—I'm only saying what I've heard said. SOCRATES: Does it make no difference to us, my friend, whether the pleasure comes with right opinion and knowledge, or with the falsehood and ignorance that often arise in each of us? PROTARCHUS: It's likely to make no small difference. SOCRATES: Then let's proceed to examine the difference between them. PROTARCHUS: Lead the way, wherever seems best to you. SOCRATES: This is the way I'll lead. PROTARCHUS: Which way? SOCRATES: Opinion, we say, is sometimes false and sometimes true? PROTARCHUS: It is. SOCRATES: And often, as we were just saying, pleasure and pain follow along with these—true opinion and false opinion, I mean. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: Now doesn't opinion, and the attempt to form opinions, arise for us on each occasion out of memory and perception? PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: Isn't it necessary that we're in something like this condition regarding these things? PROTARCHUS: How? SOCRATES: When someone sees things from a distance, not very clearly, wouldn't you say he often wants to judge what he's making out? PROTARCHUS: I'd say so. SOCRATES: Then wouldn't this same person next ask himself something like this? PROTARCHUS: What? SOCRATES: 'What in the world is that thing appearing to stand by the rock, under some tree?' Don't you think a person would say such things to himself, having glimpsed some such appearance? PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: And then, after this, wouldn't such a person, as if answering himself, say that it's a man, hitting on the truth? PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: But then again, misled, he might instead call the thing he's making out the work of some shepherds. PROTARCHUS: Very possibly. SOCRATES: And if someone is there with him, he'd stretch what he said to himself into speech, addressing it to the person present—the very same words—and so what we then called opinion has become an actual statement? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: But if he's alone, thinking this same thing to himself, he carries it around within him, sometimes for quite a while. PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Well then—does what I think about this appear the same to you? PROTARCHUS: What's that? SOCRATES: It seems to me that at such a time our soul resembles a kind of book. PROTARCHUS: How so?

SOCRATES: Memory, coinciding with the perceptions, and whatever feelings cluster around these, seem to me to write words in our souls, as it were, at that moment. And when this experience writes what's true, true opinion results, and true statements arising from it come about in us; but when the scribe within us writes something false, the opposite of the truth results. PROTARCHUS: That's quite how it seems to me too, and I accept what's been said in that way. SOCRATES: Then accept also another craftsman at work in our souls at that same time. PROTARCHUS: Which one? SOCRATES: A painter, who comes after the scribe of words and paints in the soul images of the things just spoken of. PROTARCHUS: But how and when do we say this one works? SOCRATES: Whenever someone, having drawn the opinions and statements from sight or some other perception away from the act of seeing itself, then in some way views within himself images of the things opined and stated. Isn't that something that happens in us? PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: So then the images of true opinions and statements are true, while those of false ones are false? PROTARCHUS: Absolutely. SOCRATES: If we've spoken rightly on this, let's examine one further point besides. PROTARCHUS: What point? SOCRATES: Whether this is something we must necessarily undergo regarding things that are and have happened, but not regarding things that are going to be. PROTARCHUS: No—the same holds for all times alike. SOCRATES: Now weren't the pleasures and pains that come through the soul itself said earlier to arise even before the pleasures and pains that come through the body—so that it turns out we can feel pleasure and pain in advance, regarding time yet to come? PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: Then do the writings and paintings, which we said a little earlier come to be in us, concern only past and present time, and not the future? PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: Do you really mean that all these are hopes reaching toward time to come, and that we are, throughout our whole life, always full of hopes? PROTARCHUS: Absolutely. SOCRATES: Come then, answer me this as well, in addition to what's been said. PROTARCHUS: What is it? SOCRATES: A just man, and a pious and good one—is he not altogether dear to the gods? PROTARCHUS: Of course.

SOCRATES: And what about the unjust man, and the wholly bad one—isn't he the opposite of that man? PROTARCHUS: How could he not be? SOCRATES: And every human being, as we were just saying, is full of many hopes? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And there are statements present in each of us, which we call hopes? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And what's more, there are also the painted images. And a person often sees himself coming into abundant gold, and many pleasures on account of it; indeed he sees himself painted in there too, rejoicing greatly over it. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Shall we say, then, that for the good these painted scenes are, for the most part, true, since they're dear to the gods, while for the wicked it's, for the most part, the opposite—or shall we not say that? PROTARCHUS: We certainly must say it. SOCRATES: But the wicked no less have pleasures painted within them too—only these, presumably, are false. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: So the wicked, for the most part, delight in false pleasures, while good people delight in true ones. PROTARCHUS: What you say is quite inevitable. SOCRATES: So according to our present account there are false pleasures in the souls of human beings, imitating the true ones but in a more ridiculous way—and pains likewise. PROTARCHUS: There are. SOCRATES: Now it was the case that anyone who forms an opinion at all always genuinely does form an opinion, even when it isn't about things that are, or have been, or will be. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And this, I think, is what produced false opinion then, and the forming of a false opinion. Is that right? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Well then—mustn't we grant to pains and pleasures the corresponding condition in their own case? PROTARCHUS: How? SOCRATES: That whoever feels pleasure at all, however and about whatever it may randomly be, always genuinely does feel pleasure—even though it isn't about things that are, or have been, and often, perhaps most often, about things that will never even come to be. PROTARCHUS: This too must be so, Socrates. SOCRATES: Then wouldn't the same account hold for fears, and fits of anger, and all such things—that all of these too are sometimes false? PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And what about it—can we say bad and good opinions come to be otherwise than by being false? PROTARCHUS: In no other way. SOCRATES: Nor, I think, do we understand pleasures to be bad in any other way than by being false.

PROTARCHUS: You've said exactly the opposite of the truth, Socrates. It's hardly the case that false pains and pleasures are especially bad—rather it's the ones mixed up with some other great and widespread badness. SOCRATES: Well, we'll talk shortly about the pains and pleasures that are bad because of badness, if we still think it worth doing. But the false ones—the many that exist in us and keep arising in a different way—those we need to discuss now, since we'll probably need that for our judgments. PROTARCHUS: Of course—if they really exist. SOCRATES: But they do exist, Protarchus, in my view at least. And as long as that opinion stands with us, it obviously can't go untested. PROTARCHUS: Fair enough. SOCRATES: Then let's circle around this argument the way wrestlers do. PROTARCHUS: Let's go. SOCRATES: Now, if we remember, we said a little earlier that whenever the so-called desires are in us, the body and the soul are at that moment split apart and separated in their experiences. PROTARCHUS: We remember—that was said before. SOCRATES: And wasn't it the soul that did the desiring, desiring the state opposite to what the body was in, while it was the body that produced the pain, or some pleasure, through its condition? PROTARCHUS: Yes, that's how it was. SOCRATES: Then work out what happens in these cases. PROTARCHUS: Go on. SOCRATES: It turns out that whenever this happens, pain and pleasure lie side by side, and our perceptions of them, opposite as they are, arise right next to each other—which is exactly what showed up just now. PROTARCHUS: So it appears. SOCRATES: And hasn't this also been said and already agreed between us? PROTARCHUS: What's that? SOCRATES: That both of these, pain and pleasure, admit of more and less, and that they belong among the unlimited things. PROTARCHUS: It's been said. What of it? SOCRATES: So what means do we have of judging these correctly? PROTARCHUS: In what way, and how? SOCRATES: If the aim of our judgment in cases like these is, each time, to determine which of them is greater than the other and which is smaller, and which is more intense and which more forceful—pain against pleasure, pain against pain, pleasure against pleasure. PROTARCHUS: Yes, that's the kind of thing they are, and that is indeed the aim of the judgment.

SOCRATES: Well then—in sight, doesn't looking at sizes from far away and from close up hide the truth and make us form false opinions? And doesn't the very same thing happen with pains and pleasures? PROTARCHUS: Even more so, Socrates. SOCRATES: So now we've arrived at the opposite of what we said a moment ago. PROTARCHUS: What do you mean? SOCRATES: Earlier, it was the opinions—true or false—that, in becoming so, filled the pains and pleasures themselves with their own condition. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: But now it's the pains and pleasures themselves that, because they're each time viewed from far away or close up and set side by side with each other, appear—the pleasures—greater and more intense next to what is painful, and the pains, in turn, appear the opposite next to pleasures. PROTARCHUS: That's bound to happen, given all this. SOCRATES: So then, to whatever degree each of the two appears greater or smaller than it really is—if you cut away that apparent excess, which isn't real, from each of them, you won't call that appearance itself correct, nor will you ever dare to call the resulting portion of the pleasure or pain right and true. PROTARCHUS: No, indeed not. SOCRATES: Next we'll look, if we approach it this way, for pleasures and pains that are false in a still deeper sense than these—both as they appear and as they exist in living creatures. PROTARCHUS: Which ones do you mean, and how? SOCRATES: It's been said many times that when the nature of each thing is being disturbed—by combinations and separations, fillings and emptyings, certain growths and wastings—pains and aches and sufferings and everything that goes by such names result. PROTARCHUS: Yes, that's been said often. SOCRATES: And when a thing is settling back into its own nature, we agreed that this restoration is pleasure, as far as we ourselves are concerned. PROTARCHUS: Correct. SOCRATES: But what about when none of this is happening in our body at all? PROTARCHUS: And when would that ever happen, Socrates? SOCRATES: That question you're asking now is beside the point, Protarchus. PROTARCHUS: Why is that? SOCRATES: Because it doesn't stop me from asking you my own question again. PROTARCHUS: Which one? SOCRATES: If such a state didn't occur, Protarchus, I'll say—what would necessarily follow from that for us? PROTARCHUS: You mean, with the body moved in neither direction? SOCRATES: That's it. PROTARCHUS: Well, this much is clear, Socrates: neither pleasure nor pain would ever arise in such a state.

SOCRATES: Beautifully put. But I think what you mean is that one of these two must always be happening to us, as the wise men say—for everything is always flowing, up and down. PROTARCHUS: Yes, that's what they say, and they don't seem to be talking nonsense. SOCRATES: How could they, being no fools themselves? But I want to slip out of the way of this argument as it comes bearing down. Here's how I plan to make my escape—join me in it. PROTARCHUS: Tell me how. SOCRATES: Let's grant them all this, we'll say to these people—but you answer me: is it always true that whatever happens to any living thing is felt by the thing it happens to, so that we never fail to notice ourselves growing, or undergoing anything of that sort—or is it quite the opposite? PROTARCHUS: Quite the opposite, surely—nearly all such things escape our notice completely. SOCRATES: Then what we just said wasn't well put—that changes moving up and down produce pains and pleasures. PROTARCHUS: True enough. SOCRATES: It will be put better and less open to objection this way. PROTARCHUS: How? SOCRATES: That the great changes produce pains and pleasures in us, while the moderate and small ones produce neither of the two at all. PROTARCHUS: That's more correct than the other way, Socrates. SOCRATES: And if that's so, then the life we spoke of a moment ago comes back into view. PROTARCHUS: Which life? SOCRATES: The one we said was free of pain and without joys. PROTARCHUS: Quite true. SOCRATES: So from this, let's posit three lives for ourselves—one pleasant, one painful, and one neither. Or how would you put it? PROTARCHUS: I'd put it no other way—there are three lives. SOCRATES: Then not being in pain wouldn't be the same thing as feeling joy? PROTARCHUS: How could it be? SOCRATES: So whenever you hear someone say that the sweetest thing of all is to pass one's whole life without pain, what do you take such a person to mean? PROTARCHUS: It seems to me he's saying that not being in pain is pleasant. SOCRATES: Well, take any three things you like and set them down, using nicer names for them—call one gold, another silver, and the third neither of these. PROTARCHUS: Done. SOCRATES: Now, could the one that is neither of the two ever become one of them, gold or silver? PROTARCHUS: How could it? SOCRATES: So the middle life, too, if it's called pleasant or painful, could never rightly be so judged—not if one thinks it, nor if one says it, at least by the correct account. PROTARCHUS: How could it?

SOCRATES: And yet, my friend, we do notice people saying this and thinking it. PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: Do they then also suppose they feel pleasure whenever they aren't in pain? PROTARCHUS: That's what they say, at any rate. SOCRATES: So they do suppose they feel pleasure then—otherwise they wouldn't say so. PROTARCHUS: It seems so. SOCRATES: But they hold a false opinion about feeling pleasure, if indeed the nature of not-being-in-pain is distinct from that of feeling pleasure. PROTARCHUS: And it was distinct. SOCRATES: So shall we choose to hold that there are three states, as just now, or only two—pain as an evil for human beings, and release from pains, which is itself a good, being called pleasant? PROTARCHUS: Why are we asking ourselves this now, Socrates? I don't follow. SOCRATES: Do you really not recognize the enemies of our friend Philebus here, Protarchus? PROTARCHUS: Who do you mean? SOCRATES: People with quite a reputation for expertise in natural science, who say there is no such thing as pleasure at all. PROTARCHUS: What of it? SOCRATES: That all these things Philebus and his party now call pleasures are nothing but escapes from pain. PROTARCHUS: So are you advising us to believe them, Socrates, or what? SOCRATES: No—rather to make use of them the way one makes use of prophets, who divine not by skill but by a certain harshness of nature, not ignoble, that has come to hate the power of pleasure so intensely, and to regard it as nothing sound, that they take even pleasure's alluring charm to be sorcery rather than pleasure at all. You could make use of them in this way, after examining their other objections too. After that you'll hear what pleasures seem true to me, so that, having examined it from both accounts, we can weigh its power against the judgment. PROTARCHUS: Well said. SOCRATES: Let's pursue these people, then, as allies, following the trail of their harsh objection. I think what they mean is something like this, starting from somewhere further back: if we wanted to see the nature of any kind of thing—hardness, say—would we understand it better by looking at the hardest things, or at things with only a trace of hardness? You must answer these harsh critics the way you'd answer me, Protarchus. PROTARCHUS: Certainly—and I tell them: by looking at the things that are first in degree.

SOCRATES: So if we wanted to see what nature the kind called pleasure has, we shouldn't look at the faintest pleasures, but at those said to be the most extreme and most intense. PROTARCHUS: Everyone would grant you that now. SOCRATES: And the pleasures readiest to hand, and also the greatest, are the bodily ones we keep mentioning—aren't they? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Are they greater, and do they arise more, in people who are sick and suffering than in people who are healthy? Let's be careful not to answer too hastily and stumble somewhere. We might well be tempted to say: in the healthy. PROTARCHUS: That's plausible. SOCRATES: Well, but don't the greatest pleasures come from the things that are preceded by the greatest desires? PROTARCHUS: That's true. SOCRATES: And don't people with fevers, and those gripped by illnesses of that sort, feel thirst and cold more, and everything the body normally undergoes, and are they not more caught up in deprivation, and don't they get greater pleasures when it's satisfied? Or shall we deny this is true? PROTARCHUS: What you've just said certainly does seem true. SOCRATES: So then, would we be right to say that if someone wanted to see the greatest pleasures, he shouldn't look toward health but toward sickness? Watch that you don't take me to be asking whether the very sick feel more pleasure than the healthy—rather, think I'm looking for the size of pleasure, and where its intensity occurs at each point. We need, I say, to grasp what nature it has, and what those who deny it exists at all are talking about. PROTARCHUS: Well, I think I'm following your argument. SOCRATES: You'll show it soon enough, Protarchus. Answer me this: do you see greater pleasures—I don't mean more numerous, but exceeding in intensity and degree—in a life of excess, or in a life of self-control? Answer carefully. PROTARCHUS: I've understood what you mean, and I see a great difference. The self-controlled are held in check, at every turn, by that proverbial maxim—'nothing too much'—which they obey; but with the senseless and unrestrained, violent pleasure takes hold right up to madness and makes them notorious. SOCRATES: Well said—and if that's really so, it's clear that the greatest pleasures, and the greatest pains too, arise in some badness of soul and body, not in virtue. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: So we need to pick out some of these and examine in just what way we meant they were the greatest.

PROTARCHUS: That must be so. SOCRATES: Now look at the pleasures that come with disorders of this sort — what shape they take. PROTARCHUS: Which disorders do you mean? SOCRATES: The unseemly ones, the kind that people we called squeamish find utterly hateful. PROTARCHUS: Such as? SOCRATES: Take the relief people get from scratching an itch, and anything like that, which needs no other remedy. For heaven's sake, what should we call that feeling? Pleasure, or pain? PROTARCHUS: It looks like some mixed sort of bad thing, Socrates. SOCRATES: I didn't bring this up for Philebus's sake. Without these pleasures, Protarchus, and the ones that go with them, once we've examined them closely, we probably won't be able to settle the question we're now pursuing. PROTARCHUS: Then we'd better go after their relatives. SOCRATES: You mean the ones that share in this mixing? PROTARCHUS: Exactly. SOCRATES: Now, some mixtures occur in the body itself, within the body, others belong to the soul alone, within the soul; and then we'll find further mixtures of pain and pleasure belonging to soul and body together, which are sometimes called pleasures and sometimes pains, depending on both together. PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: Whenever someone, in the process of settling into a state or being pulled apart from it, undergoes opposite affections at once — sometimes shivering and getting warm, sometimes being heated and then chilled — wanting, I think, to keep the one and be rid of the other. What's called 'a sweetness mixed with bitterness' — when it's hard to shake off, it produces irritation, and later a wild tension. PROTARCHUS: What you just said is quite true. SOCRATES: So some of these mixtures consist of equal pains and pleasures, others of one or the other in excess? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Tell me about the ones where the pains outweigh the pleasures — the itching cases we just mentioned, and cases of tickling — when there's a boiling and inflammation inside, and the rubbing and scratching doesn't reach it, only stirs up the surface: sometimes people bring these spots to the fire, or turn to the opposite, applying heat treatments, producing at times overwhelming pleasures, at other times the reverse, setting what's inside against what's outside — mixing pains with pleasures, and depending on which way the balance tips, they give relief either by forcibly dispersing what's compacted together or by compacting together what's dispersed — and so they set pains right alongside pleasures.

PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: And when, in cases like these, more pleasure gets mixed in, the small residue of pain causes a tingling and a mild irritation, while the much larger dose of pleasure poured in creates tension and sometimes makes people leap about, producing all sorts of colors, all sorts of postures, all sorts of gasping, and works up utter astonishment and cries devoid of sense. PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: And it makes a person say of himself, my friend, and makes others say of him, that he's practically dying of delight in these pleasures; and the more dissolute and senseless he happens to be, the more relentlessly he chases after them — he calls these the greatest pleasures, and reckons the one who lives immersed in them as much as possible to be the happiest of all. PROTARCHUS: You've laid out exactly, Socrates, what most people believe on all this. SOCRATES: Yes, concerning the pleasures found in the body's own common affections, blended from what's on the surface and what's within. But as for the cases where soul opposes body — pain set against pleasure and pleasure against pain, so that the two come together into one single blend — we went through those earlier: how, when a person is emptied out, he desires to be filled, and rejoices in hoping, yet suffers pain while being emptied. We didn't call witnesses to that then, but now we say that when soul and body pull apart in all these countless cases, a single mixture of pain and pleasure comes about. PROTARCHUS: You're probably quite right. SOCRATES: There's still one mixture of pleasure and pain left for us. PROTARCHUS: Which one do you mean? SOCRATES: The one we said the soul itself often takes on, all by itself. PROTARCHUS: What exactly do we mean by that? SOCRATES: Anger, fear, longing, lamentation, love, jealousy, envy, and all such things — don't you count these as pains belonging to the soul itself? PROTARCHUS: I do.

SOCRATES: Then won't we find them also full of boundless pleasures? Or do we need reminding — the case of rage and anger, the one who 'goads even a wise man into fury,' though 'far sweeter than dripping honey' — and the pleasures found in lamentation and longing, mixed in among the pains? PROTARCHUS: No, that's exactly how these things come about, and no other way. SOCRATES: And you remember watching tragedies, how people weep even as they enjoy themselves? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And do you know that our state of soul at comedies also involves a mixture of pain and pleasure? PROTARCHUS: I don't quite follow that one. SOCRATES: It really isn't easy, Protarchus, to grasp that particular experience in this case. PROTARCHUS: It doesn't seem so to me, at any rate. SOCRATES: Then let's take it up all the more precisely, since it's the murkier case — so that in other instances too, one may find it easier to recognize a mixture of pain and pleasure. PROTARCHUS: Go on, then. SOCRATES: Take the term we just used, envy — will you set it down as some pain of the soul, or how? PROTARCHUS: Yes, that. SOCRATES: But surely the envious man will turn out to take pleasure in the misfortunes of his neighbors. PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: And ignorance is a bad thing — what we call a foolish condition. PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Now, from all this, see what nature laughter has. PROTARCHUS: Just tell me. SOCRATES: It's a kind of badness in sum, named after a certain condition; and of all badness, it's the opposite state to what's written on the inscription at Delphi. PROTARCHUS: You mean 'know yourself,' Socrates? SOCRATES: I do. The opposite of that would clearly be not knowing oneself at all, the thing the inscription warns against. PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Now, Protarchus, try to cut this into three. PROTARCHUS: How do you mean? I doubt I can manage it. SOCRATES: So you're saying I need to make this division now? PROTARCHUS: I am, and I'm asking you to, on top of saying so. SOCRATES: Isn't it necessary that those who don't know themselves fall into this condition in one of three ways? PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: First, regarding money — thinking oneself richer than one's actual wealth. PROTARCHUS: Many people, at any rate, have that condition. SOCRATES: And even more think themselves taller and better-looking than they are, and superior in every bodily respect, beyond the truth of their actual state. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: But the vast majority, I think, are mistaken about the third kind, the one concerning qualities of soul — thinking themselves better in virtue than they are, when they're not. PROTARCHUS: Very much so.

SOCRATES: And among the virtues, isn't it wisdom that the crowd clings to hardest of all, full of quarrels and false pretensions to wisdom? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: One would be right to call all of this a bad condition. PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: Now we still need to split this in two, Protarchus, if we're going to see, in this childish envy, the strange mixture of pleasure and pain. How do we cut it in two, you ask? All those who hold this false opinion of themselves foolishly, as is true of everyone — of these, some necessarily have strength and power attached to them, others, I think, the opposite. PROTARCHUS: Necessarily. SOCRATES: Divide it that way, then: those among them who are weak, and unable to retaliate when laughed at — call them ridiculous, and you'll speak the plain truth. But those who are capable of retaliating, and strong — call them frightening and hateful; you'll give the most accurate account of them for yourself. For ignorance in the strong is hateful and shameful — harmful to their neighbors, both itself and any likenesses of it — while the weak sort of ignorance has been allotted the rank and nature of the ridiculous. PROTARCHUS: Quite right. But I still don't see clearly the mixture of pleasures and pains in these cases. SOCRATES: Then take up first the power of envy. PROTARCHUS: Just tell me. SOCRATES: There's some unjust pain, and some pleasure too? PROTARCHUS: That must be so. SOCRATES: Now, taking pleasure in the misfortunes of enemies is neither unjust nor a mark of envy? PROTARCHUS: Certainly not. SOCRATES: But seeing the misfortunes of friends and not being pained, but taking pleasure instead — isn't that unjust? PROTARCHUS: Of course it is. SOCRATES: And didn't we say ignorance is bad for everyone? PROTARCHUS: Rightly so. SOCRATES: So the false pretension to wisdom or beauty in our friends, and all the rest we just went through — occurring, we said, in three kinds — ridiculous when weak, hateful when powerful: shall we say, or not say, what I said just now, that this condition in friends, when it's harmless to others, is ridiculous? PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And don't we agree that it's a bad thing, being ignorance? PROTARCHUS: Very much so. SOCRATES: And do we feel pleasure or pain when we laugh at it?

PROTARCHUS: Clearly pleasure. SOCRATES: And didn't we say that pleasure at the misfortunes of friends is the work of envy? PROTARCHUS: It must be. SOCRATES: So our argument tells us that in laughing at the ridiculous traits of our friends, by mixing pleasure with envy, we're mixing pleasure with pain — since we agreed long ago that envy is a pain of the soul, and laughing is a pleasure, and the two occur together on these occasions. PROTARCHUS: True. SOCRATES: So our argument now reveals that in laments, in tragedies and comedies — not only on stage, but in the whole tragedy and comedy of life — pains are mixed together with pleasures, and in countless other cases too. PROTARCHUS: It's impossible not to agree with this, Socrates, even for someone bent on arguing the opposite. SOCRATES: Now, we proposed anger, longing, lamentation, fear, love, jealousy, and envy, and all such things, as cases where we said we'd find the very mixtures we've now often discussed. Isn't that so? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Then we understand that everything we just went through applies to lamentation, envy, and anger? PROTARCHUS: Of course we understand. SOCRATES: And there's still much left over? PROTARCHUS: A great deal, indeed. SOCRATES: Why do you suppose I singled out the mixture in comedy to show you? Wasn't it to give you confidence — since it's easy to display the blend in fears, in love, and the rest — so that once you've grasped this point for yourself, you'd let me off from having to go through those other cases and drawing things out, and simply accept this: that body without soul, soul without body, and the two together, are full, in their experiences, of pleasure blended with pain? So tell me now, will you let me off, or will you keep me here till midnight? I think I can get off with saying just a little more — I'll be willing to give you an account of all this tomorrow. For now I want to move on to what remains, toward the judgment Philebus is pressing us for. PROTARCHUS: Well said, Socrates. But go through what's left, in whatever way you please. SOCRATES: Then naturally, after the mixed pleasures, by some necessity we should move on in turn to the unmixed ones.

PROTARCHUS: Well put. SOCRATES: Let me try to shift ground and explain these to you. As for those who claim that every pleasure is simply a cessation of pain, I'm not at all convinced -- rather, as I said, I'm using them as witnesses that some things that seem to be pleasures are not pleasures at all, while certain other things appear great and numerous at once, though they are really jumbled together with pains and with the relief of the worst distresses of body and soul. PROTARCHUS: And which pleasures, Socrates, would one correctly take to be true? SOCRATES: Those connected with what are called beautiful colors, with shapes, with most smells, with sounds, and with anything whose lack goes unnoticed and unfelt while its fulfillment is felt and pleasant, arriving pure of any pain. PROTARCHUS: How do you mean this, Socrates? SOCRATES: What I'm saying isn't obvious right away, but let's try to make it clear. I'm not now trying to speak of the beauty of shapes in the sense the many would assume -- living things, say, or paintings of them -- but something straight, our argument says, and round, and the plane and solid figures produced from these by the lathe, and those made by rulers and set-squares, if you follow me. These, I claim, are not beautiful relative to something, as other things are, but are by nature always beautiful in themselves, and possess pleasures of their own, in no way like the pleasure of scratching an itch. And colors of this same kind are beautiful too, and have their own pleasures. Do we follow this, or not? PROTARCHUS: I'm trying to, Socrates -- but you try to put it still more clearly. SOCRATES: I mean the smooth, clear sounds that give off one pure note, beautiful not in relation to something else but in themselves, with pleasures native to them that follow along. PROTARCHUS: Yes, that too exists. SOCRATES: The class of pleasures connected with smells is a less divine kind than these, but the fact that no necessary pains are mixed in with them -- wherever and in whatever this occurs for us -- I count as the exact counterpart of the other case. So, if you follow, these are the two kinds of pleasure we're speaking of. PROTARCHUS: I follow.

SOCRATES: Now then, let's add to these the pleasures connected with learning, if indeed we think these have no hungers -- no pains arising at the start from a hunger for learning. PROTARCHUS: Yes, I agree with that. SOCRATES: But what about this: when people who have been filled with learning later suffer losses through forgetting, do you see any pains in that? PROTARCHUS: Not by nature, no -- only in certain calculations about the experience, whenever someone, deprived of it, is pained by the need for it. SOCRATES: But right now, my good man, we're tracing only the natural experiences themselves, apart from any calculation. PROTARCHUS: Then you're right that forgetting happens to us in matters of learning every time without pain. SOCRATES: So these pleasures of learning must be said to be unmixed with pain, and belong not to the many at all but to very few. PROTARCHUS: How could one not say so? SOCRATES: Now that we've reasonably distinguished the pure pleasures from those that could rightly be called nearly impure, let's add to our account that the violent pleasures involve excess, while the others involve the opposite, measure -- and let's set down that those admitting of the great and the violent, occurring often or seldom, belong to that class of the unlimited which runs, more or less, through body and soul alike, while the others belong to the class of the measured. PROTARCHUS: Perfectly right, Socrates. SOCRATES: There's still one more thing about them to examine after this. PROTARCHUS: What's that? SOCRATES: What should we say is closer to truth -- the pure and unmixed, or the intense, the abundant, the great, the vehement? PROTARCHUS: What are you really asking me, Socrates, and why? SOCRATES: So as to leave nothing out, Protarchus, in testing pleasure and knowledge fully -- whether each of them has a pure part and an impure part -- so that each may come to judgment in its purest form, making the verdict easier for me, for you, and for all of us here. PROTARCHUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: Come then, let's think this way about all the kinds we call pure: let's pick out one of them first and examine it.

PROTARCHUS: Which shall we pick? SOCRATES: Let's look first at the kind called white, if you like. PROTARCHUS: By all means. SOCRATES: Then what would purity in white be, and what would count as it? Is it the largest and most abundant amount, or the most unmixed, in which no trace whatever of any other color is present? PROTARCHUS: Clearly the most unadulterated. SOCRATES: Right. So won't we say, Protarchus, that this is the truest white, and at the same time the most beautiful of all whites -- not the most abundant or the greatest? PROTARCHUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: So if we say that a small amount of pure white is whiter, and at the same time more beautiful and truer, than a large amount mixed with other things, we'll be speaking entirely correctly. PROTARCHUS: Entirely correctly indeed. SOCRATES: Well then -- surely we won't need many such examples for our account of pleasure; it's enough to grasp straightaway from this that any pleasure whatever, small or great, will be more pleasant, truer, and more beautiful once purified of pain. PROTARCHUS: Absolutely -- and this example is sufficient. SOCRATES: Now what about this: haven't we heard it said of pleasure that it's always a coming-into-being, and that pleasure has no being at all? Some clever people try to convey this very point to us, and we owe them thanks. PROTARCHUS: How so? SOCRATES: I'll work this out for you by asking further questions, dear Protarchus. PROTARCHUS: Just speak and ask. SOCRATES: There are two things, one existing in itself, the other always reaching after something else. PROTARCHUS: What are these two, and what do you mean? SOCRATES: The one is always by nature the most august; the other falls short of it. PROTARCHUS: Say it still more clearly. SOCRATES: We've observed beautiful and good boys, and along with them their courageous lovers. PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Now look for two other things resembling these two, running through everything we say exists. PROTARCHUS: Should I say it a third time? Speak more clearly, Socrates, about what you mean. SOCRATES: Nothing elaborate, Protarchus -- our argument is just teasing us. It's saying that of the things that exist, one is always for the sake of something, while the other -- that for whose sake the first is always coming to be -- is what it's always coming to be for the sake of. PROTARCHUS: I barely followed that, and only because you said it so many times.

SOCRATES: Perhaps, my boy, we'll understand better as the argument goes on. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Let's take up these two further things. PROTARCHUS: What things? SOCRATES: One, coming-to-be of all things; the other, being, as a separate thing. PROTARCHUS: I accept these two from you -- being and coming-to-be. SOCRATES: Quite right. Now which of these is for the sake of which? Shall we say coming-to-be is for the sake of being, or being for the sake of coming-to-be? PROTARCHUS: Are you now asking whether the thing called being is what it is for the sake of coming-to-be? SOCRATES: So it seems. PROTARCHUS: In the gods' name, are you asking me something like this: tell me, Protarchus, do you say shipbuilding happens for the sake of ships, or ships for the sake of shipbuilding, and all such cases? SOCRATES: That's exactly what I mean, Protarchus. PROTARCHUS: Then why didn't you answer yourself, Socrates? SOCRATES: No particular reason -- but you should share in the argument too. PROTARCHUS: By all means. SOCRATES: Well, I say that drugs and all instruments and all materials are provided for the sake of coming-to-be in every case, and that each particular coming-to-be occurs for the sake of some particular being, and that coming-to-be as a whole occurs for the sake of being as a whole. PROTARCHUS: Perfectly clear. SOCRATES: So pleasure too, if indeed it's a coming-to-be, must necessarily come to be for the sake of some being. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And surely that for whose sake a thing that comes to be for something always comes to be belongs to the portion of the good; while what comes to be for the sake of something else must be placed, my friend, in a different portion. PROTARCHUS: Absolutely necessary. SOCRATES: So if pleasure really is a coming-to-be, won't we be right to place it in a portion other than the good? PROTARCHUS: Perfectly right. SOCRATES: So, just as I said at the start of this argument, we owe thanks to the one who pointed out that pleasure is a coming-to-be and has no being whatsoever -- for clearly he's laughing at those who claim pleasure is a good. PROTARCHUS: He certainly is. SOCRATES: And this same person will also laugh at all those who find their fulfillment in the various comings-to-be. PROTARCHUS: What do you mean, and which people? SOCRATES: I mean those who, curing hunger or thirst or anything of that sort that coming-to-be cures, rejoice in the coming-to-be as though it were pleasure itself, and say they wouldn't choose to live without thirsting and hungering and experiencing all the other things that follow upon such states.

PROTARCHUS: They do seem to say that, at least. SOCRATES: And wouldn't we all say that the opposite of coming-to-be is perishing? PROTARCHUS: Necessarily. SOCRATES: So anyone choosing this would be choosing perishing and coming-to-be, not that third life in which one neither rejoices nor suffers pain, but which allows for thinking in the purest way possible. PROTARCHUS: A great deal of absurdity results, it seems, Socrates, if one sets down pleasure as our good. SOCRATES: A great deal indeed -- since we can still put it this way too. PROTARCHUS: How? SOCRATES: Isn't it absurd that nothing is good or beautiful in bodies, or in most other things, except in the soul, and there only pleasure -- while courage, moderation, understanding, and all the other goods the soul possesses count as nothing of the kind? And beyond this, that the person not rejoicing but in pain must be forced to admit he's bad whenever he's in pain, even if he's the best of all people -- while the one who rejoices, the more he rejoices, the more he's supposed to excel in virtue, just in that moment of rejoicing? PROTARCHUS: All this, Socrates, is as absurd as it could possibly be. SOCRATES: So let's not try to conduct every possible scrutiny of pleasure while appearing to spare understanding and knowledge entirely. Instead let's nobly knock on both of them all over, to see if either has anything unsound in it, so that once we've seen what is purest by nature in each, we can use that for the common judgment between them and the truest parts of pleasure. PROTARCHUS: Right. SOCRATES: Now I think one part of our knowledge is the craftsman's kind, concerned with the arts, and another part concerns education and nurture. Isn't that so? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Let's first consider, in the case of the manual arts, whether one part of them holds more to knowledge and another less, and whether we should regard some as the purest and others as more impure. PROTARCHUS: Yes, we should. SOCRATES: Then we must distinguish the leading ones among them, each separately. PROTARCHUS: Which ones, and how? SOCRATES: For instance, if one were to separate arithmetic, measurement, and weighing out from all the other arts, what's left over from each would, so to speak, be trivial. PROTARCHUS: Trivial indeed.

SOCRATES: What's left, after that, would be guesswork—training the senses through experience and a certain practiced skill, drawing on the powers of estimation that many people call arts, powers whose strength has been built up through practice and effort. PROTARCHUS: That's exactly right. SOCRATES: Now music, to begin with, is full of this, isn't it—tuning its harmonies not by measurement but by a trained guess, and the whole art of flute-playing along with it, hunting for the right pitch of each string by estimation, so that it has a great deal of guesswork mixed in and only a small amount of certainty. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: And we'll find medicine, farming, piloting, and generalship the same way. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: Carpentry, though, I think, by using a great many measures and instruments that give it a high degree of precision, comes out more exact than most of the sciences. PROTARCHUS: In what way? SOCRATES: In shipbuilding and housebuilding, and in many other kinds of woodworking—it uses the ruler, I think, and the lathe, the compass, the chalk-line, and a certain ingenious contraption for aligning things. PROTARCHUS: Quite right, Socrates. SOCRATES: Let's set the so-called arts, then, into two groups—those that go along with music, sharing a lesser degree of precision in their work, and those that go with carpentry, sharing more. PROTARCHUS: Let it stand so. SOCRATES: And of these, the most exact are the ones we mentioned first just now. PROTARCHUS: You seem to mean arithmetic, and the arts you named just now that go along with it. SOCRATES: Certainly. But Protarchus, shouldn't we say these too come in two kinds? Or how do you see it? PROTARCHUS: Which kinds do you mean? SOCRATES: Isn't there one arithmetic practiced by the many, and another practiced by philosophers—shouldn't we say that first? PROTARCHUS: How would one draw the line between one and the other kind of arithmetic? SOCRATES: It's no small distinction, Protarchus. Some people count unequal units when they reckon—two armies, say, or two oxen, or two of the smallest things there are, or two of the very greatest. Others would never go along with them unless one insists that not a single one of all those countless units differs in the least from any other. PROTARCHUS: You're quite right that there's no small difference among those who busy themselves with number—enough to justify calling them two distinct things.

SOCRATES: And what about this—calculation and measurement as practiced in carpentry and commerce, compared with the geometry and calculation practiced in philosophy—should we say each of these is one thing, or set them down as two? PROTARCHUS: Following what we said before, I'd cast my vote for calling each of them two. SOCRATES: Rightly so. Now do you see why we brought all this into the middle of the discussion? PROTARCHUS: Perhaps—but I'd rather you were the one to answer the question you're now asking. SOCRATES: Well, it seems to me that this argument, no less than when we first began to make it, has set up something to stand opposite the pleasures, by asking whether one branch of knowledge is purer than another, just as one pleasure is purer than another. PROTARCHUS: Yes, that's quite clear—that this is exactly what it's been aiming at. SOCRATES: So then—hadn't we already found, earlier on, that one art was clearer than another applied to different subjects, one more exact and another less so? PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And in these cases here, hasn't he used a single name for what is really two arts, creating the impression that it's one thing, and then asked all over again, as though there were two, which of the two—the philosophers' version or the non-philosophers'—has more clarity and purity in these matters? PROTARCHUS: Yes, that does seem to be what he's asking. SOCRATES: Then what answer shall we give him, Protarchus? PROTARCHUS: Socrates, we've come to see a tremendous difference in the clarity of these branches of knowledge. SOCRATES: Won't we find it easier to answer, then? PROTARCHUS: Certainly—and let it be said that these two are far superior to the other arts, and that among these two, the ones connected with the drive of true philosophers surpass the rest immeasurably in precision and truth about measures and numbers. SOCRATES: Let that stand as you say, and trusting you, we can boldly answer those who are skilled at pulling arguments in every direction— PROTARCHUS: Answer them how? SOCRATES: That there are two arithmetics and two arts of measurement, and a good many other such pairs following along with them, sharing this same twin nature while being called by one common name. PROTARCHUS: Let's give this answer, and good luck to us, to those clever fellows you speak of, Socrates. SOCRATES: So we're saying these are the most exact of the sciences? PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: But Protarchus, the power of dialectic would refuse to have anything to do with us if we ranked any other science above it. PROTARCHUS: And what science must we call this one, then?

SOCRATES: Clearly, anyone would recognize the one just described. I think that everyone who has even a small share of intelligence believes that the knowledge concerned with what is, with what is truly and always constant in the same way, is by far the truest kind of knowledge. But what do you think? How would you settle this, Protarchus? PROTARCHUS: I've heard it said again and again, Socrates, by Gorgias, that the art of persuasion far surpasses all other arts—for it makes everything its slave through willing consent rather than through force, and is by far the best of all the arts. But I wouldn't want to set myself against you or against him right now. SOCRATES: It seems to me you wanted to name your weapon, but felt ashamed and left it behind. PROTARCHUS: Let it be however you think it is. SOCRATES: Am I to blame, then, for your not understanding correctly? PROTARCHUS: For what? SOCRATES: My dear Protarchus, I wasn't asking, at least not yet, which art or science surpasses all the rest by being the greatest and best and most useful to us, but rather which one looks toward clarity, exactness, and the truest truth, however small its scope and however little benefit it provides—that's what we're looking for now. And see here—you won't offend Gorgias by granting that his art has the advantage of practical mastery over people, while granting to the pursuit I'm describing—just as I said before about the color white—that even if it's a small thing, so long as it's pure, it surpasses whatever is large in quantity but impure, precisely in being the truest thing of its kind. So now, having thought this through carefully and reasoned it out well enough, without looking to any usefulness or reputation the sciences might have, but asking whether there is some power native to our soul that loves the truth and does everything for its sake—let's say, once we've thoroughly investigated it, whether this power has acquired, as far as we can judge, the purest possible share of intellect and understanding, or whether we must look for some other power more sovereign than this one. PROTARCHUS: I'm considering it, and I think it would be hard to grant that any other science or art holds more firmly to truth than this one.

SOCRATES: Now did you have something like this in mind when you said what you just said—that most of the arts, and those who've labored hard at them, work first of all with opinions, and pursue matters of opinion with great intensity? And if someone thinks he's investigating the natural world, you know that he spends his whole life investigating this world around us—how it came to be, how it's affected, and how it acts. Shall we say that, or how? PROTARCHUS: That's how it is. SOCRATES: So such a person has devoted his labor not to what always is, but to what comes to be, will come to be, and has come to be? PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: Could we then say that anything about these things becomes clear with the most exact truth, when none of them has ever remained, or will remain, or now remains, in the same state? PROTARCHUS: How could it? SOCRATES: How, then, could anything ever become certain for us regarding things that possess no stability whatsoever? PROTARCHUS: I don't think it could, in any way. SOCRATES: Then neither intellect nor any science concerning these things possesses the truest truth. PROTARCHUS: It doesn't seem likely. SOCRATES: So we must set aside entirely—you, me, Gorgias, and Philebus—and affirm the following through our argument. PROTARCHUS: What is that? SOCRATES: That certainty, purity, truth, and what we call unmixed reality belong either to those things that are forever constant in the very same way, utterly unmixed, or, second to those, to whatever is most akin to them; and everything else must be called secondary and inferior. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: And isn't it most just to assign the finest of names to the finest of these things? PROTARCHUS: That seems likely. SOCRATES: Aren't intellect and understanding the names one would honor most of all? PROTARCHUS: Yes. SOCRATES: So these names find their most precise and proper use in application to thoughts concerning what truly is. PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: And indeed, the very things I brought forward earlier for our judgment are nothing other than these same names. PROTARCHUS: Of course, Socrates. SOCRATES: Well then. If someone were to say that, regarding understanding and pleasure and their mixture with each other, we're like craftsmen who need the materials out of which, or in which, to build something, he would be making a fine comparison. PROTARCHUS: A very fine one. SOCRATES: So after this, shouldn't we attempt the mixing itself? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And wouldn't it help to remind ourselves of a few points first? PROTARCHUS: Which points?

SOCRATES: The ones we mentioned before. The proverb seems right that what's worth saying well is worth repeating twice, even three times. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Come then, by Zeus—I think this is more or less how what was said before went. PROTARCHUS: How? SOCRATES: Philebus claims that pleasure is the correct target for all living things, and that all of them ought to aim at it, and further that this very thing is the good for everyone, and that the two names 'good' and 'pleasant' rightly apply to one single thing with one single nature. Socrates, on the other hand, says this isn't one thing but two, just as the names are two, and that the good and the pleasant have natures different from each other, and further that understanding has a greater share in the good than pleasure does. Isn't that what was said then, and what is being said now, Protarchus? PROTARCHUS: Absolutely. SOCRATES: And wouldn't we also agree, both then and now, on this point? PROTARCHUS: Which point? SOCRATES: That the nature of the good differs from everything else in this way. PROTARCHUS: In what way? SOCRATES: That whatever living thing possesses it, always, completely, and in every respect, has no further need of anything else, but has everything sufficient and complete. Isn't that so? PROTARCHUS: Yes, it is. SOCRATES: And didn't we try, in our argument, to set each of the two apart from the other, testing them separately in the life of each creature—pleasure unmixed with understanding, and understanding, likewise, having not the slightest trace of pleasure? PROTARCHUS: We did. SOCRATES: And did either of the two seem sufficient to us at that time? PROTARCHUS: How could it have? SOCRATES: And if we went astray at all back then, let anyone now take up the matter and correct it, treating memory, understanding, knowledge, and true opinion as belonging to one and the same class, and considering whether anyone would choose to have or acquire anything at all without these—let alone pleasure, however great or however intense, if he neither truly believed he was enjoying it, nor knew at all what he was experiencing, nor retained any memory of the experience for any length of time whatsoever. Let him say the same about understanding too—whether anyone would choose to have understanding entirely without pleasure, even the smallest amount, rather than combined with some pleasures, or would choose all pleasures apart from understanding rather than combined with some understanding. PROTARCHUS: That's not possible, Socrates—but there's no need to keep asking this over and over.

SOCRATES: So neither of these two could be the perfect thing, the thing choiceworthy for everyone, the wholly good? PROTARCHUS: How could it be? SOCRATES: Then we need to grasp the good clearly, or at least get some outline of it, so that, as we said, we'll know to whom to award second prize. PROTARCHUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: Well, haven't we found a certain path toward the good? PROTARCHUS: Which one? SOCRATES: The way that if someone were looking for a particular man, and first found out correctly where he lives, that would go a long way toward finding the man he's after. PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And just now some argument showed us, as it did at the start, that we shouldn't look for the good in the unmixed life but in the mixed one. PROTARCHUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: And there's more hope that what we're after will show up more clearly in a well-mixed blend than in one that isn't? PROTARCHUS: Much more. SOCRATES: Then, Protarchus, let's pray to the gods and start mixing — whether it's Dionysus or Hephaestus or whichever god has been given the honor of this blending. PROTARCHUS: By all means. SOCRATES: And indeed we have, standing by us like a pair of wine-pourers, two springs — you might compare pleasure's spring to honey, and understanding's to some sober, wineless, healthy water — and we must do our best to mix them together as well as we can. PROTARCHUS: How could we not? SOCRATES: Well then, first: if we mixed every kind of pleasure with every kind of understanding, would we hit the mark best that way? PROTARCHUS: Maybe. SOCRATES: But that's not safe. I think I can show a way to mix that's less risky. PROTARCHUS: Tell me what it is. SOCRATES: We agreed, didn't we, that one pleasure is truly more true than another, and likewise one skill more exact than another? PROTARCHUS: Of course. SOCRATES: And knowledge differs from knowledge too — one kind looks at things that come to be and perish, the other at things that neither come to be nor perish but remain the same, in the same way, forever. Judging by the standard of truth, we decided the second was truer than the first. PROTARCHUS: Quite rightly. SOCRATES: So if we first mixed together the truest portions of each — would that blend be enough, all by itself, to produce the most desirable life for us, or do we still need something more, even some things that aren't like that?

PROTARCHUS: I think that's what we should do, at any rate. SOCRATES: Then let's suppose we have a man who understands justice itself, what it is, and can give an account that follows his understanding, and who thinks the same way about everything else that is. PROTARCHUS: Let's suppose so. SOCRATES: Will this man have adequate knowledge, if he has an account of the circle and the sphere themselves, the divine ones, but is ignorant of this human sphere and these human circles here, and uses the same rulers and circles when he builds a house and does everything else? PROTARCHUS: What we're describing, Socrates, is a ridiculous state to be in, if we're confined only to the divine sciences. SOCRATES: What do you mean? Must we throw in and blend together, with the rest, even the unreliable, impure craft that uses the false ruler and the false circle? PROTARCHUS: We have to, if any of us is ever going to find his way home. SOCRATES: And what about music, which we said a little while ago is full of guesswork and imitation and lacks purity? PROTARCHUS: It seems necessary to me, if our life is going to be a life at all, in any sense. SOCRATES: Do you want me, then, like a doorkeeper shoved and jostled by a crowd, to give in, throw the doors wide open, and let all the sciences pour in and mix together, the less pure right along with the pure? PROTARCHUS: I certainly can't see, Socrates, how anyone would be harmed by having all the other sciences as well, so long as he keeps the first ones. SOCRATES: Shall I, then, let them all flow together into the reservoir of Homer's — and indeed poetry's — 'meeting of the waters'? PROTARCHUS: By all means. SOCRATES: They're let in. Now we need to go back again to the spring of the pleasures. Because our plan to mix in only the true pleasures first — that didn't work out for us; instead, out of our fondness for every kind of knowledge, we let them all flood in together before we ever got to the pleasures. PROTARCHUS: That's exactly true. SOCRATES: So now it's time for us to deliberate about the pleasures too — whether we should let all of these in as a mass as well, or whether here too we should let in the true ones first. PROTARCHUS: It makes a great difference for safety's sake to let the true ones in first. SOCRATES: Let them in, then. What comes next? If some pleasures are necessary, as was true there, mustn't we mix those in too? PROTARCHUS: Of course — the necessary ones, surely.

SOCRATES: And if, just as it was harmless and beneficial to know all the crafts throughout one's life, the same holds now for the pleasures — if it's actually good for us and harmless to everyone to feel every pleasure throughout life, then we should blend them all in. PROTARCHUS: So how should we talk about this, and what should we do? SOCRATES: It's not us we should be questioning, Protarchus, but the pleasures themselves, and the kinds of understanding, asking them something like this about each other. PROTARCHUS: What sort of thing? SOCRATES: 'Dear friends — whether we should call you pleasures, or by whatever other name — wouldn't you rather live together with understanding of every kind, or apart from thought altogether?' I think they'd be bound to answer this. PROTARCHUS: What? SOCRATES: What we said before — that for any single kind to exist alone, in isolation and pure, is neither really possible nor beneficial. And of all the kinds, we hold that the best thing to have living alongside us is the capacity to know everything else, and in turn to know itself completely, as far as that's possible for each of us. PROTARCHUS: We'll say they've answered well just now. SOCRATES: Rightly so. Next, then, we must in turn question understanding and mind: 'Do you need any pleasures at all in the mixture?' We'd be asking mind and understanding this in turn. 'What kind of pleasures?' they might well ask. PROTARCHUS: Likely enough. SOCRATES: And here's how our argument goes next. 'Besides those true pleasures we mentioned' — we'll say — 'do you still need the greatest and most intense pleasures to live with you?' 'How could we, Socrates,' they might well say, 'when those pleasures throw countless obstacles in our way, throwing the souls we live in into turmoil with their mad excess, and won't even let us come into being in the first place, and as a rule, through the carelessness they breed and the forgetfulness that follows, they utterly destroy whatever offspring of ours do come to be?'

SOCRATES: But the pleasures you called true and pure — take those as belonging to us, more or less, and along with them the pleasures that come with health and self-control, and indeed with the whole of virtue, all the pleasures that follow virtue everywhere as its attendants, the way attendants follow a god — mix those in. But as for the pleasures that are forever tagging along with folly and the rest of vice, it would be sheer irrationality to mix those in with mind — for anyone who wants to see the finest, least conflicted blend and mixture, and to try to learn from it what the good really is, by nature, in a human being and in the universe, and what form we should divine it to have. Won't we say that mind has answered wisely and consistently with itself, on behalf of itself, and of memory, and of correct opinion, in what it's just said? PROTARCHUS: Absolutely. SOCRATES: But then there's this too, which is necessary, and without which nothing could ever come to be, not even one thing. PROTARCHUS: What's that? SOCRATES: Whatever we don't mix truth into could never truly come to be, and even if it did come to be, it couldn't continue to be. PROTARCHUS: How could it? SOCRATES: No way at all. But if this mixture still needs anything more, you and Philebus should say so. As for me, the argument now looks to me like it's produced something like an incorporeal order that will rule beautifully over an ensouled body. PROTARCHUS: Then count me as agreeing that's how it is too, Socrates. SOCRATES: So perhaps we'd be right, in a sense, to say that we're now standing at the very threshold of the good, at the door of its dwelling. PROTARCHUS: I think so, at any rate. SOCRATES: Well then, what element in this mixture would strike us as the most valuable, and at the same time most responsible for making such a disposition dear to everyone? Once we've seen this, we'll go on to examine whether it's more closely allied and akin to pleasure, or to mind, in the nature of things as a whole. PROTARCHUS: Right — that's the most useful thing for us in reaching our judgment. SOCRATES: And indeed, it isn't hard to see the reason why any mixture whatever turns out to be worth everything, or worth nothing at all. PROTARCHUS: What do you mean? SOCRATES: No human being is ignorant of this. PROTARCHUS: Of what? SOCRATES: That any mixture whatsoever, made in any way at all, that misses measure and the nature of due proportion, necessarily destroys its ingredients, and itself first of all. Such a thing isn't really a blend at all, but a sort of unblended jumble, and it turns out, every time, to be a genuine disaster for whoever possesses it. PROTARCHUS: Perfectly true. SOCRATES: So now the power of the good has taken refuge for us in the nature of the beautiful — for measure and proportion, surely, everywhere turn out to be beauty and virtue. PROTARCHUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: And we also said that truth is mixed in with them, in the blend. PROTARCHUS: Yes indeed.

SOCRATES: So then, if we can't capture the good under one single form, let's take hold of it with three — beauty, proportion, and truth — and say that we'd be most right to treat these, as if they were one thing, as responsible for what's in the mixture, and that it's because of these, as being good, that the mixture has turned out as it has. PROTARCHUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: At this point, then, Protarchus, anyone at all could serve as an adequate judge between pleasure and understanding, as to which of the two is more akin to the best thing and more valuable, among gods and among men. PROTARCHUS: That's clear, but still, it's better to work it through with the argument. SOCRATES: Then let's judge each of the three, one by one, in relation to pleasure and to mind — we need to see which of the two we should assign each of them to as more closely related. PROTARCHUS: You mean beauty, truth, and proportion? SOCRATES: Yes. Take truth first, Protarchus — and having taken hold of it, look at the three, mind, truth, and pleasure, and after taking your time, answer yourself: is pleasure more akin to truth, or is mind? PROTARCHUS: What do we need time for? I think the two are worlds apart. Pleasure is the biggest fraud of them all — and, as the story goes, in the pleasures of sex, which are held to be the greatest, even perjury gets forgiveness from the gods, as if pleasures were children possessing not the least bit of sense. But mind is either the same thing as truth, or of all things the most like it and the truest. SOCRATES: Then next, consider proportion the same way: does pleasure possess more of it, or does understanding possess more than pleasure? PROTARCHUS: That's an easy question too, the one you've set before us. I think you'd never find anything by nature more lacking in proportion than pleasure and its excess of delight, and nothing more full of proportion than mind and knowledge. SOCRATES: Well said. But go on and give me the third one too. Has mind gotten a greater share of beauty than the class of pleasure has, so that mind is more beautiful than pleasure, or is it the other way around? PROTARCHUS: Well, Socrates, no one has ever seen or imagined understanding and mind as shameful, whether waking or dreaming, at any time, in any way — whether in the past, the present, or the future. SOCRATES: Rightly said.

PROTARCHUS: Yes, and pleasures too — even, one might say, the greatest of them — when we see someone in the grip of pleasure and notice either the ridiculousness that follows or the utter shamefulness of it, we ourselves feel embarrassed, and we do our best to hide it out of sight, handing all such things over to night, as though daylight had no business seeing them. SOCRATES: Then you will proclaim it everywhere, Protarchus, sending messengers to the absent and telling it to those present, that pleasure is not the first thing worth possessing, nor even the second, but that the first prize — the eternal one — has been won by whatever belongs to measure, the moderate, the timely, and everything else of that sort. PROTARCHUS: So it appears, at least from what has just been said. SOCRATES: The second prize, then, goes to the proportionate, the beautiful, the complete, the sufficient, and everything else of that family. PROTARCHUS: So it seems. SOCRATES: And the third, as my own divination tells me, if you set down intelligence and wisdom there, you would not stray far from the truth. PROTARCHUS: Perhaps. SOCRATES: And then, in fourth place — those things we assigned to the soul itself, the branches of knowledge, the arts, and what we called correct opinions — shouldn't these come fourth, right after the first three, since they are more akin to the good than to pleasure? PROTARCHUS: Perhaps so. SOCRATES: And fifth, then, the pleasures we set apart, defining them as painless, calling them the pure pleasures of the soul itself, those that follow upon knowledge, as opposed to those that follow upon the senses? PROTARCHUS: Perhaps. SOCRATES: 'But in the sixth generation,' says Orpheus, 'let the order of the song cease' — and it looks as though our own argument, too, has come to a halt at the sixth judgment. Nothing remains for us after this except to set, so to speak, a head upon what has been said. PROTARCHUS: Yes, we ought to do that. SOCRATES: Come then — let us call once more, for the third time, on the same god as our savior, and go back over the argument. PROTARCHUS: Which argument do you mean? SOCRATES: Philebus maintained that the good, for us, was pleasure — all pleasure, entire and complete. PROTARCHUS: It seems, Socrates, you were just now saying we ought to take up the argument again from the beginning — that was your 'third time.' SOCRATES: Yes — but let's hear what comes after that. For once I had seen through the things I have just gone over, and grown weary of Philebus's claim — not only his, but that of countless others as well — I said that intelligence was by far the better and superior thing for human life, compared with pleasure. PROTARCHUS: That is what you said. SOCRATES: But suspecting, too, that there were many other things in play, I said that if something should appear better than both of these, then I would fight alongside intelligence for second place against pleasure, and pleasure would be deprived even of second place.

PROTARCHUS: Yes, that is what you said. SOCRATES: And after that it became utterly clear that neither of the two was sufficient by itself. PROTARCHUS: Very true. SOCRATES: So in this argument, weren't both intelligence and pleasure entirely ruled out from being the good itself, or even a substitute for it, seeing that they were deprived of self-sufficiency and of the power that belongs to what is adequate and complete? PROTARCHUS: Quite right. SOCRATES: And once a third thing appeared, better than either of these two, intelligence has now shown itself to be, by an enormous margin, closer akin to the character of the victor than pleasure is. PROTARCHUS: How could it not be? SOCRATES: So then, by the ranking our argument has just now revealed, the power of pleasure would come in fifth. PROTARCHUS: So it seems. SOCRATES: But first place it certainly will not hold, not even if all the cattle and horses and every other kind of beast should insist on it by their pursuit of enjoyment — trusting them, as though they were birds and we the prophets reading their flight, the many judge that pleasures are the strongest things for living well, and think that the cravings of beasts are more authoritative witnesses than the arguments divined, again and again, in the company of the philosophic Muse. PROTARCHUS: We all say now, Socrates, that what you have just said is entirely true. SOCRATES: Then will you let me go? PROTARCHUS: There is still a small bit left, Socrates — for surely you will not give up before we do; I will remind you of what remains.

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