Seth Benardete: The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
An earlier version of this review appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Spring 1997. Volume 24, Number 3.
In the Philebus “Socrates finally replaces the good with the beautiful in his summary of the goods.” In this, “Plato does not simply oppose philosophy to poetry and contrast reason with the indulgence of the passions; he has philosophy invade the territory of poetry and claim for itself what seems to be the indisputable domain of poetry.” Philosophy’s superiority to poetry “cannot lie in the neutral impersonality of its discourse” but in its ability “to tell a better story than poetry.” If “better” means, finally, more beautiful, then how does philosophy differ from poetry in kind?
Tragic poets evidently, and perhaps comic poets indirectly, tell stories “center[ing] around foundational crimes, crimes that reveal what must not be violated if either man is to be man or the city is to be possible”—as seen in Oedipus, as he wonders at the riddle of the Sphinx. “In light of what Oedipus has done, Oedipus has to cease to be what he is,” a king, a just judge of criminals. He is the criminal, and so must put an end to his own royalty. Benardete’s Plato answers that philosophy’s beauty is a beauty of the mind and its thoughts, not of the body and its actions, a beauty that reflects a “divide between man as man and man as political animal that poetry denies.” “Socrates caps the poets by telling a story about the impossible, since it is true that such radical abstraction from the body is impossible.” But that only makes it more beautiful, farther above the city, which “did not educate [the philosopher] either in its opinions or in philosophy.” [1] How then does the philosopher differ from the aesthete? He differs in that the most beautiful is also the truest: “there is a range of human experience that is incorrigibly false, and the recognition of this is known to the soul, which is always trying to divine where the true good for itself is,” and “hides from the enchantments of poetry.” Is, then, the beautiful the true good? In that case, Socrates has not exactly replaced the good with the beautiful.
This book consists of two main parts: a translation of the Philebus and Benardete’s commentary. Socrates recalls to Protarchus that Philebus, whose name means lover of youth, has claimed that happiness consists of enjoyment, pleasure, delight. He may be said to be a lover of a certain sort of beauty, but is it the bodily beauty of youth or the beauty or potential beauty of youthful souls? Or both? Socrates, whose name might playfully be said to mean ‘rule of wisdom,’ associates himself thoughtfulness, thinking, remembering. Who, then, is the true lover of youth?
Protarchus is taking over Philebus’ argument. His name means ‘first ruler’ or ‘foremost ruler,’ a name that may express the ambition of a sophist. Socrates says he initiated the dialogue in order to articulate and interpret what is the best of human possessions. His “way,” he says, is to throw his interlocutors into “perplexity.” When it comes to pleasures, Protarchus is a man who wants to have it all. Protarchus wants a life that combines pleasure and thought. Socrates argues that without knowledge one would not know one is being pleasured and that thought therefore outranks pleasure. Protarchus may be too optimistic about the ability to enjoy many intense pleasures, particularly sexual pleasures, while thinking (either at the same time or at many other times); as Yogi Berra said, “You can’t hit and think at the same time.” Pleasure, Socrates remarks, is “a complex thing,” as there are good and bad pleasures. One needs to select among them, which requires thinking prior to enjoying. The pleasure associated with falsehood differs from the pleasure associated with knowledge. But this leaves open the possibility that knowledge merely instrumental to pleasure.
He proceeds by ‘abstracting’ thought from pleasure and pleasure from thought, to see if either in its pure form is preferable. Without knowledge, one wouldn’t even know if one were being pleasured. There are pleasures of the soul as well as pleasures of the body, and the soul is the locus of desires, not the body. “Our soul at times resembles a kind of a book”; memories and sensations ‘write’ “as it were speeches on our souls,” while images are ‘painted’ on them. Souls with bad pictures painted on them love false pleasures, false because bad for the soul. Thus, the greatest pains and pleasures come to the wicked, who are ‘extremists.’ Powerful evils are hateful, weak evils ridiculous; hence “the entire tragedy and comedy of life.”
An archē is a ruling cause and also a cause that begins what it effects, a genesis. Socrates effectively debunks the name of Protarchus by distinguishing being from genesis in the sense that genesis is for the sake of being. But if genesis aims at a purpose, a tēlos, then Protarchus’ sophistry may well be a false beginning resulting in false wisdom, in unwisdom. Protarchus may not be a hateful tyrant, but he is a ridiculous thinker. Socrates argues that one should choose the “kind of life” that is closest to being, the life “in which there was neither joy nor pain, but thoughtful thinking as pure as possible.”
What would such a life be? Socrates divides the “science of learning” into two parts, a demiurgic part and a part “concerned with education and upbringing.” Demiurgic learning, learning about artisanship, production, aims at understanding the precise and worthwhile elements of the arts, namely, the arts of number, of measurement, and of weighing. All other elements of the arts consist of guesswork and of experiential knowledge. This means that some knowledge is purer or clearer than other kinds of knowledge, even as some pleasures are pure than others. Is there, then, a truest understanding, “that which is by nature always the same way.”
Protarchus easily grasps this point in the abstract but applies it in an unfortunate way. Asked if there is a truest understanding, an understanding that “is by nature always in the same way,” Protarchus mentions Gorgias’ opinion that rhetoric is the best art. He would like to combine demiurgic learning with right upbringing; that is, being a sophist, he wants saying something to make it so. While admitting that rhetoric is great in the sense of extensive, far-reaching in its effects, Socrates suggests that to be the best art an art must be pure, even if not great. Mind and thought are the most pure and beautiful things; “thought is a participant in the lot and portion of the good to a higher degree than pleasure.” Why? Let a man “speak rightly”: “Let him set down memory, thought, knowledge, and true opinion as belonging to the same species (idea), and then have him consider whether anyone would choose for himself to have or get anything whatsoever without them, let alone pleasure, regardless of whether the pleasure were the most extensive or the most extreme possible, which he neither truly opines that is enjoying nor altogether knows what experience he has undergone; and, in turn has no memory of the experience for any length of time whatsoever.”
Socrates does not say that thought is or brings about the most intense pleasure. While distinguishing thought and pleasure and subordinating the latter, he does not eliminate it. Pleasure is honey; thought is water. Mix them—otherwise, one will be ridiculously ‘pure’ (one might say ‘Kantian’), using the instruments of the divine science in the mundane world. The pleasures must be ‘filtered,’ so that none is admitted that will interfere with thought. But again, any blending requires numbering, measuring, and weighing, which means that mind be prior to pleasure. Measure is beautiful; there, Socrates says, “the power of the good has fled for us into the nature of the beautiful.” In that sense the beautiful “replaces” the good. The good consists of beauty, commensuration, and truth. Mind is more nearly akin to these than pleasure is. The philosopher’s way of life is therefore superior to the pleasure-loving sophist’s way of life.
Benardete comments that measure requires the ideas of the limited and the unlimited. The dialogue itself embodies these ideas. It begins, like many a narrative poem, in medias res and so has a ‘missing’ beginning. “We are forced to wonder…whether the unbounded Philebus does not represent something essential about philosophy, that it is an activity that cannot have a beginning or an end of a strictly determined kind, even though the philosopher always begins somewhere in the neighborhood of the true beginning of philosophy and end almost every question short of the answer he has set out to find. The philosopher’s own death or senility also cuts short his quest without affecting the unending life of philosophy itself.” Philosophy has two beginnings, the first cosmological—the quarrel of philosophers with poets concerning the status of myths—the other human, when Socrates turned away from the teleological physics that previous philosophers had offered as a replacement for myths. The uniqueness of the Philebus consists in its presentation of Socrates after his ‘turn’ not mentioning the city and almost not mentioning the law. “All of morality is out of bounds in the Philebus, and, whatever the human good turns out to be, it is not informed by any social virtues.” It might be supposed that philosophers will agree with Protarchus, since “pleasure as the good…seems to be the first deduction that speculative philosophy would make when it turned from heaven to the human things.” And indeed “all of morality is out of bounds in the Philebus, a dialogue in which the polis is “never mentioned.” “Socrates, then, has been put by Plato in the difficult position of arguing against pleasure without any of the weapons with which his discovery of political philosophy might have furnished him.” His Socrates responds by noticing a weakness in the ever-changing, shape-shifting, apparently characterless character of the sophist: he needs pleasure to be the answer to the question of what the human good is. He needs finality, even as he attempts to escape the attempted finality of the city.
The city’s laws treat human perplexity by answering questions with finality. “The dissatisfaction that Protarchus feels at the end of the Philebus must reflect the unfinishable character of any true philosophical question, but it cannot represent the true state of the issue of the human good, for that issue must be settled once and for all if the philosopher is not to be in doubt about the good of philosophy as the human good. The argument of the Philebus must come to a nonarbitrary end…while it opens up everything else.” As Socrates remarks, human pleasure is double: tragic or comic. But tragedy or comedy, alone or in combination, cannot grasp the truth. “Philosophy must be by itself the truth of comedy and tragedy and the good of human life,” else philosophy collapses back into poetry. Philosophy, then, is a way of life, as “Socrates stands not just for thinking in all its purity but for the effort to think as well.” The moral-political life represents a ‘third way,’ independent of either philosophy or the life of pleasure.
Although his name means first beginning, Protarchus fails to achieve such perfectly free self-determination, as certain limits are inevitable in any life. Consider, for example, the meaning of his name. Despite it, he likely didn’t give it itself to himself, as “no man gives to himself his first name.” (For example, a journeyman professional wrestler named George Wagner had to rename himself, start calling himself ‘Gorgias George,’ before he could achieve fame and fortune as ‘The Toast of the Coast.’) Even “self-determination of this most elementary kind is not his.” The desire to maximize pleasure and thought simultaneously is utopian, as hedonism’s limit is the thoughtlessness that precludes knowing you’re having a good time. “Any hedonistic calculus must…devise a scale on which pleasure can be set.” But “the licentious cannot enjoy their own states since by definition they are not in a state they can identify, for otherwise they would be under control.” They preclude themselves from any rightful measure.
The demarcation set upon the moral-political man is Mardi Gras, the feast of fools, the purgative elevation of lords of misrule. As for the philosopher, “To be silly is a privilege of the wise on holiday.” Not only is hedonism “a funny form of idealism”, which conceives pleasure as a kind of universal with many particulars that ‘participate’ in it, but each of the other ways of life has its own funny form of idealism: the too-political man, whose desire for self-sufficiency forever contradicts his real dependence on others; the (in a sense) too-philosophic man, Socrates, whose life delineates the limits of philosophic inquiry and who needs Plato’s ‘poetic’ rescue.
In Protarchus, the attempt to mix pleasure and thought yields a political sort of soul, but one of the potentially the most dangerous type. As a matter of fact,”Protarchus is more eager to win, or at least not to lose, than he is interested in pleasure.” (Perhaps his praise of the hedonistic way of life is an attempt to soften the souls of would-be rivals for rule, of making them compliant subjects.) A rhetorician unbound by the laws, an apolitical-political man, tends toward tyranny. Unlike youth-loving Philebus, he secretly craves to be honored more than he seeks to be pleasured. Socrates cannot deal with him as he deals with the respectable but wavering Crito, or as the Athenian Stranger deals with his sober interlocutors. Socrates must convince Protarchus that there are many pleasures, and that thought is needed to sort them out and rank them. Socratic knowledge of ignorance thrives when its opponents concede that pleasure is heterogeneous because then one must choose on the basis of truth, which Socratic inquiry is uniquely suited to undertake. Protarchus needs to want a science of pleasure. Yet “he does not want to believe that the perfection (telos) of life consists in perplexity. A life of eidetic analysis is not a life for him.” But desire belongs first of all to the soul, not to the body, and “soul from the start is a structure of question,” proto-philosophic not proto-hedonistic.
Recalling the stern and pious laws of the pious, Benardete observes that the philosopher launches his “second sailing,” his philosophic quest, after seeing that the first sailing, on the winds of divine inspiration, gets one nowhere nearer the truth, and that a new effort—not exactly sailing but rowing, using one’s own powers—is necessary. “Socrates stands not just for thinking in all its purity but for the effort to think well”; as such, he guards himself against sophistic blandishments and, in his dialogues with fellow citizens, prepares (a very few of) them for sterner stuff, as well. Protarchus is well beyond the first sailing, beyond public opinion, at least in his own mind (although if he practiced the rhetoric he preaches he would find himself dependent upon the opinions of the many, the opposite of free). He is not yet at the second sailing, in that he does not know his own true powers or his own true weaknesses. He wants moral certainty without the morality; he does not want to know what he does not know. Socratic “freedom from the gods and other men” wants very much to know its own ignorance and thereby arrives at a certainty concerning the human good denied to quest-for-certitude, moral-political men and mindless hedonists. “However different pleasure and thought might be, Socrates presents both as a state and condition of the soul with the causal power to render human life happy.” But the pleasure he is talking about isn’t the bodily pleasure Philebus wants and Protagoras professes to want and to teach the likes of Philebus how to reach. For his part, Socrates inclines to teach that “whatever is impossible is not good,” that whatever eidetic analysis brings forth, a “cosmological constant” will defeat “whatever combination of elements eidetic analysis came up with that went beyond the real.” After all, “if the good and the real do not coincide, then one might as well choose to dream one’s life or give up reason,” become a misologist. “If, however, the good sticks to the real, the first good is knowledge, and moral virtue is largely irrelevant, particularly if moral virtue includes piety, which can be only an opinion about the gods and their providence.” This is where self-knowledge comes in, as “self-knowledge, Socrates implies, is an exact knowledge of one’s own goods.”
That the life of reason is not without its problems—the problem of the one and the many being perhaps the foremost among them—does not of course escape Socrates’ notice. In terms of the life of philosophy, this is the problem of how to choose rationally the life of reason, of how to know in advance that the reasoning life is best. It is settled practically by providence or necessity, which actually may be unprovidential or random, even if very fortunate. As Benardete puts it, Socrates “can choose the life of philosophy, but he cannot choose Socrates’ life of philosophy, which shapes up as he goes along and becomes good.”
Some souls simply do not incline to satisfied belief. “To introduce gods into human life is to make too much of human life. It is to give oneself airs.” And so “Socrates rejects with a laugh the entire basis of Antigone’s nobility.” Obviously, the philosopher does more than laugh, else there would be no distinction between a philosopher and the village atheist. “Self-knowledge, Socrates implies, is an exact account of one’s own goods”; lack of self-knowledge is more comic than tragic. The human soul by nature does not rest content—if it could, the purposeless pleasures of hedonism would suffice—nor can it never rest or “simply postulate a goal outside itself” that gives the soul no taste of its own goodness. To recognize this is to abandon “the psychology of pleasure and pain” and (what finally mirrors that psychology?) the hopes of reward for the just and pious. The truth the philosopher uncovers is “the truth of our perplexities and their necessary structure,” which is not a pleasurable truth, although it is good for the soul to recognize it. Few souls bring themselves to live happily according to this disenchanted truth.
Note
- In the Republic, Plato tells “a story that solves the political problem once and for all by showing that it is impossible”—that is, that there is no human nature that is born to rule” except for philosophic souls, who don’t want to rule. “Philosophy alone can give a true account of the Cave because it starts from that element in the Cave that is connected, however tenuously, with the light.” That is, Socratic or political philosophy starts from the opinions of citizens, in principle open to reconsideration in light of reason, thought governed by the principle of noncontradiction. Philosophers stumble if they begin by gazing at the heavens in an attempt to understand nature directly.
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