The Sokrates of the Protagoras would have regarded the complainant as suffering under a misfortune, and would have tried to suggest some remedy: either the prescription of Akumenus, or any other more promising that he could think of. The Sokrates of the Phædon, on the contrary, would have congratulated him on the improvement in his condition, inasmuch as the misguiding and degrading ascendancy, exercised by his body over his mind, was suppressed in one of its most influential channels: just as Kephalus, in the Republic (i. 329), is made to announce it as one of the blessings of old age, that the sexual appetite has left him. The Sokrates of the Philêbus, also, would have treated the case as one for congratulation, but he would have assigned a different reason. He would have replied: “The pleasures of eating are altogether false. You never really had any pleasure in eating. If you believed yourself to have any, you were under an illusion. You have reason to rejoice that this illusion has now passed away: and to rejoice the more, because you have come a step nearer to the most divine scheme of life.”
Speusippus (the nephew and successor of Plato), if he had been present, would have re-assured the complainant in a manner equally decided. He would have said nothing, however, about the difference between true and false pleasures: he would have acknowledged them all as true, and denounced them all as mischievous. He would have said (see Aul. Gell. ix. 5): “The condition which you describe is one which I greatly envy. Pleasure and Pain are both, alike and equally, forms of Evil. I eat, to relieve the pain of hunger: but unfortunately, I cannot do so without experiencing some pleasure; and I thus incur evil in the other and opposite form. I am ashamed of this, because I am still kept far off from Good, or the point of neutrality: but I cannot help myself. You are more fortunate: you avert one evil, pain, without the least alloy of the other evil, pleasure: what you attain is thus pure Good. I hope your condition may long continue, and I should be glad to come into it myself.”
Not only the sincere pleasure-haters, but also other theorists indicated by Aristotle, would have warmly applauded this pure ethical doctrine of Speusippus; not from real agreement with it, but in order to edify the audience. They would say to one another aside: “This is not true; but we must do all we can to make people believe it. Since every one is too fond of pleasures, and suffers himself to be enslaved by them, we must pull in the contrary direction, in order that we may thereby bring people into the middle line.” (Aristot. Eth. Nikom. x. 1, 1172, a. 30.)
It deserves to be remarked that Aristotle, in alluding to these last theorists, disapproves their scheme of Ethical Fictions, or of falsifying theory in order to work upon men’s minds by edifying imposture; while Plato approves and employs this scheme in the Republic. Aristotle even recognises it as a fault in various persons, that they take too little delight in bodily pleasures — that a man is τοιοῦτος οἷος ἧττον ἢ δεῖ τοῖς σωματικοῖς χαίρων (Ethic. Nikom. vii. 11, 1151, b. 24).
These few are all the varieties of pleasure which Plato admits as true: they are alleged as cases of the absolutely pleasurable (Αὐτο-ἡδύ) — that which is pleasurable per se, and always, without relation to any thing else, without dependence on occasion or circumstance, and without any antecedent or concomitant pain. All other pleasures are pleasurable relatively to some antecedent pain, or to some contrasting condition, with which they are compared: accordingly Plato considers them as false, unreal, illusory: pleasures and not pleasures at once, and not more one than the other.[135] Herein he conforms to the Eleatic or Parmenidean view, according to which the relative is altogether falsehood and illusion: an intermediate stage between Ens and Non-Ens, belonging as much to the first as to the last.
[135] Compare, respecting this Platonic view, Republic, v. pp. 478-479, and pp. 583-585, where Plato contrasts the παναληθὴς or γνησία ἡδονή, which arises from the acquisition of knowledge (when the mind nourishes itself with real essence), with the νόθη (p. 587 B) or ἐσκιαγραφημένη ἡδονή, εἴδωλον τῆς ἀληθοῦς ἡδονῆς, arising from the pursuits of wealth, power, and other objects of desire.
The comic poet Alexis adverts to this Platonic doctrine of the absolutely pleasurable, here, there, and everywhere, — τὸ δ’ ἡδὺ πάντως ἡδύ, κἀκεῖ κἀνθάδε, Athenæ. viii. 354; Meineke, Com. Frag. p. 453.
In the Phædrus (258 E), we find this same class of pleasures, those which cannot be enjoyed unless preceded by some pain, asserted to be called for that reason slavish (ἀνδραποδώδεις), and depreciated as worthless. Nearly all the pleasures connected with the body are said to belong to this class; but those of rhetoric and dialectic are exempted from it, and declared to be of superior order.
The pleasure of gaining a victory in the stadium at Olympia was ranked by Greeks generally as the maximum of pleasure: and we find the Platonic Sokrates (Republ. v. 465 D) speaks in concurrence with this opinion. But this pleasure ought in Plato’s view to pass for a false pleasure; since it was invariably preceded by the most painful, long-continued training.
The reasoning of Sokrates in the Philêbus (see especially pp. 46-47) against the intense and extatic pleasures, as being never pure, but always adulterated by accompanying pain, misfortune, disappointment, &c., is much the same as that of Epikurus and his followers afterwards. The case is nowhere more forcibly put than in the fourth book of Lucretius (1074 seq.): where that poet deprecates passionate love, and points out that pure or unmixed pleasure belongs only to the man of sound and healthy reason.