[82] Plato, Legg. ii. p. 664 D.
Pleasure — Good — Happiness — What is the relation between them?
What is the relation between Pleasure, Good, and Happiness? Pain, Evil, Unhappiness? Do the names in the first triplet mean substantially the same thing, only looked at in different aspects and under different conditions? Or do they mean three distinct things, separable and occurring the one without the other? This important question was much debated, and answered in many different ways, by Grecian philosophers from the time of Sokrates downward — and by Roman philosophers after them. Plato handles it not merely in the dialogue now before us, but in several others — differently too in each: in Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic, Philêbus, &c.[83]
[83] See above, [vol. ii. ch. xxiv. pp. 353].
Comparison of the doctrine laid down in Leges.
Here, in the Dialogue De Legibus (by incidental allusion, too, in some of the Epistles), we have the latest form in which these doctrines about Pleasure, Happiness, Good — and their respective contraries — found expression in Plato’s compositions. Much of the doctrines is the same — yet with some material variation. It is here reasserted, by the Athenian, that the just and temperate man is happy, and that the unjust man is miserable, whatever may befall him: moreover that good things (such as health, strength, sight, hearing, &c.) are good only to the just man, evil to the unjust — while the contrary (such as sickness, weakness, blindness) are good things to the unjust, evil only to the just. To this position both the Spartan and the Kretan distinctly refuse their assent: and Plato himself admits that mankind in general would agree with them in such refusal.[84] He vindicates his own opinion by a new argument which had not before appeared. “The just man himself” (he urges), “one who has been fully trained in just dispositions, will feel it to be as I say: the unjust man will feel the contrary. But the just man is much more trustworthy than the unjust: therefore we must believe what he says to be the truth.”[85] Appeal is here made, not to the Wise Man or Artist, but to the just man: whose sentence is invested with a self-justifying authority, wherein Plato looks for his aliquid inconcussum. Now it is for philosophy, or for the true Artist, that this pre-eminence is claimed in the Republic,[86] where Sokrates declares, that each of the three souls combined in the individual man (the rational or philosophical, in the head — the passionate or ambitious, between the neck and the diaphragm — and the appetitive, below the diaphragm) has its special pleasures; that each prefers its own; but that the judgment of the philosophical man must be regarded as paramount over the other two.[87] Comparing this demonstration in the Republic with the unsupported inference here noted in the Leges — we perceive the contrast of the oracular and ethical character of the latter, with the intellectual and dialectic character of the former.
[84] Plato, Legg. ii. p. 662 C.
[85] Plato, Legg. ii. p. 663 C.
[86] Plato, Repub. ix. pp. 580 E-583 A.
[87] Plato, Repub. ix. p. 583 A. Ἀνάγκη ἃ ὁ φιλόσοφός τε καὶ ὁ φιλολόγος ἐπαινεῖ, ἀληθέστατα εἶναι … κύριος γοῦν ἐπαινέτης ὢν ἐπαινεῖ τὸν ἑαυτοῦ βίον ὁ φρόνιμος.