In Philebum: A Speculative Reflection

By Francis K. Peddle

This commentary on Plato's Philebus reconciles a close analysis of the text with a new interpretation of the dialogue. In Philebum focuses on the overarching metaphysical and cosmological coherency of the dialogue rather than its ethical import. This interpretation contrasts with the more common segmented philological analysis of this most evocative of Platonic dialogues. Plato's late ontology and theory of an immanent Good portray a very different philosophical terrain than that of the transcendental visions of the Good found in other dialogues. The final chapter of In Philebum, entitled "The Life of the Speculative Philosopher," extends this analysis of the dialogue to contemporary speculative philosophy. Based on Plato's portrayal of a fourfold onto-cosmology and of the Good as measurability, proportionality, and intelligence, In Philebum makes connections between the doctrine of measured order-relations, triadicity, quadratic structure, and self-explanation that figure predominantly in contemporary speculative philosophy. It is intended for a broader audience of readers of Plato as well as for graduate students and commentators on Plato. In Philebum contains a Prolegomenon on the controversies surrounding the structural divisions of the Philebus as well as an up-to-date bibliography and general index.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Oct 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666761375

Francis K. Peddle

Francis K. Peddle is professor of philosophy at Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada.

Book preview

1

Metaphysical Presuppositions: Aporetics, Methodology, and Cosmology

(11a–31a)

Introductory (11a–14b)

There is no dramatic introduction to the Philebus. It lacks any form of contextual prologue, place-setting, or hint of dramatic date. Scholars generally agree, though not without exception, that it is a late dialogue probably written in the period that gave us Sophist and Timaeus. Philebus starts immediately and simply enough with the summary of two competing theories. The eponymous interlocutor, Philebus, literally a young lover, who is probably entirely fictional, has withdrawn from the discussion. The open-ended cultivation of pleasure and its rhetorical justification has always had no shortage of adherents.

So it was in Plato’s Athens. The spectacles of Alcibiades, of roving speechifiers and eccentrics, the pleasures of high-stakes debates were everywhere. Plato knew well enough the quick distractions of youth. His geriatric stand-in, Cephalus, at the beginning of the Republic, notes how eager the young are to go into the city. The singular pleasure of Cephalus in old age is enlightened conversation. That may well have been the ideal for the younger Plato. If the Philebus is indeed a late dialogue, then Plato clearly wishes to revisit the conversational pleasures espoused by Cephalus. Unfortunately for unapologetic hedonists, Plato provides in the Philebus the grounds for a thoroughgoing disenchantment with our pleasure-illusions. Surprisingly, however, he does so without completely banishing the truer pleasures, yes there are such things, from the classical narrative about how to live well.

The Platonic corpus serves up a luxurious gallery of evocative characters. Not so in Philebus. It commences mid-conversation and then leaves off inconclusively with a polite invitation to come back tomorrow. At the beginning of the dialogue, the boy Philebus, impatient and fed up, has voluntarily washed his hands of the matter. He makes five brief appearances (18, 18d, 22c, 27e, and 28b) somewhat later in the dialogue. We find out subsequently that juvenile delinquents should not have easy access to dialectic. The fleeting appearances of Philebus in the dialogue are mostly in the form of dogmatically stating his position in an attempt to shut down the argument and get on with the requisite indulgences. His friend, Protarchus, not firmly controlled by Philebus or the Cyrenaic pleasure school, is given the autonomy to make agreements with Socrates or to stand his own ground. Dialogic freedom, a beguiling constant in Plato, enables the conversation to move along, as it has clearly reached an impasse at the beginning of the dialogue.

Like in Phaedrus, the goddess appealed to in Philebus is Aphrodite. She is identified by Philebus with pleasure. For Philebus she is not the hyperuranian Aphrodite of the great palinode in Phaedrus, but the earthly, elemental Aphrodite represented by Pandemus in Greek mythology, who was the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Symposium (180d-e) also helps us with the elliptical references. Soaring descriptions of divine love and titillating stories of life in the pleasure houses do not make up the narrative of Philebus. As dialogues go it is definitely a literary pleasure killer.

The two theories with respect to what constitutes the good for all animate beings, but especially human beings, are summarily enumerated by Socrates, who seems to have a special knack for such exercises. Summaries are often transitional points in Platonic dialogues. It is fun to assume a hidden drama at this preliminary stage in what we have of the dialogue, and on the literary level we certainly seem to have only a fragment of it, in that we might suppose there are two warring schools in the Academy. One aligned with the Socratics and the other with Aristippus, Eudoxus, and the Cyrenaics. Could this controversy be threatening to tear the Academy apart? Is it a revolt of the not so studious youth against the curmudgeons in charge? Philebus on the surface is more didactic and doctrinaire than adversarial, but a real life battle in the Academy, perhaps threatening its very existence, could very well need to be decisively dealt by the patriarch. Only metaphysics, and metaphysical argument, can do the job. Maybe the mixed life is the great Platonic compromise necessary to perpetuate a beloved institution.

The two theories with respect to the good life are stated symmetrically, at least in the threefold use of descriptive words. Noteworthy is the general lack of doctrinal attribution to Protarchus, the principal interlocutor, although initially he is allied with Philebus.

Philebus: the good is pleasure, enjoyment, and delight (ἡδονή, τέρψις, χαιρείν,

11

b

4–5

).

Socrates: the good is thought, intelligence, and memory (φρονεῖν, νοεῖν, μεμνῆσθαι) and things akin to these, right opinion and true calculation (reasoning) (δόξαν τε ὀρθὴν καὶ ἀληθεῖς λογισμούς,

11

b

8

).

There does not appear to be a correlation between the respective words of each position, but the close alignment of φρονεῖν, practical wisdom or careful judgment, νοεῖν, intelligence or intuitive reason, and μεμνῆσθαι, active memory, repeated throughout the dialogue, is no accident. The pairing of intelligence and thought (νοῦς καὶ φρόνησις) occurs eight times in the dialogue (11b7, 22a3, 28d8, 58d6–7, 59d1, 63c5–6, 65e4, 66b5–6).The ancient Greeks gave Memory a very special status, as both the mother of the nine Muses and a necessary prerequisite for coherent experience and the life of mind. Memory in the Philebus does not play as huge a role, as it does in such dialogues as Theaetetus and Phaedrus, but it surfaces at crucial turning points in the argument. Some of the mechanics of memory, for instance, are found in the section on pleasure. Memory is a Phileban god and perhaps the power behind the compromise of the mixed life.

It is important to note that we are looking for a state or condition of the soul (ἕξιν ψυχῆς καὶ διάθεσιν, 11d4) that would make possible a happy or flourishing life (τὸν βίον εὐδαίμονα). This is a well-rounded life (βίον), which is a determinate, specifically lived life, and not the generally applied term to animate beings (πᾶσι ζῴοι) of the preceding passage in the dialogue. This tells us that animal-pleasure is not the sole concern of the dialogue. Both ἕξις and διάθεσις denote an enduring disposition, or the state or condition that is well known from Aristotle’s more systematic treatment of the virtues in Nicomachean Ethics. Some translators (e.g., Frede) prefer to translate either ἕξις or διάθεσις as possession, perhaps to link it up with the possessions (κτῆμαι, 66), properties, or ranks of the good at the end of the dialogue. This gives us a nice unity in translation, but ἕξις and διάθεσις are not the same as the properties of the good as such which are prior to these states or dispositions. The early pages of Philebus are reminiscent of Aristotle’s observations on the state of the soul (ἕξις ψυχῆς) in the Nicomachean Ethics.

Normally, the introductory passages of Philebus are taken as signalling a dialogue on ethics. Is this yet another foray into the heroic, virtuous life of the Golden Age of Periclean Athens, one reflectively given over to what may be the good life? No doubt there is in Philebus a psychagogic element as can be found in just about any other Platonic dialogue. Our souls must be led from their befogged state into the sunlight of intellectual clarity. White light figures as much in Philebus as it does in Theaetetus and in the exertions of the cave-dwellers in Republic, the first soi-disant transcendental speleologists in Western philosophy. The soul is a mixer and a cause. It is also the world or the universe, as we find out later in the Philebus and in the Timaeus. The demiourgos, which is also human, as suggested in Philebus (55c et seq.), is an efficient, proximate causal agent. Psychē, forever entangled in delights and confrontations with the body, has no good reason to be insufferably material. The central passage in Philebus on pleasure presents the late Platonic rethinking of the rigid treatment of the soul in Phaedo. The soul is a complex of active and more affective pathologies. The detailed investigation of pleasure in the Philebus is one of the most ingenious excursions into our inner self in ancient Greek psychology. The psychagogic bipolarity is not as floridly portrayed therein as in Phaedo or Phaedrus, but nonetheless the sundering extremes are clearly laid out in the Phileban/Socratic divide.

Socrates is not, however, merely content to simply juxtapose pleasure and knowledge, but wishes to discover whether one side is better than the other. This is the initial set up for a contest in which prizes will be awarded at the end of the dialogue. Whether there is much finality in victory is another matter. The flux of adversarial dialectics, the dreaded eristics, cries out for more than a negative outcome. In fact, all dialectic is to some extent eristic, but it does not stop at that. In order to be a true dialectic it must point to something beyond the flux of the argument. Philebus, our phantom interlocutor, is like the politician who overcome by hybris claims victory before the campaign is over. Such claims foreclose on political debate and turn the contest into a mere clash of personalities. Phileban dogmatism is the basis for eristics, but only an eristics that cannot evolve into a genuine dialectical exchange.

The pronaos of the dialogue ends with Socrates’ invocation of Aphrodite (12b7), although he is somewhat indifferent to whatever name one wishes to call her (12c2). It is up to her to choose a pleasing title for herself. Socrates has a great fear of naming the gods, in fact the greatest of all fears. There is power in naming as the philosophers of language frequently remind us. Maybe the identity principle is too confining for the gods? Perhaps they must always remain mysterious or maybe it is hybris of the worst sort to think that divine naming is rightfully in the domain of humans? It is something Plato does not shy away from in other dialogues like Cratylus or Gorgias. Identifying Aphrodite with Pleasure (΄Ηδονή) sets up some real world puzzles with respect to language and logic that require a rigorous conceptual and methodological consideration. Already, the initial suspicion that there are a variety of pleasures, and different kinds of knowledge, pushes the pleasure is pleasure opinion of Philebus into the background. Protarchus emerges out of that background as a more able interlocutor because he recognizes the attractions and the traps of the identity principle, for which Socrates congratulates him. A=A is foundational, and no doubt juvenile, but nothing can commence in philosophy or life without it. The formulation of the identity principle (τοῦτο αὐτὸ ἑαυτῷ, πάντων χρημάτων, 12e1–2) both ends the Introduction to Philebus and initiates the subsequent discussion of the one and the many. It makes possible definition and classification.

Who or what may be the Phileban gods or god is a conundrum. There are no processions of the gods as in Phaedrus, nor is there an elaborate divine etymology or catalogue of divine names as in Gorgias, and Cratylus.¹ Mind, thought, reason (νοῦς) is for Plato as it is was for Anaxagoras unquestionably divine. The Good certainly qualifies for some form of divinity. Can we say proportion, beauty, and truth are gods? The earthly Aphrodite is still a goddess and Plato is committed to divine knowledge. Cause is a divinity as well. The soul, in a starkly dualistic section of the Phaedo, is divine, immortal, indivisible, and imperishable. Do each of the Four Kinds in Philebus have divine status? This is unproblematic textually since the divine cause is the universal ordering principle. For the ἄπειρον (the indefinite) it is a different story. There is certainly some textual authority in Philebus that the unlimited is a unified genus, indeed a Monad/Form, infused with some element of divinity. There are thus plenty of things in Philebus that clearly have divine status, but like other dialogues it raises the issue as to whether the Forms apply to such things as mud, slugs, and squalor, which are clearly not divine. Formless existences are a conundrum. Are there things in the universe that the gods cannot control or order in accordance with the metaphysical presuppositions to which all things must comport? If Formless existences are epistemically opaque, then why do they exist in the first place? Plato, forever elusive, gives us no definitive resolution. His gods and his theology in the Philebus are not, however, a philosophical theology as one finds in Aristotle. The divinity in the Divine Method helps clarify this somewhat.

Finally, the debate over whether this whole section on metaphysical presuppositions (11a–31a), which covers epistemology, methodology, and cosmology, is itself a preface, i.e., something inserted as an introductory afterthought to the core sections on pleasure, knowledge, and the mixed life, misses the spirit and intent of Plato’s words. Apart from scholarly intrigue, it is not necessary to resolve the matter textually for metaphysics and philosophy. The section on metaphysical presuppositions in Philebus autonomously provides both the structure and the philosophical meaning for the real world analyses of pleasure, knowledge, and the mixed life. On the other hand, we will fall into the world of interminable interpretation if these metaphysical presuppositions are not understood as suffusing the remaining sections on pleasure, knowledge, and the good life. This section can no more be thought of as a dispensable preface for Plato than nature can be construed as an irrational collusion of indecipherables. Plato has given us in Philebus a set of powerful tools to mine intellectually the lower levels of the divided line in terms of pleasure-illusions and the productive arts. What we make of the Philebus, as individuals and as philosophical schools, for promoting a thoughtful life and culture is for us an open text as Plato fully intended.

The One and the Many (11a–15a) or (14c–15a)

There are two possible approaches with regard to what portion of the first part of Philebus specifically addresses the one are many and the many are one problematic. It is explicitly brought forth at a certain point by Socrates as an amazing state of things and as amazing statements (θαυμαστόν being used by Plato twice at 14c8–9, in relation to both φύσις and λόγος). The whole Introduction, however, can be taken as a butterfly mosaic of the oneness and manyness of things. The double wonderment (θαυμαστόν) at 14c8–9 brings the imaginary into the pervasive and befuddling recognition that things are one as much as they are many. By throwing a self-negating dynamic into the fray through a stark iteration of the one/many contradiction, with an excluded middle, Plato here and elsewhere inaugurates for Western philosophy a dialogue about dialectic that has never ceased.

Plato elicits the insights of Parmenides and Sophist at a complex number of levels in the sections on the One and the Many and on the Divine Method in Philebus. The sundering of the Pythagorean One into the indefinite Dyad, and further division into both a structured and indefinite plurality, is a prominent and well known theme in late Platonic dialogues and their subsequent interpreters in the Old Academy.² The self-identity principle cannot be identical to itself without not being identical to itself. In becoming opposite to itself it defeats its own selfsameness and thus ceases to be a self-identity. Sameness and difference must therefore, as Sophist demonstrated, be a fundamental part of our understanding of things.

At the organic level pain and pleasure represent a primary sundering of organic existence with their continual going over into each other. Socrates never ceases to marvel at this. In Phaedo he notes with boyish irony how pleasure follows so quickly upon his release from the chains around his ankles. Pleasure can easily become pain as we all know well enough from infancy. They have an experiential immediacy. The dour ones, οἱ δυσχερεῖς, whom we encounter later in the dialogue, live in terror of this very experience. If pleasure is identified with what is good, as Philebus and his sidekick Protarchus claim, how can this good account for bad or illusory pleasures, or those seemingly pleasurable states that immediately conjure up pain? The one/many problematic is embedded immediately in our tactile existence.

The Protarchean absolute all pleasure is good is now subject to a Socratic analysis in terms of multiple confusions as to the identity of predicates, predicative assertions, and the transitivity of identity. The issue, which is a basic reductio ad absurdum argument made in other places, such as Phaedo, can be dealt with formally as follows:

1.Assume x is both like y, in that x and y both exist, and that x is unlike y, in that they are separate, qualitatively distinct entities;

2.Then x is like y;

3.And then x is unlike y;

4.By transitivity of identity, like is unlike.

The theory of Forms is in part designed to address this puzzle of sameness and difference. It does so by introducing predicative assertions wherein a thing, like Number in Phaedo (101c) participates in the opposite Forms of Evenness and Oddness. This can be formalized as follows:

X is y, and x is not-y, are compatible because y and not-y refer to separate Forms.

Thus, for example,

Number is

3

, number is

4

,

Therefore number x participates in or shares in oddness y, and evenness not-y. The problem of intermediation always lurks in the background of a Platonic dialogue. The Philebus takes this up in both the sections on the Aporiai and the Divine Method. Participation (μεθέξις or μεταχέσις) makes one think of being a part of something higher or at least to share in it. While instantiation intuitively, maybe because of Neoplatonic prejudices, puts the higher first for it gives subsistence to the particular. It may be entirely inappropriate in interpreting the Philebus, and the late Plato generally, to use vertical associations for participation and instantiation. Plato’s more common usage in Philebus is to say something is akin to (συγγενής) something else. There is no discussion of the participation of particulars in universals. One is inclined in this context to connect things laterally, especially with regard to different orders of reality. Speculation on the dialectical integration of the lateral and the vertical, especially with regard to the Four Kinds and the good in its five possessions, is one of the more elevating, though rarely indulged, delights of the Philebus. The old problem, pursued, Socrates notes, by the competent as well as the incompetent, of likeness and dissimilarity (13c7–8), sameness and difference, that so much plagued early Christians with respect to the components of the Trinity, is redolent throughout the first part of the dialogue.

The one/many problematic is the basic conceptual underpinning to both the sameness/difference and likeness/unlikeness problematics. These are dialectical positions that take on various colorations in the Philebus. For the moment, and we must remember that we are in a sense always in mediis rebus here as elsewhere in Plato, Socrates himself now seems to be aligned with the difference principle by throwing a wedge between good and pleasure, and between pleasure and itself. Protarchus sticks to the proposition that all pleasures are good and thus the same. The whole thrust of the early give and take of the dialogue is to inject diversity, multiformity, and comparative unevenness into the naive and singular view of pleasure espoused by Philebus and Protarchus. And then the multiformity goes viral.

Socrates tries to reverse who should be doing the questioning at 13e2 in a further attempt to unsettle the dogmatism of Protarchus. Perhaps this is necessary so that Protarchus does not become too self-satisfied with his having successfully discovered the identity principle. Knowledge (variously φρόνησις, ἐπιστήμη, νοῦς at this point in the dialogue) is equally vulnerable to pluralization. Protarchus becomes even more satisfied that his plight is on all fours with Socrates’ situation. The speakers are now equalized in argument and allies in the pursuit of truth. Dialogic association in equality is a prerequisite to move things forward. It is an equality that will not be definitively undone until the end of the dialogue with the awarding of prizes and the presentation of the hierarchy of possessions in the