THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE QUESTION
Though Plato's Phaedo does not focus on pleasure, some considerable talk on pleasure takes place in it. Socrates argues for the soul's immortality and, while doing so, hopes to highlight to his companions how important it is to take care of our soul by focussing on the intellect and by neglecting the bodily realm as far as is possible in this life. Doing philosophy, so his argument goes, is something like dying, if we grant that death is the separation of the soul from the body and notice that genuine philosophers wish nothing else than to be detached from the bodily realm. For indulging into bodily pleasures has detrimental consequences on the soul, impeding the search of truth and distorting reality, and so philosophers should undertake to purify themselves from all bodily concerns and gratifications and love the objects of learning and knowledge without deviation and distraction. On the contrary, ordinary people fall for the bodily realm as the only real domain that should therefore be of priority and of their earnest concern.Footnote 2
Having distinguished between the philosophers as lovers of wisdom and the lovers of the body and between their different objects and ways of love, Socrates criticizes the latter for exemplifying spurious moral virtue owing to their being slaves to bodily pleasures, and in particular for applying a hedonistic calculus when comparing and choosing pleasures over pains instead of aiming at virtue, irrespective of what accompanies it and results from it.Footnote 3 Although both vehement critique of bodily pleasure and subtle critique of one type of hedonism are well integrated into the dialogue's argument, pleasure is neither its topic nor its focus as it is in the Philebus.
Socrates refers to the pleasures of learning in passing, after narrating the long story about afterlife, when he emphasizes that philosophers should purify their lives from bodily pleasures, and focus on the objects the engagement with which produces the respective intellectual pleasures: in particular, the pleasures of learning.Footnote 4 This is not a slip of the pen: for in his defence of the philosophers’ study of dying, Socrates did not say or imply that all pleasures are bodily and should be discarded, nor that the philosophers’ intellectual endeavours are devoid of all possible affectivity, rendering the philosophers ‘men or women of stone’, but he argued that they must detach themselves from the bodily realm and its respective pleasures.Footnote 5
To date, Platonic research has engaged in fascinating debates about Plato's pleasures of learning and knowing in the Republic Footnote 6 and the Philebus, but the Phaedo has not attracted much attention, though researchers have pointed out that there is a clearer recognition of intellectual pleasures in this dialogue, which hints at their distinctive role in the good life and thereby goes beyond what is offered in the Gorgias and points forward to the picture drawn in the Republic.Footnote 7 The value of pleasures has also been debated in the Phaedo, in this case the bodily pleasures and the hedonic calculus, with the focus on the question: does Plato think that bodily pleasures are bad in themselves, or is it rather a particular attitude toward them that we should reproach?Footnote 8 Some have argued that Phaedo's proposal is asceticism, according to which one should refrain from all pleasures.Footnote 9 Others, following Gosling and Taylor, have taken the other extreme and portrayed a hedonist Plato owing to the pleasure that Socrates takes in his intellectual activity throughout the dialogue: one should aim at a higher kind of pleasure that Plato identifies with goodness. Another recent approach has been to develop an interpretation that accommodates both the devaluation of bodily pleasure and the permeating Socratic intellectual pleasure without attributing any form of hedonism to Plato.Footnote 10
Purification (κάθαρσις), which in the particular context means the soul's separation from the body, sets up the goal that we should be approximating as far as possible in our embodied life, and makes up the general motto in the Phaedo. Not surprisingly, Socrates frequently highlights purity (καθαρότης/καθαρός as adjective). He never ascribes purity—or its opposite, namely impurity—to any kind/type of pleasure or any particular pleasure though.Footnote 11 Plato has obviously not yet established and does not operate with the fundamental opposition between pure and impure pleasures, or pleasures unmixed with and mixed with pain,Footnote 12 but with the opposition between bodily pleasures and pleasures of learning; the former are to be very broadly construed and include not only pleasures of eating, drinking and having sex but also pleasant elations accompanying wild passions of the soul; the latter stand for a narrow realm of intellectual pleasures: any pleasure that is relevant to learning activities. Accordingly, we should not reconstruct a dichotomy between pleasures of the body and pleasures of the soul for the Phaedo, but rather between—indeed, too broadly construed—bodily pleasures and cognitive pleasures accompanying learning and relevant activities.
In the following, I ask whether the philosophers’ pleasures of learning in the Phaedo are pure: whether we should understand them as being pure, since Socrates never characterizes them as pure, and, if so, how we should understand this purity. This is a question that, although to my knowledge it has not yet been asked, is very important for the development of Plato's critical project on pleasure, for the pleasures of learning are characterized as pure in both the Republic and the Philebus. If we take the Republic and the Philebus together:
Pure pleasures (be they of sensation or of learning and knowing) are not cessations of pains; in both the Republic (584a11–c3) and the Philebus (50e5–51a9) they are introduced as a piece of evidence against the view that all pleasures are cessations of pain.
We encounter a clear transition from the purification-motto which characterizes the Phaedo to pleasures free from pain in the Philebus: in the Republic, there is a vexing ambiguity in the meaning of purity when attributed to pleasure. When pure pleasures are introduced, they refer to pure pleasures of sensation, and in particular smell. Purity in this context does not mean separation from the body but being unmixed with pain, not preceded by the pain that gives way to pleasure when ceased. A couple of pages later, pure pleasures mean unmixed with the bodily realm, that is, intellectual or cognitive pleasures (586b, as in 583b, where they are compared to the unreal pleasures of the spirited and the appetitive parts of the soul). In the Philebus, instead, pure pleasures are throughout free from pain and not from the bodily realm.
Pure pleasures of learning and knowing—with the aid of the more authoritative Philebus—are unmixed with pain in their nature, which means that necessarily they are not mixed with pain in what they are; not that they cannot be mixed with pain circumstantially: they can be coupled with pain as long as that does not affect their nature. There might be pains occurring before and after pure pleasures of learning, if and only if these pains are not a constitutive part of these pleasures’ nature, which would be the case if the pleasures of learning were the cessation of their opposite precedent pains. There can be pain preceding the pure pleasures of attaining knowledge, for example, owing to aporia, or pain following pure pleasures of knowing, when, for instance, we realize that we need a piece of knowledge we had acquired but have forgotten.Footnote 13 But pleasures of learning will be pure if and only if they are not cessations of the opposite pain: that is, if and only if the respective pain is not like the pain felt when we feel hunger, which Socrates makes explicit.Footnote 14 If one is pained by aporia after realizing one's ignorance and eagerly wishes to acquire knowledge in order to get rid of this pain of being stuck in aporia, and if, therefore, one experiences the pleasure of learning as a relief of the precedent pain, one is not taking pure pleasure in learning but impure. Moreover, any subordination of learning to utilitarian calculations would deprive one of the experience of pure pleasures of learning: for example, if someone fervently wishes to expand her curriculum vitae, and if the prevention of this expansion causes her distress, and if, when attaining—and applying—knowledge, she is relieved of this particular pain, that pleasure is not pure.
My answer to my question is ‘yes’, the philosophers’ pleasures of learning are pure. Leaving aside the question of whether the philosophers’ pleasures of learning are free from the bodily realm—a question to which I also answer ‘yes’—,Footnote 15 I confine myself to answering my question by precisely delineating the purity in question as freedom from pain. In accordance to my analysis of Philebus’ pure pleasures, I will argue that the philosophers’ pleasures of learning acts in the Phaedo are, in contrast to bodily pleasures, necessarily not preceded and necessarily not followed by opposite pains, but necessarily—that is, in their own nature—free from such pains, though intellectual undertakings are not in the least completely free from intellectual pains.
Though the trend has wanted the Phaedo to have been mostly taken into account for Plato's critique of hedonism, this paper claims to show that this Platonic dialogue can also shed light on the nature of the philosophers’ pleasures of learning in contrast to bodily pleasures. If the picture and the conclusions I draw are accurate, then Plato's philosophical project on pleasure is unified in the following respect: though before Philebus’ analysis of pleasure, Plato already in the Phaedo thinks of the relation to pain as fundamental to the nature of different pleasures.Footnote 16
Furthermore, the paper contributes to the Phaedo itself and the question of whether philosophers are hedonists or not by focussing on their intellectual pleasures and pains in passages that have not been considered for solving this problem so far, surprising though this may be. Lovers of learning will prove to be not aiming at the finest possible pleasures, namely intellectual pleasures as the good, nor will they be caught up conducting a hedonistic calculus for the sake of indulging into the greatest possible intellectual pleasure; they will not consider intellectual pains as bad in themselves either and as such to be avoided. That said, intellectual distress can bring about devastating consequences and impede learning activities, especially when it gives rise to intellectual depression, such as that into which Socrates’ fellows except for Simmias and Cebes fell. In this respect, intellectual pain can be contaminating. This is not a worry of contaminating as tying to the bodily realm, as the case is with bodily pleasures and pains, but as interrupting the activity that the lover of learning should be focussing on.
In the first section (A.), I will analyse Socrates’ initial example of pleasure and suggest cautiously what we can conclude about that example: it is an example of bodily pleasure that is necessarily related to pain. Then I will turn to the pleasures of learning (B.). After focussing on the kind of his own and his fellows’ intellectual pleasures (B.i.), I will prove that those pleasures are pure (B.ii.). For they are not cessations of their opposite pains. Purity of the philosophers’ pleasures of learning does not mean that intellectual pain is absent in their intellectual undertakings, though. The philosophers’ learning adventures, as Socrates’ autobiography implies, are not free from pain. What distinguishes the philosophers from other learners, besides the purity of intellectual pleasures and their taking pleasure in all possible learning acts, is their own particular attitude to both pleasure and pain related to learning. They pursue knowledge and truth irrespective of whether pleasure or pain accompanies this pursuit, and they will not aim at pleasure or shun from pain, but welcome the former and successfully alleviate the latter or endure it courageously and for the sake of learning. In the last part (B.iii.), I will further delve into the philosophers’ attitude toward intellectual pain, this time the pain of other lovers of learning. The analysis of the misology passage (88c1–91c5) will bring up even more strongly that what is continuous in the philosophers’ endeavour is not their pleasure but their appropriate attitude toward intellectual pleasure and pain.
PLEASURES OF LEARNING AS PURE OF PAIN
A. A significant example of bodily pleasure
Nowhere in the Phaedo do we find an analysis of bodily pleasure, but we do encounter a significant example of such a pleasure at the very beginning of the narrative.Footnote 17 Socrates, after being released from his fetters, wonders at the phenomenon of what people call pleasure:
How strange does it seem to be what people call pleasant, he said, my friends! How remarkable is its relation to what seems to be its opposite, namely what is painful! They are not willing to be present in us, both at the same time, but if one pursues one of them and grasps it, one is almost always compelled to grasp the other, too, like two creatures attached to a single head. It seems to me, he said, that, if Aesop had reflected upon it, he would have composed a fable that god wanted to change their enmity for friendship, but, because he could not, he fastened their heads together; because of this, when someone has one of them, then the other follows. This seems to be happening to me: after pain was caused in my limb owing to the fetter, now pleasure seems to be following.Footnote 18
I will focus on two questions that are relevant to my purposes: what it means to say that pleasure and pain are not willing to visit us simultaneously and what it means to say that those two are inseparably connected if not—at least in this context—as simultaneously interdependent. I think that, in order to give the right answers to both questions, we need to understand Socrates as not referring to all (kinds of) pleasure, as he clearly indicates by speaking of what people call pleasure. Instead of referring to all pleasure, I take Socrates to be referring to a particular type of pleasure, including the pleasure he feels in his limbs after the release from the fetters, namely bodily pleasure.Footnote 19 Therefore, the scope is not so broad as to include all pleasures nor so narrow as to be restricted to nothing but the particular bodily pleasure that Socrates is experiencing now.
Regarding the first question about the meaning of the assertion ‘pleasure and pain are not willing to be present in us, both at the same time’: what I take Socrates to be hinting at without developingFootnote 20 is that the principle of non-contradiction is not violated, given that pleasure and pain are opposites. He is not saying that pleasure and pain never occur simultaneously in us, full stop, but he is making an incomplete statement about pleasure and pain as opposites. He could have said that they never emerge at the same time in the same place (or in the same part in us), in the same respect and with reference to the same object.
Plato cannot intend Socrates to mean that any kind of pleasure and any other kind of pain cannot co-exist in a single subject, which would contradict our most common experiences: it is possible that pleasure and pain are forced to be simultaneous, even if not willing, to build on their personification, as long as they have different objects: we can have an unfamiliar mixture of pleasure and pain, as in the Phaedo: on the one hand, pleasure in doing philosophy; on the other hand, the anticipatory emotional pain owing to the subsequent loss of a friend and teacher.Footnote 21
Another possible kind of simultaneous pleasure and pain is the pleasure of eating that we experience while still suffering the pain of hunger. Also in this case the pleasure and the pain concern different objects, so contradiction is avoided: we feel pain during and because of the process of disintegration of the natural state and equilibrium, whereas we feel pleasure during and owing to the opposite process of restoration. Things can be more vexed because we can be still hungry while in the process of eating and still thirsty while drinking and quenching our decreasing thirst. Also in such cases, pleasure and pain are not caused by the same things: the former arises owing to the increasing re-establishment of the organism's equilibrium, while the latter is caused by the still remaining disintegration of the same equilibrium, which is gradually diminishing and will vanish when the natural equilibrium is completely re-established. What is mixed here is a diminishing pain and an increasing pleasure.Footnote 22
Things can be further complicated because it is the soul that feels pleasure related to bodily processes, and so we can have pain owing to bodily disintegration, and at the same time pleasure of anticipation of the opposite process, whenever we anticipate the future release from pain. This combination—a subtlety that is not worked out in the Phaedo—is possible because we have a soul's pleasure simultaneous with a pain originating in the body.
Let us now turn to the second question and try to understand the inseparability of pleasure and pain focussed on in this context. Also for this undertaking I would suggest a bit of caution: Socrates maintains that when one—not he himself—pursues a certain kind of pleasure—for, admittedly, no one will aim at pain—one will inevitably get the rest of the ‘package’, namely pain: σχεδόν τι ἀναγκάζεσθαι ἀεὶ λαμβάνειν καὶ τὸ ἕτερον.Footnote 23 I read nothing more and nothing less than this view in these lines. What does this statement mean?
From the nothing more, Socrates does not draw the general conclusion that bodily pleasures and pains are experienced in continuous alternation. That cannot be the case for at least three reasons. First, the Greek σχεδόν τι is a restriction. Second, pleasure necessarily following pain and pleasure that is bound to be followed by pain would contradict our—admittedly not too frequent—experience of prolonged episodes of pleasure or pain without interruption from the opposite state.
Moreover, such a generalization would overlook the intermediary neutral state between pleasure and pain. In both the Republic and the Philebus, Socrates introduces such a state and, in this way, corrects the logical flaw of those who believe that pleasure should be defined as cessation of pain, because they overlook the reality of the intermediate state which is neither pleasant nor painful, and which, depending on the comparison to the painful or the pleasant state, sometimes appears to be and is called pleasant and at other times painful. In the Phaedo, there is no argumentative support for the rejection of the intermediary state,Footnote 24 and there is more than an argument ex silentio, namely a hint in our passage that corroborates the assumption of the intermediary state in the Phaedo and that pleasure-follows-pain-follows-pleasure is not the entire story. Socrates says that the release from the fetters appears to be pleasant, a formulation which invites us to ask the question: is Socrates’ present state really pleasant? For it could be simply the cessation of the earlier pain, and thus a neutral state—neither pleasant nor painful in itself—that seems to be pleasant only when compared to the previous pain. By now it is clear that the example itself does not exemplify the general account that bodily pleasure necessarily follows pain, the latter of which is going to be followed by pleasure.
As for the nothing less, the question becomes more pressing: what is the view then, for the exemplification of which Socrates gives his example? I think it is the following: there is some kind of pleasure that is inseparably and in its own nature—that is, necessarily—connected with pain. Thus the necessity is a logical necessity and does not refer to the particular sequel of pleasure-pain-pleasure-pain but to this pleasure's inseparability from pain owing to its own nature.Footnote 25 Satisfying the need and experiencing the pleasure bring about the opposite, depletion, whose satisfaction reinstates the original depletion and reactivates, if not intensifies, the initial desire for satisfaction: despite the intermezzos of some fleeting moments of peace, war prevails, and under certain circumstances we can be caught in a vicious Sisyphean or incurable Calliclean circle. Therefore, we are chained not only to pain but also to this predictable repetition of never-completing and never-ceasing cycles of depletion and restoration. Only death completes, or rather puts a full stop to, this repetitive process. The situation can become even worse. False perspectives of pleasure can leave us unaware of where we are in the ongoing process, whether we are in pleasure or in pain.
B.i. Lovers of learning at work. The kind of Socrates’ and his fellows’ intellectual pleasures
According to the dualistic framework of the dialogue and the division into body and intellect, I will turn from Socrates’ statements about the type of bodily pleasure, which, though inferior, is evaluated by the many as what real pleasure is, to Socrates’ intellectual pleasures during his early adventures and in his current exchange with his friends. For he paradigmatically exemplifies Plato's philosophers as lovers of learning and experiences the respective pleasures. Though the companions around his deathbed have not progressed as far as he has with respect to the current topic of discussion, they too are philosophers and, therefore, their affective states will be taken into account.Footnote 26 In this way, we will extract a lot about their nature and relation to pain.Footnote 27
Before turning to those pleasures’ relation to pain, we need to gain some precision about the kind of intellectual pleasures that they are. Socrates clearly speaks of the pleasures of learning, those of our coming from not knowing to knowing something, at 114d3. Also at 97c he says that he was delighted with intellect as the cause of everything according to what Anaxagoras announced in his book, which is implicitly a pleasure of learning and a true one, as it is dependent on the truth that intellect is the cause of everything. Immediately afterwards (97d), he says that he was glad to have found a teacher, and, in this way, registers his pleasure of becoming a pupil. This pleasure was distinct from, but coincided in time with, an anticipated pleasure of learning, for Socrates is someone who does not take pleasure in becoming a student for the sake of merely becoming a student or in order to partake in the fame that his teacher might be enjoying, but so as to learn on his teacher's side. If this is so, Socrates was simultaneously pleased that he would learn what he was looking for. Reconstructed as such, this anticipated pleasure of learning of his was false: although he did learn about material causation, his anticipation that he should become acquainted with the specifics of the intellect's causality remained unfulfilled.
There is an additional hint at further Socratic intellectual pleasure: at 99c, when he says that he would gladly become a pupil of the teacher who is able to meet the challenges of his predecessors and contemporaries and is knowledgeable about teleology in nature, his anticipated pleasure of learning is similarly implied as temporarily coinciding with his also anticipated pleasure of becoming a pupil. Irrespectively of whether this pleasure would be fulfilled in the future or not, it is a true pleasure. In the case of meeting that teacher, Socrates would have had a true anticipated pleasure of learning. For the teacher possessing that knowledge would be able to successfully transmit it to a pupil so apt for learning such as Socrates. Indeed, Socrates met this teacher in Plato's literary imagination. It was one of Plato's characters, namely Timaeus in the homonymous dialogue, who narrates to Socrates and to other distinguished fellows how the divine intellect created the universe. Even in the case that such a meeting would not occur, Socrates’ past anticipatory pleasure would not have been false in retrospect, though unfulfilled, as Socrates was not pleased that he would meet that meticulous teacher but he would be pleased if the meeting occurred.
As for the current common investigation in the Phaedo, Socrates does not deprive the intellectual activity of giving and taking reasons of affectivity either, and in particular of pleasure. He is pleased when he and his companions exchange their accounts, and is also pleased to listen to Cebes’ objection to his argument for the philosophers’ readiness to die (62e). When Cebes invites him to return to the point where they had left the proof of the soul's immortality after the exposition of the first two proofs, asking whether that would please him, Socrates affirms the pleasure and asks Cebes what else—other than his being pleased—he could have expected.Footnote 28 The pleasures of examining arguments with others and teaching as sharing what Socrates has been acquainted with pervades the exchange. With his encouragement, Socrates’ companions partake in the pleasure of engaging in philosophical arguments.Footnote 29
The above intellectual pleasures do not exclusively involve pleasures of learning strictly speaking, that is, of turning from not-knowing to knowing something, but, more broadly, pleasures accompanying intellectual activities related to learning, like the activities of examining arguments together with others and of teaching. Although all three aspects of learning, examining and teaching are essential parts of dialectic and provide distinct pleasures,Footnote 30 Socrates mentions only the pleasures of learning as representing all relevant pleasures, a preference that makes sense because what it means to be a genuine philosopher is to love to learn (φιλομαθής),Footnote 31 as the desire to learn is what characterizes him above all. For to apply acquired knowledge in new contexts and to challenge the soundness of arguments provide a philosopher with new pleasures of relearning. As for those pleasures’ temporal orientation, they are not only experienced as occurring in the present moment but also currently remembered as having occurred in the past or presently anticipated to take place in the immediate or remote future.
B.ii. The presence of intellectual pains: a threat to the purity of the philosophers’ pleasures of learning?
We now need to consider any relevant intellectual pains that emerge, and, if they do, to examine whether they turn the philosophers’ pleasures of learning into impure ones. There are two moments that disrupt Socrates’ pervasive cheerfulness, both of them in his initial intellectual adventures. The first moment is when he says that the natural philosophers’ methods, with which he initially became familiar, and which dealt with a series of puzzles related to growth, made him intensely blind.Footnote 32 Blinding, when meant literally, is associated with the painfulness caused by a fatal accident or with the subsequent emotional pain related to the loss of sight as the most precious sense. Here blinding is a metaphor. After spelling out what blindness and blinding stand for in other contexts, I will pin down the pain Socrates points to and the particular epistemic status that this pain affects. For pain should not be excluded from the picture and this metaphor has always epistemological reference.
To Plato, people are like blind when deprived of knowledge about anything, that is, the knowledge of the particular forms in which anything participates.Footnote 33 In this case, their opinions, even when sometimes true, are not firmly grounded in knowledge, and are also, metaphorically speaking, blind.Footnote 34 Not surprisingly, those people easily change their views and wander without practising any method of enquiry.Footnote 35 Given that frequently Plato draws the analogy between the soul's capacity of understanding and the eyes’ capacity of sight,Footnote 36 to blind the soul means to prevent the soul's capacity from functioning properly. This obstruction could be temporary or permanent. Short-term deeming and blinding occur in the case of transitions: when the soul is all of a sudden directed from its familiar dwelling to a new and unfamiliar dwelling; or from the realm of forms to the realm of the sensible things or the other way round.Footnote 37 Irrespectively of objects and focal concerns, a momentary disturbance and even impairment of the soul's capacity to understand happens when the soul turns from greater ignorance that darkness represents into what is brighter, that is, into knowledge. Importantly, strong pain emerges during this transition as it does during its opposite.Footnote 38 For the capacity of sight needs some time to adjust to the object or realm it newly turns to, be it the brighter or the darker. Lasting obstruction and even damage of the particular capacity of the soul can be caused when people in their activities and engagements attend exclusively to the dark field of what comes into being and perishes.Footnote 39
Turning to Socrates’ becoming blind in our context: he introduces his initial state of confusion as due to frequent changes in his views (ἄνω κάτω μετέβαλλον, 96b1), which indicates that he has not yet attained firm knowledge, before describing his being intensely blinded (σφόδρα ἐτυφλώθην, 96c5) by the natural philosophers’ methods. The enquiry was about the explanation of growth and Socrates admits his lacking knowledge of the causes for all sorts of quantitative changes ranging from growth in bodies to increase and decrease in numbers.Footnote 40 For his puzzlement with the latter made him insecure regarding his alleged knowledge about physical growth with the aid of a physicalist explanation.Footnote 41
There is cognitive pain caused by the confusion Socrates is in. It not pleasant to be perplexed about one's object of investigation. It is rather painful indeed to be aware of not being in the state of knowing yet. What causes distress is a second-level knowledge, which is a knowledge whose object is a first-level ignorance, namely the knowledge that one does not know (yet). This reflection causes cognitive pain to everyone, including the extraordinarily talented Socrates, given that he recognizes the importance of this knowledge.
This pain one takes in knowing that one has not yet attained knowledge, though, is not all the affectivity that arises on the learner's path. When blinded, Socrates turned from double ignorance, that is, the illusion that he knows, to simple ignorance, that is, the disillusioned awareness that he does not possess the requisite knowledge.Footnote 42 Turning from lack of knowledge, from not knowing that he does not know, to its opposite—that is, to the knowledge that he does not know—is an instance of learning. This learning can bring about pleasure or distress, depending on whether one is a lover of learning or not. Philosophers, like Socrates, will be pleased at this change, because they are aware that this transition from double ignorance to simple ignorance is necessary for the desire to learn and attain knowledge to emerge at all.Footnote 43 At the end of his first stage of investigation, Socrates applies a confused method of his own, as he says, but by then considerable progress has taken place: not only does he not nurture any illusion that he has knowledge about what he does not know, but he has been also able to reject one particular way of investigation as erroneous: the physicists’ approach.Footnote 44
Non-philosophers will be instead at double cognitive pain during the transition from double ignorance to single ignorance: pained at finding out that they do not possess a particular knowledge, a distress to which the pain at not knowing yet will be added. Therefore, the difference between philosophers and non-philosophers is not that the former will have no cognitive pain when caught up in perplexities, but rather that the latter will have only cognitive pain and will take no pleasure in the learning that they do not know as they had thought one knew. This divergence is based on the different attitude that the philosophers and the non-philosophers have towards their previous position. For the former recognize the progress and endure the pain of not knowing yet, whereas the latter's nostalgia for and fervent desire to return to the bliss of double ignorance as soon as possible reveals an incapability of grasping the difference of the two states’ value.
The threat for the purity of pleasure of this particular learning can be easily dismantled given my understanding of pure pleasures and the above analysis of the affectivity that accompanies the transitional cognitive state. For one was not in pain when lacking this second-order knowledge of one's ignorance and so the pleasure of learning that one does not know is not the cessation of the opposite respective pain. Moreover, the cognitive pleasure and pain I detected are not opposites, but refer to different objects and causes. The pain is caused by knowing that one does not know yet, which means that it arises when one compares the present and the possible future state, whereas the pleasure is brought up by learning that one does not know what one thought one knew and refers to the transition from the past double ignorance to the present state of single ignorance.
There is a further moment of pain to be scrutinized. I have already referred to Socrates’ delight to hear that Anaxagoras had recognized intelligence as the cause of everything (97c1), as he expected Anaxagoras to go beyond his fellow Presocratics and to give a teleological explanation for the workings of cosmic intelligence. Socrates narrates in detail the riddles that he pleasantly expected Anaxagoras to solve by explaining, among other things, the shape of the earth and its being situated in the middle of the universe,Footnote 45 and then adds what happened to those expectations of his:
… but, after getting hold of the books in all haste, I read them as quickly as I could in order to attain the knowledge as quickly as possible of what was best and what is worst. And then, my friend, I came hurtling down from a marvelous hope.Footnote 46
For, Socrates explains, Anaxagoras introduces but makes no use of intelligence as a cause, and, to make matters worse, mistakes material necessary conditions for the true and only causes. Socrates’ hopes have been left unfulfilled and he has not attained the knowledge he had expected. This intellectual pain does not contaminate the pleasures of learning, because we had none of those in reality but only an anticipated pleasure of learning.
Before embarking into the narrative of the second intellectual voyage about the Platonic forms as formal causes, Socrates says:Footnote 47
I would gladly become the disciple of anybody whatsoever about the nature of that kind of cause; but because I was deprived of it (ἐστερήθην) and was neither able to discover it myself nor to learn it from anyone else, do you wish me to give an exposition, Cebes, of the second sailing about the search for the cause as I have been engaged therein?
Socrates is clearly aware of his lack of knowledge, the acquaintance with which he has considered to be very important.Footnote 48 Therefore, there arises intellectual pain, though not made explicit. Instead of expressing any distress or letting the cognitive pain transform into despair owing to the persisting puzzlement and prevailing confusion,Footnote 49 Socrates diverts his attention from the existing affection of intellectual pain to another passion, an intellectual pleasure. He joyfully anticipates the future opportunity to become the student of anyone who can meet the challenge that the Presocratics could not: specifically, to successfully expose teleology in natural philosophy (99c). Again, what matters to my purpose, since it is once again proven that the philosopher does not escape intellectual pain, is that this pain does not pose any threat to any pleasure of learning, because there is no such pleasure taking place now. Moreover, what distinguishes Socrates is that he offers himself a therapy of this pain by diverting his attention to the prospective pleasure.
This attitude toward pain is not grounded in any subtle therapy of emotions but in the insight of how knowledge gradually evolves and accumulates in the history of philosophy, in which Socrates situates himself. Plato the writer, who narrates a bit of the history of Western philosophy in his rendering of Socrates’ autobiography, starting with the Presocratics and ending with his own contribution of the theory of forms as causes, is very well aware of this gradual and continuous progression and of his contribution. As the testimony of Socrates shows, a Socrates who was initially attracted by Presocratic wisdom before turning the page to Plato's theory of formsFootnote 50 does not exemplify a straightforward progress. Proposals are made and challenges are raised, as with the teleological explanation of the physical world, that are not to be met in the very next turn; the situation becomes more complex because problems that were to be solved are postponed, as in Socrates’ second voyage, and others developed instead. When one philosopher thinks to have met the particular challenges of his predecessors, like Plato in his Timaeus, another one, in this case Aristotle, will raise further challenges that he thinks have not been satisfied. And so the never-ending dialogue will be further nurtured and the history of philosophy will further develop. Because the development is not a straight line, and also because Socrates is aware of how successful pain can be in impeding or even blocking intellectual endeavours, he has a good reason in diverting his attention from the present intellectual pain to another, future pleasure of learning. The pleasure of learning that Socrates anticipates in the Phaedo and will experience, at least as dramatis persona, when listening to the Timaean physics, will not be impure. In anticipation of the future pleasure, he does not say that it will consist in the cessation of the pain caused by the dashing of his hopes.
B.iii. Dealing with and curing the intellectual pain of other lovers of learning: the methodological interlude on misologyFootnote 51
Socrates does not aim at the finest kind of pleasure, namely intellectual delight, as the good but rather as something good as accompanying the attainment of truth and knowledge. He does not avoid intellectual pains as something bad in themselves either, and he accepts them as being an inevitable part of the broader intellectual adventures, though no part of the acts of learning themselves, in any case not for the lovers of learning. Because he is aware of the detrimental influence that intense intellectual pains may exert on the investigation itself, he knows how to adequately treat them, by deviating his attention from them, for instance, and by directing it to anticipated pleasures of attaining the respective knowledge instead.
Socrates is the doctor and the patient for this therapy: the alleviation of pain for the sake of continuing the intellectual undertaking. This is not only a self-therapy and he is not the only patient, though; he is also proven to be able to cure other philosophers’ intellectual pain when its intensity jeopardizes the progress and the very continuation of the intellectual endeavour. Such therapy takes place when Simmias and Cebes introduce their two objections (85b9–88b8), themselves being in a state of perplexity (aporia, 84c9, 84d5, 85c1) and immense distress.Footnote 52 For the three proofs have not yet established firm knowledge, and, therefore, doubt and lack of trust (ἀπιστία, 86e5) in the past arguments prevail. All other companions who had been persuaded too well by the three antecedent proofs, especially the last, fall into despair after Simmias and Cebes articulate their objections:
When we all heard what they said, we fell into depression (ἀηδῶς διετέθημεν), as we later said to one another. For after we had been persuaded too well (σφόδρα πεπεισμένους) by the antecedent argument, they seemed to confound us again and throw us into distrust not only about the previous arguments but also about what we are going to say afterwards, lest we are worthy judges of anything or the things themselves are unreliable (ἄπιστα).Footnote 53
Despair goes far beyond and more deeply than the current pain that Cebes and Simmias have expressed. For the others’ doubt does not affect only the previous arguments but is generalized and projected to all future arguments and possible topics: they fear either being proven to be worthless judges of any topic, or the particular topic—the immortality of the soul—being incapable of admitting any certainty at all.
This means that past, present and future are painted black, and intellectual depression enters the scene and threatens to prevail. Socrates is far from showing any signs of distress in that context; instead of being disquieted, he receives the Thebans’ dissenting accounts with pleasure because they are alert, not willing to accept the proofs as true without further ado, and able to thoroughly examine the arguments.Footnote 54 Moreover, he manages to cure his other companions of the state of despair through his account of misology (88c–91c), and encourages them to patiently examine any given account, as Simmias and Cebes have done, instead of overenthusiastically surrendering themselves to arguments without scrutinizing them. In this way, Socrates, like an experienced therapist, successfully turns their attention to the common investigation of the accounts for the sake of truth, and succeeds in lifting up the spirits by transferring his joyful attitude regarding the examination of the arguments to everyone.Footnote 55
What Socrates suggests in order to help his companions overcome their despair is caution (εὐλάβεια)Footnote 56 about the worst possible evil that can afflict someone, that is, the hatred of arguments (μισολογία). The genesis of the disease he describes as follows:
It would be pitiable, Phaedo, he said, if someone, though there were an argument, true and certain and capable of being understood, because of encountering some suchlike arguments [reference to ἀντιλογικοὶ λόγοι, 90c1] that appear to the same people sometimes as true but other times not, would not accuse himself or herself nor his or her lack of skill, but owing to being in pain would end up gladly shifting the blame from him or herself to the arguments and would spend the rest of life hating and accusing arguments, and would be deprived of (στερηθείη) the truth and knowledge of beings.Footnote 57
The above fellows have been misled to think that no argument has any soundness or certainty, and—following the thought to the very end—that no object of enquiry is reliable, a conclusion that can—in its generalized form and concerning all arguments—be drawn when many consecutive disappointments about particular arguments are experienced, which, though initially thought to be true, turn out to seem or be false on closer inspection. For having experienced pain many times owing to suchlike disappointments, they try to relieve the pain. Apparently, they take pleasure to be identified with the cessation of pain, without even reflecting on it, given that instinctively they try to deviate from their pain: because they are in pain (διὰ τὸ ἀλγεῖν), instead of blaming themselves and hating themselves, which would establish and deepen their pain, they shift the blame from themselves and their lack of skill with arguments to the arguments themselves that take on the role of a scapegoat. And this they do gladly. For to flee and be freed from the consecutive pains they had experienced seems to be pleasant to them.
Unaware of their unhealthy state, the afflicted end up thinking that all arguments are unhealthy and unreliable for the rest of their lives. What makes matters even worse is that the disease of misology is all-pervasive. It permeates all subsequent levels and relationships. Following their teachers of sophistry and eristics, the diseased nurture a distorted self-image with regard to knowledge: according to this perception, they are the wisest (σοφώτατοι, 90c2) as the only that have reached the alleged truth that all arguments are unsound and unreliable and all beings and reality are unstable and fluctuating up and down like in flux.Footnote 58 Lacking self-knowledge, they are far from being able to situate themselves epistemically between ignorance and knowledge. In reality, truth and knowledge of being escape them, of which they are not aware. Therefore, they are condemned to double ignorance,Footnote 59 and there is no intellectual pain felt in their state. Furthermore, the relation they develop toward their dialogue partners does not show signs of health either. Motivated by their love of honour, and not by love of wisdom, they are merely interested in winning the argument in order to either persuade the listener or defeat the opponent, irrespectively of whether the argument is sound and the view is right.
Socrates’ companions pondered whether they might be unable to evaluate and judge any topic or whether the things themselves are unreliable (88c6), which clearly indicates that they have not been irrevocably afflicted by that all-pervasive disease. For their first thought amounts to a generalization but of another sort: it affects the depressed persons, in our case intellectually depressed persons, who doubt their own capacity to judge anything, whereas the misologists’ generalization concerns all arguments and not their capability, of which they think very highly. And their second pondering concerns the particular topic of soul's immortality and not all possible topics. This being said, their being struck by despair after the Thebans’ objections is a state that can pave the way, if strengthened by repetition, toward misology. Therefore, when analyzing the worst evil of misology, Socrates is not making a diagnosis about his companions’ disease, but explains how their current state of despair can be conducive to the disease of misology and is not only treating their current state but also providing preventive medicine by giving them helpful advice on how to take care of their souls in the future and after he drinks the hemlock and is unable to advise them in person.
The Socratic therapy is not affective but rational and as such influencing affectivity. For to cure his friends’ immense pain, Socrates does not propose another kind of affection to replace the emotion of despair they are currently suffering from,Footnote 60 but encourages their alertness so that the worst evil of misology is avoided. Instead of considering the arguments to be a kind of scapegoat, they should center on themselves and hold their lack of health responsible. Instead of being in a depressed state and thinking that they are incapable of judging anything, as his fellows did a while ago, Socrates urges them to take courage and show eagerness to cure themselves (ἀνδριστέον καὶ προθυμητέον ὑγιῶς ἔχειν, 90e3). The need of exemplifying courage manifests itself when there is pain to go through and endure for the sake of the good and fine, and there is pain, including intellectual distress, when one realizes that one is still sick and not yet healthy, when one reflects on the fact that one has not attained truth about the soul's immortality but falls from enthusiasm to depression.
This is the first step that Socrates exhorts his fellows and anyone threatened by the ‘worst evil’ to take. What Socrates prescribes for the sequence is the development and exercise of a skill (a technē). All arts are manifestations of rationality as systems of certain methods and principles. Arguments, accounts and explanations (λόγοι) that refer to reality or being (τὰ ὄντα, 90c4) make up the field of the recommended art (περὶ τοὺς λόγους τέχνη), whose opposite is the lack of that skill to deal with arguments, accounts and explanations about reality (ἄνευ τῆς περὶ τοὺς λόγους τέχνης, 90b7; ἀτεχνία, 90d3) This is not, therefore, the art of rhetoric—not even an ideal version as the one introduced in the Phaedrus—that aims at the creation of good speeches (another meaning of λόγος) but a much more demanding art, the art which in various Platonic contexts is interchangeably called the art or science of dialectics and which is opposed to sophistry or eristics.Footnote 61
The dialecticians or philosophers are the people who have been privileged with a philosophical education (negated in 91a3, ἀπαίδευτοι), and further nurture a philosophical disposition (negated in 91a2, οὐ φιλοσόφως ἔχειν). The lovers of wisdom and learning manifest health on all three levels that the disease permeates in the case of the haters of arguments. They are characterized by the appropriate attitude to arguments, accounts and explanations about what is real. For they do not embrace them too hastily nor trust them all too intensely and before scrutinizing whether they are true or false. Additionally, they are aware of where they stand regarding knowledge, namely between double ignorance and divine knowledge, and which pieces of reality they have attained human knowledge of.Footnote 62 Their self-awareness does not turn to self-centredness, though: conscious of their contributions and achievements as well as their failings as they are, they are able to dissociate themselves from their own selves and their own intellectual gratification. For they do not feel they must fill their intellectual lack and their mind here and now, as when affected by their own stomach's hunger they must fill their own and no one else's stomach.
Finally, on the discursive level, misologists and any lovers of honour aim at persuading others that the view to which they are personally attached is correct: for they wish to persuade that they are right through this view or its opposite, if they are in the mood of so doing tomorrow. Their personal attachment might change quickly, but they are always personally attached to a view or another. Socrates instead intends to persuade his fellows, but only as a by-work, as a consequence of the soul's immortality being true, in this way favouring the realist over the pragmatic concept of truth. He notes that his primary focus will be the agreement in and with himself (ὅπως αὐτῷ ἐμοὶ ὅτι μάλιστα δόξει οὕτως ἔχειν, 91a9–92b1), the inner consistency of the final argument that articulates his soul's inner dialogue. Aware that his talking about himself and about how the argument appears to be to himself might be misleading, he adds that his friends should not be concerned about him but about the truth or falsehood of the argument itself. For, even when the philosophers’ view has such important consequences so as to take themselves to be committed to it, they are never self-centred but able to detach themselves from and be critical to the view they represent.Footnote 63
CONCLUSIONS
The Socratic narration and the chat with his fellows make it clear that the path of genuine philosophical learning is never straightforward. That path does contain intellectual pain but in a different way than the way in which bodily pleasure necessarily involves pain, as Socrates briefly referred to it in 60b–c. There is plenty of intellectual perplexity and pain during the long-winded endeavours of the search for knowledge. That said, pain is never part of any learning act in the case of the lovers of learning, even when they learn that they do not know what they thought they knew, for instance, when their argument is defeated.Footnote 64
What distinguishes the lovers of learning from non-philosophers is their attitude to intellectual pleasures and pains: we do not catch them comparing pleasures and pains in order to calculate the greatest intellectual pleasure, for they do not strive for intellectual pleasure as the only good nor do they avoid intellectual pain as the only bad thing. None the less, they know very well that intellectual pain can lead to intellectual depression and can interrupt philosophical investigations. As dialecticians, they are most able to cure themselves and others, either by diverting the attention to anticipated pleasures in the case of present intellectual pains or by healing the intellectual depression their companions suffer from as lovers of learning who are not as experienced in dialectic.
