Electronic journal for philosophy
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K. Urstad
Pathos, Pleasure and the Ethical Life 9
words; for whether you call it (the pleasant) ‘pleasant’ or ‘delightful’ or ‘enjoyable’, whatever manner you please to name this sort of thing…” (358a-b, italics added). It is hard not to see such terms as connoting a very wide variety of positive psychological states. This surely indicates Socrates’ refusal to allow any narrowing of that wide range of meaning which the words accept. So that Socrates so readily exploits their conflation or synonymy again suggests that when he uses the word ‘pleasure’ or ‘pleasant’ he has something broader in mind than the standard uniform sensation view (in fact, we ought to notice that Socrates has already used ‘enjoy’ as a synonym at 354c-d). We should also notice that the term hedone itself is used in many places in the
these cases the referent has nothing to do with physical or bodily pleasures. For instance, When Socrates and young Hippocrates arrive at the house of Callias, Socrates says of the pupils of Protagoras, that their “…dance simply delighted me (h(/sqhn i)dw/n) when I saw how beautifully they took care never to get in Protagoras’ way.” (315b); at 347b Socrates states: “I leave it up to Protagoras, but if it’s all right with him (h(/dion)…”; and following this he says to him: “I would be glad to settle (h(de/wj a)n e)pi\ te/loj e)/lqiomi) in a joint investigation with you.” (347c) All this is ordinary, everyday Greek usage of the term, and it clearly betrays a broad application. Thus there are two important distinctions to be made here, both implying open- endedness. In the first case, Socrates is saying (to Prodicus) that terms like ‘enjoyment’, ‘delight’, etc, words which connote a wide range of positive psychological states, can mean the same as, or be used interchangeably with, or subsumed under, the term hedone. In the second case, variations of hedone itself can be seen to be used in a variety of contexts where different sorts of pleasures are being implied. Furthermore, it may be significant that Socrates includes the ‘defence of one’s city’ as one of the compensating pleasures (for the prior undergoing of such painful things as military training and starvation diets) mentioned at 354b. The pleasure here seems to amount to something like the satisfaction of knowing that one’s efforts and deprivations have contributed to the city’s safety. Again, whatever sort of pleasure this is exactly, it is not done full justice by the standard view. Thus it seems most reasonable to understand the notion of pleasure in the Protagoras as a largely inclusive and heterogeneous one, compatible with a wide field of experiences or psychological states, like positive sensations, attitudes, perceptions, or feelings.
K. Urstad
Pathos, Pleasure and the Ethical Life 10
Finally, one might comment on Socrates’ opening question to Protagoras at the start of their discussion on pleasure: “Now, if he (the everyday man) completed his life, having lived pleasantly, does he not seem to you to have lived well?” (351b) On its own, the expression ‘the pleasant life’ is undeniably vague, and it seems this is precisely why Socrates employs it. This is corroborated by the expression he takes it to be synonymous with, ‘to live well’. No doubt in normal Greek parlance ‘to live well’ involves saying that one is leading a comfortable life, having one’s bodily needs met, in a word, that one is getting one’s basic bodily pleasures 19 Another important piece of work during this time to take into consideration with respect to Aristippus and pleasure is Plato’s Philebus. In fact, for various reasons, many scholars have seen this dialogue in close connection with Aristippus. ; but it also standardly connotes the idea of a life of various sorts of satisfactions and enjoyments, moral ones, aesthetic ones, etc. In sum then, if Aristippus was exposed to, or influenced by, the Protagoras, it need not be an indication that he turned to, or found corroboration in, a bodily view of pleasure. In fact, given what has just been said, it is probably more likely that what would have resonated in him is a much more inclusive sense of the notion of pleasure. 20 Socrates’ disagreement with Protarchus is made clear right from the very beginning of their dialogue when he makes the preliminary claim that an examination of the nature (phusis) of pleasure reveals that it is a ‘complex’ thing and that ‘in fact it comes in many forms’ (12c). The gist of Socrates’ ensuing argument might be put as follows. He argues that ‘pleasure’ is not a name for a single intuited quality of feeling or unitary phenomenon at all, anymore than there is one concretely intuited quality of experience called ‘color’. Both are something like abstract class concepts. One does Part of what Socrates does there is he illuminates and enlarges the coarse and vague application of the term ‘pleasure’ as it is used by the younger interlocutors in the early stages of the discussion. At the outset, Protarchus denies that good and bad pleasures are unlike each other in so far as they are pleasures or qua pleasures (13c5). He rejects Socrates’ view that the temperate and intemperate person are undergoing different pleasures (12c8-d4). According to Protarchus, pleasure is the same thing regardless of what occasions it or of what it points to, so that the temperate and intemperate are simply getting the same thing from different sources. This suggests he understands pleasure simply as some kind of sensation or feeling which is entirely distinct from the activity associated with it, a “kick…a mere aftereffect or epiphenomenon” as D. Frede (1993, xviii) has put it.
19 On the closeness between ‘living well’ (and such similar expressions) and pleasure in Greek thought, see Stokes, 1986, 366. 20 For instance, Merlan, 1960, 33-5; Zeller, 1963, 112; Irwin, 1995, 16. Yüklə 174,04 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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