Note 116 — Chapter XXXII · PHILEBUS.

See Republic, ix. pp. 581-582, where he compares the pleasures of the three different lives. 1. Ὁ φιλόσοφος or φιλομαθής. 2. Ὁ φιλύτιμος. 3. Ὁ φιλοκερδής.

Again in the Phædon, he tells us that we are not to weigh pleasures against pleasures, or pains against pains, but all of them against φρόνησις or Intelligence (p. 69 A-B). This appears distinctly to contradict what Sokrates affirms in the Protagoras. But when we turn to another passage of the Phædon (p. 114 E), we find Sokrates recognising a class of pleasures attached to the exercise of Intelligence, and declaring them to be more valuable than the pleasures of sense, or any others. This is a very different proposition: but in both passages Plato had probably the same comparison in his mind.

Sydenham, in a note to his translation of the Philêbus (pp. 42-43), observes — “if Protarchus, when he took on himself to be an advocate for pleasure, had included, in his meaning of the word, all such pleasures as are purely mental, his opinion, fairly and rightly understood, could not have been different in the main, from what Sokrates here professes — That in every particular case, to discern what is best in action, and to perceive what is true in speculation, is the chief good of man; unless, indeed, it should afterwards come into question which of the two kinds of pleasure, the sensual or the mental, was to be preferred. For if it should appear that in this point they were both of the same mind, the controversy between them would be found a mere logomachy, or contention about words (as between Epicureans and Stoics), of the same kind as that would be between two persons, one of whom asserted that to a musical ear the proper and true good was Harmony, while the other contended that the good lay not in the Harmony itself, but in the pleasure which the musical ear felt from hearing it: or like a controversy among three persons, one of whom having asserted that to all animals living under the northern frigid zone, the Sun in Cancer was the greatest blessing; and another having asserted that not the Sun was that chief blessing to those northern animals, but the warmth which he afforded them; the third should imagine that he corrected or amended the two former by saying — That those animals were thus highly blest neither by the Sun, nor by the warmth which his rays afforded them, but by the joy or pleasure which they felt from the return of the Sun and warmth.”