Plato Notesheet

Today: the non-hedonistic perspective you find, and find predominating in Plato's writings.

What both Plato and Christianity hold out for you is the prospect of something other than 'pleasure': and better than pleasure.

What's wrong with pleasure?

Plato's estimation of pleasure is bound up with his conception of the human being as made up of different 'agencies', agencies that are often in conflict with each other.

The city, the Charioteer and the prisoners in the Cave

Plato draws an analogy between the 'soul' and the city. In a city - according to Plato's Republic Socrates - there are three elements: rulers, soldiers, artisans.

In a successful city, the rulers will excel in wisdom, soldiers in courage and artisans in obedience ... And in a just city there will be harmony between the three classes, a harmony that results in each of the classes doing the thing they are most suited to: ruling, fighting, making.

It is the same in the 'soul'. There are three elements. And in a just soul there is harmony between the three elements, arising when each of the elements does what they are specially fit for.

Another figure Plato offers (in the Phaedo) is the soul as two horses yoked together in a chariot, and their driver the Charioteer. He wants to go to a 'heavenly banquet', but the two horses are trying to go in different directions - one 'up' and one 'down'.

So one idea is that satisfying desire yields pleasure, but there is some component that should be heeded more than desire and that is reason. That seems to be one source of the conclusion that there is something more important than pleasure - ie more important than pleasure is whatever you get from exercising your reason.

Plato has another idea tending to the same conclusion. Pleasure is associated most clearly with the senses, and the senses, Plato makes clear, are in his opinion next to worthless. So it's a small step to the conclusion that the pleasures they yield must be low-grade too.

This comes across vividly in another of Plato's vastly influential images: the image of the Prisoners in the Cave (Plato, Republic, Book vii 514-18). See last year.

'Understanding' v pleasure

One claim in Plato is that 'understanding' is different from having 'sense experience'. But then he adds another: somehow acquiring understanding is more worthwhile than having sense experience.

What is the reward associated with understanding?

It is the enlightenment we achieve when we have struggled out of the cave and see, illuminated by the intellectual sun, things as they really are.

Plato and Christianity

Plato's ideas were taken up in medieval times by Augustine (and later by others, especially Aquinas) who both tried to develop the idea that there was just the one theory of the universe that came through with authority from ancient times, and that was the theory taught by Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and St Paul on the other.

The question was still: how can I achieve happiness? And the Fathers' answer:

(1) in this life you follow God's commandments and you accept the help of the Church. You will then be able to enjoy true happiness - nothing to do with earthly pleasures - which is eternal communion with God.

(2) Bear in mind that one way of missing out on happiness is certainly to suffer the perpetual torments of hell - so if you don't understand the 'communion' bit you should live a good Christian life even so.

VP

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