Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, ca. 1640
2,185 words
(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, Part 8 here, Part 9 here, Part 10 here, Part 11 here, Part 12 here, Part 13 here, Part 14 here, Part 15 here)
In our last installment, Callicles has admitted to being a hedonist. Hedonism is the view that happiness (eudaimonia) is pleasure. In other words, pleasure is the good that all men seek. If pleasure is the good, that means that the distinction between good and bad things boils down to the presence or absence of pleasure. If pleasure is present, then something is good. This implies that there are no bad pleasures, for pleasure is what makes things good. Thus if pleasure is present, so is goodness.
Socrates’ critique of Callicles’ hedonism gets very involved, with a lot of back and forth between them, so it is easy to lose the thread. To make the discussion easier to follow, I have distilled out four arguments.
But before we go into the arguments, we need to deal with some preliminaries. Socrates claims that Callicles is contradicting his earlier positions by upholding hedonism. Which positions, though? Is Socrates simply referring to Callicles’ express distaste for certain low sorts of pleasures? If so, then Callicles can and will defeat Socrates simply by accepting that low forms of pleasure are also part of the good life.
After Callicles states that he thinks that pleasure and the good are the same and will not shrink (like Gorgias and Polus) from the shameful consequences, Socrates asks Callicles if he believes that knowledge (episteme) exists. Callicles says yes. Socrates then asks Callicles if courage (andreia) exists. Callicles says yes again. Socrates then asks if courage and knowledge are different things. Callicles agrees that they are. Socrates then asks if knowledge and pleasure are different. Callicles agrees they are. Finally, Socrates asks and Callicles affirms that courage is different from pleasure. In sum:
- Pleasure and the good are the same.
- Courage and knowledge exist and are different.
- Knowledge and pleasure are different.
- Courage and pleasure are different.
We should be on the lookout for whether and how these premises reappear in the course of the argument.
When Socrates sums up these premises, he uses legal language: “Callicles of Acharnia [Acharnia is one of the demes of Athens; this is how Callicles would be referred to in court] deposes and states that pleasure and good are the same, but knowledge and courage are different from each other and from the good [i.e., pleasure].” To which Callicles responds, also in legalistic terms, “And Socrates of Alopece dissents. Or does he join us?” Socrates replies that he will not, and that Callicles himself will not, “when he sees himself correctly,” meaning when he understands that hedonism contradicts his real convictions.
But why the legalistic language? Is Socrates responding to Callicles’ accusation (which prophesies Socrates’ trial) that if Socrates goes on trial, he will be helpless to defend himself? Is Socrates putting Callicles on trial? If so, Callicles does not acquit himself.
At this point, Socrates begins his first refutation of hedonism, which I summarize as follows.
- The good (eudaimonia) and the bad (wretchedness), cannot exist in the same person at the same time and in the same respect.
- Pleasure associated with satisfaction and pain associated with desire can exist in the same person at the same time.
Therefore, the good is not pleasure and the bad is not pain.
Let’s analyze this.
Premise one: you can’t be miserable and happy at the same time, wretched and happy at the same time. We must be careful here, because when Socrates speaks of happiness and wretchedness, he is talking not about feelings but about states of virtue. Now, somebody might ask, “Can’t you be courageous in battle but cowardly about disappointing your mother? So can’t you be both happy (virtuous) and wretched (vicious) at the same time?”
This is why the qualifier “in the same respect” is also there: at the same time and in the same respect. You may be both courageous and cowardly at the same time about different objects, particularly if you are talking about courage and cowardliness as potentialities, i.e., as traits of character which don’t need to be manifest at the same time. It is harder to imagine actually being courageous and cowardly about different objects at the same time. But you clearly cannot actually be both cowardly and courageous at the same time about the same objects, i.e., in the same respect.
However, pleasure and pain can exist in the same person at the same time. Here pain is associated with desire and pleasure with the satisfaction of desire. Socrates gives the example of the pain of thirst and the pleasure of drinking. Being thirsty on a hot day is feeling pain, drinking water is feeling pleasure, and the two feelings exist at the same time. I didn’t say “in the same respect” because I’m not quite sure if you can make that claim. You could say that you’re feeling pleasure insofar as you’re satisfying yourself and feeling pain insofar as you haven’t fully satisfied yourself. So, maybe the proviso of “in the same respect” doesn’t apply there.
The conclusion is this: pleasure is not the good and pain is not the bad, because pleasure and pain can exist in a person at the same time while the good and the bad can’t exist in a person at the same time. The underlying assumption here is that if pleasure/pain and good/bad have different ways of being, they can’t be the same thing.
Callicles is unimpressed, claiming that Socrates is pulling “clever tricks,” prompting an equally testy response from Socrates. When Callicles seems to be bowing out, Gorgias interrupts and insists that Callicles answer. Callicles protests that Socrates’ “little questions” are “worthless” and “narrow.” But Gorgias insists. When Callicles assents, Socrates says, “You’re a happy [eudaimon] man, Callicles; you’ve been initiated into the Greater Mysteries before the Lesser. I didn’t think that was religiously permitted.” Socrates is accusing Callicles of thinking he has advanced knowledge before he acquires basic knowledge, but it is not clear what body of knowledge he is referring to.
Socrates then offers a new argument, which I reconstruct as follows.
- The good and the bad do not cease together. The ceasing of the good is the bad. The ceasing of the bad is the good. They don’t end at the same time. When one ends the other begins.
- Pleasure and pain cease at the same time.
Therefore, the good is not pleasure and the bad is not pain.
As in the first argument, the underlying assumption here is that if pleasure/pain and good/bad have different ways of being, they can’t be the same thing. Whereas the first argument deals with how the good/bad and pleasure/pain exist, this argument deals with how they cease to exist.
Let’s consider the first premise in terms of the virtue of moderation and the vice of immoderateness. Let’s focus on a single object of moderation, namely material wealth. You cannot simultaneously be both moderate and immoderate in your pursuit of material wealth. However, if you are moderate, you can become immoderate at another time. And if you are immoderate, you can become moderate at another time. Moderation ceases when immoderation begins, and vice versa.
Now let us consider the second premise, that the pleasures and pains associated with the satisfaction of desire cease at the same time. For instance, when you eat and you become full, the pleasure of eating ceases at the same time as the pain of hunger ceases.
Socrates does not allow Callicles to respond to the second argument before moving on to the third:
- Good men are good because of the presence of goodness.
- Bad men are bad because of the presence of badness.
- Good and bad men both experience pleasure and pain.
- Good men remain good while experiencing pain.
- Bad men remain bad while experiencing pleasure.
Therefore, pleasure cannot be the cause of goodness and pain can’t be the cause of badness.
The first two premises are pure Platonism. This man is good because he has goodness, i.e. good qualities, such as courage and honor. This man is bad because he has badness, i.e. bad qualities, like cowardice and greed. But both good and bad men experience pleasure and pain. However, if pleasure is the good, then wouldn’t experiencing pleasure—a good meal, a nice massage—make a bad man good? If hedonism were true, wouldn’t the best way to reform criminals be to send them to bars, restaurants, and massage parlors? And if pain is the evil, then experiencing pain—injury, illness, loss—will make a good man bad. But we see that good men remain good while experiencing pain. Indeed, standing up to pain arguably makes good men better, since the virtue of courage masters pain and fear. Moreover, bad men remain bad while experiencing pleasure. Indeed, bad men arguably become worse by experiencing pleasure, since the virtue of moderation masters pleasure. Therefore, pleasure is not the good and pain is not the bad.
At this point, Callicles throws in the towel by abandoning the claim that pleasure is the good, which entails that there are no bad pleasures. But he does not do so gracefully. Instead, he pretends that he was only joking when he defended hedonism. “Socrates, I’ve been listening to you for some time and agreeing, while thinking that if anybody grants you something even as a joke, you delight in it like a boy. Do you suppose that I and every other man don’t believe some pleasures better and others worse?”
Callicles thinks he is offering a refinement to his hedonism, but actually he is destroying it completely. If one can recognize that some pleasures are better than other pleasures, doesn’t that mean there is another standard of the good besides the pleasurable? If there are bad pleasures as well as good ones, then pleasure can’t be the good. Conversely, if there are good pains as well as bad ones, then pain can’t be the bad. This final refutation of hedonism can be articulated as follows:
- If pleasure is the good and pain is the bad, there can be no bad pleasures or good pains.
- There are bad pleasures and good pains.
Therefore, the good is not pleasure and the bad is not pain.
If we think about it, we can all cite examples of bad pleasures and good pains. For instance, the sugary snacks that rot one’s teeth are bad pleasures, while the discomforts one endures in the dentists’ chair are good pains.
But if we can distinguish between bad and good pleasures and pains, that doesn’t just mean that pleasure is not the good. It also means that we already have a standard of what is good and bad. We already know what the good is. It was already operative in our thinking all along, and we didn’t even know it was there. This is why Socrates said that in affirming hedonism, Callicles was not merely in disagreement with Socrates, he was in disagreement with himself.
But if all of us already know the good, then why do we disagree so violently about different conceptions of the good life? If we already know the good, then what is the purpose of moral philosophy? The answer to these questions hinges on precisely how we already know the good. We all have the ability to recognize the good and the bad. This is how, based on examples, we can simply see that there are good pains and bad pleasures.
One way this works is through moral sentiments like disgust and shame. Thus when Gorgias and Polus shrank back from certain ideas in shame, or Callicles shrank back in disgust from certain implications of hedonism, this is a manifestation not of social convention but of innate moral knowledge.
But this ability to recognize the good in concrete situations is more akin to practical know-how than an articulated theory. Thus matters get tricky when we start talking about the good, i.e., articulating in general terms what we can already see in particular circumstances. Thus as soon as we begin comparing our moral intuitions, we begin to disagree about the good. Since we already know the good, the purpose of moral philosophy is not to impart such knowledge but rather to help us fully and accurately articulate it. Socratic moral philosophy works by articulating a view of the good (the good = pleasure), then testing these articulations in the light of our intuitive knowledge of the good (there are good pains and bad pains), then trying to articulate a better account of the good.
Now let’s return to the four propositions that Socrates elicited from Callicles at the beginning of this part of the argument:
- Pleasure and the good are the same.
- Courage and knowledge exist and are different.
- Knowledge and pleasure are different.
- Courage and pleasure are different.
Socrates has overthrown the first proposition. But thus far, he has said nothing about the rest.
4 comments
Perhaps I spoke too soon in my last comment in the last article. But I think it still stands.
If we distinguish better and worse pleasure by its relationship to the good, taking the good to be separate from pleasure, then obviously Callicles’s argument begins to sputter and fall apart.
But if we’re just taking better and worse pleasure to mean “how much” pleasure, or perhaps even “how pure the pleasure is as pleasure”, then I think Callicles’s criteria still stands. If the good is merely pleasure, then more pleasure, purer pleasure (pleasure qua pleasure, unmixed with anything which may “crowd it out”), still appears to be workable in Callicles’s favor.
I don’t think that your counter-argument works, because you must still appeal to a standard over and above pleasure itself, which is the true good, not pleasure. For instance, if too much pleasure is bad, then there can be bad pleasures, and the good is provided by the principle by which you measure pleasures. Too much pleasure is bad for what? For the organism? Then that is the good. The same is true of measuring pleasures in terms of purity. Purity from what? How do you sort good and bad pleasures? However you propose to do that, the standard you employ will stand above pleasure as a standard of the good, thus replacing pleasure as the good.
I largely agree with the thrust of this reply and the last article’s reply. But let me add one more vice to it. In what sense do we say that too much pleasure is bad? Perhaps I may emphasize the problem of purity and the threat of mixing.
Let’s assume that pleasure is the good. Hypothetically, if we can take as much pleasure as we want, without any downside, then there is no issue. However, we then introduced the problem of “too much pleasure”, and in that sense being bad. But what makes for too much pleasure? We’ve already ruled out the pleasure of itching, since that is a meager and petty pleasure which is crowded out by greater pleasures. But what about the other example, the pleasure of being a catamite? It is not pure pleasure. It is accompanied by pain, including the pain of physical wear and tear, the pain of social shame, the pain of not being in control, etc. So, we discovered that the problem is not that it is “too much” pleasure, but rather that it is impure pleasure to the point that whatever quantity of pleasure we have is actually quite diluted and not a “too much” at all.
Therefore, it makes sense to think that these examples aren’t satisfactory refutations of the pleasure principle, so to speak, because pain tarnishes the pleasure. Pleasure is still the measure, and the more something is like pleasure, and the more pleasure you have, the better it is. I suppose we can say that Epicurus and Lucretius are still in the running.
If I can add some motivation to this… I sense that there is a difference between what is ideally, universally, and eternally true, versus what plays out within a limited amount of time.
I fully agree with you that ultimately, that there is a good separate from pleasure, that “too much” pleasure ends up ruining the organism, ruining the collective, and etcetera.
However, when we unravel each of these examples (a good example is unraveling the pain of “shame” from the pleasure of a catamite—think about how much shame is dwindling in our current society), we find limits to pleasure that seem merely contingent. And then we have other factors, such as medical advances, allowing us to further dodge the consequences of too much pleasure. Advances in medicine allow us to receive state-of-the-art medical treatment for STIs, or to allow ourselves to gorge ourselves endlessly without succumbing to obesity. And this technological capacity is only getting stronger.
Perhaps all of these measures of “perverting being” for the sake of pleasure will have a reckoning. Perhaps we will eventually be limited by the scarcity of natural resources, or some other kind of karmic effect. But I am reminded of Glaucon and Adeimantus’s challenge to Socrates in Book II of the Republic, to make his arguments about the eternal relevant to the cause-and-effect, the limited life spans, etc., in the world that people actually live in, and how Socrates is at pains to answer their charge. What happens when we individually, or perhaps collectively, can modify the cause-and-effect chain so that the effect is postponed beyond the lifespan of any given person? Where is the argument for justice after that?
People will look at the future reckoning and say, in the long run we’re all dead, not my problem because I won’t be around, and other Keynesisms and boomerisms. This is a real problem.
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