Essay 12
Recall that Plato prefaces his explanation of the democratic soul in Book VIII of Republic by elaborating on the distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires he introduced in setting out the oligarchic soul:
Then these and others like them are the characteristics of democracy. And it would seem to be a pleasant constitution, which lacks rulers but not variety and which distributes a sort of equality to both equals and unequals alike.
We certainly know what you mean.
Consider, then, what private individual resembles it. Or should we first inquire, as we did with the city, how he comes to be?
Yes, we should.
Well, doesn’t it happen like this? Wouldn’t the son of that thrifty oligarch be brought up in his father’s ways? [d]
Of course.
Then he too rules his spendthrift pleasures by force—the ones that aren’t money-making and are called unnecessary.
Clearly.
But, so as not to discuss this in the dark, do you want us first to define which desires are necessary and which aren’t?
I do.
Aren’t those we can’t desist from and those whose satisfaction benefits us rightly called necessary, for we are by nature compelled to satisfy them both? Isn’t that so? [e]
Of course.
So we’d be right to apply the term “necessary” to them? [559]
We would.
What about those that someone could get rid of if he practiced from youth on, those whose presence leads to no good or even to the opposite? If we said that all of them were unnecessary, would we be right?
We would.
Let’s pick an example of each, so that we can grasp the patterns they exhibit.
We should do that.
Aren’t the following desires necessary: the desire to eat to the point of [b] health and well-being and the desire for bread and delicacies?
I suppose so.
The desire for bread is necessary on both counts; it’s beneficial, and unless it’s satisfied, we die.
Yes.
The desire for delicacies is also necessary to the extent that it’s beneficial to well-being.
Absolutely.
What about the desire that goes beyond these and seeks other sorts of foods, that most people can get rid of, if it’s restrained and educated while they’re young, and that’s harmful both to the body and to the reason and [c] moderation of the soul? Would it be rightly called unnecessary?
It would indeed.
Then wouldn’t we also say that such desires are spendthrift, while the earlier ones are money-making, because they profit our various projects?
Certainly.
And won’t we say the same about the desire for sex and about other desires?
Yes.
And didn’t we say that the person we just now called a drone is full of such pleasures and desires, since he is ruled by the unnecessary ones, [d] while a thrifty oligarch is ruled by his necessary desires?
We certainly did.
Let’s go back, then, and explain how the democratic man develops out of the oligarchic one. It seems to me as though it mostly happens as follows.
How?
When a young man, who is reared in the miserly and uneducated manner we described, tastes the honey of the drones and associates with wild and dangerous creatures who can provide every variety of multicolored pleasure in every sort of way, this, as you might suppose, is the beginning [e] of his transformation from having an oligarchic constitution within him to having a democratic one.
It’s inevitable that this is how it starts.
And just as the city changed when one party received help from likeminded people outside, doesn’t the young man change when one party of his desires receives help from external desires that are akin to them and of the same form?
Absolutely.
And I suppose that, if any contrary help comes to the oligarchic party within him, whether from his father or from the rest of his household, who exhort and reproach him, then there’s civil war and counterrevolution [560] within him, and he battles against himself.
That’s right.
Sometimes the democratic party yields to the oligarchic, so that some of the young man’s appetites are overcome, others are expelled, a kind of shame rises in his soul, and order is restored.
That does sometimes happen.
But I suppose that, as desires are expelled, others akin to them are being nurtured unawares, and because of his father’s ignorance about how to bring him up, they grow numerous and strong. [b]
That’s what tends to happen.
These desires draw him back into the same bad company and in secret intercourse breed a multitude of others.
Certainly.
And, seeing the citadel of the young man’s soul empty of knowledge, fine ways of living, and words of truth (which are the best watchmen and guardians of the thoughts of those men whom the gods love), they finally occupy that citadel themselves.
They certainly do. [c]
And in the absence of these guardians, false and boastful words and beliefs rush up and occupy this part of him.
Indeed, they do.
Won’t he then return to these lotus-eaters and live with them openly? And if some help comes to the thrifty part of his soul from his household, won’t these boastful words close the gates of the royal wall within him to prevent these allies from entering and refuse even to receive the words of older private individuals as ambassadors? Doing battle and controlling things themselves, won’t they call reverence foolishness and moderation [d] cowardice, abusing them and casting them out beyond the frontiers like disenfranchised exiles? And won’t they persuade the young man that measured and orderly expenditure is boorish and mean, and, joining with many useless desires, won’t they expel it across the border?
They certainly will.
Having thus emptied and purged these from the soul of the one they’ve possessed and initiated in splendid rites, they proceed to return insolence, anarchy, extravagance, and shamelessness from exile in a blaze of torch-light, [e] wreathing them in garlands and accompanying them with a vast chorus of followers. They praise the returning exiles and give them fine names, calling insolence good breeding, anarchy freedom, extravagance magnificence, and shamelessness courage. Isn’t it in some such way as this that someone who is young changes, after being brought up with necessary desires, to the liberation and release of useless and unnecessary [561] pleasures?
Yes, that’s clearly the way it happens.
And I suppose that after that he spends as much money, effort, and time on unnecessary pleasures as on necessary ones. If he’s lucky, and his frenzy doesn’t go too far, when he grows older, and the great tumult within him has spent itself, he welcomes back some of the exiles, ceases [b] to surrender himself completely to the newcomers, and puts his pleasures on an equal footing. And so he lives, always surrendering rule over himself to whichever desire comes along, as if it were chosen by lot. And when that is satisfied, he surrenders the rule to another, not disdaining any but satisfying them all equally.
That’s right.
And he doesn’t admit any word of truth into the guardhouse, for if someone tells him that some pleasures belong to fine and good desires [c] and others to evil ones and that he must pursue and value the former and restrain and enslave the latter, he denies all this and declares that all pleasures are equal and must be valued equally.
That’s just what someone in that condition would do.
And so he lives on, yielding day by day to the desire at hand. Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; [d] at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy. He often engages in politics, leaping up from his seat and saying and doing whatever comes into his mind. If he happens to admire soldiers, he’s carried in that direction, if money-makers, in that one. There’s neither order nor necessity in his life, but he calls it pleasant, free, and blessedly happy, and he follows it for as long as he lives.
[e] You’ve perfectly described the life of a man who believes in legal equality.
I also suppose that he’s a complex man, full of all sorts of characters, fine and multicolored, just like the democratic city, and that many men and women might envy his life, since it contains the most models of constitutions and ways of living.
That’s right.
Then shall we set this man beside democracy as one who is rightly [562] called democratic?
Complicating his distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires is a further distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Since desires may be necessary and yet directed at higher or lower pleasures, or unnecessary and directed at higher or lower pleasures, we have essentially a matrix of desires and pleasures.
Likewise Aristotle takes pleasure to be crucial to his account of virtue, beginning Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics:
The next task, presumably, is to discuss pleasure. For it seems to be especially [20] proper to our [animal] kind; that is why, when we educate children, we steer them by pleasure and pain.* Besides, enjoying and hating the right things seems to be most important for virtue of character. For pleasure and pain extend through the whole of our lives, and are of great importance for virtue and the happy life, since people decide on pleasant things, and avoid painful things.
In the following five chapters, Aristotle develops an account of pleasure and its relationship to the virtues and the good for man which he began in Book VII, chapters 11 thru 14, closing here in chapter 5 of Book X with the crucial distinction between proper pleasure and alien or improper pleasure:
Hence pleasures also seem to differ in species.* For we suppose that things of different species are completed by different things. That is how it appears, both with natural things and with artifacts—for instance, with animals, trees, a painting, a statue, a house, or an implement. Similarly, activities that differ in species are also completed by things that differ in species. §2 Now activities of thought differ in species from activities of the capacities for perception, and so do these from each other; so also, then, do the pleasures that complete them.
[30] This is also apparent from the way each pleasure is proper to the activity that it completes.* For the proper pleasure increases the activity; for we judge each thing better and more exactly when our activity involves pleasure. If, for instance, we enjoy doing geometry, we become better geometers, and understand each question better; and similarly lovers of music, building, and so on improve at their proper function when they [1175b] enjoy it. Each pleasure increases the activity; what increases it is proper to it; and since the activities are different in species, what is proper to them is also different in species.
§3 This is even more apparent from the way some activities are impeded by pleasures from others. For lovers of flutes, for instance, cannot pay attention to a conversation if they catch the sound of someone playing the flute, because they enjoy flute playing more than their present activity; and so the pleasure proper to flute playing destroys the activity of conversation.
§4 The same is true in other cases also, whenever we are engaged in two activities at once. For the more pleasant activity pushes out the other [10] one, all the more if it is much more pleasant, so that we no longer even engage in the other activity. Hence if we are enjoying one thing intensely, we do not do another very much. It is when we are only mildly pleased that we do something else; for instance, people who eat nuts in theatres do this most when the actors are bad.
§5 Since, then, the proper pleasure makes an activity more exact, longer, and better, whereas an alien pleasure damages it, clearly the two pleasures differ widely. For an alien pleasure does virtually what a proper pain does. The proper pain destroys activity, so that if, for instance, writing or rational calculation has no pleasure and is in fact painful for us, we [20] do not write or calculate, since the activity is painful. Hence the proper pleasures and pains have contrary effects on an activity; and the proper ones are those that arise from the activity in itself. And as we have said, the effect of alien pleasures is similar to the effect of pain, since they ruin the activity, though not in the same way as pain.
§6 Since activities differ in degrees of decency and badness, and some are choiceworthy, some to be avoided, some neither, the same is true of pleasures; for each activity has its own proper pleasure. Hence the pleasure proper to an excellent activity is decent, and the one proper to a base activity is vicious; for, similarly, appetites for fine things are praiseworthy, [30] and appetites for shameful things are blameworthy. And in fact the pleasure in an activity is more proper to it than the desire for it. For the desire is distinguished from it in time and in nature; but the pleasure is close to the activity, and so little distinguished from it that disputes arise about whether the activity is the same as the pleasure.
§7 Still, pleasure would seem to be neither thought nor perception, since that would be absurd. Rather, it is because [pleasure and activity] are not separated that to some people they appear the same.* Hence, just [1176a] as activities differ, so do the pleasures. Sight differs from touch in purity, as hearing and smell do from taste; hence the pleasures also differ in the same way. So also do the pleasures of thought differ from these [pleasures of sense]; and both sorts have different kinds within them.
§8 Each kind of animal seems to have its own proper pleasure, just as it has its own proper function; for the proper pleasure will be the one that corresponds to its activity. This is apparent if we also study each kind; for a horse, a dog, and a human being have different pleasures, and, as Heracleitus says, an ass would choose chaff over gold, since asses find food more pleasant than gold.* Hence animals that differ in species also have pleasures that differ in species; and it would be reasonable for animals of the same species to have the same pleasures also.
§9 In fact, however, the pleasures differ quite a lot, in human beings at [10] any rate. For the same things delight some people, and cause pain to others; and while some find them painful and hateful, others find them pleasant and lovable. The same is true of sweet things. For the same things do not seem sweet to a feverish and to a healthy person, or hot to an enfeebled and to a vigorous person; and the same is true of other things.
§10 But in all such cases it seems that what is really so is what appears so to the excellent person. If this is right, as it seems to be, and virtue, i.e., the good person insofar as he is good, is the measure of each thing, then what appear pleasures to him will also really be pleasures, and what is pleasant will be what he enjoys.*
And if what he finds objectionable appears pleasant to someone, that is [20] not at all surprising; for human beings suffer many sorts of corruption and damage. It is not pleasant, however, except to these people in these conditions. §11 Clearly, then, we should say that the pleasures agreed to be shameful are not pleasures at all, except to corrupted people.*
But what about those pleasures that seem to be decent? Of these, which kind, or which particular pleasure, should we take to be the pleasure of a human being? Surely it will be clear from the activities, since the pleasures are consequences of these. Hence the pleasures that complete the activities of the complete and blessedly happy man, whether he has one activity or more than one, will be called the fully human pleasures to the fullest extent. The other pleasures will be human in secondary, or even more remote ways, corresponding to the character of the activities.
How does the aristotelian conception of pleasure (and its role in particular with respect to the virtues) contrast with the platonic? Can Aristotle's account be understood as a refinement of Plato's? Is Aristotle's account in any case plausible, and can it, more importantly, bear the weight he requires of it in his theory of virtue and the best life for man?