Complete Works (97 page)

P
ROTARCHUS
: What you say is very plausible.

S
OCRATES
: But if the reverse happens, and harmony is regained and the former nature restored, we have to say that pleasure arises, if we must pronounce only a few words on the weightiest matters in the shortest possible time.

[e] P
ROTARCHUS
: I believe that you are right, Socrates, but why don’t we try to be more explicit about this very point?

S
OCRATES
: Well, is it not child’s play to understand the most ordinary and well-known cases?

P
ROTARCHUS
: What cases do you mean?

S
OCRATES
: Hunger, I take it, is a case of disintegration and pain?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: And eating, the corresponding refilling, is a pleasure?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: But thirst is, once again, a destruction and pain, while the
[32]
process that fills what is dried out with liquid is pleasure? And, further, unnatural separation and dissolution, the affection caused by heat, is pain, while the natural restoration of cooling down is pleasure?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Very much so.

S
OCRATES
: And the unnatural coagulation of the fluids in an animal through freezing is pain, while the natural process of their dissolution or redistribution is pleasure. To cut matters short, see whether the following [b] account seems acceptable to you. When the natural combination of limit and unlimitedness that forms a live organism, as I explained before, is destroyed, this destruction is pain, while the return towards its own nature, this general restoration, is pleasure.

P
ROTARCHUS
: So be it, for it seems to provide at least an outline.

S
OCRATES
: Shall we then accept this as one kind of pleasure and pain, what happens in either of these two kinds of processes?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Accepted.

S
OCRATES
: But now accept also the anticipation by the
soul
itself of these [c] two kinds of experiences; the hope before the actual pleasure will be pleasant and comforting, while the expectation of pain will be frightening and painful.

P
ROTARCHUS
: This turns out then to be a different kind of pleasure and pain, namely the
expectation
that the soul experiences by itself, without the body.

S
OCRATES
: Your assumption is correct. In both these cases, as I see it at least, pleasure and pain will arise pure and unmixed with each other, so that it will become apparent as far as pleasure is concerned whether its whole class [d] is to be welcomed or whether this should rather be the privilege of one of the other classes which we have already discussed. Pleasure and pain may rather turn out to share the predicament of hot and cold and other such things that are welcome at one point but unwelcome at another, because they are not good, but it happens that some of them do occasionally assume a beneficial nature.

P
ROTARCHUS
: You are quite right if you suggest that this must be the direction to take if we want to find a solution to what we are looking for now.

S
OCRATES
: First, then, let us take a look together at the following point. [e] If it truly holds, as we said, that their disintegration constitutes pain, but restoration is pleasure, what kind of state should we ascribe to animals when they are neither destroyed nor restored; what kind of condition is this? Think about it carefully, and tell me: Is there not every necessity that the animal will at that time experience neither pain nor pleasure, neither large nor small?

P
ROTARCHUS
: That is indeed necessary.

S
OCRATES
: There is, then, such a condition, a third one, besides the one in which one is pleased or in which one is in pain?
[33]

P
ROTARCHUS
: Obviously.

S
OCRATES
: Make an effort to keep this fact in mind. For it makes quite a difference for our judgment of pleasure whether we remember that there is such a state or not. But we had better give it a little more consideration, if you don’t mind.

P
ROTARCHUS
: Just tell me how.

S
OCRATES
: You realize that nothing prevents the person who has chosen the life of reason from living in this state.

P
ROTARCHUS
: You mean without pleasure and pain? [b]

S
OCRATES
: It was one of the conditions agreed on in our comparison of lives that the person who chooses the life of reason and intelligence must not enjoy pleasures either large or small.

P
ROTARCHUS
: That was indeed agreed on.

S
OCRATES
: He may then live in this fashion, and perhaps there would be nothing absurd if this life turns out to be the most godlike.

P
ROTARCHUS
: It is at any rate not likely that the gods experience either pleasure or the opposite.

S
OCRATES
: It is certainly not likely. For either of these states would be quite unseemly in their case. But this is a question we had better take up again later if it should be relevant to our discussion, but let us count it as [c] an additional point in favor of reason in the competition for second prize, even if we cannot count it in that for first prize.

P
ROTARCHUS
: A very good suggestion.

S
OCRATES
: But now as for the other kind of pleasure, of which we said that it belongs to the soul itself. It depends entirely on memory.

P
ROTARCHUS
: In what way?

S
OCRATES
: It seems we have first to determine what kind of a thing memory is; in fact I am afraid that we will have to determine the nature of perception even before that of memory, if the whole subject matter is to become at all clear to us in the right way.

P
ROTARCHUS
: How do you mean? [d]

S
OCRATES
: You must realize that some of the various affections of the body are extinguished within the body before they reach the soul, leaving it unaffected. Others penetrate through both body and soul and provoke a kind of upheaval that is peculiar to each but also common to both of them.

P
ROTARCHUS
: I realize that.

S
OCRATES
: Are we fully justified if we claim that the soul remains oblivious of those affections that do not penetrate both, while it is not oblivious of those that penetrate both?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Of course we are justified. [e]

S
OCRATES
: But you must not so misunderstand me as to suppose I meant that this ‘obliviousness’ gave rise to any kind of forgetting. Forgetting is rather the loss of memory, but in the case in question here no memory has yet arisen. It would be absurd to say that there could be the process of losing something that neither is nor was in existence, wouldn’t it?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Quite definitely.

S
OCRATES
: You only have to make some change in names, then.

P
ROTARCHUS
: How so?

S
OCRATES
: Instead of saying that the soul is oblivious when it remains unaffected by the disturbances of the body, now change the name of what
[34]
you so far called obliviousness to that of
nonperception.

P
ROTARCHUS
: I understand.

S
OCRATES
: But when the soul and body are jointly affected and moved by one and the same affection, if you call this motion
perception,
you would say nothing out of the way.

P
ROTARCHUS
: You are right.

S
OCRATES
: And so we know by now what we mean by perception?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Certainly.

S
OCRATES
: So if someone were to call memory the ‘preservation of perception’, he would be speaking correctly, as far as I am concerned.

[b] P
ROTARCHUS
: Rightly so.

S
OCRATES
: And do we not hold that recollection differs from memory?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Perhaps.

S
OCRATES
: Does not their difference lie in this?

P
ROTARCHUS
: In what?

S
OCRATES
: Do we not call it ‘recollection’ when the soul recalls as much as possible by itself, without the aid of the body, what she had once experienced together with the body? Or how would you put it?

P
ROTARCHUS
: I quite agree.

S
OCRATES
: But on the other hand, when, after the loss of memory of [c] either a perception or again a piece of knowledge, the soul calls up this memory for itself, we also call all these events recollection.

P
ROTARCHUS
: You are right.

S
OCRATES
: The point for the sake of which all this has been said is the following.

P
ROTARCHUS
: What is it?

S
OCRATES
: That we grasp as fully and clearly as possible the pleasure that the soul experiences without the body, as well as the desire. And through a clarification of these states, the nature of both pleasure and desire will somehow be revealed.

P
ROTARCHUS
: Let us now discuss this as our next issue, Socrates.

[d] S
OCRATES
: It seems that in our investigation we have to discuss many points about the origin of pleasure and about all its different varieties. For it looks as if we will first have to determine what desire is and on what occasion it arises.

P
ROTARCHUS
: Let us determine that, then. We have nothing to lose.

S
OCRATES
: We will certainly lose something, Protarchus; by discovering what we are looking for now, we will lose our ignorance about it.

P
ROTARCHUS
: You rightly remind us of that fact. But now let us try to return to the further pursuit of our subject.

S
OCRATES
: Are we agreed now that hunger and thirst and many other things of this sort are desires? [e]

P
ROTARCHUS
: Quite in agreement.

S
OCRATES
: But what is the common feature whose recognition allows us to address all these phenomena, which differ so much, by the same name?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Heavens, that is perhaps not an easy thing to determine, Socrates, but it must be done nevertheless.

S
OCRATES
: Shall we go back to the same point of departure?

P
ROTARCHUS
: What point?

S
OCRATES
: When we say “he is thirsty,” we always have something in mind?

P
ROTARCHUS
: We do.

S
OCRATES
: Meaning that he is getting empty?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Certainly.

S
OCRATES
: But thirst is a desire?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Yes, the desire for drink.

S
OCRATES
: For drink or for the filling with drink?
[35]

P
ROTARCHUS
: For the filling with drink, I think.

S
OCRATES
: Whoever among us is emptied, it seems, desires the opposite of what he suffers. Being emptied, he desires to be filled.

P
ROTARCHUS
: That is perfectly obvious.

S
OCRATES
: But what about this problem? If someone is emptied for the first time, is there any way he could be in touch with filling, either through sensation or memory, since he has no experience of it, either in the present or ever in the past?

P
ROTARCHUS
: How should he?

S
OCRATES
: But we do maintain that he who has a desire desires something? [b]

P
ROTARCHUS
: Naturally.

S
OCRATES
: He does, then, not have a desire for what he in fact experiences. For he is thirsty, and this is a process of emptying. His desire is rather of filling.

P
ROTARCHUS
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: Something in the person who is thirsty must necessarily somehow be in contact with filling.

P
ROTARCHUS
: Necessarily.

S
OCRATES
: But it is impossible that this should be the body, for the body is what is emptied out.

P
ROTARCHUS
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: The only option we are left with is that the soul makes contact with the filling, and it clearly must do so through memory. Or could it [c] make contact through anything else?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Clearly through nothing else.

S
OCRATES
: Do we understand, then, what conclusions we have to draw from what has been said?

P
ROTARCHUS
: What are they?

S
OCRATES
: Our argument forces us to conclude that desire is not a matter of the body.

P
ROTARCHUS
: Why is that?

S
OCRATES
: Because it shows that every living creature always strives towards the opposite of its own experience.

P
ROTARCHUS
: And very much so.

S
OCRATES
: This impulse, then, that drives it towards the opposite of its own state signifies that it has memory of that opposite state?

P
ROTARCHUS
: Certainly.