The Classical Quarterly 69.

2 566–584 © The Classical Association (2020) 566

doi:10.1017/S0009838820000087

PLATO’S PHAEDO: ARE THE PHILOSOPHERS’ PLEASURES OF

LEARNING PURE PLEASURES?1

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE QUESTION

Though Plato’s Phaedo does not focus on pleasure, some considerable talk on pleasure
takes place in it. Socrates argues for the soul’s immortality and, while doing so, hopes to
highlight to his companions how important it is to take care of our soul by focussing on
the intellect and by neglecting the bodily realm as far as is possible in this life. Doing
philosophy, so his argument goes, is something like dying, if we grant that death is the
separation of the soul from the body and notice that genuine philosophers wish nothing
else than to be detached from the bodily realm. For indulging into bodily pleasures has
detrimental consequences on the soul, impeding the search of truth and distorting
reality, and so philosophers should undertake to purify themselves from all bodily
concerns and gratifications and love the objects of learning and knowledge without
deviation and distraction. On the contrary, ordinary people fall for the bodily realm
as the only real domain that should therefore be of priority and of their earnest concern.2
Having distinguished between the philosophers as lovers of wisdom and the lovers of
the body and between their different objects and ways of love, Socrates criticizes the
latter for exemplifying spurious moral virtue owing to their being slaves to bodily
pleasures, and in particular for applying a hedonistic calculus when comparing and
choosing pleasures over pains instead of aiming at virtue, irrespective of what accompanies
it and results from it.3 Although both vehement critique of bodily pleasure and subtle
critique of one type of hedonism are well integrated into the dialogue’s argument, pleasure
is neither its topic nor its focus as it is in the Philebus.
Socrates refers to the pleasures of learning in passing, after narrating the long story
about afterlife, when he emphasizes that philosophers should purify their lives from
bodily pleasures, and focus on the objects the engagement with which produces the
respective intellectual pleasures: in particular, the pleasures of learning.4 This is not a

1
This is a substantially revised version of a paper I aired at the Plato Colloquium at Western
University Canada (March 2016) and further developed and presented at the International Plato
Society Conference at Brasília (July 2016) and at Atelier V, under the aegis of Études
Platoniciennes in Paris (June 2017). I am thankful to all discussants, and especially to Luc Brisson,
Devin Henry, Rusty Jones, Arnaud Macé, Olivier Renaut, Ravi Sharma, David Sedley and John
Thorp, and also to Nicholas Smith for written comments and Cecilia Li for a discussion of the revised
paper. I am indebted to the anonymous referee for a most helpful report. I am responsible for any
remaining errors. All translations are mine.
2
The passages on the critique of bodily pleasure that culminates in a critique of the entire bodily
realm are 64c4–67b6 and 80c2–84b8.
3
The critique of their hedonism takes place in the passage immediately following 67b7–69e5.
4
114d8–115a2. Socrates does not say that one should aim at the pleasures of learning themselves
as a kind of reward, which would make one a hedonist, be it of a subtle kind. That one should study
these pleasures can mean nothing else but that one should be serious about (σπουδάζειν is the verb
used) and engaged with the objects that cause these pleasures.
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 567

slip of the pen: for in his defence of the philosophers’ study of dying, Socrates did
not say or imply that all pleasures are bodily and should be discarded, nor that the
philosophers’ intellectual endeavours are devoid of all possible affectivity, rendering
the philosophers ‘men or women of stone’, but he argued that they must detach
themselves from the bodily realm and its respective pleasures.5
To date, Platonic research has engaged in fascinating debates about Plato’s pleasures
of learning and knowing in the Republic6 and the Philebus, but the Phaedo has not
attracted much attention, though researchers have pointed out that there is a clearer
recognition of intellectual pleasures in this dialogue, which hints at their distinctive
role in the good life and thereby goes beyond what is offered in the Gorgias and points
forward to the picture drawn in the Republic.7 The value of pleasures has also been
debated in the Phaedo, in this case the bodily pleasures and the hedonic calculus,
with the focus on the question: does Plato think that bodily pleasures are bad in
themselves, or is it rather a particular attitude toward them that we should reproach?8
Some have argued that Phaedo’s proposal is asceticism, according to which one should
refrain from all pleasures.9 Others, following Gosling and Taylor, have taken the other
extreme and portrayed a hedonist Plato owing to the pleasure that Socrates takes in his
intellectual activity throughout the dialogue: one should aim at a higher kind of pleasure
that Plato identifies with goodness. Another recent approach has been to develop an
interpretation that accommodates both the devaluation of bodily pleasure and the permeating
Socratic intellectual pleasure without attributing any form of hedonism to Plato.10
Purification (κάθαρσις), which in the particular context means the soul’s separation
from the body, sets up the goal that we should be approximating as far as possible in our
embodied life, and makes up the general motto in the Phaedo. Not surprisingly, Socrates
frequently highlights purity (καθαρότης/καθαρός as adjective). He never ascribes

5
See 65c6, 83c5, 83d3 and 84a4. Each time pleasures are coupled with pains in this dialogue, they
are bodily and experienced through the body. No argument is given or implied ad loc. that the body
has always pleasures mixed with pain or that only the body has them. Though pain is not explicated in
the case of intellectual endeavours, I will show that it emerges.
6
See J. Warren, ‘Plato on the pleasures and pains of knowing’, OSAPh 39 (2010), 1–32: he
elegantly resolves the discrepancy between the philosopher’s life as the most pleasant life in
Republic Book 9 and the intellectual pains that are included in such a life.
7
J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford, 1982), 95.
8
The hedonic calculus (Phd. 68c–69c) has been hotly debated, in its comparison to that of the
Protagoras. See R. Weiss’s critique of Gosling and Taylor (n. 7), 83–95, in her ‘The hedonic calculus
in the Protagoras and the Phaedo’, JHPh 27 (1989), 511–29, and Gosling and Taylor’s reply and
modification of their initial thesis in their article ‘The hedonic calculus in the Protagoras and the
Phaedo: a reply’, JHPh 28 (1990), 115–16. They answer that they have been representing the view
that the Phaedo is compatible with hedonism.
9
Olympiodorus (Commentary on the Phaedo 3.5.1–13) and Damascius (Lectures on the Phaedo
1.69.6–9) belong to the Platonists who overlook the mention of pleasures of learning (Phd.
114d–115a) and repudiate bodily pleasures because of their objects.
10
D. Russell, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford, 2005) accommodates both the
rejection of bodily pleasures and the promotion of intellectual pleasures without opting for an ascetic
or a hedonistic view: pleasure is a conditional good, neither good nor bad in itself, and its goodness
depends on the way in which intelligence incorporates it in the entire life. Despite my sympathy to
Russell’s stress of attitude, the objects of pleasure influence the evaluation of their pleasures,
which Russell sidelines. The view that all reality lies in the sensible world arises from being only
concerned with bodily pleasures. It is the object of these pleasures, though, and the fact that we do
not deal with this object in a detached manner but make it the only reality we dwell on, that cause
the inappropriate attitude to the sensible things. Therefore, the object of pleasure and the intercourse
with it seem to me to be what is primary—as what causes the attitude—in this context, and not the
attitude.
568 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

purity—or its opposite, namely impurity—to any kind/type of pleasure or any particular
pleasure though.11 Plato has obviously not yet established and does not operate with the
fundamental opposition between pure and impure pleasures, or pleasures unmixed with
and mixed with pain,12 but with the opposition between bodily pleasures and pleasures
of learning; the former are to be very broadly construed and include not only pleasures of
eating, drinking and having sex but also pleasant elations accompanying wild passions of
the soul; the latter stand for a narrow realm of intellectual pleasures: any pleasure that is
relevant to learning activities. Accordingly, we should not reconstruct a dichotomy
between pleasures of the body and pleasures of the soul for the Phaedo, but rather
between—indeed, too broadly construed—bodily pleasures and cognitive pleasures
accompanying learning and relevant activities.
In the following, I ask whether the philosophers’ pleasures of learning in the Phaedo
are pure: whether we should understand them as being pure, since Socrates never
characterizes them as pure, and, if so, how we should understand this purity. This is
a question that, although to my knowledge it has not yet been asked, is very important
for the development of Plato’s critical project on pleasure, for the pleasures of learning
are characterized as pure in both the Republic and the Philebus. If we take the Republic
and the Philebus together:
Pure pleasures (be they of sensation or of learning and knowing) are not cessations of
pains; in both the Republic (584a11–c3) and the Philebus (50e5–51a9) they are introduced
as a piece of evidence against the view that all pleasures are cessations of pain.
We encounter a clear transition from the purification-motto which characterizes the
Phaedo to pleasures free from pain in the Philebus: in the Republic, there is a vexing
ambiguity in the meaning of purity when attributed to pleasure. When pure pleasures
are introduced, they refer to pure pleasures of sensation, and in particular smell.
Purity in this context does not mean separation from the body but being unmixed
with pain, not preceded by the pain that gives way to pleasure when ceased. A couple
of pages later, pure pleasures mean unmixed with the bodily realm, that is, intellectual or
cognitive pleasures (586b, as in 583b, where they are compared to the unreal pleasures
of the spirited and the appetitive parts of the soul). In the Philebus, instead, pure
pleasures are throughout free from pain and not from the bodily realm.
Pure pleasures of learning and knowing—with the aid of the more authoritative
Philebus—are unmixed with pain in their nature, which means that necessarily they
are not mixed with pain in what they are; not that they cannot be mixed with pain
circumstantially: they can be coupled with pain as long as that does not affect their
nature. There might be pains occurring before and after pure pleasures of learning,
if and only if these pains are not a constitutive part of these pleasures’ nature, which

11
Socrates speaks of cleansing the city (καθαρεύειν, 58b5) and purifying of wrongdoings by
penalties in the afterlife (καθαιρόμενοι, 113d7); καθαρῶς accompanies verbs that mean to attain
knowledge (66d8, 66e5, 68b4). Socrates defines purification as soul’s separation from the body
(κάθαρσις, 67c5; see 67b5: καθαρεύωμεν ἀπ᾽αὐτοῦ; 69b–c refers to freedom from hedonistic
calculations). Sometimes the philosophers, their souls or their minds are characterized as purified
(67c3, 69c6, 114c1; for impure souls, see 81b1); moreover, the eternal beings or the ‘place’ to
which they belong are called pure (79d2, 80d6) but also earth, stones, ether and wet mud in the
final myth (109b7, 110c2, 110e3, 111b6, 111d8).
12
The single instance of κρᾶσις of pleasure and pain (59a) is not sufficient evidence against the
above observation. For Plato speaks of mixture instead (μῖξις) in the Philebus, because κρᾶσις is a
combination of two or more elements that acquire a completely new nature in their indissoluble
connection.
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 569

would be the case if the pleasures of learning were the cessation of their opposite
precedent pains. There can be pain preceding the pure pleasures of attaining knowledge,
for example, owing to aporia, or pain following pure pleasures of knowing, when, for
instance, we realize that we need a piece of knowledge we had acquired but have
forgotten.13 But pleasures of learning will be pure if and only if they are not cessations
of the opposite pain: that is, if and only if the respective pain is not like the pain felt
when we feel hunger, which Socrates makes explicit.14 If one is pained by aporia
after realizing one’s ignorance and eagerly wishes to acquire knowledge in order to
get rid of this pain of being stuck in aporia, and if, therefore, one experiences the
pleasure of learning as a relief of the precedent pain, one is not taking pure pleasure
in learning but impure. Moreover, any subordination of learning to utilitarian
calculations would deprive one of the experience of pure pleasures of learning: for
example, if someone fervently wishes to expand her curriculum vitae, and if the
prevention of this expansion causes her distress, and if, when attaining—and
applying—knowledge, she is relieved of this particular pain, that pleasure is not pure.
My answer to my question is ‘yes’, the philosophers’ pleasures of learning are pure.
Leaving aside the question of whether the philosophers’ pleasures of learning are free
from the bodily realm—a question to which I also answer ‘yes’—,15 I confine myself
to answering my question by precisely delineating the purity in question as freedom
from pain. In accordance to my analysis of Philebus’ pure pleasures, I will argue that
the philosophers’ pleasures of learning acts in the Phaedo are, in contrast to bodily
pleasures, necessarily not preceded and necessarily not followed by opposite pains,
but necessarily—that is, in their own nature—free from such pains, though intellectual
undertakings are not in the least completely free from intellectual pains.
Though the trend has wanted the Phaedo to have been mostly taken into account for
Plato’s critique of hedonism, this paper claims to show that this Platonic dialogue can
also shed light on the nature of the philosophers’ pleasures of learning in contrast to
bodily pleasures. If the picture and the conclusions I draw are accurate, then Plato’s
philosophical project on pleasure is unified in the following respect: though before
Philebus’ analysis of pleasure, Plato already in the Phaedo thinks of the relation to
pain as fundamental to the nature of different pleasures.16

13
Warren (n. 6) offers an insightful analysis of the two conditions under which a lack of knowledge
might be painful: a) reflection upon the lack of knowledge and b) recognition of lacking knowledge as
needed. He is not interested in discussing what kind of pain in particular makes the pleasure of learning
impure. For both conditions might be fulfilled and therefore pain must and does arise: none the less, the
existence of pain does not suffice in itself to threaten the purity of pleasures of learning. In the above
lines, I am concerned with the kind of pains that jeopardize the purity of pure pleasures and make them
impure. The existence of intellectual pain is not sufficient to threaten the pure pleasures of learning and
make them impure, because it does not affect their own nature.
14
Phlb. 51e7–52a3. See my analysis of those pure pleasures ‘Placing pure pleasures beyond the
chain of hunger: Plato’s quest for paradigmatic pleasures in the Philebus’, in J. Jirsa, F. Karfík and
Š. Špinka (edd.), Plato’s Philebus (Prague, 2016), 130–56, especially 136–40.
15
For this I would have to answer the question why bodily pleasures should be avoided according
to 64c–69e, 80c–82d and 82d–84b. The explanation culminates in 83c5–8, namely the view that the
bodily realm is the only reality is ‘the greatest and worst evil of all’. Two conclusions will follow for
the Phaedo: first, the dialogue does not condemn all pleasures, because not all pleasures are bodily
pleasures; second, there is no space left for good (or pure) pleasures related in any way to bodily
processes, in contrast to the pure pleasures of sensation of the Republic and the Philebus.
16
Plato’s project on pleasure concerns both critique of hedonism and critique of pleasure. Though
dialogues such as the Phaedo and the Gorgias admittedly offer more on Plato’s critique of different
570 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

Furthermore, the paper contributes to the Phaedo itself and the question of whether
philosophers are hedonists or not by focussing on their intellectual pleasures and pains
in passages that have not been considered for solving this problem so far, surprising
though this may be. Lovers of learning will prove to be not aiming at the finest possible
pleasures, namely intellectual pleasures as the good, nor will they be caught up conducting
a hedonistic calculus for the sake of indulging into the greatest possible intellectual
pleasure; they will not consider intellectual pains as bad in themselves either and as
such to be avoided. That said, intellectual distress can bring about devastating
consequences and impede learning activities, especially when it gives rise to intellectual
depression, such as that into which Socrates’ fellows except for Simmias and Cebes
fell. In this respect, intellectual pain can be contaminating. This is not a worry of
contaminating as tying to the bodily realm, as the case is with bodily pleasures and
pains, but as interrupting the activity that the lover of learning should be focussing on.
In the first section (A.), I will analyse Socrates’ initial example of pleasure and
suggest cautiously what we can conclude about that example: it is an example of bodily
pleasure that is necessarily related to pain. Then I will turn to the pleasures of learning
(B.). After focussing on the kind of his own and his fellows’ intellectual pleasures (B.i.),
I will prove that those pleasures are pure (B.ii.). For they are not cessations of their
opposite pains. Purity of the philosophers’ pleasures of learning does not mean that
intellectual pain is absent in their intellectual undertakings, though. The philosophers’
learning adventures, as Socrates’ autobiography implies, are not free from pain. What
distinguishes the philosophers from other learners, besides the purity of intellectual
pleasures and their taking pleasure in all possible learning acts, is their own particular
attitude to both pleasure and pain related to learning. They pursue knowledge and
truth irrespective of whether pleasure or pain accompanies this pursuit, and they will
not aim at pleasure or shun from pain, but welcome the former and successfully alleviate
the latter or endure it courageously and for the sake of learning. In the last part (B.iii.),
I will further delve into the philosophers’ attitude toward intellectual pain, this time the
pain of other lovers of learning. The analysis of the misology passage (88c1–91c5) will
bring up even more strongly that what is continuous in the philosophers’ endeavour is
not their pleasure but their appropriate attitude toward intellectual pleasure and pain.

PLEASURES OF LEARNING AS PURE OF PAIN

A. A significant example of bodily pleasure

Nowhere in the Phaedo do we find an analysis of bodily pleasure, but we do encounter a
significant example of such a pleasure at the very beginning of the narrative.17 Socrates,
after being released from his fetters, wonders at the phenomenon of what people call
pleasure:

types of hedonism than on his critical analysis of pleasure, we can also draw conclusions about the
latter aspect of the Platonic project.
17
Crucial topics are frequently introduced at the beginning of Platonic dialogues. That said, we
should not overstrain our interpretation by expecting initial statements to be more than hints at
what comes up later and even less the philosopher’s last word. Given that the dialogue does not
analyse bodily pleasures, we should be treading carefully. Gosling and Taylor (n. 7), 86 are right
on this.
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 571

How strange does it seem to be what people call pleasant, he said, my friends! How remarkable
is its relation to what seems to be its opposite, namely what is painful! They are not willing to be
present in us, both at the same time, but if one pursues one of them and grasps it, one is almost
always compelled to grasp the other, too, like two creatures attached to a single head. It seems to
me, he said, that, if Aesop had reflected upon it, he would have composed a fable that god
wanted to change their enmity for friendship, but, because he could not, he fastened their
heads together; because of this, when someone has one of them, then the other follows. This
seems to be happening to me: after pain was caused in my limb owing to the fetter, now
pleasure seems to be following.18

I will focus on two questions that are relevant to my purposes: what it means to say that
pleasure and pain are not willing to visit us simultaneously and what it means to say that
those two are inseparably connected if not—at least in this context—as simultaneously
interdependent. I think that, in order to give the right answers to both questions, we need
to understand Socrates as not referring to all (kinds of) pleasure, as he clearly indicates
by speaking of what people call pleasure. Instead of referring to all pleasure, I take
Socrates to be referring to a particular type of pleasure, including the pleasure he
feels in his limbs after the release from the fetters, namely bodily pleasure.19
Therefore, the scope is not so broad as to include all pleasures nor so narrow as to be
restricted to nothing but the particular bodily pleasure that Socrates is experiencing now.
Regarding the first question about the meaning of the assertion ‘pleasure and pain are
not willing to be present in us, both at the same time’: what I take Socrates to be hinting
at without developing20 is that the principle of non-contradiction is not violated, given
that pleasure and pain are opposites. He is not saying that pleasure and pain never occur
simultaneously in us, full stop, but he is making an incomplete statement about pleasure
and pain as opposites. He could have said that they never emerge at the same time in the
same place (or in the same part in us), in the same respect and with reference to the same
object.
Plato cannot intend Socrates to mean that any kind of pleasure and any other kind of
pain cannot co-exist in a single subject, which would contradict our most common
experiences: it is possible that pleasure and pain are forced to be simultaneous, even
if not willing, to build on their personification, as long as they have different objects:
we can have an unfamiliar mixture of pleasure and pain, as in the Phaedo: on the
one hand, pleasure in doing philosophy; on the other hand, the anticipatory emotional
pain owing to the subsequent loss of a friend and teacher.21
Another possible kind of simultaneous pleasure and pain is the pleasure of eating that
we experience while still suffering the pain of hunger. Also in this case the pleasure and
the pain concern different objects, so contradiction is avoided: we feel pain during and

18
Phd. 60b3–c7.
19
This is confirmed by further reference in 64d3. What people call pleasure is what appears to be
pleasure to them: consider φαίνεσθαι in 60c7 and my comments in the main text, which is not real
pleasure. Τὸ καλούμενον or τὸ λεγόμενον sometimes neutrally means ‘what is called’ and sometimes
attains the undertone of negative evaluation and means ‘the so-called’. In 60b4 and 64d3 we have the
latter meaning and the underpinning opposition is between appearance and reality. Although the
Phaedo does not analyse bodily pleasures as one type of pleasure among the ones mixed with
pain, it shares this understanding of bodily pleasures as mixed with pain with the Philebus, as I
hope to show.
20
For a full articulation of the principle of non-contradiction, if compared with the Republic’s (see
436b), we would need not only the factor of the same time but also the factors of the same place (or
the same part in which something happens), the same respect and the reference to the same thing.
21
Phd. 59a1–7.
572 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

because of the process of disintegration of the natural state and equilibrium, whereas we
feel pleasure during and owing to the opposite process of restoration. Things can be
more vexed because we can be still hungry while in the process of eating and still thirsty
while drinking and quenching our decreasing thirst. Also in such cases, pleasure and
pain are not caused by the same things: the former arises owing to the increasing
re-establishment of the organism’s equilibrium, while the latter is caused by the still
remaining disintegration of the same equilibrium, which is gradually diminishing and
will vanish when the natural equilibrium is completely re-established. What is mixed
here is a diminishing pain and an increasing pleasure.22
Things can be further complicated because it is the soul that feels pleasure related to
bodily processes, and so we can have pain owing to bodily disintegration, and at the
same time pleasure of anticipation of the opposite process, whenever we anticipate
the future release from pain. This combination—a subtlety that is not worked out in
the Phaedo—is possible because we have a soul’s pleasure simultaneous with a pain
originating in the body.
Let us now turn to the second question and try to understand the inseparability of
pleasure and pain focussed on in this context. Also for this undertaking I would suggest
a bit of caution: Socrates maintains that when one—not he himself—pursues a certain
kind of pleasure—for, admittedly, no one will aim at pain—one will inevitably get the
rest of the ‘package’, namely pain: σχεδόν τι ἀναγκάζεσθαι ἀεὶ λαμβάνειν καὶ τὸ
ἕτερον.23 I read nothing more and nothing less than this view in these lines. What
does this statement mean?
From the nothing more, Socrates does not draw the general conclusion that bodily
pleasures and pains are experienced in continuous alternation. That cannot be the
case for at least three reasons. First, the Greek σχεδόν τι is a restriction. Second,
pleasure necessarily following pain and pleasure that is bound to be followed by pain
would contradict our—admittedly not too frequent—experience of prolonged episodes
of pleasure or pain without interruption from the opposite state.
Moreover, such a generalization would overlook the intermediary neutral state
between pleasure and pain. In both the Republic and the Philebus, Socrates introduces
such a state and, in this way, corrects the logical flaw of those who believe that pleasure
should be defined as cessation of pain, because they overlook the reality of the
intermediate state which is neither pleasant nor painful, and which, depending on the
comparison to the painful or the pleasant state, sometimes appears to be and is called
pleasant and at other times painful. In the Phaedo, there is no argumentative support
for the rejection of the intermediary state,24 and there is more than an argument

22
Socrates entertains the possibility of suchlike simultaneous pain and pleasure in Grg. 496c–497d,
in which he argues against the Calliclean identification of pleasure with the good and pain with the
bad respectively. This is no contradiction to the Phaedo passage if we read it in my way. I am
thankful to Devin Henry and Nicholas Smith for pressing me on the question of compatibility.
23
σχεδόν τι is a qualification (see Phd. 59a8). It is not always that pain follows pleasure and vice
versa but pretty much always. I agree with the translations by T. Ebert, Platon: Phaidon (Göttingen,
2004) (‘so gut wie immer gezwungen …’), H.N. Fowler, Plato with an English Translation:
Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus (Cambridge, Mass., 1990) (‘generally obliged to’),
R. Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedo (New York, 1952) (‘practically compelled to …’). D. Gallop, Plato:
Phaedo (Oxford, 1975), does not capture this detail in his translation, I think: ‘always pretty well
bound to …’. C. Rowe, Plato: Phaedo (Cambridge, 1993), 117 comments helpfully and spot–on.
24
Socrates does not refer to the opposites of pleasure and pain in the first argument for the soul’s
immortality, which would show, one might think, that pain follows pleasure and pleasure follows pain.
But another option is also possible: instead of speaking of the process from the pleasant to the painful
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 573

ex silentio, namely a hint in our passage that corroborates the assumption of the
intermediary state in the Phaedo and that pleasure-follows-pain-follows-pleasure is
not the entire story. Socrates says that the release from the fetters appears to be pleasant,
a formulation which invites us to ask the question: is Socrates’ present state really pleasant?
For it could be simply the cessation of the earlier pain, and thus a neutral state—neither
pleasant nor painful in itself—that seems to be pleasant only when compared to the
previous pain. By now it is clear that the example itself does not exemplify the general
account that bodily pleasure necessarily follows pain, the latter of which is going to be
followed by pleasure.
As for the nothing less, the question becomes more pressing: what is the view then,
for the exemplification of which Socrates gives his example? I think it is the following:
there is some kind of pleasure that is inseparably and in its own nature—that is,
necessarily—connected with pain. Thus the necessity is a logical necessity and does
not refer to the particular sequel of pleasure-pain-pleasure-pain but to this pleasure’s
inseparability from pain owing to its own nature.25 Satisfying the need and experiencing
the pleasure bring about the opposite, depletion, whose satisfaction reinstates the
original depletion and reactivates, if not intensifies, the initial desire for satisfaction:
despite the intermezzos of some fleeting moments of peace, war prevails, and under
certain circumstances we can be caught in a vicious Sisyphean or incurable
Calliclean circle. Therefore, we are chained not only to pain but also to this predictable
repetition of never-completing and never-ceasing cycles of depletion and restoration.
Only death completes, or rather puts a full stop to, this repetitive process. The situation
can become even worse. False perspectives of pleasure can leave us unaware of where
we are in the ongoing process, whether we are in pleasure or in pain.

B.i. Lovers of learning at work. The kind of Socrates’ and his fellows’ intellectual
pleasures
According to the dualistic framework of the dialogue and the division into body and
intellect, I will turn from Socrates’ statements about the type of bodily pleasure,
which, though inferior, is evaluated by the many as what real pleasure is, to Socrates’
intellectual pleasures during his early adventures and in his current exchange with his
friends. For he paradigmatically exemplifies Plato’s philosophers as lovers of learning
and experiences the respective pleasures. Though the companions around his deathbed
have not progressed as far as he has with respect to the current topic of discussion, they

and the other way around, Socrates could have spoken of a transition from the more pleasant to the
more painful and vice versa, using comparatives, and he could have implicitly accommodated the
intermediate state between pain and pleasure, as in the cases of the smaller and the larger (70e7),
the stronger and the weaker (71a3–4), and the more just and the less just (71a6).
25
Having put the Socratic claims into the right perspective, I do not read any gaps between the
lines and I am left with no mystery in Socrates’ words, pace Gallop (n. 23), 77: ‘the alleged
inseparability of pleasure from pain seems a curious moral for Socrates to draw from the state of
his leg.’ Readings like Gallop’s do no justice to how Plato writes the introductory passages. Also
consider D. Frede’s critical comments of Gallop’s interpretation in her Platons Phaidon
(Darmstadt, 1999), 13 n. 8.
574 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

too are philosophers and, therefore, their affective states will be taken into account.26 In
this way, we will extract a lot about their nature and relation to pain.27
Before turning to those pleasures’ relation to pain, we need to gain some precision
about the kind of intellectual pleasures that they are. Socrates clearly speaks of the
pleasures of learning, those of our coming from not knowing to knowing something,
at 114d3. Also at 97c he says that he was delighted with intellect as the cause of
everything according to what Anaxagoras announced in his book, which is implicitly
a pleasure of learning and a true one, as it is dependent on the truth that intellect is
the cause of everything. Immediately afterwards (97d), he says that he was glad to
have found a teacher, and, in this way, registers his pleasure of becoming a pupil.
This pleasure was distinct from, but coincided in time with, an anticipated pleasure of
learning, for Socrates is someone who does not take pleasure in becoming a student
for the sake of merely becoming a student or in order to partake in the fame that his
teacher might be enjoying, but so as to learn on his teacher’s side. If this is so,
Socrates was simultaneously pleased that he would learn what he was looking for.
Reconstructed as such, this anticipated pleasure of learning of his was false: although
he did learn about material causation, his anticipation that he should become acquainted
with the specifics of the intellect’s causality remained unfulfilled.
There is an additional hint at further Socratic intellectual pleasure: at 99c, when he
says that he would gladly become a pupil of the teacher who is able to meet the
challenges of his predecessors and contemporaries and is knowledgeable about
teleology in nature, his anticipated pleasure of learning is similarly implied as temporarily
coinciding with his also anticipated pleasure of becoming a pupil. Irrespectively of
whether this pleasure would be fulfilled in the future or not, it is a true pleasure. In the
case of meeting that teacher, Socrates would have had a true anticipated pleasure of
learning. For the teacher possessing that knowledge would be able to successfully transmit
it to a pupil so apt for learning such as Socrates. Indeed, Socrates met this teacher in
Plato’s literary imagination. It was one of Plato’s characters, namely Timaeus in the
homonymous dialogue, who narrates to Socrates and to other distinguished fellows
how the divine intellect created the universe. Even in the case that such a meeting
would not occur, Socrates’ past anticipatory pleasure would not have been false in
retrospect, though unfulfilled, as Socrates was not pleased that he would meet that
meticulous teacher but he would be pleased if the meeting occurred.
As for the current common investigation in the Phaedo, Socrates does not deprive the
intellectual activity of giving and taking reasons of affectivity either, and in particular of
pleasure. He is pleased when he and his companions exchange their accounts, and is
also pleased to listen to Cebes’ objection to his argument for the philosophers’ readiness

26
Socrates distinguishes between the majority of people and philosophers, and makes clear at the
very beginning that he and his fellows will be among themselves (πρὸς ἡμᾶς) and the majority of
people who are not characterized by the love of learning are excluded (64b7–c3). Therefore, all
present interlocutors are philosophers irrespectively of where they stand with respect to knowledge.
27
These are the appropriate passages on which to base positive claims for the philosophers’ attitude
to pleasure, whereas it is methodologically inappropriate to exclusively focus on the sections that
present the hedonistic calculus that can offer nothing but thin evidence for any positive claims
about any alleged openness of the philosophers’ undertaking as in a way hedonistic. Would Plato
embrace any kind of hedonism, the philosophers would delve into their measuring business of
comparing pains and pleasures—the pain of the disappointment and the anticipatory pleasure of future
progress—but there is not a single trace of such a hedonistic comparison in Socrates’ autobiography
and his exchange with his students. Learning is pleasant to the philosopher, because learning is
pleasant in its own nature.
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 575

to die (62e). When Cebes invites him to return to the point where they had left the proof
of the soul’s immortality after the exposition of the first two proofs, asking whether that
would please him, Socrates affirms the pleasure and asks Cebes what else—other than
his being pleased—he could have expected.28 The pleasures of examining arguments
with others and teaching as sharing what Socrates has been acquainted with pervades
the exchange. With his encouragement, Socrates’ companions partake in the pleasure
of engaging in philosophical arguments.29
The above intellectual pleasures do not exclusively involve pleasures of learning
strictly speaking, that is, of turning from not-knowing to knowing something, but,
more broadly, pleasures accompanying intellectual activities related to learning, like
the activities of examining arguments together with others and of teaching. Although
all three aspects of learning, examining and teaching are essential parts of dialectic
and provide distinct pleasures,30 Socrates mentions only the pleasures of learning as
representing all relevant pleasures, a preference that makes sense because what it
means to be a genuine philosopher is to love to learn (φιλομαθής),31 as the desire to
learn is what characterizes him above all. For to apply acquired knowledge in new
contexts and to challenge the soundness of arguments provide a philosopher with
new pleasures of relearning. As for those pleasures’ temporal orientation, they are not
only experienced as occurring in the present moment but also currently remembered
as having occurred in the past or presently anticipated to take place in the immediate
or remote future.

B.ii. The presence of intellectual pains: a threat to the purity of the philosophers’
pleasures of learning?
We now need to consider any relevant intellectual pains that emerge, and, if they do, to
examine whether they turn the philosophers’ pleasures of learning into impure ones.
There are two moments that disrupt Socrates’ pervasive cheerfulness, both of them in
his initial intellectual adventures. The first moment is when he says that the natural
philosophers’ methods, with which he initially became familiar, and which dealt with
a series of puzzles related to growth, made him intensely blind.32 Blinding, when
meant literally, is associated with the painfulness caused by a fatal accident or with
the subsequent emotional pain related to the loss of sight as the most precious sense.
Here blinding is a metaphor. After spelling out what blindness and blinding stand for
in other contexts, I will pin down the pain Socrates points to and the particular
epistemic status that this pain affects. For pain should not be excluded from the picture
and this metaphor has always epistemological reference.

28
Phd. 78a10–b1.
29
There are more kinds of pleasure beyond the bodily and the intellectual ones in the Phaedo.
His pleasures include the anticipatory emotional pleasure based on his hope regarding the afterlife
(68a–b). After the completion of the proofs, Simmias says twice that he would pleasantly listen to
his account of the afterlife (108d3, 110b4). The real pleasures of learning, though, would accompany
a long-winded investigation into the truth of the final myth.
30
For the three aspects of dialectic and any craft in general (μανθάνειν, σκοπεῖν, διδάσκειν), see
Phlb. 17.
31
φιλόσοφοι and φιλομαθεῖς are two terms that Socrates uses interchangeably in his speech of
defence in the Phaedo.
32
‘For I was made so intensely blind by this investigation even to what I clearly knew before, as it
seemed to me and others, that I unlearned even what I thought I knew before, about many other things
and in particular about why human beings grow’ (96c3–7).
576 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

To Plato, people are like blind when deprived of knowledge about anything, that is,
the knowledge of the particular forms in which anything participates.33 In this case, their
opinions, even when sometimes true, are not firmly grounded in knowledge, and are
also, metaphorically speaking, blind.34 Not surprisingly, those people easily change
their views and wander without practising any method of enquiry.35 Given that
frequently Plato draws the analogy between the soul’s capacity of understanding and
the eyes’ capacity of sight,36 to blind the soul means to prevent the soul’s capacity
from functioning properly. This obstruction could be temporary or permanent.
Short-term deeming and blinding occur in the case of transitions: when the soul is all
of a sudden directed from its familiar dwelling to a new and unfamiliar dwelling; or
from the realm of forms to the realm of the sensible things or the other way round.37
Irrespectively of objects and focal concerns, a momentary disturbance and even
impairment of the soul’s capacity to understand happens when the soul turns from greater
ignorance that darkness represents into what is brighter, that is, into knowledge.
Importantly, strong pain emerges during this transition as it does during its opposite.38
For the capacity of sight needs some time to adjust to the object or realm it newly
turns to, be it the brighter or the darker. Lasting obstruction and even damage of the
particular capacity of the soul can be caused when people in their activities and engagements
attend exclusively to the dark field of what comes into being and perishes.39
Turning to Socrates’ becoming blind in our context: he introduces his initial state of
confusion as due to frequent changes in his views (ἄνω κάτω μετέβαλλον, 96b1), which
indicates that he has not yet attained firm knowledge, before describing his being
intensely blinded (σφόδρα ἐτυφλώθην, 96c5) by the natural philosophers’ methods.
The enquiry was about the explanation of growth and Socrates admits his lacking
knowledge of the causes for all sorts of quantitative changes ranging from growth in

33
See Resp. 484c (οἱ τοῦ ὄντος ἑκάστου ἐστερημένοι τῆς γνώσεως) and 508c–d for the comparison
of turning the eyes to darkness, which will make them deem, and turning the focus of the soul to the dark
realm of becoming, which will result in its being deem and easily changing its judgements.
34
See Resp. 506c.
35
Phdr. 270d–e. Consider the comparison of the instability of opinions to the statues of Daedalus
in Euthphr. 11b–c and 15b–c, and Meno 97d–e, and furthermore the passage that clearly speaks of
pleasure taken in being defeated, namely Grg. 458a–b. An anonymous referee pointed to the important
distinction between a) having an argument for your view defeated, but you have others up your sleeve,
and b) having your view defeated and you would not know how to save it. Socrates in the Phaedo is in
the former state, but it would be difficult to see why a philosopher would take pleasure in b) and not
instead be fretting and distressed. The way in which I answer the referee’s question is that b) is
complex. There is a learning that one does not really know what he thought one knew, which will
always be pleasant to a lover of learning, such as Socrates (see the above passage in the Gorgias
and the explanation in the Meno), and a knowing that one does not (yet) know that is painful.
What will further distinguish the philosopher from a non-philosopher will be how the former deals
with the pain so that it does not block the further intellectual investigation. See later in the main text.
36
This happens paradigmatically in the sun analogy in the Republic (506b–509b).
37
On the sight’s impairment for both transitions, see Resp. 516e–517a. The pain involved here is
not merely on the level of epistemology. For in the allegory of the cave, one turns from one world, in
which one has lived, which one has taken for real, and to which one has been accustomed, to another.
38
Consider the allegory of the cave, especially at 515c, 515e (ἀλγεῖν, ὀδυνᾶσθαι) and 516e
(ἀμβλυώττειν), 518a6–7.
39
The soul can be purified and rekindled through the pursuit of astronomy, or be damaged and
blinded if getting engaged with other subjects. Compare the second occurrence of becoming blind,
Phd. 99e, when Socrates begins to narrate his second voyage. He speaks of the lurking danger that
his soul would be blinded if relying only on its senses. For it would become deprived of the only
reality, namely the reality of the forms.
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 577

bodies to increase and decrease in numbers.40 For his puzzlement with the latter made
him insecure regarding his alleged knowledge about physical growth with the aid of a
physicalist explanation.41
There is cognitive pain caused by the confusion Socrates is in. It not pleasant to be
perplexed about one’s object of investigation. It is rather painful indeed to be aware of
not being in the state of knowing yet. What causes distress is a second-level knowledge,
which is a knowledge whose object is a first-level ignorance, namely the knowledge that
one does not know (yet). This reflection causes cognitive pain to everyone, including the
extraordinarily talented Socrates, given that he recognizes the importance of this
knowledge.
This pain one takes in knowing that one has not yet attained knowledge, though, is
not all the affectivity that arises on the learner’s path. When blinded, Socrates turned
from double ignorance, that is, the illusion that he knows, to simple ignorance, that
is, the disillusioned awareness that he does not possess the requisite knowledge.42
Turning from lack of knowledge, from not knowing that he does not know, to its
opposite—that is, to the knowledge that he does not know—is an instance of learning.
This learning can bring about pleasure or distress, depending on whether one is a lover
of learning or not. Philosophers, like Socrates, will be pleased at this change, because
they are aware that this transition from double ignorance to simple ignorance is
necessary for the desire to learn and attain knowledge to emerge at all.43 At the end of
his first stage of investigation, Socrates applies a confused method of his own, as he
says, but by then considerable progress has taken place: not only does he not nurture
any illusion that he has knowledge about what he does not know, but he has been also
able to reject one particular way of investigation as erroneous: the physicists’ approach.44
Non-philosophers will be instead at double cognitive pain during the transition from
double ignorance to single ignorance: pained at finding out that they do not possess a
particular knowledge, a distress to which the pain at not knowing yet will be added.
Therefore, the difference between philosophers and non-philosophers is not that the
former will have no cognitive pain when caught up in perplexities, but rather that the
latter will have only cognitive pain and will take no pleasure in the learning that they
do not know as they had thought one knew. This divergence is based on the different
attitude that the philosophers and the non-philosophers have towards their previous
position. For the former recognize the progress and endure the pain of not knowing
yet, whereas the latter’s nostalgia for and fervent desire to return to the bliss of double
ignorance as soon as possible reveals an incapability of grasping the difference of the
two states’ value.

40
For the common nature of this first series of puzzles in Phd. 96a–97b and the Presocratic
materialistic solutions that did not leave Socrates content, see S. Menn, ‘On Socrates’ first objections
to the physicists (Phaedo 95E8–97B7)’, OSAPh 38 (2010), 37–68.
41
He had thought that addition of flesh to flesh explains the increase in the human being’s volume,
but then was caught up in puzzles about addition and division and lost his trust in the initial
explanations: for he wondered, for instance, whether it is the addition of the two things or rather
the one of the things that is added or being added that makes them two, and whether opposite causes
(addition of two things and division of one) can bring about the same result (being two).
42
Beforehand Socrates had taken for granted he knew why human beings grow but he then
unlearned what he knew or, as he corrects, what he had thought he knew (96c).
43
Meno 84b–c is the passage that shows beautifully what the lover of learning is aware of, namely
that the transition from double to simple ignorance is necessary in order to desire to learn.
44
τιν’ ἄλλον τρόπον αὐτὸς εἰκῇ φύρω (97b6–7).
578 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

The threat for the purity of pleasure of this particular learning can be easily
dismantled given my understanding of pure pleasures and the above analysis of the
affectivity that accompanies the transitional cognitive state. For one was not in pain
when lacking this second-order knowledge of one’s ignorance and so the pleasure of
learning that one does not know is not the cessation of the opposite respective pain.
Moreover, the cognitive pleasure and pain I detected are not opposites, but refer to
different objects and causes. The pain is caused by knowing that one does not know
yet, which means that it arises when one compares the present and the possible future
state, whereas the pleasure is brought up by learning that one does not know what
one thought one knew and refers to the transition from the past double ignorance to
the present state of single ignorance.
There is a further moment of pain to be scrutinized. I have already referred to
Socrates’ delight to hear that Anaxagoras had recognized intelligence as the cause of
everything (97c1), as he expected Anaxagoras to go beyond his fellow Presocratics
and to give a teleological explanation for the workings of cosmic intelligence.
Socrates narrates in detail the riddles that he pleasantly expected Anaxagoras to solve
by explaining, among other things, the shape of the earth and its being situated in the
middle of the universe,45 and then adds what happened to those expectations of his:

… but, after getting hold of the books in all haste, I read them as quickly as I could in order to
attain the knowledge as quickly as possible of what was best and what is worst. And then, my
friend, I came hurtling down from a marvelous hope.46

For, Socrates explains, Anaxagoras introduces but makes no use of intelligence as a

cause, and, to make matters worse, mistakes material necessary conditions for the
true and only causes. Socrates’ hopes have been left unfulfilled and he has not attained
the knowledge he had expected. This intellectual pain does not contaminate the
pleasures of learning, because we had none of those in reality but only an anticipated
pleasure of learning.
Before embarking into the narrative of the second intellectual voyage about the
Platonic forms as formal causes, Socrates says:47

I would gladly become the disciple of anybody whatsoever about the nature of that kind of
cause; but because I was deprived of it (ἐστερήθην) and was neither able to discover it myself
nor to learn it from anyone else, do you wish me to give an exposition, Cebes, of the second
sailing about the search for the cause as I have been engaged therein?

Socrates is clearly aware of his lack of knowledge, the acquaintance with which he has
considered to be very important.48 Therefore, there arises intellectual pain, though not
made explicit. Instead of expressing any distress or letting the cognitive pain transform
into despair owing to the persisting puzzlement and prevailing confusion,49 Socrates

45
ἐπεκδιηγήσεσθαι τὴν αἰτίαν καὶ τὴν ἀνάγκην (Phd. 97e1–2): consider the repeated occurrence
of that verb in the very next lines (97e3–4 and 98b3), which highlights that the explanatory account
needed is a story to be narrated about how intelligence has ordered everything in the best possible
way, postponed to the Timaeus.
46
98b4–7.
47
99c6–d2.
48
The two conditions for the emergence of pain, as Warren (n. 6) describes them based on
Protarchus’ contribution in the Phlb. 52a–b, are fulfilled.
49
To draw from the pleasures of anticipation of the Philebus would complicate things unnecessarily.
And I think that we should not do so, because those pleasures are confined to bodily processes of
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 579

diverts his attention from the existing affection of intellectual pain to another passion, an
intellectual pleasure. He joyfully anticipates the future opportunity to become the
student of anyone who can meet the challenge that the Presocratics could not: specifically,
to successfully expose teleology in natural philosophy (99c). Again, what matters to my
purpose, since it is once again proven that the philosopher does not escape intellectual
pain, is that this pain does not pose any threat to any pleasure of learning, because
there is no such pleasure taking place now. Moreover, what distinguishes Socrates is
that he offers himself a therapy of this pain by diverting his attention to the prospective
pleasure.
This attitude toward pain is not grounded in any subtle therapy of emotions but in the
insight of how knowledge gradually evolves and accumulates in the history of philosophy,
in which Socrates situates himself. Plato the writer, who narrates a bit of the history of
Western philosophy in his rendering of Socrates’ autobiography, starting with the
Presocratics and ending with his own contribution of the theory of forms as causes,
is very well aware of this gradual and continuous progression and of his contribution.
As the testimony of Socrates shows, a Socrates who was initially attracted by
Presocratic wisdom before turning the page to Plato’s theory of forms50 does not
exemplify a straightforward progress. Proposals are made and challenges are raised,
as with the teleological explanation of the physical world, that are not to be met in
the very next turn; the situation becomes more complex because problems that were
to be solved are postponed, as in Socrates’ second voyage, and others developed instead.
When one philosopher thinks to have met the particular challenges of his predecessors,
like Plato in his Timaeus, another one, in this case Aristotle, will raise further challenges
that he thinks have not been satisfied. And so the never-ending dialogue will be further
nurtured and the history of philosophy will further develop. Because the development is
not a straight line, and also because Socrates is aware of how successful pain can be in
impeding or even blocking intellectual endeavours, he has a good reason in diverting his
attention from the present intellectual pain to another, future pleasure of learning. The
pleasure of learning that Socrates anticipates in the Phaedo and will experience, at
least as dramatis persona, when listening to the Timaean physics, will not be impure.
In anticipation of the future pleasure, he does not say that it will consist in the cessation
of the pain caused by the dashing of his hopes.

B.iii. Dealing with and curing the intellectual pain of other lovers of learning: the
methodological interlude on misology51
Socrates does not aim at the finest kind of pleasure, namely intellectual delight, as the
good but rather as something good as accompanying the attainment of truth and

disintegration and restoration and do not provide the model for all anticipatory pleasures, including the
pleasures of attaining knowledge.
50
The line of argument does not rest on whether Socrates introduces heavy-duty forms in the
second voyage or not, a point that is debated in research.
51
Except for in the commentaries of the Phaedo, researchers have not focussed on the misology
passage. Exceptions are R. Woolf, ‘Misology and truth’, Proceedings of the Boston Area
Colloquium for Ancient Philosophy 23 (2007), 1–16 and T. Miller, ‘Socrates’ warning against
misology’, Phronesis 60 (2015), 145–79. Woolf begins with the passage on misology to ask about
the value of truth the philosopher strives for. Against the communis opinio, Miller detects Plato’s
subtle sympathy to the misologists as proto-sceptics. For my part, I focus on how Socrates cured
his companions of their depression.
580 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

knowledge. He does not avoid intellectual pains as something bad in themselves either,
and he accepts them as being an inevitable part of the broader intellectual adventures,
though no part of the acts of learning themselves, in any case not for the lovers of
learning. Because he is aware of the detrimental influence that intense intellectual
pains may exert on the investigation itself, he knows how to adequately treat them,
by deviating his attention from them, for instance, and by directing it to anticipated
pleasures of attaining the respective knowledge instead.
Socrates is the doctor and the patient for this therapy: the alleviation of pain for the
sake of continuing the intellectual undertaking. This is not only a self-therapy and he is
not the only patient, though; he is also proven to be able to cure other philosophers’
intellectual pain when its intensity jeopardizes the progress and the very continuation
of the intellectual endeavour. Such therapy takes place when Simmias and Cebes
introduce their two objections (85b9–88b8), themselves being in a state of perplexity
(aporia, 84c9, 84d5, 85c1) and immense distress.52 For the three proofs have not yet
established firm knowledge, and, therefore, doubt and lack of trust (ἀπιστία, 86e5) in
the past arguments prevail. All other companions who had been persuaded too well
by the three antecedent proofs, especially the last, fall into despair after Simmias and
Cebes articulate their objections:

When we all heard what they said, we fell into depression (ἀηδῶς διετέθημεν), as we later said
to one another. For after we had been persuaded too well (σφόδρα πεπεισμένους) by the
antecedent argument, they seemed to confound us again and throw us into distrust not only
about the previous arguments but also about what we are going to say afterwards, lest we are
worthy judges of anything or the things themselves are unreliable (ἄπιστα).53

Despair goes far beyond and more deeply than the current pain that Cebes and Simmias
have expressed. For the others’ doubt does not affect only the previous arguments but is
generalized and projected to all future arguments and possible topics: they fear either
being proven to be worthless judges of any topic, or the particular topic—the immortality
of the soul—being incapable of admitting any certainty at all.
This means that past, present and future are painted black, and intellectual depression
enters the scene and threatens to prevail. Socrates is far from showing any signs of
distress in that context; instead of being disquieted, he receives the Thebans’ dissenting
accounts with pleasure because they are alert, not willing to accept the proofs as true
without further ado, and able to thoroughly examine the arguments.54 Moreover, he
manages to cure his other companions of the state of despair through his account of
misology (88c–91c), and encourages them to patiently examine any given account, as
Simmias and Cebes have done, instead of overenthusiastically surrendering themselves
to arguments without scrutinizing them. In this way, Socrates, like an experienced
therapist, successfully turns their attention to the common investigation of the accounts
for the sake of truth, and succeeds in lifting up the spirits by transferring his joyful
attitude regarding the examination of the arguments to everyone.55

52
Socrates asks Cebes what troubles him (literally what breaks him in pieces: τί ἦν τὸ σὲ αὖ
θρᾶττον;). There is absolutely no doubt that the two objectors are in a state of pain.
53
88c1–7. Because ἀηδῶς διετέθημεν (88c1–2) means much more than an unpleasant state, as the
sequence of 88c4–7 reveals, I translate it ‘fell into depression’.
54
Socrates’ reaction is characterized by pleasure and mildness, and not distress (88e1–2).
55
I take Socrates and Plato to consider the final argument as sufficiently proving the immortality of
the soul, following D. Frede, ‘The final proof of the immortality of the soul in Plato’s Phaedo
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 581

What Socrates suggests in order to help his companions overcome their despair is
caution (εὐλάβεια)56 about the worst possible evil that can afflict someone, that is,
the hatred of arguments (μισολογία). The genesis of the disease he describes as follows:

It would be pitiable, Phaedo, he said, if someone, though there were an argument, true and
certain and capable of being understood, because of encountering some suchlike arguments
[reference to ἀντιλογικοὶ λόγοι, 90c1] that appear to the same people sometimes as true but
other times not, would not accuse himself or herself nor his or her lack of skill, but owing to
being in pain would end up gladly shifting the blame from him or herself to the arguments
and would spend the rest of life hating and accusing arguments, and would be deprived of
(στερηθείη) the truth and knowledge of beings.57

The above fellows have been misled to think that no argument has any soundness or
certainty, and—following the thought to the very end—that no object of enquiry is
reliable, a conclusion that can—in its generalized form and concerning all arguments—be
drawn when many consecutive disappointments about particular arguments are
experienced, which, though initially thought to be true, turn out to seem or be false
on closer inspection. For having experienced pain many times owing to suchlike
disappointments, they try to relieve the pain. Apparently, they take pleasure to be
identified with the cessation of pain, without even reflecting on it, given that instinctively
they try to deviate from their pain: because they are in pain (διὰ τὸ ἀλγεῖν), instead of
blaming themselves and hating themselves, which would establish and deepen their
pain, they shift the blame from themselves and their lack of skill with arguments to the
arguments themselves that take on the role of a scapegoat. And this they do gladly.
For to flee and be freed from the consecutive pains they had experienced seems to be
pleasant to them.
Unaware of their unhealthy state, the afflicted end up thinking that all arguments are
unhealthy and unreliable for the rest of their lives. What makes matters even worse is
that the disease of misology is all-pervasive. It permeates all subsequent levels and
relationships. Following their teachers of sophistry and eristics, the diseased nurture a
distorted self-image with regard to knowledge: according to this perception, they are
the wisest (σοφώτατοι, 90c2) as the only that have reached the alleged truth that all
arguments are unsound and unreliable and all beings and reality are unstable and
fluctuating up and down like in flux.58 Lacking self-knowledge, they are far from
being able to situate themselves epistemically between ignorance and knowledge. In
reality, truth and knowledge of being escape them, of which they are not aware.

102a–107a’, Phronesis 23 (1978), 27–41 and D. Sedley, ‘The Phaedo’s final proof of immortality’,
in G. Cornelli, T.M. Robinson and F. Bravo (edd.), Plato’s Phaedo (Sankt Augustin, 2018), 212–22.
Accordingly, the pleasure Socrates has is well rooted in his having attained the truth. If Socrates would
not avail of a valid and sound argument, he would not express contentment, but would be in cognitive
pain about this lack of knowledge, as Simmias and Cebes were and any lover of learning would be
who does not yet possess knowledge. None the less, he would not be depressed and would try instead
to alleviate or distract from the pain so as to further foster his enquiry and not give up.
56
See 89c11, 90d9, 91c3.
57
90c8–d7.
58
Miller (n. 51) is subtler than the text can bear when it comes to the evidence he wishes to find
about Plato’s sympathy to the ones engaged with ἀντιλογικοὶ λόγοι. Despite the reminiscence to the
Heraclitean ‘flux’ view, it is not the sensible world that is in flux in 90c4–6: no mention is made of
γένεσις / γιγνόμενα but of ὄντα. Therefore, the μόνοι in 90c2 cannot be implying Plato’s agreement
(so Miller [n. 51], 160). Plato simply repudiates the so-called wisdom (σοφώτατοι) they boast to
possess and their lack of self-knowledge.
582 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

Therefore, they are condemned to double ignorance,59 and there is no intellectual pain
felt in their state. Furthermore, the relation they develop toward their dialogue partners
does not show signs of health either. Motivated by their love of honour, and not by love
of wisdom, they are merely interested in winning the argument in order to either
persuade the listener or defeat the opponent, irrespectively of whether the argument is
sound and the view is right.
Socrates’ companions pondered whether they might be unable to evaluate and judge
any topic or whether the things themselves are unreliable (88c6), which clearly indicates
that they have not been irrevocably afflicted by that all-pervasive disease. For their first
thought amounts to a generalization but of another sort: it affects the depressed persons,
in our case intellectually depressed persons, who doubt their own capacity to judge
anything, whereas the misologists’ generalization concerns all arguments and not
their capability, of which they think very highly. And their second pondering concerns
the particular topic of soul’s immortality and not all possible topics. This being said,
their being struck by despair after the Thebans’ objections is a state that can pave the
way, if strengthened by repetition, toward misology. Therefore, when analyzing the
worst evil of misology, Socrates is not making a diagnosis about his companions’
disease, but explains how their current state of despair can be conducive to the disease
of misology and is not only treating their current state but also providing preventive
medicine by giving them helpful advice on how to take care of their souls in the future
and after he drinks the hemlock and is unable to advise them in person.
The Socratic therapy is not affective but rational and as such influencing affectivity.
For to cure his friends’ immense pain, Socrates does not propose another kind of
affection to replace the emotion of despair they are currently suffering from,60 but
encourages their alertness so that the worst evil of misology is avoided. Instead of
considering the arguments to be a kind of scapegoat, they should center on themselves
and hold their lack of health responsible. Instead of being in a depressed state and
thinking that they are incapable of judging anything, as his fellows did a while ago,
Socrates urges them to take courage and show eagerness to cure themselves
(ἀνδριστέον καὶ προθυμητέον ὑγιῶς ἔχειν, 90e3). The need of exemplifying courage
manifests itself when there is pain to go through and endure for the sake of the good and
fine, and there is pain, including intellectual distress, when one realizes that one is still
sick and not yet healthy, when one reflects on the fact that one has not attained truth
about the soul’s immortality but falls from enthusiasm to depression.
This is the first step that Socrates exhorts his fellows and anyone threatened by the
‘worst evil’ to take. What Socrates prescribes for the sequence is the development and
exercise of a skill (a technē). All arts are manifestations of rationality as systems of
certain methods and principles. Arguments, accounts and explanations (λόγοι) that
refer to reality or being (τὰ ὄντα, 90c4) make up the field of the recommended art
(περὶ τοὺς λόγους τέχνη), whose opposite is the lack of that skill to deal with
arguments, accounts and explanations about reality (ἄνευ τῆς περὶ τοὺς λόγους
τέχνης, 90b7; ἀτεχνία, 90d3) This is not, therefore, the art of rhetoric—not even an
ideal version as the one introduced in the Phaedrus—that aims at the creation of

59
τῶν δὲ ὄντων τῆς ἀληθείας τε καὶ ἐπιστήμης στερηθείη (90d6–7).
60
If Socrates had considered it to be appropriate, he would have recommended fear of the disease
as an evil that might arise in the future, and would have worked with an emotion against another
emotion. See Phlb. 47e for fear as an emotion of the soul: a kind of pain that, under scrutiny, proves
to be mixed with pleasure.
 P L ATO ’ S P H A E D O 583

good speeches (another meaning of λόγος) but a much more demanding art, the art
which in various Platonic contexts is interchangeably called the art or science of
dialectics and which is opposed to sophistry or eristics.61
The dialecticians or philosophers are the people who have been privileged with a
philosophical education (negated in 91a3, ἀπαίδευτοι), and further nurture a philosophical
disposition (negated in 91a2, οὐ φιλοσόφως ἔχειν). The lovers of wisdom and learning
manifest health on all three levels that the disease permeates in the case of the haters of
arguments. They are characterized by the appropriate attitude to arguments, accounts
and explanations about what is real. For they do not embrace them too hastily nor trust
them all too intensely and before scrutinizing whether they are true or false.
Additionally, they are aware of where they stand regarding knowledge, namely between
double ignorance and divine knowledge, and which pieces of reality they have attained
human knowledge of.62 Their self-awareness does not turn to self-centredness, though:
conscious of their contributions and achievements as well as their failings as they are,
they are able to dissociate themselves from their own selves and their own intellectual
gratification. For they do not feel they must fill their intellectual lack and their mind
here and now, as when affected by their own stomach’s hunger they must fill their own
and no one else’s stomach.
Finally, on the discursive level, misologists and any lovers of honour aim at persuading
others that the view to which they are personally attached is correct: for they wish to
persuade that they are right through this view or its opposite, if they are in the mood
of so doing tomorrow. Their personal attachment might change quickly, but they are
always personally attached to a view or another. Socrates instead intends to persuade
his fellows, but only as a by-work, as a consequence of the soul’s immortality being
true, in this way favouring the realist over the pragmatic concept of truth. He notes
that his primary focus will be the agreement in and with himself (ὅπως αὐτῷ ἐμοὶ
ὅτι μάλιστα δόξει οὕτως ἔχειν, 91a9–92b1), the inner consistency of the final argument
that articulates his soul’s inner dialogue. Aware that his talking about himself and about
how the argument appears to be to himself might be misleading, he adds that his friends
should not be concerned about him but about the truth or falsehood of the argument
itself. For, even when the philosophers’ view has such important consequences so as
to take themselves to be committed to it, they are never self-centred but able to detach
themselves from and be critical to the view they represent.63

61
Though not labelled ‘dialectic’ in the interlude, the art of arguments can be no other than that.
One clear indication is the opposition between the arguments made by the ones possessing that art and
the ones who study contradictory arguments (90b9–c1). For whenever Plato illustrates his view about
the nature of philosophy as dialectic, he always contrasts it to sophistry or eristics, both of which
especially endanger the youth. Moreover, this is strongly confirmed by the later occurrence of the
antilogikoi in contrast to philosophers: 101c9–102a1. For this opposition consider additional
contexts—Resp. 537e–539d and Phlb. 15d–16a—as inappropriate method of dealing with unity
and multiplicity in arguments, before the introduction of dialectic as the successful method
(16b–19b). Thus I cannot agree with Miller that Plato sympathizes with the antilogicians.
62
The art of accounts and arguments is not an art of measuring pleasures aiming at the greatest
possible pleasure and least possible pain. If Plato had wanted to opt for any openness toward hedonism
in the Phaedo, he would have found the way to do so in the passages that positively propose how the
philosopher behaves and learns. But he did not, as he was not a hedonist.
63
Woolf (n. 51), 8 writes about 91a3–91c5: ‘Socrates both advocates a disinterested pursuit of truth
(as the mark of the philosopher) and at the same time admits that he might not be practising what he
preaches. His partisanship threatens to get the better of him.’ I have not opted for the philosophers’
disinterestedness (as it is a love for wisdom and truth) but for the priority of the realist over the
584 GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

CONCLUSIONS

The Socratic narration and the chat with his fellows make it clear that the path of genuine
philosophical learning is never straightforward. That path does contain intellectual pain
but in a different way than the way in which bodily pleasure necessarily involves pain,
as Socrates briefly referred to it in 60b–c. There is plenty of intellectual perplexity and
pain during the long-winded endeavours of the search for knowledge. That said, pain
is never part of any learning act in the case of the lovers of learning, even when they
learn that they do not know what they thought they knew, for instance, when their
argument is defeated.64
What distinguishes the lovers of learning from non-philosophers is their attitude to
intellectual pleasures and pains: we do not catch them comparing pleasures and pains
in order to calculate the greatest intellectual pleasure, for they do not strive for intellectual
pleasure as the only good nor do they avoid intellectual pain as the only bad thing. None
the less, they know very well that intellectual pain can lead to intellectual depression
and can interrupt philosophical investigations. As dialecticians, they are most able to
cure themselves and others, either by diverting the attention to anticipated pleasures in
the case of present intellectual pains or by healing the intellectual depression their
companions suffer from as lovers of learning who are not as experienced in dialectic.

King’s University College and Western University GEORGIA MOUROUTSOU

gmourout@uwo.ca

pragmatic concept of truth, and so I do not detect the tension that Woolf points to. Socrates might be
interested in the victory, but it is truth’s victory.
64
See n. 35 above.
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