Seminar: Plato "The making and unmaking of selfhood"

Derek van Zoonen (University of Oslo)

Tricked by Pleasure: Pleasure and Illusion in Plato's Argument for Asceticism

Abstract

Although there are places in the corpus where Plato’s thoughts about pleasure are rather mild, sometimes even bordering on hedonism, the Phaedo suggests, rather bleakly, that the good life consists in a kind of embodied death—the philosopher actively avoids affective states like appetitive desire and bodily pleasure. Traditionally, this plea for affective detachment (as we might call it) has been understood as a plea for renunciation or asceticism. More recently, though, scholars (such as Woolf and Russell) have argued that the good life just involves metaphorical abstinence from appetitive desires and bodily pleasures. When Plato’s Socrates advocates affective detachment, the thought goes, he merely asks us to ascribe little or no value to the body and its affective states. My aim in this paper is twofold: having first shown that the evaluative reading is both exegetically and philosophically problematic, my next and more important aim is to explain Plato’s defence of renunciation or detachment. This plea for asceticism is not rooted in ressentiment or developed ad or post hoc, I argue, it is cogent, interesting, and tied to Plato’s central views. In what I call the Deception Argument (83b4–e4), Socrates suggests that bodily pleasure deceives us about the reality and clarity of the messy sensible world in which we find ourselves. While experiencing bodily pleasure, we are surreptitiously tricked into erroneously taking the sensible objects involved in our pleasures—the material, visible things around us, including our bodies—for ‘most real and most clear,’ although they are messy and less than fully real.  The philosopher—who structures his life around the attempt to transcend the illusory world of seeming—has no choice, then, but to avoid bodily pleasure. This reading does not just explain Plato’s adherence to some kind of asceticism, it also fits the rest of the Phaedo and Plato’s over-arching hedonic theorizing with no rough edges, and it elucidates other passages in the corpus where a connection is drawn between the experience of pleasure and a mistaken sense of reality. 

More information from Andrea Sangiacomo.