Hedonic Studies. τίς γὰρ ἁδονᾶς ἄτερ θνατῶν βίος ποθεινὸς ἢ ποία τυραννίς; τᾶσδ ἄτερ οὐδὲ θεῶν ζηλωτὸς αἰών. (Simonides fr. 79)

Transcription

1 Hedonic Studies τίς γὰρ ἁδονᾶς ἄτερ θνατῶν βίος ποθεινὸς ἢ ποία τυραννίς; τᾶσδ ἄτερ οὐδὲ θεῶν ζηλωτὸς αἰών. (Simonides fr. 79) Hedonic Studies is a collection of eight essays. Each essay makes a contribution to the broad topic of pleasure in ancient Greek philosophy. Most engage a novel subject or problem within this topic. The exceptions, chapters seven and eight, offer novel solutions to familiar problems. To a large extent, each essay may be read as an independent piece. However, beyond the broad topical unity, numerous strands run through the collection, inter-illuminating the contents. The whole is, therefore, significantly greater than the sum of its parts. In considering how to organize the essays, a loosely chronological organization ultimately seemed more sensible than any alternative. I speak of a 1

2 loose chronology for the following reason. From Hesiod to Epicurus and then in the final chapter to the Old Stoics and to contemporary philosophical conceptions of pleasure, the organization is conspicuously chronological. But the sequence is in fact more complex. The study of ancient philosophy is often archaeological. Most relics of antiquity survive in a ruinous state. The routes to their reconstruction are always mediated. The process is akin to rebuilding a vessel whose shards have been appropriated and reworked into other objects. The inquiry compels the investigator from one figure to another, across centuries, in and out of genres, and through diverse habits of mind. Simply put, the study of ancient philosophy requires the use of later writers as evidence of the thought and contributions of their predecessors. Chapter eight features a familiar example where the texts, testimony, and doxography in Diogenes Laertius' Lives are indispensible to the study of Epicurus who lived almost six hundred years earlier. But many chapters involve more exotic cases. In chapter two, a letter, perhaps composed in the late Hellenistic or early Imperial Period, casts light on the content of a lost dialog composed by the Socratic philosopher Phaedo who lived about four hundred years earlier. In chapter three Qust ā ibn Lūqā's ninth century Arabic translation of pseudo-plutarch's epitome of Aëtius' Plactia provides a crucial link in the study of the Empedoclean doxographical tradition, which extends back into the fourth century BCE nearly thirteen hundred years earlier. In chapter four the testimony of the fifth century CE Neoplatonist Hermias is essential to the clarification of the division of refined pleasures made 2

3 by Prodicus of Ceos almost one thousand years earlier. In short, the discussions in almost all of the chapters appeal to figures and texts centuries removed from one another. More precisely, then, the chronological organization of the collection is a matter of sequential foci, most with broad temporal peripheries. So much for the broad organizing principles of the collection. The remainder of this introduction summarizes the essays and highlights connections between them. Chapter two pursues a theme resonant through all of philosophical antiquity: engagement with the dominant poetic culture and its traditions, especially the works of Homer and Hesiod. The discussion here examines the ethical responses of Prodicus, Socrates, and a number of Socratics, including Plato, Xenophon, Aristippus, and Phaedo, to Hesiod's Encomium to Work in Works and Days. In the Age of Gold under the rule of Chronos humanity lives in ease and pleasure; the earth freely provides for their material needs; labor, disease, and suffering do not exist. Humans end their long and happy lives in a peaceful sleep. The assumption of the rule of Zeus abruptly ends this period. Subsequent ages descend in metallic quality and quality of life. Hesiod and his contemporaries live four stages removed in the Age of Iron where war and injustice are endemic. A prosperous life must be hard-won by decency and above all labor. The pursuits of the pleasure-seeker, inevitably deceitful and vicious, are vein. Hesiod delivers the Encomium to Work to his wayward brother Perses as 3

4 an exhortation to cease his injustice and to devote himself to making an honest living. The chapter argues that Prodicus and various Socratics found in the Encomium a framework for ethical reflection on the roles of labor and pleasure in human life. For instance, Prodicus agreed that at least one form of pleasureseeking is vicious and hopeless. However, in his Choice of Heracles, modeled after the two-paths theme in Hesiod, Prodicus presents the goddess Ἀρετή offering the hero Heracles an alternative in which pleasure and contentment can be achieved within a life of political service. In Memorabilia Xenophon has Socrates paraphrase Prodicus' Choice to Aristippus of Cyrene, who there assumes a role like that of Perses. But Aristippus defends hedonism, drawing on Hesiod himself for support, while idiosyncratically maintaining that it is sensible to unburden oneself of civic responsibilities and to enjoy a life free of political ties. These early reflections concern the practical conditions under which pleasure is to be pursued. The metaphysical question "What is pleasure?" has not yet become an object of theoretical interest. A report in Stobaeus' Anthology suggests that Empedocles might have been the first to address this question. Chapter three pursues the lead. The discussion begins with the Empedoclean doxographical tradition, then considers the results in relation to pertinent Empedoclean fragments. The inquiry into the Empedoclean doxography follows a circuitous path stretching from Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus to Aëtius' Placita and its 4

5 descendant epitomes, including ibn Lūqā's Arabic translation, as well as to Nicolaus of Damascus' adaptation of Aristotle's lost treatise On Plants. The report in Stobaeus suggests that Empedocles held that desire arises through lack of a certain element in the desiring being and is for the element lacking, and that pleasure arises through the restoration of the lacking element and thus mixing of like elements. In other words, the report indicates that pleasure is a function of a distinctive form of desire-satisfaction. I argue that Aëtius himself conjoined two distinct δόξαι: one concerning desire, the other concerning pleasure and pain. The opinion on pleasure and pain ultimately derives from Theophrastus' On the Senses. But whereas Theophrastus explains Empedocles' view of pleasure in terms of the structural conformity of perceptual effluences and pores, Aëtius explains it in terms of elemental homogeneity. This disparity owes precisely to Aëtius' conjunction of the motivational and affective opinions. I then trace the motivational opinion through Aristotle and ultimately to Plato's Lysis, where Socrates attributes to Empedocles the cosmological principle of homogeneous elemental attraction. Using ibn Lūqā's Arabic translation of Pseudo-Plutarch's epitome of the Placita, which depends on a manuscript that is independent of any in the surviving Greek tradition, I show that Aëtius adapted the cosmological principle to a psychological one. Given this, I use Nicolaus' On Plants to show, more precisely, that the Aristotelian doxography on the psychological capacities of plants led Aëtius to render the motivational opinion 5

6 as a claim about nutritional desire, that is, appetite, and more precisely still about botanical desire. Attention to this seemingly bizarre topic turns out to be quite reasonable once we appreciate the breadth of early conceptions of ψυχή and thereby recognize that the Greeks were wrestling with a genuine scientificphilosophical problem: how and where to draw distinctions between kinds and capacities of living things. With the doxographical strands untangled, the second part of the chapter examines those fragments of Empedocles' On Nature in which the concepts of desire and pleasure are expressed, and thus compares the doxography with Empedocles' own thought. Here Empedocles' psychological theory plays a central role. Empedocles is a panpsychist. This is because, like most pre-platonic philosophers, he regards the fundamental elements or principles of the cosmos as divinities. Hence, Empedocles regards these principles as more powerful and so more psychologically powerful than the organic complexes they come to constitute. Consequently, our discussion begins with the psychological capacities of the Empedoclean roots and the abstract cosmological forces of Love and Strife. Only then does it turn to the physiological stuffs that comprise what we call living things, and finally to animals and humans. Moving through these levels of ontology, the special fascinations of Empedoclean thought are on display, its combination of traditional mythopoetic themes and modes of thinking with the revolutionary cosmological and physiological ideas of early Greek thinkers. We also encounter here another 6

7 example of the reception of Hesiod. Recall that in the Theogony pleasure enters Hellas on a wave. Chronos dismembers Ouranos with a sickle and casts the immortal flesh into the Aegean. Long-buffeted at sea, a brilliant foam forms around the genitals; and from this brine and the seed of Ouranos, "she who is rendered from foam" Ἀφροδίτη ultimately alights on Cypris. The role that the goddess plays in Empedocles' poem is loosely akin to her influence under the reign of Chronos. On the one hand, Empedocles has abandoned the Hesiodic conception of human history as a linear descent from the Age of Gold, replacing it with his δίπλον tale of the endless cyclical dominions of Love and Strife. On the other hand, the influence of Empedoclean Aphrodite conforms to the harmonious, peaceful, and hedonic spirit of the Age of Gold. In sum, the discussion shows how Empedocles' psychology combines Archaic thought with early Greek physiology and cosmology, while at the same time serving as a cautionary lesson in how not to read On Nature as a proto- Peripatetic treatise. Empedocles was not in fact committed to a desire-satisfaction theory of pleasure; and he did not hold that the subjects and objects of desire are limited to homogeneous elements or kinds. Aphrodite's central contribution to the cosmos is, in fact, to create harmonious mixtures of heterogeneous entities. Chapter four returns to Prodicus by way of reports in Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Hermias' record of Syrianus' lectures on Plato's Phaedrus. The broad topic of the chapter is quintessentially sophistic: ὀρθότης ὀνοµάτων. 7

8 But the discussion takes aim at both conventional conceptions of sophistry and, more precisely, Prodicus' semantic agenda. The reports from Aristotle, Alexander, and Hermias attribute to Prodicus a διαίρεσις of τέρψις, χαρά, and εὐφροσύνη. If authenticated, this would be the earliest theoretical division of hedonic kinds in Greek philosophy. The aim of the chapter is to test the attribution and, after defending its authenticity, to explain the distinctions and the motivation behind them. Plato's general disparagements of the so-called sophists and, in particular, comic portrayals of Prodicus encourages the view that if Prodicus did draw distinctions between τέρψις, χαρά, and εὐφροσύνη, he sought to distinguish the conventional meanings of these words and probably made idiosyncratic, if not ludicrous claims. I argue that Plato's influence is misleading and that Prodicus' linguistic interests were more of a piece with the pre-platonic tradition of ἱστορία περὶ φύσεως. Granted that Prodicus' Choice of Heracles was inspired by the sort of ethical considerations discussed in chapter two, the composition of Choice prompted reflection on kinds of pleasure, not on the conventional meanings of pleasure terms. In other words, the composition of Choice prompted Prodicus to consider the questions "What kinds of pleasure are there?" and "What are the values of the various hedonic kinds?" I argue that Prodicus distinguished a set of refined pleasures, the sort worthy of inclusion in a virtuous human life. He then applied a set of refined 8

9 pleasure terms to them. Various, including ad hoc considerations informed Prodicus' linguistic applications. Among these are the relations between particular pleasure terms, τέρψις and εὐφροσύνη, and traditional associations of eponymous divinities, Terpsichore and Euphrosyne. In conclusion, I suggest that Suda of all sources comes closest to the truth in stating that Prodicus was both "a natural philosopher and a sophist." Chapter five continues with the tradition of φυσιολογία, at once in a much more familiar location, but with a focus on a passage that despite being the most detailed account of sense-perceptual pleasure in the Platonic corpus has received no sustained attention in the literature: the explanation of pleasure at Timaeus 64a-65b. Because Theophrastus, in the doxography of On the Senses, adopts the framework of Plato's aetiology of the modes of sense-perception as well as pleasure and pain in Timaeus, the discussion in chapter five echoes and elaborates a number of ideas and passages engaged in the examination of the Empedoclean doxographical tradition in chapter three. Broadly speaking, chapter three follows a vein that runs through a philosophical tradition in which Timaeus' aetiology is the seminal contribution. More precisely, the conception of pleasure that Aëtius misguidedly attributes to Empedocles is Plato's own, variously expressed throughout his corpus, but again, in greatest detail, in the Timaeus passage. Chapter five draws on contents throughout Timaeus in its presentation of Timaeus' explanation of the physiology and then psychology of sense-perceptual pleasure. 9

10 Plato's basic idea is that pleasure arises through the replenishment or restoration of a physiological deficit. The psychological aspect of pleasure is the registering of the physiological replenishment or restoration. As such, pleasure involves a form of proprioception. The psychological discussion focuses on the various roles that distinct parts of the soul play in the diverse forms of senseperceptual pleasure. The chapter concludes with the argument that Plato in fact operates with a distinction between two kinds of perceptual pleasure, one tied to the classical sense-faculties and thus also involving exteroception, the other strictly limited to proprioception. Compared to the content of chapters two and three, Plato's contribution to hedonic theory in Timaeus is striking in the following respect. Both of the earlier chapters show that interest in pleasure was initially rooted in ethics rather than psychology, let alone physiology. Likewise in chapter four, even though, as I expressly argue, Prodicus' division of hedonic kinds is continuous with the tradition of φυσιολογία, ethical interests significantly inform that division. Again, it is refined pleasures that Prodicus distinguishes, not, say, pleasures derived from or associated with distinct sense-faculties. Similarly, throughout the Platonic corpus treatments of pleasure are principally motivated by ethical concerns. The aetiology in Timaeus is, therefore, exceptional. This is all the more remarkable when we note that Timaeus' account in no way discriminates among the sense-perceptual pleasures that in Hippias Major, Republic, and Philebus, among other dialogs, Plato condemns as base. 10

11 The discussions in chapters six, seven, and eight each develop or respond to the Platonic conception of pleasure as a kind of restoration, γένεσις, or κίνησις. But in contrast to the treatment in Timaeus, each in its own way is informed by an ethical agenda. Chapter six examines Plato's own διαίρεσις of pleasure, at Philebus 36c-50e. As in the case of Prodicus' division, Plato's has an ethical motivation: to distinguish pure from impure pleasures in order to recommend the former and minimize the inclusion of the latter in the good life. In this case, division and evaluation are intimately and remarkably tied to another one of Plato's central metaphysical concerns: the nature of truth and falsity. A good deal has been written on Plato's conception of truth-value, above all in view of the account in Sophist. But scholars have missed an opportunity that the Philebus διαίρεσις provides. The passage is particularly valuable because only there does Plato discuss a variety of truth-conceptions in close proximity and expressly in relation to one another. I argue that in the course of the division of true and false pleasures, Plato distinguishes two broad kinds of truth-value. I call these "representational" and "ontic" respectively. Additionally, Plato distinguishes sub-kinds among each kind: propositional, pictorial or iconic, and phenomenal representational truth-value, on the one hand; and absolute and gradable ontic truth-value, on the other. To contemporary philosophers, the concept of ontic truth-value is especially foreign. Hence, one of the chapter's central contributions is provision 11

12 of a theoretical framework for understanding this concept. This framework is presented through some basic distinctions derived from formal semantic theory pertaining to types of adjectives (subsective, intersective, privative). The chapter concludes by raising and pursuing the question how the various kinds of truthvalue are interrelated. While the discussion does not ultimately solve this problem, it provides means for advancing an answer. In sum, chapter six turns from an untrodden to the most familiar site of Platonic hedonic theory. However, the discussion approaches the centerpiece of inquiry there in a novel way. Chapter seven turns to Aristotle and specifically examines the alternatives that Aristotle offers in Nicomachean Ethics 7 and 10 to the Platonic view that pleasure is a perceived restoration. The gist of the chapter is that these alternatives are fundamentally lacunose. In EN 7 Aristotle targets Plato's commitment to the view that pleasure is a γένεσις. Against this, Aristotle maintains that pleasure is an ἐνέργεια. In advancing his opposition to Plato, one of Aristotle's claims is that some pleasures involve no restoration. But Aristotle focuses precisely on those pleasures that do involve restoration. He argues that pleasures and physiological restorative processes may be compresent or coincident, but that they are nonetheless distinct. The latter are unconscious conditions, whereas the subject experiences his pleasure. Granted this, we are led to ask just what that ἐνέργεια that is pleasure, and which coincides with a restorative physiological process, consists 12

13 in. At this crucial point, Aristotle is essentially silent. Hence, in EN 7 he does not offer a substantive alternative to the Platonic theory that he criticizes. Charitably, we may grant that the aim of EN 7 is principally critical rather than constructive. The same cannot be said of the discussion in EN 10. That book, more precisely 10.4, explicitly opens with the question, "What (τί) is pleasure or what kind (ποῖον) of thing is it?" In pursuing answers, Aristotle's discussion differs from that in EN 7 in various ways. One is that Aristotle targets the view that pleasure is a κίνησις (rather than a γένεσις). The other, and more conspicuous, is the claim that pleasure is not an ἐνέργεια, but rather that pleasure completes (τελειοῖ) an ἐνέργεια. In the context of this τελείωσις claim Aristotle presents his famous or rather notorious simile of the bloom of youth, which led Anscombe to criticize his hedonic investigations as having reduced him to babble. I defend Aristotle against the charge of babbling, but submit a charge of omission. I argue that when Aristotle speaks here of τελείωσις, he means that pleasure completes a psychological ἐνέργεια by adding value to it. In other words, Aristotle treats τελείωσις here as evaluative completion. But granting this, Aristotle does not actually clarify what the entity that completes an ἐνέργεια is. Ultimately then, while Aristotle informs us about a number of properties of pleasure and thus answers the ποῖόν τι question, he never answers the τί ἐστιν question. The chapter concludes with a reflection on why the lacuna in EN 10 13

14 exists. The suggestion is made that Aristotelian psychology lacks a categorical slot in which pleasure (or displeasure) can fit. Chapter eight turns to Epicurus, for whom the goal of human life is of course to live pleasantly. However, Epicurus recognizes that not all pleasures contribute to that goal. I call "telic" those pleasures that do. The aim of the chapter is to clarify Epicurus' conception of telic pleasure. Epicurus' conception of telic pleasure centrally involves a critical response to Plato's conception of pleasure as a kind of restoration. Once again, for Plato pleasure is a process through which a deficit is remedied. In contrast, Epicurus holds that that the kind of pleasure that is central to living well depends upon a stable, well-constructed psychological constitution. Epicurus calls such pleasure "katastematic." I argue that he coined the word "καταστηµατικόν" and did so expressly to advance his conception of telic pleasure against Plato's view of pleasure as a kind of κατάστασις. I suggest that "καταστηµατικόν" means "constitutional." Consequently, by "ἡδονὴ καταστηµατική" Epicurus intends to distinguish a kind of pleasure that derives not from a process of psychological or physiological construction, namely, restoration, but from a corporeal or mental constitution in its completed state. More precisely, Epicurus means to distinguish a kind of pleasure that derives from a constitution that, having been informed and shaped by wisdom, is stable and strong. 14

15 Epicurus often speaks of those conditions that he occasionally calls καταστηµατικά in privative and specifically analgesic terms, as "absence of pain" and "freedom from distress." Accordingly, the Cyrenaics criticize Epicurus for maintaining that pleasure is mere absence of pain. I argue that the privative descriptions do not adequately capture Epicurus' conception. The psychological constitution that wisdom endows in turn yields a well-founded sense of security and gratitude. These, I claim, are central constituents of katastematic and hence telic pleasure. Since Epicurus recognizes corporeal as well as mental katastematic pleasures, the further question arises how he understands the relation between the two. Epicurus' own physical ailments keenly attest that corporeal and mental katastematic pleasures are not on a par. Stability is a key condition of telic pleasure, but physical health is not entirely within our control. Consideration of this point, surprisingly, leads to the conclusion that katastematic pleasures do not exhaust telic pleasure. A certain kinetic pleasure is also telic, namely, a special form of gratitude, which serves an auxiliary role in response to physical distress. Recall the fragment from the Letter to Idomeneus: "On this blessed day of my life, as I am at the point of death, I write this to you. The disease in my bladder and stomach are pursuing their course, lacking nothing of their natural severity. But against all this is the joy in my soul at the memory of my past conversations with you." I argue that the special form of gratitude to which Epicurus appeals is taken in the memory of past goods; in a word, it is memorial 15

16 gratitude. Showing that episodes of memorial gratitude are kinetic rather than katastematic pleasures in turn requires the argument that Epicurus holds a conceptualist rather than perceptualist theory of memory. The chapter concludes by considering to what extent telic pleasures are indeed pleasures. In doing so, the discussion draws on a distinction first formulated in the 1960s between enjoyment and being pleased that, a distinction that is also mentioned in chapter seven in the context of discussing the psychological resources that Aristotle had available to him in attempting to answer the τί ἐστιν question. These intimations of contemporary hedonic theorizing bring us to chapter nine, which examines the relation between ancient and contemporary philosophical conceptions of pleasure. Chapter nine is not a summary of the preceding contributions. Rather, it is a reflection on the hedonic theorizing of the Greeks that focuses on select, salient ideas introduced in particular in chapters five to eight. Conjoined with this reflection is a methodological consideration, which opens the chapter. The methodological consideration arose in the context of composing my book Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy, which was a survey of the topic for non-specialists. Chapter nine revisits, sharpens, and extends the central conclusions of that book. It begins by suggesting that studies in ancient philosophy may be oriented along a spectrum, from the historical to the philosophical. At the historical end, the aim is to reconstruct ancient thought as 16

17 faithfully as possible. At the philosophical end, the aim is, somehow, to utilize the ancients in advancing a contemporary philosophical position or agenda. As I emphasize, the dichotomy is artificially sharp, whereas in practice contributions to the field are situated all along the spectrum. The various contributions of the present collection are a case in point. The chapter itself offers one way of combining historical and philosophical interests. The discussion begins by sketching the central philosophical conceptions of pleasure and of hedonic kinds from antiquity and from contemporary Anglophone philosophy. The discussion of the ancients focuses on Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Old Stoics, respectively. The discussion of contemporary philosophy includes Anglophone contributions from World War II to the present. With these points of orientation, the chapter then targets and compares the ancients' and contemporaries' treatments of three putative aspects of pleasure: hedonic attitude, hedonic object, and hedonic feeling respectively. To clarify, consider enjoyment as one form of pleasure. Enjoyment takes an activity or experience as an object. For example, one enjoys listening to a piece of music. The hedonic attitude is enjoying; the hedonic object is the music or, more precisely, listening to music; and arguably this form of pleasure has a distinct phenomenal character, in other words, a distinct hedonic feeling. In short, the chapter examines and compares the various contributions that various ancient and contemporary philosophers make to an understanding of these three putative aspects of pleasure: attitude, object, and feeling. In 17

18 examining these topics, the discussion also considers why the ancients' and contemporaries' respond to them in the distinct ways that they do. 18