Timaeus — Plato

Analysis 580-583. cxxxix j8o His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with com- Reptiblk ix. mand; he is more and more faithless, envious, unrighteous, — the Analysis. most wretched of men, a misery to himself and to others. And so let us have a final trial and proclamation ; need we hire a herald, or shall 1 proclaim the result ? * Make the proclamation yourself.

The son of Arisfon {the best) is of opinion that the best andJHstest of men is also the happiest^ and that this is he who is the most royal tnaster of himself J and that the Jinjust man is he who is the greatest tyrant of himself and of his State. Atid I add further — '■seen or unseen by gods or men.^ This is our first proof.

The second is derived from the three kinds of pleasure, which answer to the three elements of the soul 581 — reason, passion, desire; under which last is comprehended avarice as well as sensual appetite, while passion includes ambition, party-feeling, love of reputation. Reason, again, is solely directed to the attainment of truth, and careless of money and reputation.

In accordance with the difference of men's natures, one of these three principles is in the ascendant, and they have their several pleasures corresponding to them. Interrogate now the three natures, and each one will be found praising his own pleasures and depreciating those of others. The money-maker will contrast the vanity of knowledge with the solid advantages of wealth.

The ambitious man will despise knowledge which brings no honour ; whereas the philosopher will regard only the fruition of truth, and will call other pleasures necessary rather than good. y^- Now, how shall we decide between them ? Is there any better criterion than experience and knowledge ? And which of the three has the truest knowledge and the widest experience ?

The experience of youth makes the philosopher acquainted with the two kinds of desire, but the avaricious and the ambitious man never taste thC'.pleasures of truth and wisdom. Honour he has equally with them; they are 'judged of him,' but he is ' not judged of them,' for they never attain to the knowledge of true being.

And his instrument is reason, whereas their standard is only wealth and honour; and if by reason we are to judge, his good will be the truest. And so we arrive at the result that the pleasure of the rational part of the soul, and a life passed in such pleasure is the 583 pleasantest. He who has a right to judge judges thus. Next comes the life of ambition, and, in the third place, that of money-making.

cxl Analysis 583-585. Republic IX. Twice has the just man overthrown the unjust — once more, as in Analysis. ^.n Olympian contest, first offering up a prayer to the saviour Zeus, let him try a fall. A wise man whispers to me that the pleasures of the wise are true and pure ; all others are a shadow only. Let us examine this : Is not pleasure opposed to pain, and is there not a mean state which is neither?

When a man is sick, nothing is more pleasant to him than health. But this he never found out while he was well. In pain he desires only to cease from pain ; on the other hand, when he is in an ecstasy of pleasure, rest is painful to him. Thus rest or cessation is both pleasure and pain. But can that which is neither become both ?

Again, pleasure and pain are motions, and the absence of them is rest; but if so, how can r84 the absence of either of them be the other? Thus we are led to infer that the contradiction is an appearance only, and witchery of the senses. And these are not the only pleasures, for there are others which have no preceding pains.

Pure pleasure then is not the absence of pain, nor pure pain the absence of pleasure ; although most of the pleasures which reach the mind through the body are reliefs of pain, and have not only their reactions when they depart, but their anticipations before they come. They can be best described in a simile.

There is in nature an upper, lower, and middle region, and he who passes from the lower to the middle imagines that he is going up and is already in the upper world ; and if he were taken back again would think, and truly think, that he was descending. All this arises out of his ignorance of the true upper, middle, and lower regions. And a like confusion happens with pleasure and pain, and with many other things.

The man who compares grey with black, calls grey white ; and S^S the man who compares absence of pain with pain, calls the absence of pain pleasure. Again, hunger and thirst are inanitions of the body, ignorance and folly of the soul ; and food is the ssrtisfaction of the one, knowledge of the other. Now which is the purer satisfaction — that of eating and drinking, or that of knowledge?

Consider the matter thus : The satisfaction of that which has more existence is truer than of that which has less. The invariable and immortal has a more real existence than the variable and mortal, and has a corresponding measure of knowledge and truth. The soul, again, has more existence and truth and knowledge than the body, and is therefore more really satisfied and has a more

Analysis 586-588. cxli ,86 natural pleasure. Those who feast only on earthly food, are Ri-pubik ix. always going at random up to the middle and down again ; but analysis. they never pass into the true upper world, or have a taste of true pleasure. They are like fatted beasts, full of gluttony and sensuality, and ready to kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust; for they are not filled with true being, and their vessel is leaky (cp.

Gorgias, 243 A, foil.). Their pleasures are mere shadows of pleasure, mixed with pain, coloured and intensified by contrast, and therefore intensely desired ; and men go fighting about them, as Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of Helen at Troy, because they know not the truth. The same may be said of the passionate element: — the desires of the ambitious soul, as well as of the covetous, have an inferior satisfaction.

Only when under the guidance of reason do either of ,87 the other principles do their own business or attain the pleasure which is natural to them. When not attaining, they compel the other parts of the soul to pursue a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs. And the more distant they are from philosophy and reason, the more distant they will be from law and order, and the more illusive will be their pleasures.

The desires of love and tyranny are the farthest from law, and those of the king are nearest to it. There is one genuine pleasure, and two spurious ones : the tyrant goes beyond even the latter ; he has run away altogether from law and reason. Nor can the measure of his inferiority be told, except in a figure. The tyrant is the third removed from the oligarch, and has therefore, not a shadow of his pleasure, but the shadow of a shadow only.

The oligarch, again, is thrice removed from the king, and thus we get the formula 3x3, which is the number of a surface, representing the shadow which is the tyrant's pleasure, and if you like to cube this 'number of the beast,' you will find that the measure of the difference amounts to 729 ; the king is 729 times more happy than the tyrant.

And this extraordinary number is nearly equal to the number of days and nights in a year (365 x 2 = 730); and ;88 is therefore concerned with human life. This is the interval between a good and bad man in happiness only : what must be the difference between them in comeliness of life and virtue ! Perhaps you may remember some one saying at the beginning of our discussion that the unjust man was profited if he had the