Pleasure

Use in the book

Hippothales changes colours from pleasure when the argument appears to guarantee that a genuine lover is loved by his beloved. The noun explains his visible emotional reaction.

This dramatic pleasure should not be confused with proof of the conclusion. The boys’ reluctant nods and Socrates’ immediate re-examination give the reader reasons to distinguish what pleases a listener from what has been securely established.

Places to read

1. 222bὑπὸ τῆς ἡδονῆς — From pleasure.

Use in the book

The Philebus excerpt associates pleasure with the restoration of a living creature’s disrupted harmony. It then distinguishes pleasure arising in soul through anticipation from the bodily affection expected. A Hermetic discussion, by contrast, calls pleasure-bearing rejoicing harmful because of the evils it produces. The Timaeus passage on musical concord distinguishes pleasure from the gladness of those who understand the harmony.

Places to read

1. I.47.13.1Restoration of natural harmony gives rise to pleasure.
2. I.47.13.4Expectation produces a pleasure belonging to soul.
3. I.41.6.17Pleasurable rejoicing is judged harmful.
4. I.60.1.13Pleasure is distinguished from understanding gladness.

Translation in this edition

“Pleasure,” “joy,” and “gladness” preserve differences among the Greek terms instead of imposing one evaluation on every pleasant experience.

Use in the book

Lively souls initially reject pleasures after disappointment, but may return and settle for what the object is. The opportunity for intervention is therefore brief. The early duration sequence distinguishes pleasure from delight, happiness and felicity. Later, pleasure in pleasing is legitimate while domination is condemned. In the old-age reflection, pleasures belong with affairs, honors and amusements among superfluities that may no longer be needed. None of these contexts makes the word uniformly vicious: object, duration and circumstance change its value.

Places to read

1. I, p. 32, entry 1, ¶1Disappointment can either detach a soul or teach it to settle.
2. I, p. 38, entry 1, ¶1Pleasure is brief within a four-term sequence.
3. II, p. 488, entry 6, ¶1Pleasure in pleasing receives explicit approval.
4. II, p. 815–816, entry 13, ¶1Old age and sufficiency alter the need for pleasures.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains the singular/plural changes and differentiates plaisir from volupté in the early definition. It keeps the social echo “pleasure in pleasing,” and the aged speaker’s conditional setting should remain visible when citing the renunciation of pleasures.

Use in the book

II.100 resists negative accounts of felicity that merely remove riches, honours, and pleasures. Such teaching leaves human powers without objects and makes contentment an unexplained demand. The needed distinction is between clear and pure pleasures and those that are muddy or unwholesome.

Pleasure therefore belongs within the practice of virtue, not solely on the opposite side of restraint. II.99 gathers rival accounts of happiness into a comprehensive life of knowledge, love, contemplation, action, and enjoyment. The poem on David similarly contrasts fading courtly pleasures with delight in heavens, law, and praise. What changes is the scale and truth of the good perceived, not the soul’s capacity to find it sweet.

Places to read

1. II.99Pleasure is integrated with wisdom, action, rest, and communion in a comprehensive felicity.
2. II.100True pleasures must be distinguished from false ones instead of denied altogether.
3. III.69David’s poetic life relocates pleasure from fading honour to contemplation and praise.

In this edition

The moral question is regularly which pleasures and by what means. Reading pleasures as automatically sensual or suspect obscures the argument.

Use in the book

Theophrastus reports pleasure from things like the perceiver in parts and blend. Aëtius develops the account through deficiency and replenishment: what lacks something desires its like, and pleasure accompanies the fitting restoration. A second notice makes congenial and kindred blends the source of pleasure, contrasting alien material with distress and pain.

Theophrastus objects that perception and pleasure are not coextensive. We can be pained in perceiving; moreover, if likeness and close affinity suffice, things naturally grown together ought to enjoy themselves and perceive most intensely. His formulation that pleasure and pain are perceptions or accompanied by perception is part of the critical argument, not an unambiguous quotation of Empedocles' own definition.

The late cognitive objection again connects the mechanisms: if knowledge arises from likes and ignorance from unlikes, while pleasure and pain divide similarly, thought should always be pleasant and ignorance painful. This is a consequence the critic rejects. The entry must therefore distinguish the positive account of congenial replenishment from the polemical allegation that one physical mechanism collapses all experiential differences.

Places to read

1. A 86 § 9 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 9. Reports pleasure from likes in parts and blend.
2. A 86 §§ 16–17 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 16. Tests the association through perception and things naturally grown together.
3. A 86 §§ 22–23 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 23. Argues that the shared mechanisms would force thought always to accompany pleasure.
4. A 95 (testimony)Aëtius, first and second notices. Connects pleasure with likeness, replenishment, and congenial blending.

Translation in this edition

A95 contains supplements and corrections, including an inserted ἐκ and supplied words in the final pain clause. Its unusually tidy parallel structure is partly editorially restored.