SOCRATES: The argument will not allow that our body either hungers or
thirsts or has any similar experience.
PROTARCHUS: Quite right.
SOCRATES: Let me make a further observation; the argument appears to
me to imply that there is a kind of life which consists in these
affections.
PROTARCHUS: Of what affections, and of what kind of life, are you
speaking?
SOCRATES: I am speaking of being emptied and replenished, and of all
that relates to the preservation and destruction of living beings, as
well as of the pain which is felt in one of these states and of the
pleasure which succeeds to it.
PROTARCHUS: True.
SOCRATES: And what would you say of the intermediate state?
PROTARCHUS: What do you mean by 'intermediate'?
SOCRATES: I mean when a person is in actual suffering and yet remembers
past pleasures which, if they would only return, would relieve him;
but as yet he has them not. May we not say of him, that he is in an
intermediate state?
PROTARCHUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Would you say that he was wholly pained or wholly pleased?
PROTARCHUS: Nay, I should say that he has two pains; in his body
there is the actual experience of pain, and in his soul longing and
expectation.
SOCRATES: What do you mean, Protarchus, by the two pains? May not a man
who is empty have at one time a sure hope of being filled, and at other
times be quite in despair?
PROTARCHUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: And has he not the pleasure of memory when he is hoping to be
filled, and yet in that he is empty is he not at the same time in pain?
PROTARCHUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Then man and the other animals have at the same time both
pleasure and pain?
PROTARCHUS: I suppose so.
SOCRATES: But when a man is empty and has no hope of being filled, there
will be the double experience of pain. You observed this and inferred
that the double experience was the single case possible.
PROTARCHUS: Quite true, Socrates.
SOCRATES: Shall the enquiry into these states of feeling be made the
occasion of raising a question?
PROTARCHUS: What question?
SOCRATES: Whether we ought to say that the pleasures and pains of which
we are speaking are true or false? or some true and some false?
PROTARCHUS: But how, Socrates, can there be false pleasures and pains?
SOCRATES: And how, Protarchus, can there be true and false fears, or
true and false expectations, or true and false opinions?
PROTARCHUS: I grant that opinions may be true or false, but not
pleasures.
SOCRATES: What do you mean? I am afraid that we are raising a very
serious enquiry.
PROTARCHUS: There I agree.
SOCRATES: And yet, my boy, for you are one of Philebus' boys, the point
to be considered, is, whether the enquiry is relevant to the argument.
PROTARCHUS: Surely.
SOCRATES: No tedious and irrelevant discussion can be allowed; what is
said should be pertinent.
PROTARCHUS: Right.
SOCRATES: I am always wondering at the question which has now been
raised.
PROTARCHUS: How so?