The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Translated into English with analyses and introductions — Plato — John Shaqi
The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Translated into English with analyses and introductions
Plato · en
is mere talk.’
[Sidenote: _Analysis 491-494._]
Socrates compliments Callicles on his frankness in saying what
other men only think. According to his view, those who want
nothing are not happy. ‘Why,’ says Callicles, ‘if they were,
stones and the dead would be happy.’ Socrates in reply is led
into a half-serious, half-comic vein of reflection. ‘Who knows,’ as
Euripides says, ‘whether life may not be death, and death life?’
Nay, there are philosophers who maintain that even in life we are 493
dead, and that the body (σῶμα) is the tomb (σῆμα) of the soul. And
some ingenious Sicilian has made an allegory, in which he represents
fools as the uninitiated, who are supposed to be carrying
water to a vessel, which is full of holes, in a similarly holey sieve,
and this sieve is their own soul. The idea is fanciful, but
nevertheless is a figure of a truth which I want to make you
acknowledge, viz. that the life of contentment is better than the life
of indulgence. Are you disposed to admit that? ‘Far otherwise.’
Then hear another parable. The life of self-contentment and
self-indulgence may be represented respectively by two men, who are
filling jars with streams of wine, honey, milk,—the jars of the one
are sound, and the jars of the other leaky; the first fills his jars,
and has no more trouble with them; the second is always filling 494
them, and would suffer extreme misery if he desisted. Are you
of the same opinion still? ‘Yes, Socrates, and the figure expresses
what I mean. For true pleasure is a perpetual stream, flowing in
and flowing out. To be hungry and always eating, to be thirsty
and always drinking, and to have all the other desires and to
satisfy them, that, as I admit, is my idea of happiness.’ And to be
itching and always scratching? ‘I do not deny that there may be
happiness even in that.’ And to indulge unnatural desires, if they
are abundantly satisfied? Callicles is indignant at the introduction
of such topics. But he is reminded by Socrates that they are
introduced, not by him, but by the maintainer of the identity of 495
pleasure and good. Will Callicles still maintain this? ‘Yes, for
the sake of consistency, he will.’ The answer does not satisfy
Socrates, who fears that he is losing his touchstone. A profession
of seriousness on the part of Callicles reassures him, and they
proceed with the argument. Pleasure and good are the same,
but knowledge and courage are not the same either with pleasure
or good, or with one another. Socrates disproves the first of these
statements by showing that two opposites cannot co-exist, but must
alternate with one another—to be well and ill together is 496
impossible. But pleasure and pain are simultaneous, and the cessation
of them is simultaneous; e. g. in the case of drinking and thirsting,