Plato warned that some pleasures separate us from reality [View all]

https://psyche.co/ideas/plato-warned-that-some-pleasures-separate-us-from-reality


Photo by Tim Dirven/Panos Pictures



In our world of instant gratification – from Netflix binges to social media likes to online pornography – it’s worth asking: does feeling good always mean living well? Plato foresaw the dangers of confusing pleasure with flourishing. His insights compel us to reconsider our uncritical embrace of pleasure and question whether a truly good life might require more than simply feeling good. More particularly, Plato provides a powerful conceptual framework for distinguishing pleasures that are worth incorporating into one’s life from those that aren’t.

Our culture’s obsession with pleasure jibes nicely with a popular psychological and philosophical way of thinking about human happiness: that a good life is simply a pleasurable life. This idea – known to philosophers as hedonism, from the Greek hêdonê (pleasure) – holds that human wellbeing consists solely in the presence of positive experiences and the absence of negative ones. Part of hedonism’s appeal lies in what we might call the authority of pleasure and pain. Anyone who has felt joy or suffering knows how tightly these experiences are bound up with what is good for us. Backaches, heartbreak, existential crises and lonely nights spent doom-scrolling on social media are bad because they feel bad; orgasms, triple chocolate cookies, downhill mountain biking and Beethoven’s late string quartets are good because they feel good.

From this insight, it’s a short – and tempting – step to conclude that the quality of our experience, whether pleasurable or painful, is all that matters for a life well lived. And again, this is intuitive: our subjective sense of how well our life is going seems closely tied to how good or bad we feel. It’s difficult, perhaps even impossible, to imagine a time when your life was going badly, yet you felt great – or when you were suffering all the time, yet your life was going well.



Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy often addressed practical concerns about how to live well, and philosophers were particularly interested in understanding the nature and value of pleasure and its relationship to eudaimonia (flourishing). Among these ancient explorations, Plato’s treatment stands out for its originality and depth. His thinking about pleasure is easily misunderstood, though, because it seems to pull in different directions. Going from a rather superficial reading of the Phaedo – the dialogue which describes Socrates’ last moments – Friedrich Nietzsche depicted Plato as a Christian avant la lettre who advocated far-reaching abstention from all pleasure. In a similar vein, the 20th-century ethicist Richard Hare described Plato as a ‘stern and ascetic moralist’, someone who ‘would have been at home in a Zen Buddhist monastery, or even in Egypt with the desert fathers.’

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