MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFFThe Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, “the pleasure prin-
ciple has a kind of obvious predominance, unlimited and overpower-
ing” for which it would be contradictory to give a rational account (105).
Philebus proves to be as a[logo~, as irrational and inarticulate, as the
physical pleasures he defends. By bowing out of the pleasures of argu-
ment, he fi ts proleptically into Socrates’ later characterization of a fully
irrational life as subhuman, or “mollusk”-like (21d).
Intellectual pleasures, on the other hand, reveal themselves pre-
cisely in such discussion and debate. Simply because it takes place in a
philosophical dialogue, the rivalry is already biased toward intellectual
activities. Protarchus, in taking over the position, cannot escape this
implicit bias, and does not even represent the strongest proponent of he-
donism.^27 He shares Socrates’ fundamental assumption of the rational-
ity of the cosmos (28d– e), and he sometimes misses a chance to defend
his cause.^28 But his more moderate stance can also be seen as another
sign that this dialogue is a search for—and indeed a demonstration of—
a middle path between the narrowly cerebral and the crudely hedonistic
extremes.
The search for such a path leads Socrates to refl ect on naming.
Should Aphrodite’s true name be Pleasure (hJdonhv), as Philebus holds?^29
By what names dare we address the gods? Socrates expresses “a more
than human dread” at renaming the gods, but asserts confi dently of
pleasure: “If one just goes by the name, it is one single thing, but in fact
it comes in many forms [morfa~] that are in some way even quite unlike
each other” (12c– d). In turning away from the divine personifi cation
and toward the human-given name, Socrates at the same time turns
to an ambivalence rooted in language: the name, as a unit, implies the
entity is a one, while it may really be plural in its kinds. But naming can
also let us determine plurality. The pleasure of sobriety may be the op-
posite of the pleasure of silliness (to use his example), yet both go by
the same name; this tension demands a reexamination of the nature of
pleasure. In this sense names implicitly contain the one and the many
within themselves: a name can both unify things into a class and differ-
entiate them into particulars and subclasses.
Plunged into the problem of the one and the many, we immediately
see how the nuances of language can both complicate and clarify this
problem. Protarchus at fi rst cannot understand either the conceptual or
the linguistic distinctions; his “common sense” objections slow down the
dialogue but also allow needed distinctions to arise. He insists at fi rst on
the unity of pleasure: “How could pleasure not be, of all things, most
like pleasure?” (12e). Socrates replies that this refusal to differentiate