MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFFlectual and physical, pure and mixed—can become differentiated with-
out losing relation to each other, or to the dialogue as a whole.^43
Thanks to such repetitions, the more the Philebus makes things
many, the more in the end it makes things one. The plurality of lan-
guage, held in check by its own measure, allows for this eventual resolu-
tion. Protarchus fi nally denounces pleasure as “the greatest impostor”
and elevates reason as the closest thing to truth (65c– d). But thought
and pleasure have gone beyond their initial antagonism: pleasure can
be seen as more limited, determined, and intellectual. Neither side
alone can be completely self-suffi cient.^44 To emphasize the practical, the
dialogue concludes with three mentions of oijkov~ (61b, 62b – c, 64c), of
house and home as the concrete dwelling of the human good: inexact
types of knowledge must be included in the mix so that we can fi nd our
way home in the world.
The good then cannot simply be one pure being but rather a har-
monized combination of many: a trio, understood as “a conjunction of
three: beauty, proportion, and truth,” accounts for the goodness of the
good mixed life (65a1– 5). This mixture within a mixture is, as Guthrie
says, “a trinity in unity.” It cannot be just “an unconnected medley” (or
“mishmash,” as Benardete says, or “hotch-potch” as Gosling says), but
must involve “measure and proportion [mevtrou kai; th~ summevtrou]” (64d10 – e2). Such harmony, as we have seen, requires repeated testing through dissonance and disagreement. Philebus, the nonrational rep- resentative of non-bounded pleasure, cannot share in this resolution because he refuses to mature or to learn the pleasures of lovgo~. But Socrates’ last speech, repeating one of his fi rst distinctions, concludes that such a thoughtless sort of pleasure properly belongs to animals; to humans belongs the “love of argument that is constantly revealed under the guidance of the philosophic muse” (67b6– 8). The whole dialogue, then, once it fi nds the proper way of over- coming dichotomies, both argues for and demonstrates a thoughtful pleasure, a pleasurable thought. In this sense, the Philebus belongs to the mixed category itself. The dialogue portrays pevra~ and a[peirovn not
as starkly opposed but as necessarily mixed in this special sense, as the
defi ning limit and what needs such defi ning. To illustrate the point, the
dialogue begins and ends with the indeterminate, talk we do not hear;
as Protarchus remarks at the very end, “There is still a little missing,
Socrates” (67b11). In The Tragedy and Comedy of Life, Benardete suggests
that the “unbounded Philebus represents something essential about phi-
losophy, that it is an activity that cannot have a beginning or an end of a
strictly determined kind” (88). Further, Gadamer links the ontological
category of the indeterminate to the ethical challenge of achieving the
right mixture: