BOOK IX.
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Plato and Benjamin Jowett
The states intermediate between pleasure and pain are termed pleasures or pains only in relation to their opposites. And when persons are suffering from acute pain, you must have heard them say that there is nothing pleasanter than to get rid of their pain?
I have.
And there are many other cases of suffering in which the mere rest and cessation of pain, and not any positive enjoyment, is extolled by them as the greatest pleasure?
Yes, he said; at the time they are pleased and well content to be at rest.
E Again, when pleasure ceases, that sort of rest or cessation will be painful?
Doubtless, he said.
Then the intermediate state of rest will be pleasure and will also be pain?
So it would seem. 296
But can that which is neither become both?
I should say not.
And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul, are they not?
Yes.
584Pleasure and pain are said to be states of rest, but they are really motions. But that which is neither was just now shown to be rest and not motion, and in a mean between them?
Yes.
How, then, can we be right in supposing that the absence of pain is pleasure, or that the absence of pleasure is pain?
Impossible.
This then is an appearance only and not a reality; that is to say, the rest is pleasure at the moment and in comparison of what is painful, and painful in comparison of what is pleasant; but all these representations, when tried by the test of true pleasure, are not real but a sort of imposition?
That is the inference.
BAll pleasures are not merely cessations of pains, or pains of pleasures; e.g. the pleasures of smell are not. Look at the other class of pleasures which have no antecedent pains and you will no longer suppose, as you perhaps may at present, that pleasure is only the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
What are they, he said, and where shall I find them?
There are many of them: take as an example the pleasures of smell, which are very great and have no antecedent pains; they come in a moment, and when they depart leave no pain behind them.
Most true, he said.
C Let us not, then, be induced to believe that pure pleasure is the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
No.
Still, the more numerous and violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort—they are reliefs of pain.
That is true.
And the anticipations of future pleasures and pains are of a like nature?
Yes.
D Shall I give you an illustration of them?
Let me hear. 297
You would allow, I said, that there is in nature an upper and lower and middle region?
I should.
Illustrations of the unreality of certain pleasures. And if a person were to go from the lower to the middle region, would he not imagine that he is going up; and he who is standing in the middle and sees whence he has come, would imagine that he is already in the upper region, if he has never seen the true upper world?
To be sure, he said; how can he think otherwise?
E But if he were taken back again he would imagine, and truly imagine, that he was descending?
No doubt.
All that would arise out of his ignorance of the true upper and middle and lower regions?
Yes.
Then can you wonder that persons who are inexperienced in the truth, as they have wrong ideas about many other things, should also have wrong ideas about pleasure and pain and the intermediate state; so that when they are only being 585drawn towards the painful they feel pain and think the pain which they experience to be real, and in like manner, when drawn away from pain to the neutral or intermediate state, they firmly believe that they have reached the goal of satiety and pleasure; they, not knowing pleasure, err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain, which is like contrasting black with grey instead of white—can you wonder, I say, at this?
No, indeed; I should be much more disposed to wonder at the opposite.