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Impure Intellectual Pleasure and
the Phaedrus
KELLY E. ARENSON
Duquesne University

Abstract: This paper considers how Plato can account for the fact that pain features
prominently in the intellectual pleasures of philosophers, given that in his view
pleasures mixed with pain are ontologically deficient and inferior to ‘pure,’ painless
pleasures. After ruling out the view that Plato does not believe intellectual pleasures
are actually painful, I argue that he provides a coherent and overlooked account of
pleasure in the Phaedrus, where purity does not factor into the philosopher’s judg-
ment of pleasures at all; what matters instead is the extent to which a given pleasure
fosters the philosophical life. I show that to argue, as James Warren has recently done,
that Plato thinks intellectual pleasures are not per se painful is less successful than
the Phaedrus account at explaining philosophers’ lived experiences of pleasure, which
often involve pain.

I. Introduction

I mpure pleasures, according to the Republic and the Philebus, are linked to pain,
and Plato wears his disdain for them on his sleeve. In these two dialogues he
disapproves of them not only because of their inherent insatiability, but also, and
more damningly, because of the psychic condition with which they are linked:
impure pleasures belong to moral degenerates, whose souls have been corrupted
by their worst elements. Impure pleasures are indicative of internal tyranny, the
most servile of all the psychological constitutions, and so they do not belong to the
philosopher, whose soul is the paragon of rational control. Yet we often find Plato
praising the intellectual pleasure of learning, which, if we take Socratic ignorance
seriously, itself emerges from the painful realization of the limits of one’s own
knowledge and many years of intellectual toil. So how can the philosopher be a

© 2016. Epoché, Volume 21, Issue 1 (Fall 2016). ISSN 1085-1968. 21–45
DOI: 10.5840/epoche201681664
22 Kelly E. Arenson

philosopher if his pleasures come from pains? In other words, how can Plato ac-
count for the fact that impure pleasures of the intellectual sort seem to be standard
features of the rational and just life as it is actually led by philosophers? In this
paper I consider several ways of dealing with this issue, and I argue that the best
solution is found not in the Republic or the Philebus, but in the Phaedrus, the most
neglected of all the dialogues in which Plato discusses pleasure. I contend that
the Phaedrus provides a coherent account of how intellectual pleasures that are
mixed with pain are integral to the life of the philosopher qua virtuous individual.
The first solution I will consider (‘Option 1’) denies that Plato thinks the
philosophical life is pleasant at all: perhaps philosophy is simply pure pain or a
neutral state, and pleasure has nothing to do with it. When a philosopher con-
templates the forms, engages in dialectic with a competent interlocutor, or drafts
the books of the Republic, he experiences either a pain unmixed with pleasure or
some kind of state between pleasure and pain. Alternatively, one could deny that
Plato thinks intellectual pleasure, as it is actually experienced by philosophers,
is mixed with pain (‘Option 2’). This means that no philosopher experiences an
impure intellectual pleasure, so all of Socrates’s intellectual pleasures (assuming
he has any), for instance, are free of pain. A third option (‘Option 3’), argued
for relatively recently by James Warren (2010), is that Plato considers the ideal
philosophical life to be purely pleasant, with the result that Plato avoids com-
mitting himself to the troubling claim that philosophy involves mixed pleasures.
As Warren argues, philosophical knowledge can be painless when it is acquired
and exercised under perfect conditions, a claim for which he finds support in the
Republic and the Philebus.
I will argue that we should reject these three options because they fail to show
how Plato would account for the fact that the philosophical life, in its empirical,
non-idealized form, does include impure intellectual pleasures. Instead, I will
offer a fourth option: we should consider that Plato actually provides an account
of how pain is integral to the pleasure of doing philosophy, and he does so in the
Phaedrus, a dialogue that has not traditionally been recognized as the locus of
any great Platonic treatment of pleasure. Indeed, three of the most recent and,
arguably, most comprehensive scholarly works covering Platonic moral psychol-
ogy and pleasure—namely, J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor’s The Greeks on
Pleasure (1982), Daniel Russell’s Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life (2005), and
Hendrik Lorenz’s The Brute Within (2009)—do not treat the Phaedrus in any
depth, if at all.1 I will show that in contrast to Plato’s treatments of pleasure in
the Republic and Philebus, the Phaedrus focuses on the relative merits of impure
pleasures themselves, refrains from comparing impure pleasures with pure ones,
and makes no mention of a pleasure unmixed with pain. The Phaedrus is signifi-
cant because it addresses head-on the weighty issues of how impure intellectual
pleasures form part of Plato’s conception of the philosophical life and how he
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 23

believes philosophers can adjudicate between painful pleasures, given that they
constitute a large portion of available pleasures.
In this paper I proceed by analyzing the options, beginning with the first
two, which I consider jointly in Section II. There is considerable evidence in the
Platonic corpus that Plato believes intellectual pleasures of learning are mixed
with pain and that philosophy is not purely painful or some kind of neutral state.
If Plato believes the philosopher enjoys intellectual pleasures of any kind, pure or
impure, then philosophy cannot be purely painful or a neutral state. In Section
III, I consider Option 3, Warren’s interpretation, which, like the first two options,
is undesirable because it trivializes the lived experience of actual philosophers,
who do indeed experience impure pleasures of the intellectual variety. In addi-
tion, Warren’s interpretation becomes unnecessary in light of the fourth option,
which I explore in the paper’s final section: in the Phaedrus, Plato has an account
of how the philosopher virtuously and rationally incorporates impure pleasures
into the life of wisdom. If this is right, then this has serious implications for the
composition of the virtuous and happy life. If impure intellectual pleasures are
compatible with virtue and eudaimonia, then we might end up with a conception
of the best human life that reflects the lived experiences of philosophers, which is
to say, we might end up with a more attainable conception of happiness.

II. Pleasures of Learning Are Impure

In the Philebus, Socrates classifies a pleasure as pure or impure based on its
admixture of pain. Some impure pleasures are preceded by pain, which is allevi-
ated when the painful deficiency or condition is removed. He claims that many
pleasures of the body (smell being a notable exception) are impure in this way
because they are linked to the restoration of a perceived organic deficiency (Phlb.
31d4–32b8).2 His prime example is the pleasure of eating when hungry: hunger
is a case of disintegration (λύσις) and pain (λύπη), and the perceived refilling
(πλήρωσις) that follows is an impure pleasure (Phlb. 31e6). Additionally, some
impure pleasures result in pain, such as when I experience mental anguish from
failing to acquire a large pot of gold I had so pleasantly anticipated.3 Still other
impure pleasures occur simultaneously with pain, as when I enjoy scratching an
itch that remains painful during the scratching (Phlb. 46d–47a), or when I enjoy
being in love even as I am pained by my lover’s absence.4
In the Republic, Socrates’s explanation of impure pleasure is decidedly more
basic: he describes it generally as “relief from pain” (τὴν λύπης ἀπαλλαγήν,
584c1–2), and claims that most of the pleasures one encounters in daily life are
of this sort, including most bodily pleasures and pleasurable anticipations (584c).
The bad news is that these sorts of pleasures have a rather dubious ontological
status in the Republic, since they fail to possess any real qualities of their own apart
24 Kelly E. Arenson

from painlessness, which Socrates claims is not identical to pleasure. As he ex-

plains in Book 9, impure pleasures are like shadow-paintings (ἐσκιαγραφημένη)
and bastard (νόθος) children, all of which he claims are illegitimate versions of
real things (583b5, 587b14–c1).5
In contrast, pure pleasures “do not spring from pains” (ἡδονάς, αἳ οὐκ ἐκ
λυπῶν εἰσίν) (Rep. 584b1). In the Republic, Plato’s only example of a pure plea-
sure is that of smells, which “suddenly become inconceivably great without prior
pain, and when they cease they leave no pain behind” (Rep. 584b6–8). (There are
“many others,” Socrates claims at 584b5, but he does not name any of them). In the
Philebus, Plato characterizes pure pleasure quite similarly, with one noteworthy
difference: in the Philebus, pure pleasures can be preceded by deficiencies, just like
impure pleasures, but the deficiencies preceding pure pleasures go unperceived.6
Once a deficiency or other disturbance in an organism is perceived (a lack of food
or an unpleasant fear, for instance), it becomes a pain, rendering the resulting
pleasure impure. As examples of pure pleasures, Socrates mentions those related
to beautiful colors, shapes, most smells, and sounds (Phlb. 51b3–5).7 A few lines
later he adds the pleasure of learning (τὰς περὶ τὰ μαθήματα ἡδονάς), which
he claims is pure when not preceded by a “hunger” (πεινάς) for knowledge one
needs (51e7–52b9). In order for learning to be pleasurable, it must not be preceded
by the realization of one’s own ignorance about something one needs to know.
The Philebus and Republic thus share the idea that pure pleasures differ from
impure pleasures in that the former are not mixed, in whatever way, with pains.
In both the Philebus and the Republic, we learn of the many problems with
impure pleasures themselves and with the sorts of people who pursue them. In
the Philebus, impure pleasures are suspect because they are inherently insatiable,
which is a consequence of their physiology: since impure pleasures are restorations
of perceived deficiencies, and since, according to the Philebus, we are always subject
to such deficiencies, we can never permanently restore a lack and continuously
sustain an impure pleasure.8 As Socrates explains, the pleasure from eating, for
example, is bound up with the pain of hunger, which can never be eradicated and
can therefore never be satisfied once and for all. It makes sense, then, that intem-
perate people would be attracted to impure pleasures: the deficiencies preceding
such pleasures admit of continual fulfillment, so the intemperate can simply
cultivate deficiencies again and again in order to bring about restorations and
their subsequent enjoyments. As an example, Socrates describes the pleasure of
relieving an itch by scratching: pleasures of this sort are mixed with pain and are
more likely to be sought by libertines and degenerates—people who cannot con-
trol their insatiable desires (Phlb. 47a2–b7). Regarding a person who seeks such
pleasures, he claims,“the more undisciplined and mindless (ἀκολαστότερός τε
καὶ ἀφρονέστερος) he happens to be, the more will he absolutely always pursue
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 25

them, and he calls them the greatest (μεγίστας) and counts as the happiest the
one who lives most in enjoyment of them” (Phlb. 47b4–7).
In the Republic too there is ample evidence that Plato worries about the psy-
chological workings of people who fall prey to the deception of impure pleasure,
who think impure pleasures really are pleasures and make them objects of pursuit,
often to excess. According to Socrates, people consider impure pleasures to be
genuine and desire to attain them because such people are ignorant of reason, vir-
tue, and truth.9 These intemperate souls end up quarreling among themselves as
they recklessly pursue bodily goods, their desire for which is insatiable (586b2–3);
they try to fill leaky vessels with material that cannot truly fill (586b3–4).10 Later
in Book 9 of the Republic, Plato associates impure pleasures with the tyrannical
soul, thereby linking them with psychic disorganization and disease and infus-
ing his discussion with the Republic’s moral psychology. Plato places the tyrant’s
pleasures “beyond the bastards ones (τῶν νόθων), since, fleeing both law and
reason, he lives with a bodyguard of certain slavish pleasures (δούλαις τισὶ
δορυφόροις ἡδοναῖς)” (587c1–2).11 The tyrant exemplifies the slave since his
best psychic parts are subordinated to “the most wretched and mad” (577d5),
rendering his soul inharmonious and unhealthy. And since his pleasures belong
to such a soul, his pleasures will be servile too.
The question that now remains is whether Plato believes philosophers experi-
ence impure intellectual pleasures. At this point I am not attempting to determine
whether there is something about impure intellectual pleasures themselves that
Plato believes exempts them from his criticism of impure pleasures generally,
but only whether there is evidence that Plato believes philosophers experience
painful intellectual pleasures in the course of practicing philosophy.
To determine this, we should consider first whether Plato believes philosophy
is pleasant at all, since the purity of intellectual pleasures is irrelevant if there are
no intellectual pleasures to begin with. Recall that Option 1, which I introduced
earlier, would deal with the possibility of impure intellectual pleasure by denying
that philosophy is pleasurable. This option could entail that philosophy is purely
painful or a neutral state between pleasure and pain. The view that philosophy
is not pleasant gains traction if it is potentially attributable to a group of people
Plato mentions in the Philebus, the so-called “dour ones” (οἱ δυσχερεῖς), who
are reported to be “quite skilled concerning the things of nature” (Phlb. 44b9) and
are identified as Philebus’s real enemies (unbeknownst to Philebus).12 Socrates
claims that the “dour ones” pose a particular threat to Philebus’s hedonism because
they claim “there are no pleasures at all. . . . That which the followers of Philebus
now call pleasure are all just escapes from pains” (44b10–c2).13 If pleasure is just
the relief from pain, then impure intellectual pleasures, or any pleasures for that
matter, do not really exist.
26 Kelly E. Arenson

Although Plato seems to find the views of the dour quasi-useful in his own
investigation of pleasure and knowledge in the Philebus, there is evidence from
several dialogues, the Philebus included, that Plato believes the philosophical life
is pleasant and that intellectual pleasures are no mere accessory in the philoso-
pher’s intellectual pursuits. In the Republic, Plato appeals to the pleasantness of
the philosophical life as proof that it is the happiest and most virtuous. Socrates
claims in Book 9 that if the philosopher were asked to compare the pleasures
of the honor-lover and the profit-lover to “that of knowing how the truth is and
always being in such a state [viz., pleased] while learning,” he would conclude that
his pleasures are not only superior but also necessary, “since he would have no
other need for them if it weren’t for necessity” (581e1–4).14 In the Philebus too, as
I mentioned, Socrates claims there is a pleasure of learning (51e–52a), and early
in that dialogue he denies that the best life might be rational but pleasureless
on the grounds that no one would voluntarily choose a life of such “utter insen-
sitivity.”15 Although Socrates and his interlocutor Protarchus establish that the
life of pleasure alone is also undesirable, they agree that a life in which pleasure
is combined with reason is preferable to a life of reason on its own, concluding
that “if any one of us should choose otherwise, then he would choose contrary to
the nature of the truly choiceworthy, and involuntarily from ignorance or some
unhappy necessity” (22b6–8).16 Even the Phaedo, the locus of Plato’s most hostile
treatment of pleasure, allows the philosopher his own proper enjoyments: when
Socrates attempts to assuage his friends’ fears about death, he assures them that a
man need not worry for his soul if he has, among other things,“set aside enjoyment
of the pleasures of the body and its ornamentation . . . but has been earnest about
the pleasures of learning (τὰς δὲ περὶ τὸ μανθάνειν)” (114e1–4). Since Plato
seems committed to the view that pleasure (of the intellectual variety, at least)
at minimum contributes positively to happiness, and, at maximum, is indispens-
able to the best human life, I think we have sufficient evidence to reject Option 1.
So philosophy is pleasant, but is it also painful? We might be tempted to go
with Option 2 and say that it is not, perhaps inferring that Plato must believe pain
plays no part in intellectual pleasures given his disdain for painful bodily plea-
sures. However, we have good reason to conclude that Plato believes philosophy
is indeed painful, since there is substantial evidence that Plato considers distress
to be a standard, even useful, feature of learning (or, if you prefer, ‘recollecting’),
which is essential to philosophy. Plato shows in several dialogues that the acqui-
sition of knowledge goes hand in hand with the painful realization of one’s own
ignorance. This is most apparent in Book 7 of the Republic, where Plato describes
how the prisoner in the cave suffers mentally when he realizes that the shadows
on the wall are not what they seem: when the freed prisoner looks to the light he
is “pained” (πάντα δὲ ταῦτα ποιῶν ἀλγοῖ, 515c8); his eyes “hurt” (ἀλγεῖν τε
ἂν τὰ ὄμματα, 515e2); he would “suffer anything” to rid himself of his former
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 27

opinions (καὶ ὁτιοῦν ἂν πεπονθέναι, 516d6). Later in Book 7, Socrates and

Glaucon claim that perseverance in the face of hard study is necessary to become
a skilled dialectician, since “souls flinch much more in severe studies than in
bodily exercises, since the toil (πόνος) belongs more to them” (535b6–8). Plato
had expressed a similar idea in Book 6, where Socrates and Glaucon agreed that
the genuine philosopher is to be distinguished from the poser by the former’s
commitment to strive for truth, no matter the pain. Socrates states,“the real lover
of learning strives by nature for what is . . . and drawing near to and mingling
with it, begetting reason and truth, he knows and truly lives and grows, and in
this way he stays the pains of labor, but not before that time (λήγοι ὠδῖνος, πρὶν
δ᾽ οὔ)” (490a8–b7). The pain of learning is felt as something specific to oneself
as a rational being, as part and parcel of living philosophically.
Lest we be tempted to say that Plato believes pain is a mere byproduct of the
process of acquiring knowledge, we should note that sometimes in the dialogues
pain is purposely inflicted on a learner for pedagogical reasons. In the Meno, for
example, Socrates makes a point of having the slave boy answer incorrectly be-
fore solving the problem of the square; the boy must first be brought into a state
of bewilderment, wherein he is at a complete loss, before he answers correctly
(82b9–84b1). In a similar vein, Socrates warns his interlocutor in the Theaetetus
that the process of trying to sort out what knowledge really is can be compared
to the “pains of labor” (ὠδίνεις), pains that the midwife—that is, the dialecti-
cian—has the power to engender (148e6–151d6). Bringing forth intellectual
pains is an “art” (τέχνη), Socrates claims, one that he practices on Theaetetus
throughout the dialogue.
On the whole, the practice of Socratic ignorance demonstrates that the process
of coming to know philosophical truths originates in the painful realization of
one’s own mental deficiencies. This point is demonstrated in a passage I mentioned
earlier from the Philebus, where Socrates asks Protarchus whether forgetting
knowledge we once gained is painful. They conclude that the forgetting itself is
not painful, but reflecting on the loss of knowledge is indeed experienced as a
pain (Phlb. 51e7–52b5).17 The upshot of their discussion is that the pleasure of
learning is in fact painful if it is preceded by the realization of ignorance. And
since the realization of one’s own ignorance is integral to the Platonic and Socratic
quest for truth and self-knowledge, it is inevitable that the philosophical life as it
is lived is bound up with pain. In other words, not even the philosopher’s enjoy-
ments are entirely pure.

III. Ideal Pleasures of Learning Are Pure: Warren’s View

Although by this point we may accept that Plato thinks intellectual pleasures of
learning are mixed with pain, one could nevertheless argue that Plato believes
28 Kelly E. Arenson

they are not mixed with pain per se. This is the view espoused recently by Warren
(‘Option 3’), who does not dispute the claim that Plato thinks philosophers do
in fact experience impure pleasures of the philosophical sort.18 He argues that
the Philebus and Republic show that, ideally, intellectual pleasures are not tied to
suffering.19 If this is the case, then it would seem we no longer have a problem
with intellectual pleasures that are mixed with pains, since we have only to say
that Plato can discount them as lesser versions of ideal, pure intellectual pleasures.
Warren’s argument turns on the claim that in most cases where intellec-
tual progress is obviously painful—such as the respective experiences of the
prisoner emerging from the cave, Socrates’s interlocutors, and many citizens of
Athens—the pain results from the conditions under which the learning occurs,
not the learning itself. When learning is sudden and forced, as it seems to be in
the cases just mentioned, knowledge is inevitably accompanied by suffering. But
when learning is gradual and voluntary, as it is for budding philosophers in the
ideal city, whose educational program has “an assured level of success” and is
designed to lead them in a careful and measured way through difficult subjects,
“the pain involved will be, at the very least, significantly lessened.”20 As Warren
puts it, “Unlike the various people who complain of distress as a result of talking
with Socrates and unlike the dazzled and pained prisoner escaping the cave at
the beginning of Republic 7, a philosopher-in-training in the ideal city will be
making intellectual progress in maximally beneficial circumstances.”21
In addition, Warren contends that Plato need not acknowledge that all philo-
sophical pleasures are those of learning (μανθάνειν), even though Plato seems
to believe that pleasure is a motion or change (κίνησις)22 and he focuses on the
affections experienced in the process of acquiring knowledge more than on those
experienced in the state of having knowledge. Warren rightly points out that Plato
also acknowledges a pure pleasure of knowing (τῆς ἀπὸ τοῦ εἰδέναι ἡδονῆς,
Rep. 582a10–b1), which Warren delineates by making use of the Philebus’s distinc-
tion between remembering something one has forgotten and recalling something
one knows that is not presently at the forefront of one’s mind (Phlb. 34b–c). As an
example of the activity of recalling something one knows but has not forgotten,
Warren explains that when philosopher-rulers are constructing the ideal city
they will bring to mind the Form of Justice, which surely they know, and consider
how the Form can best be instantiated in the city. He claims that this process
of considering what one already knows is not painful, since it involves readily
recalling what one has stored in one’s mind (what he calls “latent knowledge”23)
rather than struggling to retrieve a needed piece of knowledge one has forgotten.
Although the process of recalling what one knows does end up filling a lack in the
philosopher’s soul, Warren contends that the process is not a relief from pain since
the philosopher has acquired his knowledge painlessly, under the ideal educa-
tional system. On Warren’s reading, this process is not only painless, but it is also
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 29

highly pleasurable, since the object with which the philosopher’s mind is ‘filled’
in this case is a Form, an object that is most true and real, which Plato claims in
the Republic yields the highest pleasure (585d11–585e5). In short, Warren argues
that the Republic and the Philebus do indeed show that the intellectual pleasure
of learning can be free of pain, or at least that it can be less painful.
Even if we grant Warren’s claims that learning is painless for philosophers in
the ideal city and that there is a pure pleasure of knowing, it remains the case
that, phenomenologically, intellectual pleasure involves pain. Unless we wish to
attribute to Plato the claim that philosophers educated in non-ideal environments
are not really philosophers because their pleasures are mixed with pains, then the
philosophical life as it is actually lived will contain impure intellectual pleasures.
Warren’s solution does nothing to mitigate the problem that pleasures that are
mixed with pains are said to belong to moral degenerates, yet the philosopher’s
own pleasures are impure. In other words, we still have no explanation for how
philosophers who have been so unfortunate as to miss out on the gentle and me-
thodical education of the ideal city should approach their own impure intellectual
pleasures. If the pain of learning can be avoided only in utopia, then how should
the painful pleasures of learning be incorporated into the rational life? What place
do such pleasures have in a virtuous soul? While Warren’s reading may shed light
on Plato’s perspective on the ontology of intellectual pleasure, it does not illuminate
the ethics of intellectual pleasure; it does not address the practical issue of how
philosophers live with their impure intellectual pleasures and why they pursue
them. Moreover, if Warren is right that pleasures of learning belonging to philoso-
phers who are educated in the ideal city will be painless, this is all the more reason
to believe that intellectual pleasures belonging to philosophers educated in less
than ideal situations will spring from pains and will therefore be inferior. Warren’s
claim that there is such a thing as an ideal, pure pleasure of learning comes at the
cost of rendering such pleasure hypothetical; lived intellectual pleasures seem
all the more deficient in comparison. Indeed, philosophical education in the real
world—which would certainly include Plato’s world too—has no “assured level
of success” and does not take place under “maximally beneficial circumstances,”
a fact that must have been transparent to Plato, given that his dialogues so often
depict education as a struggle. Indeed, several of Socrates’s interlocutors, if not
most of them, undergo significant distress as they strive to learn with him. And
even if we grant that there are pure pleasures of knowing, it is nevertheless im-
possible to enjoy knowing something without first learning it.24
At this point, we still seek a solution to the practical issue of what sort of
perspective philosophers should have on their own intellectual pleasures, given
that for them the pleasure of learning is linked to pain. As we saw earlier, it is
not feasible to argue that Plato denies that philosophers experience intellectual
pleasures or intellectual pains, and we come no closer to uncovering Plato’s take
30 Kelly E. Arenson

on the practical attitude the philosopher should have toward painful pleasures if
we argue that Plato believes it is theoretically possible for all intellectual pleasures
to be pure. In any case, such arguments are unnecessary if there exists an expla-
nation in the Platonic corpus for how philosophers qua virtuous individuals can
consider impure intellectual pleasures to be integral to their rational pursuits. In
the following section, I argue that the Phaedrus provides precisely such an account.

IV. Impure Intellectual Pleasure in the Phaedrus

My aim for the remainder of this paper is to show that in the Phaedrus Plato
believes pain is intimately linked to intellectual pleasure, and that such pleasure
is highly valuable to the practice of philosophy. I contend that Plato shows in the
dialogue that impure pleasure and virtue are not mutually exclusive: even as
the philosopher pursues and enjoys intellectual pleasures that are mixed with
pain, he nevertheless exercises virtue, which in the dialogue consists in knowing
beauty itself. As I will argue Plato shows in the Phaedrus, philosophers need not
consider the pursuit of impure intellectual pleasure to be antithetical to the life
of virtue, since it is reasonable for philosophers to evaluate a pleasure in terms
of its role in the pursuit of their overall life goals rather than solely in terms of its
admixture of pain. In this regard, I think it is telling that Socrates never mentions
pure pleasure at all in the Phaedrus; instead, he focuses on the relative merits of
impure pleasures themselves. In other words, the philosopher of the Phaedrus
is uninterested in the ontological significance of his pleasures; he is interested
instead in their ethical significance, in the practical role they play in his pursuit of
the good life. Ultimately, my point is that Plato believes philosophers can still be
philosophers even if they pursue impure pleasure—not just any kind of impure
pleasure, but an intellectual impure pleasure, which in the Phaedrus turns out to
be an erotic one.
This section proceeds as follows: first I assess Plato’s notions of ἔρως in the
dialogue, arguing that two kinds of erotic pleasure emerge from Lysias’s speech
and Socrates’s ensuing accounts of the role of ἔρως in the good life. Next, I contend
that Plato believes both of these kinds of erotic pleasure are mixed with pain, but
one belongs to the philosopher qua virtuous individual. Subsequently, I discuss
Plato’s conception of virtue in the Phaedrus, arguing that in this dialogue he does
not define virtue in terms of rational control, as he so often does elsewhere, even
though in the end reason does govern the philosopher’s soul in the Phaedrus. I
end the paper by considering a possible objection to my claim that Plato believes
impure intellectual pleasures are valuable to the philosophical life.
In order to argue that erotic impure pleasure is a valuable component of the
philosophical life in the Phaedrus, we should begin by determining what Socrates’s
conception of ἔρως itself is. It is useful to consider how his conception develops
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 31

over the course of the first half of the dialogue, as Socrates provides two accounts
that respond in different ways to a speech against ἔρως written by Lysias. Ac-
cording to Lysias, ἔρως is straightforwardly negative: it consists in the desire to
dominate another, to possess another’s body and mind in a way that smothers the
beloved and ruins the relationship. Socrates builds on this conception of ἔρως
in his first speech, where he claims that Lysias’s speech lacks a clear definition of
ἔρως and fails to provide a coherent account of how the state of the lover’s psyche
leads to such tyrannical behavior. Socrates wants to know not only the costs of
love, but also the nature of love itself and how it operates. In Socrates’s first speech,
he reiterates Lysias’s fundamental claim that lovers are harmful to the ones they
love while adding that erotic love consists in an unreasoning desire for pleasure,
particularly the pleasure of beauty in human bodies, and that it is opposed to
reason’s desire to act virtuously (238b–c). Love is the worst sort of madness, and
as such it is necessarily opposed to rationality. A lover’s pleasure in this account
is seen as something sordid: the delight a lecherous older man takes in the touch,
sound, and sight of a beautiful boy. In short, when the tyrannical lover gives
himself over to the “madness of love” he becomes “untrustworthy, fretful, jealous,
disagreeable, harmful to [his beloved’s] property, harmful to the condition of his
body, and most harmful by far to the education of his soul” (241c1–5). As G. R.
F. Ferrari notes, the non-lover of Socrates’s first speech considers the pursuit of
pleasure and the pursuit of the good to be mutually exclusive; one either pursues
physical pleasure, as does the tyrannical lover, destroying the beloved’s life in
the process, or else one cares for the good of the beloved and shuns pleasure all
together, as does the non-lover.25
Although in his second speech Socrates reconsiders these charges against
ἔρως, the desire for lecherous pleasure that he attributes to the lover in his first
speech becomes one of the defining characteristics of what I will call the ‘irrever-
ent lover’ and ‘irreverent pleasure.’ The irreverent lover will never see his beloved
boy as more than a beautiful body; such a lover remains transfixed by beauty in
a particular physical figure and constantly desires sexual enjoyment. As Socrates
explains, the irreverent lover suffers from such unrefined motivations because he
either cannot remember what he saw as a disembodied soul traversing the heavens
or he has somehow besmirched his soul such that his knowledge is inaccessible
(250e1–2). This suggests that the irreverent lover’s inability to progress beyond
the pursuit of sexual pleasure to a philosophical relationship with his beloved
is due to some intellectual, and possibly also moral, flaw: he has never had an
adequate look at true beauty, and his knowledge of it may be out of reach due to
moral depravity. In any case, his pleasure is by no means philosophical: it consists
solely in the fulfillment of a bodily desire, and the irreverent lover has no rational
pursuits of which the pleasure could be a part. Because he lacks knowledge of true
beauty, possession of which would enable him to engage philosophically with his
32 Kelly E. Arenson

partner, the irreverent lover finds himself mired in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.
There is evidence that Plato believes reason is uninvolved in this type of erotic
pleasure, since Socrates claims that the irreverent lover’s behavior resembles
that of an irrational animal: Socrates states that such a lover, “surrendering to
pleasure, attempts to go in the manner of a four-footed beast and beget children.
With insolence as his companion, he is not afraid or ashamed when he pursues
pleasure that is contrary to nature” (250e4–251a1).26 As C. J. Rowe notes, such
pleasure is “contrary to nature” because it befits animals rather than humans.27
The irreverent lover’s soul is mired in hubris, and its pleasure is crude and bodily.
Unsurprisingly, irreverent pleasure is impure, and I think there are at least
two reasons for this. First, irreverent pleasure is preceded by the recognition of
a deficiency that causes psychological discomfort: Plato describes the irrever-
ent lover as a slave to sexual appetite, whose need for sexual fulfillment is never
satisfied. Such a frustrated life resembles that of the individual in Book 9 of the
Republic who is set to the endless task of continually filling leaky vessels. In
this way, irreverent pleasure can function on the model of various basic bodily
pleasures, such as the pleasure of sating one’s hunger: like basic bodily pleasures,
irreverent pleasure results from a desire that is painful when unfulfilled. Secondly,
throughout Socrates’s first and second speeches in the Phaedrus, he attributes to
the irreverent lover all sorts of negative emotions, including jealousy (239a7) and
fear (239b5), which he explicitly describes as psychological pains (λύπη) in the
Philebus (cf. 47e1–3).28 Since irreverent pleasure is preceded by painful emotions,
occurs simultaneously with them, or even results in them (if we can imagine a
vicious circle of sexual pleasure and jealousy, one fueling the other), irreverent
pleasure is by definition impure.
In his second speech, Socrates formulates a conception of ἔρως that is largely
opposed to Lysias’: far from being the tyrannical and unreflective affliction Lysias
depicts it as, ἔρως is a divinely-inspired state that results in knowledge and vir-
tue. The rational, virtuous agent in the Phaedrus is what I will call the ‘reverent
lover,’ who sees his beloved boy as more than a mere object of sexual desire: the
reverent lover is a “recent initiate” (ὁ ἀρτιτελής) into the cult of eternal truths,
and he is easily reminded of the true nature of beauty. Reverent pleasure, like the
irreverent, has a markedly sexual quality, since it is triggered by the lover’s sexual
desire for the beautiful beloved, but what ultimately gratifies the reverent lover’s
erotic desire comes through the visual rather than the sexual organ: true beauty
is apprehended “through the clearest of our senses” (250d1–2), a fact which dis-
tances reverent pleasure from the crude bodily pleasure of the irreverent soul.29
Divinely-inspired erotic desire results in knowledge of the form of beauty, as
evidenced by the fact that it is this form in particular on which the reverent lover
homes in when he confronts his beloved (Phdr. 250d–51c). Virtue is embodied
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 33

by the reverent lover, who adopts a respectful and philosophical stance toward
his beloved and apprehends beauty itself.
In the Phaedrus, then, virtue consists in the acquisition of a philosophical
relationship with one’s beloved that results in knowledge of a particular form,
namely, beauty, and I would argue further that in the dialogue virtue does not
necessarily consist in self-control or psychic harmony. That Plato is not necessarily
thinking of virtue as rational control or harmony in the Phaedrus is supported by
the fact that the virtuous soul in the dialogue profits, at least initially, from being
disordered. The soul in the Phaedrus consists in the union of a charioteer and two
winged horses, one of good breeding, obedient to its driver, with a pristine white
coat, the other a mongrel, insolent and darkly colored (246b1–3; 253d1–e5).30
Near the end of his second speech, Socrates describes how the lover’s irrational
psychic element opposes reason, and this opposition brings the lover in touch
with the beloved’s true beauty. After the charioteer and two horses make their
initial pass at the beloved, the dark horse attempts to approach again, much to the
chagrin of the other psychic components, as Socrates explains: “And once more,
forcing them even though they are not willing to accept, [the dark horse] scarcely
yields when they beg to postpone until later. But when the agreed-upon time
comes and they pretend to forget, it reminds them” (254d1–4). If the charioteer
and the obedient horse had not been goaded by irrational desire, they would not
have approached the boy a second time, frightened as they were by his beauty.
Since no erotic relationship of any kind, reverent or irreverent, gets off the ground
without the insolence of appetite, and since virtue in the Phaedrus is sought and
found through erotic relationships, it is not the case that virtue consists in rational
control in the dialogue. In addition, the image of the soul as a union of a chari-
oteer and two horses lends itself to the idea that reason is somewhat dependent
on its two non-rational associates to move it along. To get close to the form of
beauty as it appears in the beloved’s body, and therefore to experience virtue, the
philosopher’s soul evidently requires the irrational urging of appetite.
This is not to deny, as some scholars have, that in the end reason dominates
the reverent lover’s soul.31 The imagery at the end of the myth of the charioteer
in the Phaedrus is evidence that the soul eventually curtails its unruly desire for
sex by enslaving its lustful part to the other psychic elements. The charioteer
violently restrains the undisciplined horse, drawing blood and bringing the beast
to its knees (254e2–5).32 Eventually, the proper hierarchy of the parts of the soul
is achieved (254e5–255a1):
When the bad horse suffers this many times, it stops being insolent. Being
humbled, it now defers to the foresight of the charioteer, and whenever it sees
the beautiful boy it is utterly destroyed from fright, with the result that now it
is the case that the lover’s soul follows the boy in awe and fear. (254e5–255a1)
34 Kelly E. Arenson

Now that it has the best leader, the soul has a philosophical, rather than a sexual,
relationship with its beloved, and is controlled by the psychic part that knows
and does what is best for the soul as a whole.33 But although the reverent lover’s
soul is self-controlled and rational, there is good reason to believe, as I explained
above, that self-control is not the defining feature of virtue in the dialogue, con-
trary to what we find in the main arguments of the Republic. The soul’s initial
lack of rational control is an essential step in putting the soul on the scent of
true beauty, the knowledge of which is facilitated by erotically-inspired mania
and constitutes virtue.
So what is the ethical status of reverent pleasure in the dialogue? How does
it form part of the life of virtue, and what is its relation to pain? The philosopher
of the Phaedrus enjoys acquiring the knowledge of beauty, and his pleasure is
intimately linked to pain. Reverent pleasure is impure, yet it is not antithetical
to virtue, which indicates that purity is not the primary criterion by which Plato
compares pleasures in the dialogue. Evidence for the claim that the reverent lover
experiences philosophical pleasures that are mixed with pain is found in Socrates’s
rather colorful account of the reverent lover’s reaction to his beloved, from 250a–
252b. First comes the pain: the process of regrowing the soul’s “wings,” which we
are told in the dialogue’s central myth the soul lost when it fell from the heavens
into a mortal body, is agonizing. Like a teething baby, the soul aches and groans
as its wings push their way through the shafts (251c–4), a process which could
represent the philosopher’s struggle to attain knowledge. The pain is relieved in
the presence of the beautiful boy, but it returns once he is out of sight and growth
is suspended, leaving the buds to throb in their passageways. Socrates claims
that the soul is “stung to madness and suffers” (οἰστρᾷ καὶ ὀδυνᾶται, 251d6),
“it is anguished” (ἀδημονεῖ, 251d7) by the combination of pleasure and pain
it undergoes, and the boy is “the only physician for its tremendous pains (τῶν
μεγίστων πόνων)” (252a7–b1). Although this process is evidently quite pain-
ful for the soul, it is also extremely pleasant: using unabashedly sexual language,
Plato details how the reverent lover experiences immense pleasure as the true
beauty emanating from his beautiful boy warms and unblocks his soul’s clogged,
scabbed wing shafts, resulting in “the sweetest pleasure”:34
From the mix of both things [i.e., pleasure and pain], it is anguished by the
strangeness of the feeling, and it starts back, raging. Being frantic, it is unable
to sleep at night or stay where it is by day; it runs, yearning, wherever it thinks
it might see the one who possesses that beauty. When it sees him, it bathes
in the water of desire and unblocks the pores that were obstructed before.
The stinging and anguish abate as it recovers its breath, and it enjoys for the
present the sweetest pleasure (ἡδονὴν δ᾽ αὖ ταύτην γλυκυτάτην ἐν τῷ
παρόντι καρποῦται). It is not willing to abandon this, and it considers no
one to be more beautiful. (251d7–52a2)
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 35

The “sweetest pleasure” comes over the lover when he sees Beauty itself in the
beauty of a particular body, which is to say, when he satisfies his desire to un-
derstand truth. Wings and horses aside, what the myth attempts to depict is the
severe discomfort one experiences as a result of desire, specifically the painful
urge to be in the presence of a human body so as to draw near to what is most
real; intense desire for philosophical truth is extremely painful, but its satisfac-
tion is overwhelmingly pleasant. In the Phaedrus, the philosophical pleasure of
learning is bound up with pain, but the pleasure is redeemed in the dialogue on
account of its connection to the virtuous life.
Reverent pleasure and irreverent pleasure, then, belong to two entirely different
lovers,35 and Plato is making a normative claim about the pleasures themselves by
linking them to better and worse kinds of life. When a pleasure is bound up with
the activity that characterizes a life—wanton pursuit of sex in one case, pursuit
of intelligible forms in another—the value of the activity reflects on the value of
the pleasure. Reverent pleasure has moral value because it is bound up with the
life of philosophical activity, which is itself bound up with divinely-inspired erotic
madness, one of the things Socrates claims is “given by the gods for our greatest
good fortune” (245b7–c1).36 Accordingly, irreverent pleasure is morally suspect
because it fails to form part of a life that seeks truth beyond the physical realm;
it belongs to the lover who myopically sets sexual gratification as his goal, has no
philosophical designs on his beloved, and no yearning to contemplate true beauty
or the other forms. Sexual pleasure, or any pleasure, is incompatible with happiness
when it becomes the focal point of one’s life at the expense of philosophy.37 The
irreverent lover’s pleasures are harmful because they are pursued in the service
of a goal that is immoral by Plato’s standards, not because they are mixed with
pain. Even reverent pleasures are impure, as I argued, but Plato nevertheless gives
them pride of place in the erotically-inspired philosophical life because they are
experienced in the course of acquiring knowledge of the form of beauty. In the
Phaedrus, Plato pegs the moral value of a pleasure not to its ontological status
but to the moral value of the life in which it plays a part.38
It is also arguably the case that reverent and irreverent pleasures spring from
different sources within the person, a fact that may affect Plato’s moral appraisal
of them. In the Phaedrus, irreverent pleasures seem to originate in the appetitive
part of the soul: in several places in the dialogue, Plato attributes sexual desire to
the dark horse,39 the soul’s crude and unruly appetitive part, which is consistent
with his claims elsewhere.40 Reverent pleasure, on the other hand, stems from the
rational psychic part itself. The reverent lover’s desire to be reunited with the forms
and the pleasure of satisfying this desire must belong to reason,41 since reason,
acting as the charioteer, is the only component of the soul that looks upon and
contemplates intelligible objects.42 Consequently, reverent pleasure is intellectual
and forms part of the life of the manic philosopher.43
36 Kelly E. Arenson

One might be tempted to say, then, that a pleasure’s source is the main criterion
by which Plato judges a pleasure in the Phaedrus, in which case his hedonic classi-
fication would turn out to be ontological after all. We should avoid this temptation,
however, even though a pleasure’s origin has some bearing on its moral worth. If
certain pleasures were automatically damned because of their ontological status,
this would force Plato into the unrealistic claim that philosophers never include
ontologically-challenged pleasures in their lives. After all, not all pleasures, even
appetitive ones, are as destructive as irreverent pleasures: many are harmless as
long as they do not become the focal point of one’s life and detract from one’s
philosophical pursuits. And this is just to say that a pleasure becomes danger-
ous when it forms part of a misguided (that is, non-philosophical) life. It would
make sense that a philosopher would allow himself the pleasure of satisfying his
appetitive desire for food, for example, as long as he does not pursue the pleasure
to excess and lose sight of his philosophical goals. That a pleasure’s source is not
the main criterion by which Plato judges pleasure is further supported by the fact
that, in some dialogues, intellectual pleasures or certain kinds of knowledge are
coupled with lack of virtue. In the Symposium, for instance, Alcibiades reports
that he has been bitten by the philosophical “bug,” appealing to the other mem-
bers of the gathering who understand what it is like to “partake of the Bacchic
frenzy of philosophy” (218b3–4). Yet, Alcibiades is far from virtuous: he lets his
appetites have free rein, particularly his desire for sex, and he betrays Athens
rather grievously in the Peloponnesian War. Although he is intelligent and pur-
sues knowledge of a sort, he still falls short of virtue, which suggests that not all
kinds of knowledge or learning are linked to the good life; rational things are not
praiseworthy simply because they are rational. The point is that virtue is not linked
to just any kind of intellectual pleasure or knowledge, but to learning about the
right sort of thing, the truest and most real, which in the Phaedrus is the form of
beauty itself. So while it might be the case that reverent pleasures are acceptable
because they belong to the life of reason, they are acceptable not because they are
intellectual per se, but because they belong to a rational life that seeks knowledge
of forms. What matters, as I believe Plato is arguing in the Phaedrus, is whether
a pleasure is experienced as part of a life centered on uncovering philosophical
truth, especially the truth of beauty. We should think of a pleasure’s source, then,
as a necessary but insufficient condition for devaluing the pleasure.
There is good reason to believe, then, that Plato thinks the pleasure of learning
is mixed with pain, and that the Phaedrus accounts for why virtuous, philosophical
people pursue these pleasures and prefer them to other pleasures, possibly even
purer ones.44 In the Phaedrus, his view is that virtue is not inherently exclusive
of the pursuit of certain pleasures that are mixed with pain; in other words,
purity ends up being an unhelpful criterion by which to judge the moral value
of a pleasure. Furthermore, it is not that impure pleasures such as the reverent
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 37

are merely compatible with the philosophical life; such pleasures actually define
the philosophical life in the Phaedrus, since we get the sense from the dialogue
that the reverent lover’s philosophical journey would be fundamentally different
without the mixture of pleasure and pain he experiences along the way.
In the remainder of this paper, I would like to address an objection to my
argument about the Phaedrus that might emerge from Warren’s corner, or from
Ferrari’s work on the dialogue or from Aristotle’s ethics. The objection might run
as follows: although Plato may believe that philosophers do experience learning as
an impure pleasure, he could nevertheless hold that the value of impure intellectual
pleasure in the philosophical life is illusory, just like the value of the “bastard”
pleasures in the Republic. One might argue this on the grounds that although
intellectual impure pleasure is better than the pleasure of beasts, it is still only
the best of the worst—the best pleasures immortal souls can experience while
trapped in a mortal body. Surely, this objection might go, souls would be better
off if they never fell from the heavens in the first place and became subject to the
weaknesses of a mortal body and the pain of ignorance. The pleasures associ-
ated with the satisfaction of painful physical and mental desires might therefore
be bittersweet: it is of course enjoyable to have pains removed, but at the same
time one must undergo pains in order to procure pleasure. One might claim that
it would be much more desirable on Plato’s view if all one’s intellectual pleasures
were unmixed with pain or if one’s life lacked pleasure and pain full stop.45 Since
irreverent pleasure, then, is a product of the inferior situation in which a fallen
soul finds itself, it is something the philosopher should take care to avoid, or, at
the very least, it is something he has mixed feelings about. If it is the case that
Plato considers all pleasures that stem from embodiment as second-rate and
perhaps unworthy of pursuit, then the virtuous soul has grave misgivings about
incorporating them into the philosophical life.
Ferrari, suggesting something along these lines, argues that the philosopher
in the Phaedrus thinks of erotic pleasure as a burden, and that on this point the
dialogue is in agreement with the Philebus, where Plato claims that impurities
such as painful pleasures ought to play the smallest possible role in the good life.
Ferrari writes,“[it] is not just any mixture of pleasure and pain, but an allegorical
description, in terms of a mixture of pleasure and pain, of an emotional turmoil
which eventually confirms the lover in a way of life as resistant as anything in the
Philebus to mixed pleasures.”46 According to Ferrari, the reverent lover realizes
that the pleasure and pain he experiences as a result of contact with his beloved
are hardships he must tolerate for the sake of his philosophical relationship.47
In addition, there is some precedent in Aristotle for the view that certain plea-
sures stem from mortal nature and are therefore of a lesser grade. Interestingly,
Aristotle uses the term γλυκύς (‘sweet’) derogatively when discussing pleasure
at the end of Book 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, the same word Plato uses rather
38 Kelly E. Arenson

positively in the Phaedrus to describe reverent pleasure (251e5).48 When compar-

ing divine pleasure and divinity, which are always simple and unchanging, with
human pleasure and human nature, which are multiform and variable, Aristotle,
alluding to Euripides, asserts the following: “Change in everything is sweet, accord-
ing to the poet, on account of some bad state. For just as a changeable human is
bad, so also is the nature that needs change, since it [viz., the nature] is not simple
or good” (1154b28–31).49 In other words, to take pleasure in what is changeable
is sweet, and the one who does so is imperfect. But notice that all mortals are
by nature inferior in this respect, since none is simple like God, and all human
pleasures are subject to being condemned as ‘sweet’, since none is constant.‘Sweet’
pleasures, then, are second-rate, and mortals are by nature stuck with them.
Is Plato making a similar claim in the Phaedrus? Is reverent pleasure, and, for
that matter, all pleasures we would be without were we not in our fallen mortal
condition, second-rate and to be resisted? If this were true, Plato would have to
reject learning as well, since it is a result of the soul’s embodiment and its subse-
quent loss of knowledge. But in fact Plato does not reject learning or intellectual
pleasures, not even impure ones, and he never claims explicitly that philosophers
do or ought to avoid the ardors of philosophical study. Indeed, judging from the
arguments in Section II of this paper, it would be difficult to attribute to Plato
the view that philosophers or anyone else should resist or despise learning and
intellectual pleasures because they mark us as mortal, even if it is the case that
we would be better off if we consciously retained all the knowledge we stored in
our souls before birth, thus obviating the need for recollection and its associated
pain. However, this is not to say that Plato never discounts something because of
its connection to mortality—he does so quite frequently with regard to bodily
elements, for instance—but he does so not because the thing in question has a
mere connection to mortality but because it is an expression of mortality. When I
am mired in the body, for instance, I fail to live the kind of life that is expressive
of myself as a rational being; I focus instead on the parts of myself that are most
removed from immortality, which is why, from Plato’s perspective, I would be
justified in devaluing the body. The life of learning and its respective intellectual
pleasures, however, reflect our immortal rather than our mortal aspects, and so
they are not things Plato claims we should avoid or devalue.50
In conclusion, Plato shows in the Phaedrus that a virtuous individual can
experience an impure pleasure that is intimately bound up with his or her philo-
sophical pursuits. There is no attempt to dodge the fact that the philosopher’s
intellectual interests lead to a rational pleasure that is thoroughly mixed with
pain. The Phaedrus thus shares with the Republic and the Philebus their emphasis
on the importance of pleasure in the philosophical life, and one could say that
the Phaedrus supplements these other dialogues with an account of how pain-
ful intellectual pleasures in particular—the most common kind of intellectual
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 39

pleasure experienced in real life by philosophers—fit into the best life, and how
virtuous individuals can go about comparing impure pleasures to each other. In
the Phaedrus, Plato shows himself to be more interested in assessing a pleasure
in terms of its role in an agent’s overall goals, the choice and pursuit of which
reflects the organization of the agent’s soul, rather than primarily in terms of a
pleasure’s admixture of pain. In my view, this way of appraising pleasure has the
effect of humanizing Platonic ethics, since this way is more realistic about the
lives real philosophers lead. Real philosophers do not operate under “perfect”
conditions: their educations are often painful, and they can be tempted by a wide
variety of bodily pleasures, which can mar their happiness if pursued excessively.
Real philosophers, even Platonic ones, need tools for weighing the moral value of
impure pleasures themselves, since these are the ones they are likely to encounter
in life. Strangely enough, on this reading Plato begins to seem like an Epicurean:
by appraising a pleasure in terms of its impact on the long-term goals of the
individual, Plato, like Epicurus, is rejecting certain pleasures if they are likely to
become deleterious to psychological and physical health. This by no means makes
Plato a hedonist, but it does render his ethics more livable for mortal beings.51

Notes
Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I consulted the following translations for
comparison, and I note when my translations differ markedly from them: Phaedrus—Ne-
hamas and Woodruff 1997, Rowe 1986; Philebus—Frede 1993, Hackforth 1945, Waterfield
1982; Republic—Reeve 2004, Shorey 1935. For the Greek, I followed Burnet’s text.
1. Gosling and Taylor do not discuss the dialogue at all. Lorenz does, but not in relation
to pleasure. Russell considers very briefly the gods’ pleasure in the Phaedrus, but does
not recognize that the dialogue provides an account of human pleasure too. One of the
problems motivating this paper, however, does come from Russell: Plato’s idea that
humans should become like god is particularly unsettling and confusing because it
makes it difficult to understand the role of moral virtue in our lives. Moral virtue is
utterly practical: as Russell notes, it “consists in how we live in the world,” not beyond
it, and it governs how we should deal with pleasures and pains that we experience as
embodied beings (Russell 2005: 142).
2. I am not concerned here with the way pleasure relates to restoration, i.e., whether
pleasure itself is a restoration, a perception of restoration, or some other kind of con-
dition. My point at present is that Plato believes certain pleasures are impure simply
because they are linked, in whatever way, with the removal of pain. For more on the
difficulties with Plato’s account of the nature of pleasure as it relates to perception
and restoration, see Evans 2007: 71–93.
3. Such a pleasure is considered ‘false’ (ψευδής) according to the Philebus, but it is
mixed with pain nonetheless. See Phlb. 40aff.
40 Kelly E. Arenson

4. In the Philebus, love is one case of a mixed pleasure of the soul itself. Some of Plato’s
other examples of mixed pleasures of the soul are wrath, fear, and malice (see Phlb.
47e–48a). For an interesting argument about the unavoidability of the soul’s impure
pleasure of refuting fools and a helpful discussion of the nature of mixed pleasures
of the soul, see Austin 2012: 125–39.
5. It is difficult to say, then, whether Plato believes impure pleasures exist at all. Are they
real but false, or are they entirely unreal? Frede (1985: 159) holds that Plato believes
pseudo-pleasures are indeed pleasures, and Gosling and Taylor claim that impure
pleasures “are at least distorted representations of the real thing” (1982, 108). Annas,
however, maintains that “the virtuous person’s pleasures are said to be real, whereas
the vicious person’s are unreal” (1999: 150). See also Annas 1981: 310.
6. Pure pleasures are “those that have imperceptible and painless lacks, and provide fill-
ings that are perceived, pleasant, and free of pain” (ὅσα τὰς ἐνδείας ἀναισθήτους
ἔχοντα καὶ ἀλύπους τὰς πληρώσεις αἰσθητὰς καὶ ἡδείας [καθαρὰς λυπῶν]
παραδίδωσιν, Phlb. 51b5–7).
7. Carone has argued that Plato does not consider the pleasures of colors, shapes, smells,
and sounds to be perceived fillings. See Carone 2000: 264–70. For evidence to the
contrary, see Damascius 1959: §206 and Frede 1993: 60n2.
8. See Phlb. 43a2–3.
9. Plato’s condemnation of such people in Republic 9 is acute: “Those who have no
experience of reason or virtue, but who are always engaged in feasting and such
things, are borne downwards, it seems, and back up to the middle, wandering in this
way their whole life, never going beyond this. They neither look up at nor are ever
brought to what is truly upwards, they are not filled with that which really is, nor do
they taste a pleasure that is steady and pure. Rather, looking downward at the ground
in the manner of cattle, bending toward the table, they graze, fatten, and copulate”
(586a1–8).
10. The imagery of the leaky jars is reminiscent of the Gorgias (see 493a1–494b5).
11. Liddell and Scott indicate that the metaphorical meaning of ἡδοναὶ δορυφόροι
is ‘mere satellite pleasures,’ and they refer to the instance here at Rep. 587c1–2 as a
case of this metaphorical usage. In this passage, if one were to translate δορυφόροις
ἡδοναῖς as ‘mere satellite pleasures,’ this would serve to emphasize that the tyrants’
pleasures are subordinate and dependent, just as a ‘satellite office’ is subordi-
nate to and dependent on its main office. However, I think the literal meaning of
δορυφόρος—‘bodyguard’ or ‘spearman’—better describes the tyrant’s situation.
The tyrant’s problem is not merely that he has the wrong kind of pleasures, but
that he surrounds himself with them; they are his constant bodyguards. I therefore
translate δούλαις τισὶ δορυφόροις ἡδοναῖς as ‘a bodyguard of certain slavish
pleasures.’ Reeve (2004) also prefers the ‘bodyguard’ language, while Shorey (1935)
prefers ‘mercenary,’ which I think is closer to ‘bodyguard’ than to ‘satellite.’
12. The identity of these grouchy folks is disputed. Speusippus has been suggested (see
Dillon 1996 and Schofield 1971), as has Archytas of Tarentum and Socrates himself
(see Frede 1997: 273n83 for a summary of the issue).
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 41

13. Καὶ μάλα δεινοὺς λεγομένους τὰ περὶ φύσιν, οἳ τὸ παράπαν ἡδονὰς οὔ φασιν
εἶναι. . . . Λυπῶν ταύτας εἶναι πάσας ἀποφυγάς, ἃς νῦν οἱ περὶ Φίληβον
ἡδονὰς ἐπονομάζουσιν.
14. Τὸν δὲ φιλόσοφον, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, τί οἰώμεθα τὰς ἄλλας ἡδονὰς νομίζειν πρὸς
τὴν τοῦ εἰδέναι τἀληθὲς ὅπῃ ἔχει καὶ ἐν τοιούτῳ τινὶ ἀεὶ εἶναι μανθάνοντα;
[τῆς ἡδονῆς] οὐ πάνυ πόρρω; καὶ καλεῖν τῷ ὄντι ἀναγκαίας, ὡς οὐδὲν τῶν
ἄλλων δεόμενον, εἰ μὴ ἀνάγκη ἦν; (Rep. 581d10–e4).
15. To Protarchus’s query about the desirability of the pleasureless life of reason, Socrates
responds by doubting that “any one of us would accept living with all kinds of intel-
ligence, reason, knowledge, and memory of everything we have done (φρόνησιν
μὲν καὶ νοῦν καὶ ἐπιστήμην καὶ μνήμην), but sharing in no pleasure, either large
or small, nor pain, in utter insensitivity (τὸ παράπαν ἀπαθὴς) to all such things”
(21d9–e2).
16. It is controversial what kinds of pleasure Plato is willing to include in the best human
life in the Philebus. Some argue that only pure pleasures make it into the final mixture,
based on the fact that Socrates explicitly includes only pure pleasures in the dialogue’s
final ranking of the components of the best life that most contribute to its goodness
(Phlb. 64c–67b). For this view, see Frede 1993: lxvi and 1997: 314 and Russell 2005:
201. Others argue that Plato includes some impure pleasures in the final mixture of
the best life. For this view, see Hackforth 1945: 139 and Austin 2012: 133–6.
17. “Socrates: if, after being filled with knowledge (μαθημάτων), people lose it later
on account of becoming forgetful, do you observe any pains (ἀλγηδόνας) in them?
Protarchus: Not any by nature, but in reasoning (λογισμοῖς) about the condition
whenever one is deprived [of knowledge], one is pained (λυπηθῇ) on account of the
need” (Phlb. 52a5–b1).
18. Warren 2010: 7–10.
19. See Warren 2010: 10–1. Note that I am not claiming that Plato believes intellectual
pleasures are mixed with pain per se, but only that pain is a typical component of
the pleasure of learning as it is experienced by philosophers operating outside “ideal”
environments (which is to say, by most, if not all, philosophers).
20. Warren 2010: 11.
21. Warren 2010: 11. He also argues that Plato sometimes associates pain only with the
early stages of learning and believes it can be relieved. In support, Warren cites Di-
otima’s claim in the Symposium that the pain felt in the presence of ugliness by those
who are intellectually pregnant can be relieved when they are in the presence of beauty
(Symp. 206c–e). Warren writes, “The message seems to be that intellectual progress
(here: the bringing to fulfilment of psychic potential) is not per se painful, but can
be so if undertaken in the wrong circumstances or for the sake of the wrong kind of
object” (9n9). He also mentions the Theaetetus, where Socrates’s midwifery “is also
dedicated to first bringing on birth pangs and then, ideally, allaying them (Theaet.
148E–151D). Pain, in this case, is associated with the initial possibly confused or
inchoate state of a person’s thoughts before Socrates can coax out a viable intellectual
offspring” (10n9). Although this may all be true, it remains the case that philosophers
experience learning as a painful pleasure, as I discussed in the previous section.
42 Kelly E. Arenson

22. See Rep. 583e9–10.

23. Warren 2010: 30.
24. Plato makes this point apparent in his argument in the Phaedo that all learning is
recollection. It is precisely because our souls do not come fully stocked with knowl-
edge that we must recollect everything our souls knew before they were embodied.
See Phd. 75e–76d.
25. See Ferrari 1987: 97–9.
26. ἡδονῇ παραδοὺς τετράποδος νόμον βαίνειν ἐπιχειρεῖ καὶ παιδοσπορεῖν,
καὶ ὕβρει προσομιλῶν οὐ δέδοικεν οὐδ᾽ αἰσχύνεται παρὰ φύσιν ἡδονὴν
διώκων.
27. See Rowe 1986. White similarly notes that what is unnatural is “an inappropriate
reaction to the presence of, and expression of love for, a particular type of beautiful
thing” (White 1993: 141). De Vries refers us to condemnations of homosexuality in
the Platonic corpus. See De Vries 1969.
28. For evidence that the irreverent lover is subject to extreme emotional pains, see Phdr.
242c1–5, which I quoted earlier.
29. On the connection between philosophy and sex see Halperin, who claims that “sexual
activity, for the erotic man at least, represents a low-order form of philosophical
activity: every passionate longing for the physical beauty of a human individual is
an expression of a more profound, if inchoate, metaphysical desire to transcend the
conditions of mortality and make the good one’s own forever” (Halperin 1985: 188). I
am arguing that the reverent lover’s desire to commune with the intelligible (to “make
the good one’s own forever,” to use Halperin’s language) is what distinguishes him
from the irreverent lover and forms the basis for the distinction between reverent
and irreverent pleasure.
30. I do not enter the long-standing debate about whether the parts of the soul described
in the Phaedrus map onto those described in various parts of the Republic. I am con-
cerned with the more general issue of the struggle between those psychic elements
that care for the good of the entire soul and those that do not.
31. Nussbaum, for instance, argues that the message of the Phaedrus is that non-rational
forces are essential elements in the soul’s happiness. See Nussbaum 1986: 213–23. For
a contrasting view, see Hackforth, who claims that the dark horse never harmonizes
with the rest of the soul but is entirely suppressed and viewed as evil (Hackforth 1945:
108). Gerson argues for the middle ground: non-rational forces do scar the soul, but
“to abandon love is to weaken at least one of your horses” (Gerson 2003: 141).
32. I believe Phdr. 254e2–5 rules out Nussbaum’s claim that in the Phaedrus lovers
curb their sexual appetite not because intellect demands it but “because they feel
that the extreme sensual stimulation involved in intercourse is incompatible with
the preservation of reverence and awe for the other as a separate person. Appetite
is curbed not by contemplative intellect, but by the demands of the passions it has
awakened” (Nussbaum 1986: 217). The passage at 254e2ff. shows that intellect is
directly responsible for curbing appetitive desire in the soul.
33. For more on the charioteer’s holistic concern for the soul in the Phaedrus, see Ferrari
1987: 192–8 and Griswold 1986: 135.
Impure Intellectual Pleasure and the Phaedrus 43

34. In at least one other place in the Platonic corpus, Plato uses some form of γλυκύς
(‘sweet’) with reference to pleasure. In Book 9 of the Republic Socrates states, “With
respect to the profit-lover, it is not necessary for him to taste or become acquainted
with the pleasure of learning how things are by nature and how sweet it is” (τῷ
δὲ φιλοκερδεῖ, ὅπῃ πέφυκε τὰ ὄντα μανθάνοντι, τῆς ἡδονῆς ταύτης, ὡς
γλυκεῖά ἐστιν, οὐκ ἀνάγκη γεύεσθαι οὐδ᾽ ἐμπείρῳ γίγνεσθαι) (Rep. 582b3–5).
A pleasure’s being ‘sweet,’ then, is not a mark of inferiority if even intellectual pleasures
are so described.
35. This could mean that ἔρως itself admits of variation, as Griswold claims (1986: 95).
36. Later on he adds, “We said that erotic madness is the best” (ἐρωτικὴν μανίαν
ἐφήσαμέν τε ἀρίστην εἶναι, 265b5).
37. An interesting question for another study is whether Plato believes intellectual plea-
sure can be pursued to excess and whether doing so would be deleterious to one’s
happiness.
38. I think this view is consistent with Woolf ’s reading of the philosopher’s perspective
on the body in the Phaedo: Socrates is not advocating asceticism, but an evaluative
attitude toward things that may impede the pursuit of philosophy, such as excessive
bodily pleasures and unchecked desires. Woolf argues that the Phaedo shows that what
matters more to Socrates than denying oneself things according to certain ontological
categories (e.g., bodily goods) is one’s attitude toward the things one encounters in
one’s life. As Woolf points out, Socrates himself did not appear to be an ascetic: he
had several children, drank, and ate rather well on occasion. See Woolf 2004: 97–110.
39. See Phdr. 254a3–7, where the dark horse urges the rest of the soul to proposition the
boy, and Phdr. 256b4–c5, where the respective dark horses of the boy and the lover
are filled with sexual desire.
40. Although sexual desire undoubtedly impacts the body, Plato makes clear elsewhere
that desire in general is a psychic phenomenon. See particularly Phlb. 34e–d, and
also Rep. 436a–441b and Rep. 580d–581c.
41. This would lend support to the view held by many scholars that happiness in the
Phaedrus is rationalistic, not bodily. See White 1993: 165–9, 313–4n2; Irwin 1995:
304; Ferrari 1987: 197n89; Griswold 1986: 113–4; and Santas 1982: 111–2. For a
contrasting view, see Nussbaum 1986: 200–33.
42. See Phdr. 247c7–8 and 248a2–3.
43. See Phdr. 249c8–e4, where the fourth kind of madness, namely, divinely-inspired
erotic mania, is described with reference to the activities of the mind (διάνοια).
44. My assessment is that, given the choice, the Platonic philosopher would on every oc-
casion choose the impure pleasure of learning over, say, the pure pleasure of smell. If
this is not the case, then Plato’s ethics is far more rigid than I have given him credit for.
45. An objector might cite in support Phlb. 32d9–33c3 and 55a5–8.
46. Ferrari 1987: 166.
47. Ferrari’s position is puzzling, since he claims on the one hand that if the philosopher
experiences psychological growth as painful, then he must consider his embodiment
as a burden, and on the other that the philosopher “accepts the opportunity for such
growth as a gift; that is, he would not have it any other way” (Ferrari 1987: 166). If
44 Kelly E. Arenson

the philosopher is as resistant to mixed pleasures as Ferrari claims Socrates is in

the Philebus, it strikes me as implausible that the same philosopher would want to
incorporate such pleasures into his life.
48. See also my earlier note (no. 34) regarding Plato’s use of γλυκύς in the Republic.
49. μεταβολὴ δὲ πάντων γλυκύ, κατὰ τὸν ποιητήν, διὰ πονηρίαν τινά. ὥσπερ
γὰρ ἄνθρωπος εὐμετάβολος ὁ πονηρός, καὶ ἡ φύσις ἡ δεομένη μεταβολῆς.
οὐ γὰρ ἁπλῆ οὐδ᾽ ἐπιεικής. (I follow Bywater’s Greek text.) Ross’s translation,
revised by Urmson, of ἄνθρωπος εὐμετάβολος ὁ πονηρός reads, “the vicious
man is changeable.” I think this misconstrues Aristotle’s meaning, however, which
is that humans are imperfect (or ‘bad,’ but I think Aristotle here just means ‘unlike
God’) because they are changeable, not that they are changeable because they are
imperfect. For a similar take on ‘sweetness’ see Rhetoric 1371a25–27, but see also
Aristotle’s more positive appraisal of it at Politics 1278b27–30.
50. One might respond that the fact that intellectual pleasures can be had free of pain in
Kallipolis is evidence indeed that Plato thinks people should avoid mixing pain with
their philosophy. However, this does not necessarily follow: Plato himself admits that
Kallipolis might not be realizable in practice, so it is possible that he thinks the pain-
less intellectual pleasures of the perfect educational system are too hypothetical to
serve as useful models in everyday life. See in particular Rep. 472bff., where Socrates
claims that Kallipolis is theoretically possible but perhaps not practically possible.
At any rate, Plato’s view on the possibility of Kallipolis, theoretical or otherwise, is
highly controversial, and I do not intend to enter into the debate here.
51. Many thanks to Emily Austin, Michael Harrington, and the anonymous referees at
Epoché for their comments on this paper. I am also grateful to the participants of the
33rd Annual Ancient Philosophy Workshop, held at the University of Texas at Austin,
as well as the philosophy department at The University of Memphis, for their input
on the paper’s earliest versions.

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