Philebus

The dialogue has a cold open, instantly going into Socrates and Philebus coming to a man named Protarchus so that he can decide which one of them is right. Philebus thinks that a life of luxury and pleasure is the greatest one a person can live, while Socrates argues it is a life of wisdom and knowledge that gives people a greater life. The opinion is Philebus’, but Protarchus ends up debating it for him as he wants to leave.

During Socrates establishing the argument, he says

And what if there be a third state, which is better than either? Then both of us are vanquished-are we not? But if this life, which really has the power of making men happy, turn out to be more akin to pleasure than to wisdom, the life of pleasure may still have the advantage over the life of wisdom. 

which is just a bit of foreshadowing for later, where both agree that to live the best life you need a rational but liveable middle point of pleasure and wisdom.

The first stage of the argument has a lot of confusing dialogue in which Socrates tells the other two that while pleasures are being discussed under an umbrella term, there are a huge amount of different pleasures, some similar and some opposite to each other, therefore saying that it is difficult to classify them all as good, as they can’t all be good if some are opposite to others.

He doesn’t establish this now, but this is supposed to prove why a life of wisdom is better than a life of pleasure. While pleasure is not always good, and some of them conflict with each other, wisdom is a beneficial in a less obvious but more consistent way, while it also doesn’t have any conflict between differing areas of wisdom. Wisdom can only improve your life while pleasures can improve and worsen your life.

As it would involve even more worthlessly complex discussion than usual to argue the two points in realistic ways, Socrates and Protarchus choose to debate which life would be better to live with without any trace of the other. One life with all the luxury and pleasures a life can have without any intelligence and another life with all wisdom and knowledge but with no emotion or possessions. This is because if a life needs the other to be a good life, then it proves that it is not the ultimate life, that being one of pleasure or wisdom.

Having pleasure I should have all things. 

Soc. Living thus, you would always throughout your life enjoy the greatest pleasures? 

Pro. I should. 

Soc. But if you had neither mind, nor memory, nor knowledge, nor true opinion, you would in the first place be utterly ignorant of whether you were pleased or not, because you would be entirely devoid of intelligence. 

Pro. Certainly. 

Soc. And similarly, if you had no memory you would not recollect that you had ever been pleased, nor would the slightest recollection of the pleasure which you feel at any moment remain with you; and if you had no true opinion you would not think that you were pleased when you were; and if you had no power of calculation you would not be able to calculate on future pleasure, and your life would be the life, not of a man, but of an oyster or pulmo marinus. Could this be otherwise? 

Pro. No. 

Soc. But is such a life eligible? 

Pro. I cannot answer you, Socrates; the argument has taken away from me the power of speech.

While most of his argument is that without intelligence you’d be a vegetable, which is a pretty smart-ass response, Socrates does raise a good point that wisdom and knowledge are important to frame your emotions and give them meaning and the sense of scale which makes life bearable through ups and downs. The two of them accept that a life of luxury and pleasure cannot be the best life on its own.

Soc. We must keep up our spirits;-let us now take the life of mind and examine it in turn. 

Pro. And what is this life of mind? 

Soc. I want to know whether any one of us would consent to live, having wisdom and mind and knowledge and memory of all things, but having no sense of pleasure or pain, and wholly unaffected by these and the like feelings?

This one is a lot shorter because it is a lot simpler. A life of pure wisdom and knowledge would make a walking computer. What makes life enjoyable isn’t wisdom and knowledge, it is definitely pleasure, while some people get pleasure from wisdom and it can be used to maximise happiness from wisdom.

Both of these two options have two major failings. As they say in the dialogue, all pleasure isn’t eligible for life as a void of wisdom leaves the feelings wild and meaningless, meanwhile all wisdom isn’t sufficient for life as there is not benefit for living.

This creates the idea that pleasures are the building blocks of an enjoyable life, while wisdom is the thing that enriches what pleasure there is to better heights.

Socrates goes on to convince his opponents that wisdom is more important than pleasure, but I think that was just him flexing his debating skill more than anything. To be realistic about it, your average person would benefit more from more pleasures than more wisdom. Pleasures are the baseline for an enjoyable life, so in the grand scheme of things they are more important than wisdom.

But pleasures have diminishing returns, and the modern world is the perfect example of this. Mental health isn’t a problem in developing countries, but in developed ones it’s an epidemic. Depression, anxiety, mental breakdowns, all occurring in places abundant with pleasures. You can talk all you want about the structure of society creating this, but a lot more people would be better off if they knew of healthy ways to deal with their luxury instead of ways that slowly break down their lives.

If you want to be a wise person, you don’t need to be smart, or be good at speaking, or even read a lot of books. To be truly wise is to constantly try to understand what the right thing to do it is. It’s not flashy, or impressive or fun, it’s a constant state of questioning and concentrated self-doubt where you are never completely sure you are right about any one thing.

Socrates backs this up when he says that he should be more famous for the intellectual equivalent of infanticide rather than famous for philosophy, because he kills so many of ideas by trying to remain as true as possible. He was a wise man.

But this would be a good time to comment on how he definitely wasn’t a perfect man. There’s been a few times when his commitment to ‘wisdom’ has come back to bite him, that being when his wife cheated on him and when he was killed namely. He’s also used his wisdom to justify being a bad husband and father on top of that. He was definitely the best out of the big 3 of Greek philosophy, as Plato ended up as a hateful old man and Aristotle was always a pro-slaving white imperialist, taking both to extremes even for his time. Take some of what they’ve said as pearls of wisdom, but certainly don’t idolise any of them.

Socrates keeps the debate going by pushing it into classifying the elements into four categories, (I think you can understand why that isn’t important) and ends the dialogue with a nice quote of describing the human soul as a book, with little to no explanation.

If you want to understand the points covered at the depth that Plato intended, feel free to read through the dialogue here.