Sugar Blossom

Where We Start: Plato on Happiness (1/2)

As so often, Plato made the first move. In his Gorgias and Republic he
took his start from the recognition that we have plural and conflicting
desires, aims, impulses, etc., and that somehow we have to deal with
that fact. He can hardly have been the first to notice the fact of plurality and conflict, but he was the first to react to it systematically.

In the fifth century bc, Gorgias the Greek Sophist, whose name
Plato used as the title of his dialogue, appears to have adopted the
position that a person’s well-being consists in, to put it broadly,
“getting what(ever) one wants.” Or anyway that’s the view that Plato
attributes to Gorgias in that dialogue.

Gorgias advertised himself as a teacher of rhetoric. He could, he
claimed, teach people to “be persuasive about all subjects,” though
he said that those subjects needn’t be anything about which either
he or his pupils knew anything at all (458e, 459c). With this capacity
a person would have, in words that Plato put into Gorgias’ mouth,
or in any other political gathering . . . [and so would] have the doctor
as your slave and the physical trainer too. As for your financial expert,
he’ll end up making more money for someone other than himself,
namely for you, in fact, if you’ve got the ability to speak and to
persuade the mob. (Gorgias 452d-e)

What you get from all this, in Gorgias’ view, is the ability to get
whatever you want. This, Plato makes him say, is “the greatest good.”
Gorgias doesn’t tell you what to want, or what he believes you
should want. That, he maintains, is your business. He doesn’t believe
that he needs to tell you what to want, in order to tell you what your
well-being consists in or to help you get it. Whatever things you
happen to want, your well-being consists in getting them.

Later in the Gorgias Plato introduces the character “Callicles” (not,
it seems, a real person, or at any rate certainly not under his real
name) to articulate Gorgias’ position further, thus:

How could a man prove to be happy if he’s enslaved to anyone at all?
Rather, this is what’s admirable and just by nature . . . that the man
who’ll live rightly ought to allow his appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them. And when they get as large as possible, he ought to be capable of devoting himself to them through his bravery and intelligence, and to fill them with whatever he may have an appetite for at the time. (491e-492a)

Living “rightly” means here: getting the greatest possible satisfaction
of the greatest desires, as they arise. The greatest satisfactions come
from satisfying the most intense desires. When a desire appears or
grows strong, then it should be satisfied.

Plato doesn’t deny that people are in fact normally confronted
with a plurality of desires. In the Republic he expounds a theory of
the human personality - or “soul,” as he puts it - according to
which it’s made up of many “parts” (of which the main ones are
three in number: reason, spirit, and a whole collection of “appetites”).
In a general way and apart from the particular details of his theory
of the soul, Plato’s right about this. What presents itself to us is
usually, as we live our lives, a more or less sprawling plurality: aims,
enjoyments, judgments and thoughts about what’s worthwhile,
desires, and so on. These things don’t present themselves to a person’s everyday consciousness as a single well-defined totality or whole.