Sugar Blossom

Where we start: Plato on Happiness (2/2)

Before taking up Plato’s reaction to (what he presents as) Gorgias’
view, I must mention that the view that well-being consists in getting
what you want reappears in various forms throughout the history of
happiness.

In Greek antiquity a version of it was proposed by a contemporary
of Plato, Aristippus of Cyrene, whose works are almost wholly
lost and who’s hardly known any more, and another version was
suggested by Hobbes, who paid attention to the problems in the
position that Plato had pointed out. With further
modifications and elaborations, a much more systematic adaptation
of the idea crops up in so-called “desire-satisfaction” theories of
well-being, sometimes linked to “the theory of preference” as it’s
been developed by philosophers and economists.

Hobbes’s formulation of the idea in the mid-seventeenth century
is nowadays the best known. Hobbes used the word “felicity,” which
(like “well-being” and several other words) is pretty nearly equivalent,
in most people’s usage, to “happiness.” Hobbes characterized
felicity in these words:

Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time
to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call
felicity. (Leviathan, ch. 6)

On this picture (which doesn’t give the whole of Hobbes’s view),
a person has a “continual” stream of desires, and happiness consists
in satisfying them as they pop up

In the Gorgias Plato launches a criticism of the position espoused
there by Gorgias and Callicles. To begin with, he makes Callicles feel
uncomfortable about the fact that his aims can often conflict. In
particular there are conflicts between certain desires of his and views
that he has about which desires it’s good to have. Callicles turns out
to be unwilling to advocate the greatest possible satisfaction of just
any desires. He regards some desires as shameful or trivial or both.
Plato has the character Socrates challenge Callicles (and by implication
Gorgias) as follows:

Tell me now whether a man who has an itch and scratches it and can
scratch to his heart’s content, scratch his whole life long, can also live
happily. (494d)

Callicles recoils at this suggestion. He’s simply unwilling to regard
the condition of someone who continually scratches an itch as a good
condition, even if it really were the most intense satisfaction of the
most urgent desire that he has at the time or through his life.
Virtually everyone, Plato thinks, has such scruples about which of
their wants are fulfilled. They don’t want certain desires to be satisfied
- certainly not to the exclusion of others. In fact they desire certain
of their desires not to be satisfied, or think that they shouldn’t be.
And they willingly accept recommendations to curb them:
doctors generally allow a person to fill up his appetites, to eat when he’s
hungry, for example, or drink when he’s thirsty as much as he wants
to when he’s in good health, but when he’s sick they practically never
allow him to fill himself with what he has an appetite for . . . (505a)

The man with the itch whom Plato cites against Callicles is like
this. He certainly wants to scratch, but he doesn’t want to be a
person who spends his whole life scratching an itch. Callicles’ view
involves him in an inconsistency: he aims to satisfy all his desires
immediately, and to allow all his desires to grow unrestrained so
that they can be satisfied; and on occasion he desires to scratch; but
he also (Plato makes him realize) desires not to spend all his time
satisfying that particular desire. In one fell swoop Plato makes him
see both (a) that there are certain desires that he wants not to have
(too much of ), because he regards them as contemptible, and (b) that
his position involves a kind of inconsistency.

By the way, Plato here - and even more explicitly in the Republic
- makes a point that Joseph Butler stressed in the seventeenth century.
People in fact have desires that are, so to speak, about
other desires. That is, a normal person has desires whose subject
matter concerns how he wants his desires to be, or how he wants
them to be satisfied, if at all. (”Second-order desires” is the phrase
that’s sometimes used by philosophers nowadays, and a contemporary
example is of the person who desires to smoke but also desires
not to desire to smoke, or at least desires that his desire to smoke
not be effective.) Thus, aside from being concerned simply with
states of affairs external to themselves or their bodies, people are
also spectators and judges of themselves, and accordingly have selfreferential,
self-reflective aims.