Table Of ContentTHE TRAGEDY AND COMEDY OF LIFE
THE TRAGEDY AND COMEDY
OF LIFE
PLATO’S PHILEBUS
Translated and with Commentary by
SETH BEN.ARDETE
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1991 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1993
Paperback edition 2009
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 - 2 3 4 5 6
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04239-8 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04276-3 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04239-1 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-04276-6 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubhcation Data
Plato.
(Philebus. English]
The tragedy and comedy of life: Plato's Philebus / translated and with
commentary by Seth Benardete.
p. cm.
Translation of: Philebus.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Pleasure—Early works to 1800. 2. Mind and body—Early works
to 1850. I. Benardete, Seth. II. Title. III. Title: Plato’s Philebus.
B381.A5B47 1993
171'.4—dc20
92-44620
® The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
ALLAN BLOOM
1930-92
£pvTj(j0T]v 6’ daodnig d^dTepoi
■qXiov ev xaTEdiJoap-Ev
^trv ro> 9ecb nag xai yekg xdjS'UQerai
Sophocles Ajax 383
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Phil ebus 1
I The Tragedy and Comedy of Life 87
II Socrates, Protarchus, and Philebus (11 al—12c4) 92
III The One and the Many (1) (12c4-14b8) 105
IV The One and the Many (2)14cl-15c9) 111
V The One and the Many (3): Eidetic Analysis
(15dl-17a5) 115
VI Notes and Letters (17a6-20b3) 119
VII The Good (20b4-23b6) 130
VIII Measure Theory (23b6-27c2) 138
IX Cosmology (27c3-31bl) 157
X The Seven Overlays (31b2-47d4) 166
XI Comedy (47d5-50e2) 198
XII Pure Pleasure (50e3-53c3) 209
XIII Being and Becoming (53c4-55c3) 213
XIV Science and Dialectic (55c4-59c9) 217
XV The Mixture (59cl0-64c4) 227
XVI The Good (64c6-67b 13) 235
Selected Bibliography 243
Index 247
vii
PREFACE
The Tragedy and Comedy of Life is designed to complete my account of
Plato’s understanding of the beautiful, the just, and the good. The
beautiful was treated in The Being of the Beautiful (Chicago, 1984),
which dealt with the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman; Socrates’ Second
Sailing (Chicago, 1989) in turn dealt with the Republic and tried to de
termine the just in its relation to the beautiful and the good. Although
it seems at first that the beautiful will not have anything to do with the
good in the Philebus, Socrates finally replaces the good with the beau
tiful in his summary of the ranking of goods (64e5-6). While the just
seems to be conspicuously absent from the issue that the Philebus
raises, there is a way in which it can be consideied to be present in the
argument of the Philebus.
Plato does not simply oppose philosophy to poetry and contrast
reason with the indulgence of the passions; he has philosophy invade
the territory of poetry and claim for itself what seems to be the indis
putable domain of poetry. Philosophy, he either argues or boasts, can
do better what poetry seems to do best. Since Plato is as mimetic as
the poets are, the superiority of philosophy cannot lie in the neutral
impersonality of its discourse; rather, it must be able to tell a better
story than poetry. The stories of poetry center around foundational
crimes, crimes that reveal what must not be violated if either man is to
be man or the city is to be possible. The line between man’s humanity
and man’s sociality, the poets seem to be saying, cannot be clearly
drawn, for they show that the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx and
Oedipus’s incest and patricide are linked and that, in light of what
Oedipus has done, Oedipus has to cease to be what he is. His knowl
edge cannot consist with his being, and he must shut out the world if
he is to live with his crimes. Plato, on the other hand, has Socrates
propose a city of Oedipuses, as if there were in principle no boundaries
the transgression of which would deny to man his humanity, provided
that knowledge or the love of knowledge still informed him. The mind
of man, in this account, is so much divorced from his body that no
mere action could set the limits of man.
The opposition, then, between philosophy and poetry seems
straightforward enough. There is for philosophy a divide between
man as man and man as political animal that poetry denies. This divide
Socrates expresses in a story, which culminates in the imagined sur
cease of evils when the philosopher becomes king. On the surface, the
story seems to fuse man and the city and thus to be in agreement with
ix
X Preface
poetic wisdom; but the story in fact asserts that, although there are
innumerably many different natures, each one of which finds its cog
nitive fulfillment in an art, there is no human nature that is born to
rule. No Caesar or Napoleon, no Augustus or Cyrus can be cited to
the contrary. Only the nature whose perfection is philosophic wisdom
could, if it surrendered its function, rule the city in conformity with
knowledge. Socrates caps the poets by telling a story about the impos
sible. It is a story that solves the political problem once and for all by
showing that it is insoluble. The story of Oedipus, however, makes
ignorance, or the acknowledgment of a dispensation whose ground
cannot be known, the basis for the city and man. As far as any actual
city goes, Plato acknowledges its unknowable grounds; but, rather
than conceding so much to the holy and sacred, he argues that the
arbitrariness of the limitation set on man in any community reflects
the truth of the totally nonarbitrary nature of man, which diverges at
its peak from the city at its peak. The city in fact has no peak; it is
necessarily shot through with compromises precisely because man is
not just a political animal. Justice vanishes as a virtue of the soul once
the soul has been properly ordered. The city therefore can never be
properly ordered, and the emergence of justice in the city expresses
the necessary defectiveness of the city as such. What amounts to the
same assertion is Socrates’ identification of the just man with the phi
losopher, for the philosopher minds his own business when he does
not rule the city.
Plato’s criticism of poetry turns on the issue whether the poets try
to absolutize the city’s embodiment of the principle that man is man
only if not everything is permitted. Such an embodiment cannot but
seem holy in the perspective of the city that maintains it and arbitrary
in the perspective of the stranger. The Cave replaces the natural light
of the good with an artificial light, and the artificial light can no more
be extinguished than the natural light can be let to flood in. The ascent
from the Cave is not the ascent of the Cave.
In order to establish the nature of the Cave, Socrates begins with
the city of knowledge. No one gains admission to the city of knowl
edge without the possession of a skill; but no skill is admitted that does
not serve a need of the body. The city of knowledge is fully in the
light, and it slips out of the light only with the education of its guard
ians. The body is satisfied by a manifold of arts, but the soul is shaped
by a pair of spurious arts, music and gymnastic, that cannot satisfy the
needs of the soul. Once the soul takes on the dye of opinion, in which
everything is colored by the noble lie, the issue is raised whether the
city of knowledge and the city of opinion can be joined together. They
