Plato essay I got an A on

The concept of the fourfold divisions is used by Socrates in Philebus to classify the four types of things in the universe: the unlimited; the limit; the mixture of the limit and unlimited; and the cause of the mixture. The purpose of this division is to determine whether pleasure or intelligence has a higher place in the constitution of a good life. Socrates first uses the concepts of limit and unlimited to explain to Protarchus that pleasure, while being a single unified concept, has many forms that are distinct and different. He cites ancient wisdom that states that anything which is “one” (in this case, pleasure) can be divided into smaller classifications of its different forms by use of the limit and unlimited. (16c-e) In this way, by dividing the pleasures up into all of their different counterparts, Socrates claims we can assess ‘pleasure’ as a whole and its place within a broader ‘good life’. However, Socrates soon finds this method unsatisfactory due to the immense challenge involved in categorizing every different sort of pleasure. Instead, Socrates changes course and deduces the nature of reason and pleasure, finding them both to be separate from and inferior to ‘the good’ by virtue of the fact that lives with only pleasure or only reason without the other are both equally undesirable. (20e-21e) Furthermore, the most desirable life would necessarily be a mixture of pleasure and reason (22a), which leads Socrates into the next part of the dialogue, the fourfold divisions, which he constructs using the pieces of his earlier arguments. The fourfold divisions draw from Socrates’ earlier claim that the universe is divided into two things, the unlimited and the limit, but this time Socrates includes a third and a fourth category as well: the mixture and the cause, respectively. (23c-d) The unlimited, consisting of qualitative and imprecise properties like ‘hotter’, ‘more’ or ‘drier’, (24a) comes into contact with the limit, which is made up of specific, quantitative measurements like ‘equal’ or ‘double’. (25a) The result of this combination is the third kind, the mixture; “if they [limits] are introduced where there is severe cold... they remove all that is excessive and unlimited, and create measure and balance.” (26a) The mixture, then, comprises a third kind of thing, entirely different from the first two categories; fair weather, law and order, and beauty are all mixtures, and they owe themselves to the moderation and regulation of the unlimited which creates them. (26b-c) Furthermore, a good life would fall into this category of mixed things; recall that the most desirable life was found to be one with a mixture of both reason and pleasure in 22a. This is reiterated in 27d when Socrates states that the “victorious life”, being mixed, “is a part of our third kind.” Pleasure (and pain), being indistinct terms which “admit of ‘the more’ and ‘the less’,” (27e) are of the unlimited category. On the other hand, reason falls under the fourth category: the cause. Socrates justifies this claim with a sweeping metaphysical analysis of the nature of the universe, arguing that the whole universe functions in an ordered, rational way. This is evidenced by the predictable, patterned movements of heavenly bodies (28e), the annual regularity of the seasons (30c), and could also be supported by more recent scientific discoveries (e.g. the predictable behavior of chemical elements, laws of physics) to prove that there is an orderly structure to the way the universe works. Furthermore, in the same way that our physical bodies come from and are nourished by the greater whole of the universe’s physical body (29d-30a), the same goes for the universal soul, which is greater and fairer than any smaller, individual soul. (30b) This universal, divine soul gives rise to the divine reason which orders the universe since “wisdom and reason cannot come into existence without soul.” (30c) And since this divine reason is what orders the rational universe, it can be said that reason belongs to the fourth kind since it has the power to set limits on the unlimited and create new mixtures. (31a) In summary, the first kind of division, the unlimited, is made up of things that can be said as being ‘more’ or ‘less’, but not by any specific measure; pleasure is one of these things, since it does not admit any specific amount. The third kind, the mixture, is the offspring of an unlimited coming into contact with a limit, allowing it to be quantified, regulated, and ordered. The good life, which contains pleasure in a mixture of other things, is of this third type. Lastly, the fourth kind is the cause for the mixture, the thing which sets the limit upon the unlimited and creates something new. In the finding of the good life, reason would be a part of this fourth kind by rationally ordering and limiting pleasure to the best extent possible. The second kind, the limit, is not defined in the same way as the other three, however. Socrates seems to rhetorically circumvent his definition of the limit as a unified concept. For example, he clearly sets the ‘family of the unlimited’ as containing all the things that are “becoming ‘more’ or ‘less’ so-and-so, or admitting to terms like ‘strongly,’ ‘slightly,’ ‘very,’ and so forth.” (24e-25a) But in the case of the limit, Socrates does something perplexing; although in 25a he counts specific measurements like ‘equal’ or ‘double’ as “coming under the limit,” he fails to set a clear boundary for what else can be included. In other words, whereas the unlimited consists entirely of any and all things that are ‘more’ or ‘less’, the limit is a kind of measurement: specificity in general. The limit is not a set group of different ways of limiting; rather, it comes from the cause to the degree that the cause limits the unlimited in the creation of the mixture. Therefore, the limit can be understood as being a product of the cause. Reason, a cause, determines what the proper amount of pleasure is (and therefore, the degree to which it should be limited) in the mixing of the good life.

As a system, the fourfold division seems to be internally valid; it makes intuitive sense that a causal actor can set a limit upon an unlimited concept to create something new, such as a person limiting the temperature of water to 0oC to create ice. However, this system does not apply to the identification of the most desirable life in the way that Socrates hopes it can. Socrates posits that the ‘ordered universe’ is governed by divine reason which explains the rational, regular nature of the cosmos. He uses inductive reasoning to suggest a sort of ‘as-above, so-below’ relationship where reason is also capable of limiting pleasure to discover the most desirable life––this is where, if we interrogate Socrates’ argument, we start to see it break down. It seems that Socrates is neglecting the difference between the ‘divine reason’ which orders the universe in a descriptive manner and the kind of reason that prescribes the limiting of pleasure in a good life. The orderly nature of the universe is seen in its predictability, such as the stars and planets moving in regular patterns, the predictable behavior of chemicals based on their number of valence electrons, and so on. However, these inanimate objects have no agency; divine reason simply says that positively charged particles will attract negative ones and that an object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by another force. Conversely, it is not clear that a good life would be ordered the same way, since the human animal does have agency. The way that the limit works is different when applied to a rational agent by itself. In limiting the pleasure they seek through their actions, a person is altering their own behavior according to their own reason, as opposed to natural factors outside of their control. Water’s boiling point will never change from 100oC (except depending on purely physical characteristics like altitude or salinity), whereas the amount of pleasure necessary for a good life could likely vary based on who someone is, the lifestyle they are accustomed to and the way they feel at any given moment. As such, Socrates’ logical induction of the four divisions may be inadequate for discerning the good life. One tool, philosophy (perhaps combined with psychology), may be the only solution to this issue with the fourfold divisions; if we can isolate the factors that invariably contribute to every human’s quality of life and discover the ideal ratios for each, we could potentially turn the prescriptive argument (“one should limit pleasure so that it is not in excess”) into a descriptive one (“this is the specific amount of pleasure one should experience the most desirable life”). Absent this tremendous intellectual undertaking however, we cannot make claims about the constitution of a good human life in the same way we can discern and predict the boiling point of water. With that said, however, another work of Plato’s seems to suggest that this intellectual undertaking is precisely what he hopes his disciples will take on. In the Gorgias, Socrates gives another example of unlimited pleasure coming under a limit; in the jar analogy he tells to Callicles, Socrates compares a life of maximizing pleasure to someone trying in vain to fill a leaky jar while a person who practices virtue and temperance is content with full jars. The purpose of the Gorgias is for Socrates to refute Callicles’ bottomless hedonism and instead advocate living a virtuous, tempered, but not altogether pleasureless. And if living a virtuous, temperate life brings its own pleasure, as Socrates argues in Gorgias, then perhaps this is another example of the a cause (one’s reason and conscience) applying a limit (not over-indulging or acting hedonistically) being applied to an unlimited (pleasure) to create a mixture: the most desirable life. In other words, perhaps we can apply the moral aspects of Socrates’ argument in Gorgias to begin to resolve the tension of prescriptivity in the fourfold divisions.