Pleasure

Hēdonē (ἡδονή) is pleasure or delight — and one of the most contested ideas in Greek ethics. Is pleasure the good for which we all in truth aim? Is it a part of the good life, or its enemy? The schools divided sharply, and Plato returned to the question again and again. (The word survives in our 'hedonism'.)

Plato's verdicts

In the Gorgias, Socrates attacks the claim that pleasure and the good are the same, arguing that some pleasures are base and that a life of unbridled indulgence is wretched however pleasant. In the Protagoras he explores a 'measuring art' that would weigh pleasures and pains against one another. And in the Philebus, his most careful treatment, Plato grants pleasure a place in the good life but ranks it below reason, measure, and intelligence: the good life is a mixture, with mind as its presiding principle.

The Hellenistic debate

The question divided the later schools this corpus preserves. The Epicureans made the absence of pain and disturbance the highest pleasure and the goal of life, while the Stoics held pleasure to be at best indifferent, and virtue alone sufficient for happiness. Behind every position lay the Socratic insistence that the worth of a pleasure depends on the order of the soul that pursues it.