Bad knees

I’ve been thinking more about Sextus Empiricus M 9.162–7. Here is an interestingly similar set of concerns which I have mentioned before.

My knee hurts, and I am aware of the fact. If a perfect physiologist examined my knee he would know it too. But there is a difference between my awareness and his. What kind of difference? I do not know anything which he does not know. On the contrary, he knows much more about my pain than I do–'I only know it hurts'. I do not even want to say that I know it better than he does. And, provided he is giving me his full attention, I do not want to say either that I am better aware of my pain than he is. But there is still a difference between me and him: we know what we know in completely different ways. We might say: we know the same thing from different points of view. The question then is: is it enough for God to be the perfect physiologist, or must he somehow 'feel my pain'? I think he must, because if not, then there is something which I know and he does not, viz. not my pain, but my view of my pain. Of course, God 'knows just how I feel', but that phrase is no more comfort here than elsewhere: his knowledge remains theoretical, derived, whereas mine is perceptual, immediate. Mine is not therefore better, but it is different. If God's knowledge of my pain is only that of the perfect physiologist, then I have an awareness, a perspective, which God lacks. And that contradicts the spirit of the first requirement. [1]

Franck’s reaction to the argument is that god’s omniscience can be preserved by god’s immanent omnipresence: god does have my perspective on my pain because he is ‘in me’ and therefore can know it as I can, ‘from the inside’ as it were.

I have no idea whether that is a satisfying response since I share none of the relevant starting points. I don’t even think this worry about pain is one that needs to be shown to be compatible with a certain notion of God. But looking again at this passage I think there are various other interesting things about this stretch of Francks' argument. I think there are a number of points that are worth questioning. Here is the first. Francks claims:

1. The sufferer knows nothing that the perfect physiologist does not know about the sufferer’s hurt knee.

Rather than the sufferer having some knowledge that the physiologist lacks, Francks insists instead that the two know the same thing but in different ways and from different points of view and if this is true it is enough to throw doubt on god’s omniscience since there will be a view or perspective on the hurt knee that god lacks.

I am not sure I find 1. very plausible [2]. I think I would want to say that there is a difference: the sufferer know what it is like to have a knee hurt like this which the physiologist qua physiologist does not. (He may have hurt his own knee in exactly the same way, I suppose, which might muddy the waters, but if he has then the knowledge he thus gains he has not qua perfect physiologist but qua sufferer.)

Does anyone think 1. is a plausible thing to say? (I wonder how 'perfect' physiology is imagined to be.)

[1] Francks, R. 1979. ‘Omniscience, omnipotence, and pantheism’, Philosophy 54: 395–9, at 396.

[2] Certainly the following is clearly false (unless the sufferer is a perfect physiologist too):

2. The perfect physiologist knows nothing that the sufferer does not know about the sufferer’s hurt knee.

TV like it used to be

I don't think telly is dumber than it used to be. There's a lot more telly out there, so there is a lot more dumb telly too. But I'm not sure nowadays anyone would make a programme like Bryan Magee's The Great Philosophers. They don't need to, perhaps, because you can still watch it via the glory of YouTube. The episodes are chopped into 10 minute bites, but that is perhaps a good thing too.

Here are Magee and Burnyeat on a beige sofa talking about Plato. (This is the first bit. You have to click around afterwards for part II) :

And here are Magee and Nussbaum talking about Aristotle:

Paris

I promise to get back to ancient philosophy soon but for the moment I'm drowning in college admin. But all is not lost because Morrissey's new album is out in February and here is the single. One of its virtues is that is is barely two minutes long. This may be because Moz can't be bothered to sing much but pop songs hardly ever need to be longer than three minutes at most.

It's called 'Throwing my arms around Paris' and is not, alas, a new piece of Homeric reception. But I like it all the same.

Who ya gonna call?

Anomometrics! Not catchy, I grant, and the current website is not yet in its final bells and whistles state but this latest brainchild of a colleague in college will probably find a market. I reckon it needs a big shiny box, perhaps on a backpack, and lots of flashing lights. And a big gun thing that contains all the sensors. Then we can wave it at Derek Acorah and see what happens.

I did get hold of the Science of pleasure book as promised and it's quite fun. I'm just in the early chapters on sex, drugs, and chocolate so far and there's less science and more anecdote. But I did discover that Wisbech 'Capital of the Fens', where I grew up (and attended the excellent Elm Road Primary School), was for some time a hotbed (if that's the right term) of opium eating. There's some serious academic stuff on it here. And here I found this anecdote from a visitor to Wisbech in 1871:

Went into a chemist's shop, laid a penny on the counter. The chemist said - `The best?' I nodded. He gave me a pill-box and took up the penny, and so the purchase was completed without my having uttered a syllable. You offer money, and get opium as a matter of course. This may show how familiar the custom is.

Wisbech isn't so interesting now, it seems, although Wikipedia tells me it was the site for the trials of the Tesco loyalty card.

The vanity and suffering of life

January is perhaps not the best month to be thinking such thoughts, but I am preparing a talk for the Cambridge undergraduate Classics society, the Herodoteans and for some reason I decided that I would talk about ‘The evil of being born’. The topic is related to my work on the fear of death and also to something on Cicero Tusculans 1 in which A. begins with the thought that death is bad and therefore it makes the living wretched since they have to die.

Anyway, I have been reading a bit of Schopenhauer, specifically his essay ‘On the vanity and suffering of life’ (ch. 56, supplement to book 4 of The world as will and representation). He’s a cheery soul, isn’t he? Still, he knew his classical sources well and concludes the essay by noting that in many ways they too were, as he puts it ‘deeply affected by the wretchedness of existence’. (He goes on to cite Homer, Plutarch, Theognis, Sophocles, Pliny and so on.) But earlier in the essay I noticed that he came up with this rather interesting observation:

If life itself were a precious blessing, and decidedly preferable to non-existence, the exit from it would not need to be guarded by such fearful watchmen as death and its terrors. But who would go on living life as it is, if death were less terrible? And who could bear even the mere thought of death if life were a pleasure? But the former still always has the good point of being the end of life and we console ourselves with death in regard to the sufferings of life, and with the sufferings of life in regard to death. The truth is that the two belong to each other inseparably, since they constitute a deviation from the right path, and a return to this is as difficult as it is desirable.

So the harm of death makes continuing to live bearable and the sufferings of life make the prospect of death bearable. There’s something satisfying about Schopenhauer’s paradox and it seems to me to be a smart antidote to the Epicurean claim, for example, that death is not harmful and it is possible to live a life which is somehow both satisfied such that we should not worry that it can be prematurely curtailed but also is such that it can provide sufficient reasons for us to wish to continue living.

New pleasure book

Too late for my Christmas list, unfortunately, comes a new book on the 'science of pleasure' by Paul Martin, author of Making Happy People (not, interestingly, Making People Happy... because as the subtitle shows Martin is interested first of all in childhood development). Anyway, I'll be getting hold of it as soon as I can. The review in the Grauniad is not very helpful and hints that the direct philosophical interest in the book may not be very high. (The review suggests that the 'interesting' distinction between pleasure, desire, happiness and satisfaction is left aside for some more straightforward talk that a little bit of what you like is probably good for you.) Bu there do seem to be some bits on the neurology of pleasure that even an idiot like me might be able to comprehend.

What's interesting is that there is rather a good seam of sophisticated and scientifically-informed discussion of the philosophy of pain (I'm thinking in particular of work by Hardcastle and Aydede, most recently) but much less when it comes to pleasure. Of course, philosophers like talking about pleasure alright. But there's not such an impulse to turn to our natural philosopher friends and ask what pleasure is or what its physical basis might be. I wonder if this is because pleasure is less homogeneous than pain; there seem to be so many (very) different kinds of pleasure that the impulse to find any common physiological basis is that much weaker. And Martin's book perhaps points that way too -- the title at least points to certain kinds of pleasure, physical ones linked to generally agreed pleasant physical stimuli. Now these might well have some common basis. But it wouldn't be so tempting to title a book: Sex, a nice conversation, and a new idea... even though I reckon these three too might all be said to be common causes of pleasure.

I'll let you know what the book is like once I read it. I like the cover though.

Misanthropy

Xmas has been and gone and I think we survived pretty much unscathed. I have a new coat and scarf and a snazzy Brain Training little game thingy (which nevertheless tells me my brain is aged and atrophied...) and the girls have all sorts of bits and pieces, most of which we have now found homes for.

But we made the big mistake of venturing out into town today. I don't know if anyone was spending any money (sorry, Gordon, but we aren't doing our bit do haul the UK out of its hole) but people were certainly out in numbers, mostly just to get in each other's way. Perhaps they had by now become sick of annoying their family members at home and had decided they absolutely had to get out. So they all congregate in town to annoy each other. We at least managed to get the lovely people in the Early Learning Centre to take back a malfunctioning (pink...) CD player but otherwise the trip was a bit of a dead loss. Shopping with kids is at best a hit and miss affair, unless you want just to shop for things in shops that are kid-approved. But today it was absolutely horrendous. I was very glad to get home and collapse into a sofa. (And I also was able to have a first go at Lego Batman... Lots of fun.)

Perhaps the week between Xmas and New Year is just designed to persuade us all that it won't be so bad to get back to work.

Just the panto to negotiate now and then the January pool...

RAE 2008

Some good news today from the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. The full details of the procedure and the results are available here and there is a handy pdf of the headline news from the THE here. But here are the rankings for the subjects I'm most interested in. The results here show a weighted average score (from 0 to 4) for a given assessment unit (subject) by institution. Very good news for the Cambridge Faculty of Classics. The Cambridge ancient philosophers were included in the Classics submission since that is where we hold our lectureships.

Here is the GPA ranking for Classsics, ancient history, Byzantine and modern Greek studies:

Cambridge 3.15

Oxford 3.05

UCL 2.95

King’s College 2.85

Durham 2.85

Warwick 2.85

Exeter 2.80

Manchester 2.70

Bristol 2.70

St Andrews 2.70

Birmingham 2.60

Here is the ranking for Philosophy.

Good news for the Cambridge Department of the History and Philosophy of Science.

UCL 3.15

St Andrews 3.15

King’s College 3.05

Sheffield 3.05

Reading 3.05

Cambridge A: History and philosophy of science 2.95

LSE 2.95

Oxford 2.95

Stirling 2.95

Bristol 2.90

Essex 2.90

Birkbeck 2.85

Cambridge B: Philosophy 2.85

Nottingham 2.80

Reason and childhood

Every so often I attempt to explain to my kids what I do all day. This tends not to go very well. This evening I attempted to introduce R to some interesting paradoxes. She was telling me how if someone says 'I am telling the truth' this is good evidence for the fact that they are lying. Shrewd, I thought, but then I also took the opportunity to ask her whether someone who says 'I am lying' is telling the truth or not. She would have none of this and just told me I was being silly.

So I tried to persuade her of the powers of reason by explaining how I could prove she cannot cross the room. Then I gave her a version of Zeno's dichotomy paradox. Again, the answer was that I was just being silly (she was getting quite cross with me by now) and that she would prove me wrong as soon as she got out of the bath by crossing the room easily. Such an empiricist, my daughter...

What should I conclude from this? Yes, I suppose she was right that I was being silly. BIt is certainly not clear that doing more philosophy would allow R to have a better reaction to puzzles of this sort. Her current attitude is probably, all things considered, the right sort of thing to say. If that's right, I wondered if trying to persuade anyone to do anything other than dismiss this kind of thing is really a good idea... I really need the vacation to come soon.

That's your opinion

There's an interesting article in this week's THE about 'student-centred' learning, punctuated with some nice grumpy comments from Alan Ryan. Read the article here, but for a flavour of Ryan's take on things:

"Opinions can be all right, but students aren't here to learn opinions, they are here to learn how things are," he says. "In the past I have looked at a student's work and said, 'All you have done is copied this out', and hey've replied, 'Oh, did you want my opinion?'

"Well, the answer to that is, 'No, I don't want your opinion; what I want to know is if these are proper arguments, whether Plato was right about this - I couldn't give a bugger about your opinion; who could care less?'

"All this stuff about opinions - bloody hell, who wants opinions in physics, for example? The real thing is how you assess whether people know anything, and if they aren't obliged to write coherent prose and so on, then what evidence is there that they do? The answer, I am afraid, is not much."

Grumpy Christmas

Term has just finished and we have a good few days of undergraduate admissions interviews ahead of us. These are hard work and involve some difficult decisions. It's a serious business and so it has to be done properly. I also have some supervisions hanging over from term and two MPhil students in the last throes of their first assessed essay and then a PhD to examine.

So I'm not in the mood for Christmas at all. But when you have young kids it all seems to start very early and positively demand your interest and excitement. Sigh. So this afternoon is the great-if-you-are-6 Fitzwilliam college children's Christmas party. This is an excellent institution, I hasten to add, but I can't help thinking it would be better if we could wait to have it some time in February when there's not so much else going on.

Then there are the eye-achingly sweet but dreadful Christmas 'performances' at school (a play -- the amusingly named propaganda-vehicle 'Rock around the Flock' -- and a concert) and the increasingly frequent rehearsals for the ballet school production. I'm sure these will all be terribly lovely and camcordered with much affection by parents but I just don't enjoy them. I know I should , probably, and I like it that they matter so much to the kids (though I am not sure I like the fact they give over most of this half-term in rehearsals) but I just don't. So there. I'm a bad un-Chrismassy person but there's really not much I can do about it.

Chasing the tortoise

Today I received news of this year's 'Eleatica' conference, to be held 15-18 Jan. in Ascea. The main lectures are being given by Jonathan Barnes (on Zeno) and more details can be found here. The accompanying letter also announced the inauguration of a ZENO prize 'devoted to the portrayal unsing computer graphics of Zeno pursuing the tortoise'. So if you have any talents in that direction, off you go. Of course, in order to write all the code for the programme, you need first to write half the code. And before you write half the code, you need first to finish writing a quarter... I can see it might not be easy to give this prize away.

Here's an animated attempt:

The other announcement is that the honorary citizenship of Elea will be awarded to a distinguished scholar. Can you think of any suitable modern Eleatics?

Just feel it

I am looking back at Cicero Fin. 1 and 2 and the portrayal there of the Epicurean notion of pleasure. Today I spent some time thinking about this bit:

itaque negat [sc. Epicurus] opus esse ratione neque disputatione quam ob rem voluptas expetenda, fugiendus dolor sit: sentiri haec putat, ut calere ignem, nivem esse albam, dulce mel, quorum nihil oportere exquisitis rationibus confirmate, tantum satis esse admonere.

So Epicurus denies there is any need for reasoning or argument to show why pleasure should be pursued and pain avoided: he thinks these can be perceived just as the fact that fire heats, snow is cold, and honey sweet. In these cases there is no need for elaborate arguments for confirmation; it is enough simply to point them out.

Fin. 1.30

Torquatus notes (in 1.31) that this is something of a controversial point and that other Epicureans have thought that it is necessary also to give some further reasoned justification for the choice-worthiness of pleasure. But to his mind, the value of pleasure is simply and directly perceived (sentiri), a point no doubt also made by the Epicureans’ identification of the pathē as one of the criteria of truth. Indeed, the suspicion that Torquatus is here relying on some basic points of Epicurean epistemology is confirmed by the other examples offered of things supposedly made clear and evident simply via the senses. But these examples set me wondering precisely what position about pleasure is supposed to be headed off by the optimistically robust empiricism Torquatus assumes.

Whether honey is indeed sweet, for example, is one of the most common questions to which sceptical thinkers with various degrees of caution or suspension of judgement. In that case, the general stance is that given the possibility that honey may not appear sweet to some people at some times, it is not wise to infer that honey is indeed sweet even in the cases when it does indeed appear so via the senses. Similarly, Timon, for example, declares in On the Senses (at DL 9.105) ‘that honey is sweet I do not assert, but that it appears sweet I do accept’.

It is not immediately clear, however, how an analogous argument might function in the case of pleasure. It is possible to see how the same object or activity may not always produce pleasure in all perceivers and that therefore it might be wise not to infer immediately that such and such a thing is pleasant. But the argument here concerns not the question whether some object or other is pleasant but the choice-worthiness of pleasure in general.

In that case, it seems to me that the idea which Torquatus wishes to reject is perhaps the following: some experiences of pleasure appear choice-worthy while others do not, and from this observation we should suspend judgement about the choice-worthy nature of pleasure itself. If that is the argument being answered here the Epicurean answer would be two-fold: first, they might appeal to their general resources of anti-sceptical argument; second, they will account for the false appearance of non-choice-worthy pleasures with just the kind of argument which Torquatus goes on to give at 1.32–3 which defends the per se choice-worthiness of pleasure while allowing that certain pleasures are not to be pursued on hedonistic grounds.

Snow

It snowed just a little this morning. Quite nice to look at if not to be in. So I began to think about Christmas (groan) but decided the thing to do is to work out if there are any really bearable Christmas songs. I've not got very far because most of them are awful. But besides the obvious Pogues Fairytale of New York I could manage Saint Etienne's I was born on Christmas Day (watch that here... ahh, Sarah Cracknell...) and Galaxie 500's version of Yoko Ono's Listen the snow is falling (mp3 here -- download it and let it wash over you). Incidentally, a big shot out to Bill Tieman who bought me The Portable Galaxie 500 some time ago. I'd missed them first time round but they are terrific. Any other contenders?

And here's some more Galaxie 500 while I'm at it.

Happy world philosophy day

Really; UNESCO says so. The details are here. The BBC has helpfully suggested some philosophical questions to 'make your brain hurt' here.

Good grief

Lord Drayson, a science -- that's science -- minister says that he has a sixth sense. In an interview in yesterday's Times he says

"In my life there have been some things I have known, and I don’t know why. I think there is a lot we don’t understand about human capability."

Well, fancy that. I reckon my four year old can predict that when she lets go of a cup it will fall. But I certainly haven't taught her about gravitational attraction and I'm pretty sure no one else has. How has she learned it, then? Spooky!

What a load of nonsense. (I include in the nonsense some of the reporting, including this from the Torygraph with its barbed final paragraph.) I'm sure Lord Drayson isn't claiming super powers for himself, but what he is pointing to is hardly very astounding. It turns out people sometimes believe things without conclusive evidence. What this does not suggest, however, is that it is OK to believe anything you fancy and not be liable to the critical evaluation and improvement of your beliefs. Otherwise, where would we be? We'd end up putting people in the House of Lords, say, who believe all sorts of strange unfounded tales about supernatural beings and out of body experiences and thinking it's a good idea to let them have a say on matters of national importance. What? Oh....

Outnumbered

I'm not feeling well enough to write about anything demanding today but I did find this, which is a trailer for the last series of Outnumbered, which began its second run yesterday. Last night's episode was more like a documentary as far as I was concerned, having just had to endure the stresses of two little girls being bridesmaids at a friend's wedding. But anyway, if you haven't watched it you really should.

Arisotle, love, and pleasure

Some more thoughts on Aristotle and Plato on pleasure and their interest in using homosexual erotic relationships as examples of a cause of pleasure and as a means of illustrating how to think about the nature of pleasure itself... Aristotle offers further evidence of a detailed engagement with Platonic accounts of love and pleasure at NE 1157a1–12. Here, Aristotle is contrasting the virtuous kind of friendship (philia) with other forms on the grounds that it is much more stable and lasting since each member of the relationship receives the same things from the other.

ἡ δὲ διὰ τὸ ἡδὺ ὁμοίωμα ταύτης ἔχει· καὶ γὰρ οἱ ἀγαθοὶ ἡδεῖς ἀλλήλοις. ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ ἡ διὰ τὸ χρήσιμον· καὶ γὰρ τοιοῦτοι ἀλλήλοις οἱ ἀγαθοί. μάλιστα δὲ καὶ ἐν τούτοις αἱ φιλίαι μένουσιν, ὅταν τὸ αὐτὸ γίνηται παρ’ ἀλλήλων, οἷον (5) ἡδονή, καὶ μὴ μόνον οὕτως ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτοῦ, οἷον τοῖς εὐτραπέλοις, καὶ μὴ ὡς ἐραστῇ καὶ ἐρωμένῳ. οὐ γὰρ ἐπὶ τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἥδονται οὗτοι, ἀλλ’ ὃ μὲν ὁρῶν ἐκεῖνον, ὃ δὲ θεραπευόμενος ὑπὸ τοῦ ἐραστοῦ· ληγούσης δὲ τῆς ὥρας ἐνίοτε καὶ ἡ φιλία λήγει (τῷ μὲν γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἡδεῖα ἡ (10) ὄψις, τῷ δ’ οὐ γίνεται ἡ θεραπεία)· πολλοὶ δ’ αὖ διαμένουσιν, ἐὰν ἐκ τῆς συνηθείας τὰ ἤθη στέρξωσιν, ὁμοήθεις ὄντες.

Friendship based on pleasure is similar to this one [sc. one based on virtue] for good men also are pleasing to one another. (Similarly friendship based on the useful, because good men are also useful to one another.) Friendships last especially in those cases when the same thing is shared between them, such as pleasure. But not just that; also pleasure from the same thing, for example as with witty people and not as with a lover and beloved. For these two do not take pleasure in the same things, but the former in seeing the latter, the latter is being cultivated by the lover. And sometimes when the bloom of youth fades so too does the friendship (for the appearance is no longer pleasant to the lover and the beloved is no longer cultivated). But many do remain friends, provided as a result of familiarity they enjoy each other’s character, now that they have become alike.

Aristotle offers a rather complicated analysis of different kinds of intimate relationship which may involve the taking of pleasure by both sides, by only one or, perhaps, by neither. At this point of his discussion he is comparing and contrasting cases in which a friendship is based, at least initially, on pleasure, with those which are based on either the good character of the friends or on some utility which one provides the other. In some ways, some examples of pleasure friendships are like those based on good character. For example, friendships based on pleasure can be as stable as friendships based on virtue, provided that the two members continue to take pleasure in the same things. (Virtuous people will take pleasure in the same things and so a virtuous friendship will also involve many experiences of pleasure, even though pleasure is not the grounds of the friendship.) Aristotle contrasts such a stable friendship based on pleasure with the case of a relationship between a lover and a beloved since in the latter case Aristotle says that although both members of the pair may take pleasure from the relationships, their pleasures come from different sources. For the older lover the pleasure comes from his seeing the beloved, whereas the beloved may take pleasure in being cared for and cultivated (therapeumenos) by his lover. What’s more, Aristotle insists that such erotic relationships are temporary since they depend on the particular and transitory youthful beauty.

At 1157a9 Aristotle uses the same word for the youthful beauty of the beloved – ὥρα – as he does in the simile illustrating the relationship between pleasure and activity at NE 1174b33 which further confirms the assumption that in that simile Aristotle is indeed using familiar terms of praise for a young beloved.It also confirms the suspicion that in the passage in book X the intended analogy is between the perceived outward pleasing appearance of a beloved young man and the perceived pleasure attendant on a particular activity. In his analysis of the philia between lover and beloved, Aristotle then points out that when the beauty disappears so does the lover’s pleasure in viewing the beloved and when the lover no longer offers the same kind of attention to the beloved then the beloved’s pleasure from the relationship also ceases. Often, when youthful beauty fades, since the relationship is grounded on the respective pleasures each takes, so too does the relationship itself unless it has been replaced by a more lasting tie based on familiarity (1157b10–12). This in turn contrasts with another kind of erotic relationship in which the two partners exchange favours of utility rather than pleasure (b12–14).This final form of erotic relationship is most unstable because, as Aristotle curtly notes, the two are not philoi of one another but only of the gain they might take from the relationship. Once that opportunity has disappeared, so too has the relationship.Aristotle may well be offering his analysis on the basis of what he considered to be generally acceptable accounts of how interpersonal relationship in fact differ and develop. All the same, as he wrote this passage he can hardly have been unaware of a Platonic antecedent of his discussion of the differences between the exchange of pleasures between lover and beloved and something more focussed on character and perhaps even virtue. Indeed, Plato appears to have been very fond not only of this particular theme but also of the metaphorical use of the term ὥρα to refer to the particular bloom of youth displayed by the beloved. The most obvious antecedent for Aristotle’s account of this form of philia, as Burnet notes in his commentary on NE 8.4, is Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium, particularly 183d8–e6. So that is where I will go next.

Love and pleasure

At some point this summer I got interested in exploring a link between Philebus 53d-e and Aristotle EN 1174b31-3. I even got round to posting something about it here before things got derailed. Anyway, we got to that bit of Philebus in a lecture today so it spurred me on to think again about it. It turns out that part of why I got derailed over the summer was that I got very perplexed about the passage so perhaps I might turn to my good reader(s) for clarification. The passage in question is this:

ΣΩ. Ἐστὸν δή τινε δύο, τὸ μὲν αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτό, τὸ δ’ ἀεὶ ἐφιέμενον ἄλλου.

ΠΡΩ. Πῶς τούτω καὶ τίνε λέγεις;

ΣΩ. Τὸ μὲν σεμνότατον ἀεὶ πεφυκός, τὸ δ’ ἐλλιπὲς ἐκείνου.

ΠΡΩ. Λέγ’ ἔτι σαφέστερον.

ΣΩ. Παιδικά που καλὰ καὶ ἀγαθὰ τεθεωρήκαμεν ἅμα καὶ ἐραστὰς ἀνδρείους αὐτῶν.

ΠΡΩ. Σφόδρα γε.

ΣΩ Τούτοις τοίνυν ἐοικότα δυοῖν οὖσι δύο ἄλλα ζήτει κατὰ πάνθ’ ὅσα λέγομεν εἶναι.

Soc. Let there be this pair: what is itself, by itself, and what is always aiming at something else.

Prot. What are these two you are talking about and what are they like?

Soc. The one is always by nature the most holy and the other lacks it.

Prot. Be clearer still, please.

Soc. I suppose we have seen beautiful and good young boys together with their brave lovers.

Prot. Certainly.

Soc. Then now look for another pair of things that are like these two in all the ways we are mentioning.

Given the classification to come between things that are geneseis and things that are ousiai, which is also meant to map a distinction between things that are for-the-sake-of something else and those for whose sake are other things (such as how ship-building stands to a ship) we should expect the relationship of beloved : lover or, to use the standard Greek terms, erōmenos : erastēs to function analogously to that of ousia : genesis. Pleasure will be assigned to the class of geneseis. Most importantly, therefore, it is the lover who is aligned with pleasure and ‘becoming’ while the beloved is aligned with a completion or goal and with ‘being’.

So I wondered whether that is indeed how we are supposed to interpret the erotic analogy. And this is as far as I have got. That the correct alignment is lover-genesis beloved-ousia can be supported by a variety of notions which build on a common, albeit perhaps idealised, picture of the lover–beloved relationship and also various conceptions of the lover–beloved relationship which can be found either in the surrounding context of the Philebus or elsewhere in Platonic texts:

1. It is the beloved who is here described in terms which refer to his beauty and goodness.

When Socrates finally explains the ousia–genesis distinction in terms of the value of the members of the two classes, he insists that ‘that for the sake of which something comes to be’ should be put in the class (moira) of goods while pleasure, if it is a kind of coming-to-be, ought to be placed in a different class and is therefore not a good (54c9–d3).

2. The beloved is the object of the lover’s aims and desires. It is ‘for the sake of’ the beloved that the lover undertakes various tasks, performs various acts and so on.

3. It is the lover, not the beloved, who feels desire. And desire is often figured as a kind of lack of absence. So in this sense, qua lover he is lacking.

Lack or deficiency is a characteristic of the genesis class of things (54d6–7) and is made a defining feature of the lover by Plato most obviously in the Symposium.

4. It is the lover, not the beloved, who is generally understood to take pleasure in the relationship.

This is not such a clear case. See, for example, Phaedrus 240d. To be sure, the context here is a speech in which the aim is to persuade the young man that he is better off taking up with someone who is not his lover, but the rhetorical tropes must be to some extent plausible to a general Athenian audience for the speech to be effective. Nevertheless, despite some exceptional cases, which are often intended as grotesque inversions of the norm, it is generally speaking the erastēs who is considered to take pleasure in any intercourse.

So that is as far as I have got so far. My next port of call is going to be Aristotle's analysis of philia and pleasure which also refers to these erotic relationships.

OMG! Robot dinosaurs

RJR pointed me towards this, perhaps the freakiest toy I have seen. I'm hoping it is sufficiently inaccurate paleontologically that my elder daughter won't want one. (I'm pretty sure that these things could not really wiggle their horns.) But if you want one you can go here.