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Plato's Critique of Hedonism in the Philebus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2008

ROBERT C. BARTLETT
ROBERT C. BARTLETT*
Affiliation:
Emory University
*
Robert C. Bartlett is Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 ([email protected]).
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Abstract

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question “How ought I to live?”, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato's, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure's claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of “the good” with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 102 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 141 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2008

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