Pleasures Fit for a Slave
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Phaedrus — ζῴη… τῶν τοιούτων ἡδονῶν ἕνεκα… προλυπηθῆναι δεῖ… αἱ περὶ τὸ σῶμα ἡδοναὶ ἔχουσι… δικαίως ἀνδραποδώδεις κέκληνται.
Phaedrus's enthusiasm boils over into a small philosophy of pleasure. For what, he demands, would a person even live, if not for pleasures like the one they are enjoying now — the pleasure of good talk? And he sharpens the point by contrast. Not, he says, for those pleasures that require one 'to be pained beforehand,' prolypēthēnai — the pleasures that must be preceded by discomfort to be felt at all. Nearly all the pleasures 'concerning the body' are like this: you must be hungry to enjoy food, thirsty to enjoy drink, and the enjoyment ends where the lack is filled. Such pleasures, Phaedrus concludes, 'are rightly called slavish,' andrapodōdeis — a hard word, built from the term for a war-captive-slave, that brands these pleasures as fit for chattel rather than free people. Set against them is the pleasure Phaedrus is savoring: the free, painless delight of philosophical conversation, which needs no prior suffering and leaves the soul richer, not merely relieved.
Socrates has asked whether they should stay and discuss what makes writing and speaking good or bad. Phaedrus answers with delight — for what else, he cries, is life worth living, if not for pleasures like this one? Not the bodily pleasures, which demand pain first and leave nothing behind; those, he says, are rightly called 'slavish.' The pleasure of philosophical talk is the pleasure of a free soul.
It is easy to read this as a throwaway bit of banter, but Phaedrus has stumbled — with a lover of speeches' instinct rather than a philosopher's rigor — onto a distinction Plato took with great seriousness, and would work out carefully in a late dialogue, the Philebus. There Plato divides pleasures into two kinds. Most pleasures are, as Phaedrus says, merely the filling of a lack: they presuppose a pain — hunger, thirst, itch, desire — and consist in relieving it, so that the pleasure is chained to the discomfort that came before and vanishes when the emptiness is filled. These are the pleasures of the body, and Phaedrus calls them by the brutal name andrapodōdeis, 'slavish,' because they master us the way an owner masters a slave: they run on a cycle of need and gratification we do not control. But Plato also recognizes a rarer class of 'pure' pleasures — pleasures not born of any prior pain, that add something to the soul rather than merely subtract a discomfort. The pleasure of learning, of beauty, of understanding, of good conversation: these do not require you to suffer first, and they leave you fuller, not just emptier of a lack. That is the pleasure Phaedrus is declaring the only thing worth living for, and in doing so he is unknowingly siding with philosophy against the whole hedonism of the body. The Greek ideal underneath is the contrast between the free and the slavish that organized their entire ethics: a free man is one who governs his appetites; a slave is governed by them. To pursue the painless pleasures of the mind is to live as a free soul; to be driven by the body's cycle of lack and relief is to live as andrapodon, a two-footed head of livestock. And there is a lovely dramatic aptness in this landing exactly here. The whole first half of the dialogue was about erōs, desire — and the danger that love collapses into the slavish, body-bound pleasure that must consume its object. Now, at the threshold of the discussion of speech and truth, Phaedrus places the pleasure of philosophical talk itself in the free, higher class. The conversation they are about to have is offered as living proof of the very distinction he has drawn.
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