On the Mysteries

ON PLEASURE

It is necessary that whatever remains undivided has already cast off the nature of a body; therefore, since every body is extended and divisible, it must be that whenever it acts or undergoes something, or is moved from one place to another, the parts that are closer or in front act, suffer, or turn before the others. Thus, every motion of physical bodies requires a span of time and is stretched out in a certain succession from what comes first to what follows. The soul, however, is indivisible and simple, having no internal separation or distance between parts. Therefore, the motion of the soul is indivisible and simple, and is completed entirely at a single point of time original: uno temporis puncto; refers to an instant rather than a duration. For this reason, Thales of Miletus a Pre-Socratic philosopher often cited as the first Greek philosopher said that nothing is swifter than the mind. Since, therefore, in the works of Plato, pleasure is defined as a motion not of the body but of the soul, nothing indeed prevents that motion from being a motion and yet also existing as a complete whole all at once. This is especially true since in the Platonic books, "motion" original: motus signifies not only a flow and succession (as the Peripatetics the followers of Aristotle would have it) but also every operation and act. ¶ Next, as for their claim that Plato called pleasure the refilling of a deficiency original: indigentiæ repletionem; the idea that pleasure is simply the body returning to a full state, like drinking when thirsty and pain the deficiency itself, this may perhaps seem less than true. For even he himself in the Gorgias one of Plato’s dialogues concerning rhetoric and ethics intends for pleasure to consist in a state of being refilled. But no one—except those most unlike Plato—would say that pleasure itself consists in pleasure, or that any other thing which occurs in nature consists in itself. Furthermore, in the same book, he says that refilling is "pleasurable," while deficiency is for the most part "painful." But who speaks so foolishly as to call pleasure "pleasurable" or pain "painful"? Who likewise would call beauty "beautifulness" or justice "just"? In the same way, Plato would not have called pleasure "pleasurable" nor pain "painful." Therefore, he did not intend for pain to be the deficiency itself, nor for pleasure to be the refilling itself. Moreover, he says that pleasure is produced by refilling, and pain by lack. Yet he himself believes that nothing can be produced by itself. How then could pleasure, if it were refilling, be produced by that very refilling? Or how could pain, if it were lack, be born from lack? Furthermore, he himself in the Timaeus Plato's dialogue on the physical world and soul places pleasure in the senses and calls it a motion and an affection; a man of such stature would never say that an affection or a motion of the senses is merely "refilling." If anyone reads in the Gorgias that pleasure is the refilling of the body, let him consider that passage more carefully; he will eventually find that Plato does not feel this way himself, but rather that it is the opinion of Callicles a character in the dialogue representing the pursuit of raw power and sensory indulgence, a man most devoted to pleasure, against whom Socrates disputes most sharply. ¶ Indeed, the Peripatetics grant us these points. Nevertheless, some of them deny that all pleasure is created from the refilling of a deficiency; specifically that pleasure which contemplation brings to us, and which remains in the mind...