Plato's Philebus

In earlier dialogues, such as the Phaedo, Socrates concerns himself with the life that frees the soul from the corporeal, while in the Philebus he inquires into the composition of the good life. Are both lives the same? Freedom from the corporeal is of central importance to Socrates because the corporeal is subject to change and decay. As such, it is not that which most truly is, and therefore is in a sense illusory. If one is to become free from the corporeal, one must turn away from the corporeal by engaging in the search for truth, for that which most truly is. In the life of philosophy this enterprise is undertaken. The art of philosophizing is the art of dying, of dying to the corporeal. The Phaedo advocates such a life, and at the same time, it along with other earlier dialogues, seems to associate pleasure and pain with the corporeal. In the search for truth, one moves beyond the bodily experience of pleasure and pain to the immortality resulting from action and dialectic. This seems perplexing, for one ordinarily would think that pleasure ought to be an element found in the good life. What precisely is to be done about pleasure? Is it to be totally excluded from the life of philosophy? Is it to be excluded from the good life? Is excluding it from the one the same as excluding it from the other? We can effectively answer these questions by turning to the Philebus, for there we discover that Plato's treatment of pleasure and pain is not so simple—or simplistic— as might initially be supposed. If we were to compare the Philebus with an earlier dialogue such as the Phaedo, we might initially be tempted to claim that the latter is the more "beautiful" of the two and therefore the more "pleasing." But for Plato, it is the Philebus with its appeal to dialectic, its slight use of imagery, and its almost total abandonment of myth which is truly the more appealing. Why? Because it recognizes explicitly what the Phaedo recognizes only implicitly through its aesthetic appeal to the senses, namely, that the good life