The 'Academic Questions' Behind Evaluation Of Pleasure and Happiness

“Academic Questions” sounds like exactly what a modern reader expects from ancient philosophy: a dry, technical argument about definitions, conducted by men with nothing better to do, over a question no one outside a classics department has any reason to care about. That impression is wrong. The argument Cicero stages between Lucullus and himself — whether the senses can ever deliver real knowledge, or whether we are stuck with mere probability — is not a side issue in ancient philosophy. It is the argument underneath the argument about happiness. Settle it one way, and ordinary felt pleasure is already the good, available to any infant and any adult who has not been talked out of trusting his own feelings. Settle it the other way, and pleasure becomes suspect, secondary, something to be corrected or transcended by people educated enough to access a higher, separate reality that most human beings never reach. That second answer is Plato’s, and he did not arrive at it by arguing about pleasure directly. He arrived at it by arguing, first, about what can be known at all — exactly the question Academic Questions spends two long books fighting over three centuries later.

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The Argument Plato Makes Before He Ever Mentions Pleasure

Long before Plato says a word about whether pleasure is good, he has already made a decision that settles the question in advance. Varro’s account of the Old Academy’s epistemology, recorded in Academic Questions Book One, states the doctrine plainly: knowledge, properly speaking, belongs only to the intellect grasping the fixed and unchanging “Forms” behind the flux of ordinary experience. The senses themselves — “dull and slow” — can never rise above mere opinion. Being (ousia), the realm of what is always the same, is knowable. Becoming (genesis), the realm of what is constantly changing — which includes the entire physical world, and every bodily sensation in it — is not.

This is not yet an argument about ethics. It is an argument about what counts as real knowledge at all. But it has an ethical implication built into it from the start: whatever belongs to Becoming cannot be the highest good, because the highest good, on this view, has to be something stable enough to be truly known. Pleasure, felt in a body that is constantly changing, is disqualified from being counted as the highest good before the ethical argument even opens its case.

Philebus: Pleasure Convicted of Being a Process, Not a Thing

Plato’s Philebus runs this disqualification through explicitly, using pleasure as the test case. Kelly Arenson, in Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus (2019), states the stakes of the dialogue’s opening argument this way:

“If pleasure is a process toward health rather than an end, then it belongs to the realm of becoming rather than that of being, and so it cannot, on Plato’s view, qualify as good in itself. Clearly, much is at stake for the hedonist in this dispute: Plato aims to diminish the goodness of pleasure by employing a certain description of pleasure’s nature.”

— Arenson, Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus, p. 30, previewing what she calls the “process argument” Socrates makes at Plato, Philebus 53c4-55c3

The mechanism is simple once it is named. Pleasure, on the Philebus’s restoration model, is the process of filling a depleted organism back up to its natural balance — the way eating restores the body’s balance after hunger has depleted it. A process, by definition, is always still becoming something else; it is never simply, stably, what it is. Health, the state the process aims at, might qualify as a stable “being.” The process of getting there cannot. This is the origin of the argument that pleasure supposedly has no natural limit, that it can never be “complete” the way Plato alleges genuine goods are complete. Epicurus’s answer — that the limit of pleasure is reached the moment all pain is removed, which is a real ceiling and not a receding horizon — is aimed exactly at this Platonic argument. Epicurus’s answer works because it refuses Plato’s premise. Pleasure is not disqualified from being a stable, complete good just because it is felt in a changing body. Feeling itself, on the Epicurean canon, is already a sufficient and final court of appeal. Nothing has to first pass through Plato’s separate, higher category of unchanging Being before it can be counted as real.

Republic Book Nine: The Same Argument Applied To Suggest A Hierarchy of Lives

If the Philebus disqualifies pleasure at the level of metaphysics, Republic Book Nine cashes in on that disqualification by deciding that we can rank actual human lives in terms of their pleasure. Socrates first tries to discredit what we think of as ordinary pleasure directly by calling most of what people call pleasure mere “shadow-paintings” of the real thing. As Arenson writes, quoting Plato directly:

“There is nothing sound in these appearances as far as the truth about pleasure is concerned, only some kind of magic.”

— Arenson, Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus, p. 13, quoting Plato, Republic 584a9-10

These “bastard pleasures,” Socrates says, are simply relief from a prior pain masquerading as something positive — and he pictures three zones on a vertical line, pain at the bottom, a neutral resting state in the middle, and only pure, unmixed pleasure at the very top, out of reach of anyone who has never actually arrived there.

Having tried and — in Arenson’s opinion — largely failed to make that argument hold together on its own terms, Socrates tries the Being/Becoming approach. Arenson translates Plato as follows:

“And which kinds do you think partake more of pure being? Filling up with bread, drink, delicacies, and food in general? Or the kind of filling up that is with true belief, knowledge, understanding, and, in sum, with every virtue? Judge it this way: that which clings closely to what is always the same, immortal, and true, and is itself of that kind and comes to be in something of that kind — do you think it is more than that which clings closely to what is mortal and never the same, is itself of that kind, and comes to be in something of that kind?”

— Arenson’s translation, Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus, p. 15, of Plato, Republic 585b9-c5

In other words, a pleasure is only as real as what fills it, and only the intellect’s own objects — truth, knowledge, virtue, the unchanging Forms — count as fully real. Bodily pleasure inherits the second-rate metaphysical status of food and drink, which belong to the realm of the “mortal and never the same.” The philosopher’s pleasure outranks the profit-lover’s and the honor-lover’s not because it feels better in any direct sense a person could simply notice, but because the philosopher alone has true access to the standard — Being — against which all pleasure is supposedly to be graded.

Socrates then tries to put a number on the result, arriving at his famous claim that the philosopher-king lives 729 times more pleasantly than the tyrant (Plato, Republic 587e). Arenson does not hold back her criticism:

“Socrates’ comparison of the quantitative pleasure of the kingly and tyrannical lives is so over the top as to be utterly ridiculous… In Plato’s ‘calculation’ in book 9, there are in fact no ‘pleasure units’: Socrates arrives at 729 by first counting the tyrant’s distance from the king in the ranking of psychic constitutions and then performing some ‘squaring and cubing’ (587d9-10).”

— Arenson, Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus, p. 26, discussing Plato, Republic 587d-e

Arenson argues that better than this ridiculous calculation was Plato’s final argument: that the philosophic life is most pleasant because it alone achieves psychic harmony, the whole soul working without civil war under reason’s government. This is closer, on her reading, to an ideal of health than to any single felt sensation. That argument may seem more palatable than “729 times better,” but it keeps the same fallacious structure: only the rationally governed soul, in contact with Being — what truly is — gets to count as real, complete happiness. Everyone else is left with nothing but shadow-paintings.

How “Academic Questions” Describes The Same Fight

All of this is directly applicable to Cicero’s Academic Questions. The entire quarrel between Lucullus and Cicero is over whether the senses can deliver a genuine criterion of truth. From the Epicurean perspective both the kataleptic impression argued for by the Stoics and the bare probability argued for by the Academic skeptics are fatally flawed, but the argument revolves around the same issue. Cicero himself, once his own reply is under way, spends chapter after chapter pressing exactly the doubt about the senses that Plato had already used to demote the entire realm of Becoming beneath the realm of Being. Cicero’s arguments are all too familiar: the bent oar, the dove’s neck, the sun looking no bigger than a foot across, dreams and madness collapsing the difference between true and false perception from the inside.

When Cicero finally reaches his closing survey of rival positions, he puts Plato’s answer to the canon-of-truth question on the table beside Epicurus’s, the Cyrenaics’, and Protagoras’s, stating it in language that echoes Varro’s opening account of the Forms almost word for word: truth belongs to “thought and intellect,” separated from both opinion and the senses.

Plato, the Academic skeptics, and the Stoics start with the same problem — the senses appear to be untrustworthy. The skeptic concludes: settle for probability, and never claim more certainty than the evidence allows. Plato concludes: abandon the senses as a path to real knowledge altogether, and turn instead to an unchanging, separate reality only the trained intellect can reach. The Stoics conclude: men have been so designed by nature that they are able to receive kataleptic impressions so clear that they cannot possibly be false, so that by looking to the design of the universe itself the sage can — at least in principle — reliably determine what is true.

Epicurus’s approach is entirely different: refuse to accept the initial suspicion of the senses. The senses are not almost-reliable witnesses straining toward a higher standard they can never quite meet. They are the standard. All sensations are true reports of what has actually affected the organism. Error comes into play only afterward, in the opinions the mind adds to what the senses report, never in the senses themselves. Once that is understood and accepted — once we truly trust the senses — there is no need to go looking the way Plato does for some separate and superior category of pleasure belonging to Being rather than Becoming. The entire premise that manufactured that need — that felt experience is too unstable and second-rate to count as knowledge — was false from the outset.

What This Means for Happiness and Real Life

If Plato is right that only the intellect’s contact with unchanging Being counts as real knowledge, then real happiness is, by deduction, available only to the rare person capable of that contact. It is no surprise, on this view, that it is only philosophers like Socrates or Plato themselves, trained for years, who are able to turn the soul away from the body’s pleasures and toward the Forms.

Everyone else, unable to attain such a god-like state, is left with nothing but shadow-paintings: they mistake relief from want or pain for the real thing. They are left with a life that Plato tells us we can grade as some fraction — a seven-hundred-and-twenty-ninth part — of the pleasure that a philosopher is supposedly getting to feel. By Plato’s own terms, the overwhelming majority of human beings who have ever lived were, by definition, shut out from the highest happiness available to their species, through no fault of their own except that they lacked the rare philosophical training that alone makes it available.

Epicurus refuses this analysis from the word go because he refuses the view of knowledge that generated it. The senses and the feelings are a sufficient standard of truth. They are not inferior stand-ins for intellect, not something to be disparaged in the light of some theoretical standard of “Being.” The pleasure felt by an infant reaching for its mother, by an uneducated farmer eating bread after a day’s work, or by anyone at all who enjoys more pleasure than pain, is not a shadow of anything. It is the real thing, already good in itself, already known directly and with total confidence, exactly as we know that snow is white and honey is sweet — the same way everything is known: through feeling, which does not lie. Cicero spends two books describing for us the argument about whether the senses can be trusted, but what is actually at stake is whether pleasure and happiness can belong to everyone or only to the few.