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His highest virtue is self-regarding; a concern for the Health of the Soul. III. On the Bonum, or Summum Bonum, Plato is ascetic and self-denying. 1. We have seen that in Philebus, Pleasure is not good, unless united with Knowledge or Intelligence; and the greater the Intelligence, the higher the pleasure.
In the ethics, the perfection of the human soul the perfection which it may attain is distinctly unfolded, and also the unity of the great ideas of the beautiful, just, and good. The "Phoedo" enforces the supremacy of wisdom, and the "Philebus" the "summum bonum." Love is the aspiration after a communion with perfection.
Socrates says in the Philebus, "Do we not say that the intemperate has pleasure, and that the temperate has pleasure in his very temperance, and that the fool is pleased when he is full of foolish fancies and hopes, and that the wise man has pleasure in his wisdom? And may not he be justly deemed a fool who says that these pairs of pleasures are respectively alike?"
"But if it be requisite to lay before the reader those dialogues out of many which principally unfold to us the mystic discipline about the gods, I shall not err in ranking among this number the Phaedo and Phaedrus, the Banquet and the Philebus, and together with these the Sophista and Politicus, the Cratylus and the Timaeus.
Because the poet is drawn equally to this world and to the other world, shall we characterize him as a hybrid creature, and assert that an irreconcilable discord is in his soul? We shall prove ourselves singularly deaf to concord if we do so. Poets have been telling us over and over again that the distinctive element in the poetic nature is harmony. What is harmony? It is the reconciliation of opposites, says Eurymachus in the Symposium. It is union of the finite and the infinite, says Socrates in the Philebus. Do the poet's desires point in opposite directions? But so, it seems, do the poplars that stand tiptoe, breathless, at the edge of the dreaming pool. The whole secret of the aesthetic repose lies in the duality of the poet's desire. His imagination enables him to see all life as two in one, or one in two; he leaves us uncertain which. His imagination reflects the spiritual in the sensual and the sensual in the spiritual till we cannot tell which is the more tangible or the more meaningful. We sought unity in the poetic character, but we can reduce a nature to complete and barren unity only by draining it of imagination, and it is imagination which enables the poet to find aesthetic unity in the two worlds of sense and spirit, where the rest of us can see only conflict. There is a little poem, by Walter Conrad Arensberg, which is to me a symbol of this power of reflection which distinguishes the poetic imagination. It is called Voyage
Hence, according to his doctrine, the highest truth is characterized by unity, and is the light proceeding from the good, which imparts purity, as he says in the Philebus, and union, as he says in the Republic, to intelligibles.
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