Section 586

Then those who have no experience of wisdom and virtue but are ever devoted to 1 feastings and that sort of thing are swept downward, it seems, and back again to the center, and so sway and roam 2 to and fro throughout their lives, but they have never transcended all this and turned their eyes to the true upper region nor been wafted there, nor ever been really filled with real things, nor ever tasted 3 stable and pure pleasure, but with eyes ever bent upon the earth 4 and heads bowed down over their tables they feast like cattle, 5 grazing and copulating, ever greedy for more of these delights; and in their greed 6 kicking and butting one another with horns and hooves of iron they slay one another in sateless avidity, because they are vainly striving to satisfy with things that are not real the unreal and incontinent part 7 of their souls. You describe in quite oracular style, 8 Socrates, said Glaucon, the life of the multitude. And are not the pleasures with which they dwell inevitably commingled with pains, phantoms of true pleasure, illusions of scene-painting, so colored by contrary juxtaposition 9 as to seem intense in either kind, and to beget mad loves of themselves in senseless souls, and to be fought for, 10 as Stesichorus says the wraith of Helen 11 was fought for at Troy through ignorance of the truth? It is quite inevitable, he said, that it should be so. So, again, must not the like hold of the high-spirited element, whenever a man succeeds in satisfying that part of his nature—his covetousness of honor by envy, his love of victory by violence, his ill-temper by indulgence in anger, pursuing these ends without regard to consideration and reason? The same sort of thing, he said, must necessarily happen in this case too. Then, said I, may we not confidently declare that in both the gain-loving and the contentious part of our nature all the desires that wait upon knowledge and reason, and, pursuing their pleasures in conjunction with them, 12 take only those pleasures which reason approves, 13 will, since they follow truth, enjoy the truest 14 pleasures, so far as that is possible for them, and also the pleasures that are proper to them and their own, if for everything that which is best may be said to be most its own 15 ? But indeed, he said, it is most truly its very own.