Socrates' Difference Between Good and Pleasure
"To pander" means to give in or to serve the cheaper or lower desires and tastes of others and to use their weaknesses for the benefit of the "pander." A "pander" is a middleman between a person who wants to buy cheap pleasure and the person who wants to sell it. The pander is a pimp. Socrates considered the oratory as cheap as this because the listeners of an orator simply listened to his ideas and did not send back their opinion and reactions to the orator to accept or reject it. He viewed orators (or the Sophists of his time) as speaking without interest to the truthfulness of what they said before others, but only to influence them to accept their thinking. This spread of wrong ...
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easy. Most of the time, it pertains to the body or the mind, like good food, good music, good time. Often, what is good is what goes our way and makes us look "good" to others and to ourselves.
But good is something much deeper than that and something we cannot change, hide or destroy. It means what we ought to be, what leads to our becoming our best in the eyes of the One Who created us. Socrates said that we naturally want pleasure because of the good in it, like a pleasant note, a pleasant meal, a pleasant thought. He said we cannot have pleasure in something that is not already good. But quite often, what is good is not pleasant, because it means a giving up of many of our weaknesses, which have given us some kind of comfort, which, in turn, we consider good. For example, it is pleasant and more preferable to watch videos than to study a hated subject, but studying is the good that we have to do, because it leads to learning and learning, not watching fun videos, will ...
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being good in the end is punishing criminals. Socrates believed that doing wrong (or an injustice) hurts the soul, which needs to be cured of that wrong by punishment. Because the soul is more important than the body, the pain that comes to the body by punishment is more tolerable and less unpleasant than the pain that comes to the soul by the damage caused by wrongdoing. Socrates believed that true happiness results from a combination of learning from mistakes and getting justly punished for them. He saw that the function of rhetoric was to tell someone what was wrong with him so that he could correct it.
Nobody likes punishment because it is unpleasant. Yet Socrates continued to say ...
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"Socrates' Difference Between Good and Pleasure." Essayworld.com. August 26, 2015. Accessed November 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Socrates-Difference-Between-Good-and-Pleasure/104931.
"Socrates' Difference Between Good and Pleasure." Essayworld.com. August 26, 2015. Accessed November 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Socrates-Difference-Between-Good-and-Pleasure/104931.
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