Workshop in Ancient Philosophy (Thursday - Week 5, TT25)

Abstract: In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates asserts that there are mixed pleasures of the soul alone (47d8). These include the pathē of ‘wrath, fear, longing, lamentations, love, jealousy, [and] phthonos’ (47e1). Socrates does not examine these pathē one by one, nor does he provide a general explanation for how they involve both pain and pleasure. Rather, to help us recognise the mixture of pleasure and pain in such cases, he provides an account of the mixed pleasure of ‘our state of mind in comedy’ (48a8), i.e. comic amusement. While this account has attracted scholarly attention in recent years, interpreters are far from reaching a consensus on what exactly constitutes the pleasure and pain of comic amusement. In this talk, I develop my own account of the psychology of comic amusement and show that the current lack of consensus stems from a common misinterpretation of the role of phthonos in this mixed phenomenon. Ultimately, I argue that phthonos is the pain and laughter (gelōs) is the pleasure in the mixed pleasure of comic amusement.