Plato on Happiness: The Happy Are Happy by the Possession of Good Things

Context

The Symposium's Diotima speech is a ladder of love: from the desire for one beautiful body, to the appreciation of many, to love of souls, laws, knowledge, and finally beauty itself. At the base of the ladder stands the simple observation that everyone desires the good and wants to be happy. The sentence about happiness is the hinge on which the whole ascent turns — if happiness is possession of the good, then the pursuit of love is the pursuit of happiness by another name.

The passage is also Plato's most economical answer to the question of what happiness is. It refuses to define happiness by feeling, pleasure, or luck. Happiness is possession of goods, and so the art of happiness is the art of acquiring and keeping genuine goods — which Plato identifies with virtue and understanding. This is why the Platonic account of the happy life is inseparable from the account of justice and wisdom.

Significance

By tying happiness to the possession of good things, Plato makes happiness a matter of truth rather than of temperament. Two people in identical circumstances could be differently happy on a mood-based account, but on Plato's account what matters is what is actually in their possession — health of soul, order, knowledge. The modern distinction between feeling good and doing well descends directly from this move.

The formulation also contains a built-in ethics of desire. Since everyone wants the good, the question is whether people want the right goods. Plato's answer — that the unexamined life mistakes shadows for substance — is the reason his account of happiness ends in an account of education and self-knowledge. Explore the theme in what is eudaimonia, hedonism vs eudaimonia, and happiness vs pleasure.

Related Learning

• Explore the philosophical foundations in what is happiness and what is eudaimonia.
• Read the companion insight in Aristotle on happiness eudaimonia and Socrates on virtue.
• Continue with happiness, love, and the Ancient Wisdom learning path.

Sources

1. Plato, Symposium, 205a, trans. Benjamin Jowett.
2. "Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/