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Philebus

Philebus

Philebus is a work by Plato (-360).

Core claims

  • The Philebus is Plato’s most sustained attempt to solve the problem that the Republic’s tripartite soul created — not by reconciling reason and pleasure abstractly, but by introducing a fourfold ontological schema (Limit, Unlimited, Mixture, Cause) that anticipates the alchemical Axiom of Maria and Jung’s theory of the four functions.
  • Pleasure in the Philebus is not the enemy of the good life but a species of the Unlimited — Plato’s equivalent of what Hillman calls the Errant Cause (ananke) — meaning that pathologizing and enjoyment share the same ontological ground: the indeterminate, which reason can temper but never abolish.
  • Socrates’ attribution of “wisdom and reason” to Zeus (Philebus 30c-d) is the precise moment where philosophy claims its archetypal patron, a genealogical move that Hillman identifies as foundational to understanding why Western thought privileges comprehensive mastery over polytheistic multiplicity.
  • How does the Philebus’ classification of pleasure as the Unlimited (apeiron) compare with Hillman’s reading of ananke as the Errant Cause in Re-Visioning Psychology, and what does their structural equivalence imply for the place of pathologizing in the good life?
  • In what ways does the fourfold schema of the Philebus (Limit, Unlimited, Mixture, Cause) anticipate the Axiom of Maria Prophetissa as Edinger interprets it in The Psyche on Stage, and does Plato’s reinstatement of nous as sovereign Cause betray the same resistance to the fourth function that Jung identified in Western consciousness?
  • How does Peterson’s argument in his work on the Homeric thūmos — that Plato’s Republic demoted feeling to a servant of logos — hold up against the Philebus, where Plato appears to grant pleasure an irreducible ontological status rather than merely subordinating it?

See also

  • Library page: /library/ancient-roots/plato-philebus/

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