THE TOLERABLE PLANET Our planet is the land of tolerance, not only because by tolerance among all the races and national origins and sexual genres and ideologies we get to live in peace , as an utilitarian like John Locke would state, but because our world is a place where perfection is never achieved but a tolerable amount of perfection only which satisfies us in some way. We never get want we want on this world and we must adjust to what it is possible to get , given the conditions of our time, in politics, economics, world affairs, state of the country, job market, money available, opportunities for business and other burdens of the epoch. We have learnt to live under the concept of what is tolerable, assuming that the perfect good is impossible to get on this planet where everything changes from day to day and from year to year, it is impossible to get the best good, the most perfect good on this planet , and even in the case that you get it, it will be for a short time as soon everything will change and you will lose you goodness, your perfect life, a perfect wife and children, a perfect job, a perfect home , a perfect car and so on. In this world it is impossible to get the best or the most perfect good for a long time. Plato wanted that all the behaviors of the people were guided towards the achievement of the Good , but Plato's concept of the Good was not of this world, as for Plato the Good was an intelligible form which was present before the coming of this Universe and which was used to create this Universe. But such perfect concept of the Good doesn't exist on our planet as all the things of our world are copies of that idea of Good and therefore all the things of our world are an imitation of that Good, being our worldly goods not absolutely good but just with an appearance of good. Plato criticized the sophist of his time for selling to the people not the real good but an appearance of good . The sophist sold the way to be successful by telling rhetorical speeches, void of meaning, or the way to be successful by following a shallow wisdom , one enough to make money if you are a merchant or a politician but useless to research on philosophy in deep. The sophist sold to the people an appearance of wisdom, not the real wisdom, and Plato said that the good that the sophist taught to the people was an appearance of good and not the real Good of Plato, an intelligible form. The reality show us that in our world the pure Good of Plato doesn't exist but scarcely and for a short time although all men try to get for their lives the uppermost perfection , trying to be in touch with the pure Good. All men want to be rich and happy all time and to enjoy the best things of this world, the best places, the best foods. But our world is not the world for the pure Good of Plato, this is instead the planet for the tolerable, for what is an appearance of good, for what is an imitation of the pure Good of Plato . Here in our planet everything is mixed , the goodness with the evilness, the pleasures with the pains, the tyrants with the democrats, the decent with the scoundrels, countries suffer from time to time the coming of the profiteers who take advantage of the laws becoming tyrants or corrupts, the countries suffer invasions of immigrants who shake the country 's values and traditions, or those immigrants come from other past epochs and bring trouble to the country, the clean air goes along with the smoke of wood and coal stoves or with the volcano ashes, the natural radioactivity and radon goes with the fair land, the food with the pesticides, the white with the black, the advanced with the backward, the sane with the infirm, the good lands with the bad lands, the fanatical with the learned. We live in the planet of tolerance, and not on the planet of the pure Good, here we accept some measure of Good as enough to keep living and we keep on moving, accepting as a tolerable good that we have a job, we earn a wage, we have or pay for a house, we a have a family, we pay taxes and bank bills and insurances, we must obey the laws, all that is not the pure good desired by those who always seek perfection in their lives, but only a tolerable amount of good, by which life is possible, although it be not a perfect life. Politicians and economists tell us that due to the conditions of overpopulation of our time, it is impossible to offer a good job with a good salary to all the population and , as Malthus said, our planet is limited in size and cannot produce food for so many people but by the use of large amounts of pesticides and chemicals in gigantic farming , as well as by the use of new transgenic soy beans. We cannot get good food but a tolerable food with a tolerable amount of pesticides and other chemicals on it and we accept it . By their side, the physicists tell us that we can take a tolerable amount of radioactivity coming from nuclear power plants, atomic tests bombs and medicine appliances each year and we accept it, although we would prefer to not being exposed to radioactivity at all. We drink bottled water because it is the only way to get cheap water although we know that the plastic of the bottle is dangerous but we accept the tolerable amounts of microparticles of that plastic which we drink with its water. And they add too disinfectants to that water, in small quantities, to kill bacteria, and they tell us that we can take such small quantities of disinfectant because they are "tolerable". The medical drugs and vaccines bring alongside with their magical effects other not so desirable side-effects which the physicians deem as "tolerable" by the patients. The ecologists have played the role of the "puritan" in this tragedy of the past decades : the ecologists wanted a pure world without the slightest trace of pollution on it, with pure food without any kind of chemical on it and with pure air with any kind of cinders or toxic particles on it, pristine forests, oceans without mercury poisoning, a perfect life in other words, the ecologist wanted a perfect world, according to the idea of Good of Plato. The ecologist couldn't accept a world of tolerable things , the ecologists wanted only an absolutely Good planet. They failed because they couldn't understand that our planet has never been absolutely clean and pure as this is not the purpose of our planet. This is the planet of the tolerable, not of the Good, the ecologist wanted to turn this planet into the Paradise of the Christians, the upper happy world of so many religions ,but this planet has never been such. This was the reason of the failure of the ecologist ideology. They couldn't accept that our planet is not the world of the pure Good. But there is another ideology's failure here: the ideology of the Welfare State apostles. In new countries such Australia, people has developed perfect countries with perfect public administrations and perfect Welfare States, but without being aware that it is not our mission on this world to turn it so perfect as the upper world is, but to live in our planet as it is . The apostles of the Welfare State have turned brand new countries such Australia or New Zealand into very perfect countries, from a coarse materialistic point of view, believing that to get the paradise in our planet it was enough to develop perfect Welfare States where everybody could enjoy a good life with a good job and a house and education and Medicare. They have failed too, like the ecologists, by not being able to understand that our planet is not the world of the pure Good but the planet of the tolerable. The Good of Plato is not for this world but for the upper world . Our world is an imitation of the upper world and the good we enjoy here in our planet is always mixed with evilness as this is our lot. Christian philosophers have always said it. We don't live in Paradise but in planet Earth. The Good of Plato only shows itself here in our planet for a short time , although everybody wants to get it , but what we get for most of our lives on this planet is only an appearance of the Good , a tolerable appearance of the Good of Plato. In our planet there is never the pure Good , only a mix of good and bad, of richness and poverty ( as told by Plato in his "Symposium" by the myth of Poros and Penia), of correct and corrupt people, of good and evil countries, of good and evil animals and plants and minerals. The Wild Capitalism developers stick to this concept of " a tolerable planet" to justify their politics of wild industrialization of the world, of burning of forests , of poisoning of lakes, of gathering of industrial and nuclear wastes, of growing vegetables with a lot of chemicals, the workers can take a "tolerable" amount of toxics when working at painting or at other dangerous exposure materials jobs, the developers always say that mankind can " tolerate" a certain amount of pesticides, chemicals, radioactivity and other toxics in their bodies without developing cancer, and we have learnt to live inside that narrow strip where we can still eat, breathe, drink and work in terms of reasonable safety if we don't trespass the limits of what is "tolerable" , according to the standards set by the health organizations and labor trade unions for each job and skill at the industries. Politicians rule under their own concepts on what is tolerable for the population to suffer, before there are riots. The population can tolerate bad living conditions in a country only for some time, the population can tolerate unhappiness in their country only for a short time, the people can tolerate pain only to a degree or else they revolt, people can tolerate hunger to a point and no more, people can tolerate high taxes or not, people can tolerate bad public administration until they say enough, people can tolerate a bad professional situation until something happens, people can take an historical situation until they get tired of it, people can stand minorities inside their country until they feel menaced their majority. The reality of our time show us that it is impossible to afford jobs for our huge population if we only work in safe, clean, not polluting industries. It is absolutely impossible in economic terms. The only way to give jobs to everybody is to accept a " tolerable" amount of pollution and chemicals and poisons and unsafe conditions of working . This the lesson that countries such India or China or Pakistan are giving to us. There the levels of industrial pollution are unbearable and the working conditions at their factories are appalling for a Western point of view, but at the same time it is the only way to give jobs to the millions who live there. It is impossible to make a living if you only work on jobs which have no perils at all on them or which are totally safe and not dangerous for the health . It is impossible to supply energy to our population only by the means of the wind or solar power plants. We need , reluctantly, the nuclear power plants. Once again, bad and good come together in our world. We get good and cheap nuclear energy at the price of risking to get another Chernobyl. Solar and wind energy are safe and beautiful but we need to mix it with the energy coming from the burning of coal or from the nuclear power plants. Good and bad come mixed in this planet and in a very unstable way, both last short time, and even when a good "Belle époque" happens from time to time by random, soon come again new problems. All the jobs trades, skills and professions have some kind of evil on them , some use toxic chemicals, others hurt the body , others hurt the mind. The same so called " natural" ecological foods come often filled with bacteria and other microbes. We live under the concept of the "tolerable". We don't work on the job we like but on the job we can find. We don't make the money we want but the money they pay us and we accept it as "tolerable". We don't live in the best place of the country or of this planet but on the place closer to our factory or workplace. And we find " tolerable" that once every year or every two years they allow us to travel to the best places of this world as tourists. We accept a given situation in our country as "tolerable" because it is better that a right party rules instead of the communists or it is better that a left party rules instead of the fascists. We find tolerable that the ruling upper class steals some money from us, if it is done in secrecy and in small quantities. We tolerate the ruling of a party which we hate if it brings economical prosperity, and we endure even a dictatorship by the same reason. The dialogue from Plato: "Philebus" is most interesting to bring more light to this subject. In "Philebus", Plato says that man is like a machine which perceives the reality with trouble, always needing the thought to confirm or check what the senses perceive. Without the help of the mind, man is just another living being acting by instinct , like the oysters or the polypus. Man needs to ask his mind all time about the truth of his perceptions , to compare what he sees or listens with what he saw or listened in the past and to do this function , he must ask to his memory . For Plato, memory is a skill so wonderful that it cannot be explained but by saying that memory must be divine or that it must be something divine inside our mind ( St. Augustine will follow too Plato here, in his own concept of memory as God himself). Memory is what makes us humans, without memory we turn to be just instinctive animals , plants or minerals without mind ( as it happens to those humans who have lost the memory because some diseases such Alzheimer's). Memory has a partner called reminiscence . By the memory we know the reality when comparing our present perceptions with our past perceptions saved in our memory. By the reminiscence we call again to our memory those perceptions gathered there in the past , without the need of a current perception to arise that reminiscence. Memory and reminiscence are so wonderful abilities of our mind that Plato cannot avoid to give them the credit for being humans and not mere beasts. Plato develops a philosophy of his own from the fact that we have such wonderful mental skills called memory and reminiscence. Inside the memory there are books written by us ( Plato calls books all our information gathered in the memory and, at the same time, calls the real books of paper and ink : " external memory or out of the body memory " ). But inside the memory there are paintings too: all those images which we have seen in the past ( and again Plato calls the real paintings of oil and watercolors as just " external paintings or out of the body paintings ", reducing by this way the whole art of painting to be just a rendering in a material base such canvas or paper of our inner images gathered by our memory ; by the same way Plato says that music is just a rendering to the outer world of our sounds listened in the past and gathered by our memory ). The dialogue "Philebus" mentions several times the process of research which a philosopher must begin to find a beautiful answer to the philosophical problems he sets on. Socrates fights once and again with his students, always skeptical or disbelieving at his new argumentations, and once and again Socrates demonstrates that he is right, this process is very usual at the classrooms of philosophy, with the teacher playing Socrates and the students playing the ignorant and the reluctant to the new ideas or thesis . It seems that every time a philosophical research is plotted , we watch the same process once and once again : the opposition of some students to the new findings of the philosopher and the final victory of him after much attack from his opponents. For Plato it is very important that all the findings, argumentations , proofs and demonstrations must be beautiful, as for Plato if a philosophical argumentation is beautiful, it must be necessarily true. For an utilitarian like Bentham, an argumentation or a philosophical thesis could be true not for being beautiful but for being useful for the majority of the population, in the sense that the thesis reached must bring pleasure , comfort or happiness to the public, resolving the philosophical problem by the most interesting way in terms of money, economy, benefit and good living for the majority. Plato never asks himself if his concluding thesis of his philosophical research is the most pleasant for the majority of the people , he only regards that his argumentations must be the most beautiful ones. We are never sure that Plato's philosophy be useful or be of some profit for men. Sometimes we think that Plato's philosophy is just a sort of " mental games" ( and not "language games " as Wittgenstein said) without any kind of use for the real problems of the every day men, which tend to disdain philosophy as a pastime for idle aristocrats, a pastime not much different from other " mental games" which have no relation at all with reality and which work just as a sport for the brain. Plato sometimes seem rather than a philosopher, a science fiction novelist who poses himself a lot of " if " , just to play with them and to see to what answers he can reach, by mental speculation. If you believe that the soul is spread al around the Universe and that even God has a soul, then... to what conclusions do you come ? If you believe that memory is the most important of our bodily organs , then ... to what conclusions do you come ? And so on, this seems to be the sport of the aristocrat Plato. It doesn't help the fact that most of the explanations which Plato gives along this dialogue "Philebus" be childish. We can understand that, as Iamblichus said, since the Egyptians there has been a progress in the use of our mental faculties, being more aware little by little of how we perceive, how we think, how we remember. In Plato's time it was fashionable to the people to ask themselves about the power of the memory. The explanations which Plato gives to the memory functions can sound childish for our ears but not for the ears of the contemporaries of Plato. We, after 2500 years, we have assumed all the discoveries of the past scientists on the memory as well as on many other subjects, but for the men of Plato's time, it was a novelty the findings of Plato on how our memory works. Plato cannot avoid the worst sin for a philosopher: to be a reductionist. Plato reduces man to be a machine which perceives and gathers perceptions inside his memory , and Plato adds that our body cannot use the memory but by the intervention of our soul. The body has no memory at all ( other materialistic physicians would disagree on this, saying than the body remembers very well the pains, blows and accidents it has suffered along the life and that even the bones have a memory of their own ) . For Plato, the perceptions of the body must pass thru the soul to be able to be gathered at the memory. And in the reminiscence, the body has no part at all on it, we get reminiscences just by asking our memory to remember past perceptions gathered in our memory, without any kind of present perception arising the need. Pleasures and pains can be unlimited or limited. Here we meet another very important concept in Plato's philosophy, which comes from Pythagoras. Plato knows that all the facts can be numbered in degree or amount until the infinity: those are the unlimited facts. But for Plato an unlimited fact is a wild, mad, causeless, at random fact. Plato strives to limit all the facts on this universe, by putting on them an order, a measure, a number as Plato believes all the beautiful things on this universe are limited to get proportion, measure, order , in all things : from our own body to the same Universe itself. Plato believes on a civilization of men who use their mind to think on their perceptions and who use their memory, and a civilization of men can be only where there is proportion, measure and order on it. Plato defines, at a given point, that man is a combination of limited and unlimited things, man is a battlefield of all the facts and forces which happen in this universe, both the limited and the unlimited ones. The Christians and the Gnostics will interpret this famous definition of man by Plato as that man is a bridge between the limited world ( the material world) and the unlimited world ( the divine world) , with Jesus as a medium between those two worlds, relating them, because Jesus was at the same time limited and unlimited. For the materialistic, the definition of man by Plato can be understood as that our body and mind is a special and strange combination of limited and unlimited parts : in our physical growth intervene unlimited processes ( Plato himself says that our body cannot perceive our physical growth) meanwhile in our mind there is the urge to get limited processes only, bringing to this world the rationality, the order and the possibility of a civilization. Man is a strange creature which shares limited and unlimited parts on him, and it seems that our role in this universe is to embody both limited and unlimited parts , this can be retold too by the usual definition which says that man is half beast and half divine. There are many more ways to interpret the definition of man by Plato as a mix of limited and unlimited parts and for sure every reader has one of his own. Pleasures and pains can be limited or unlimited. Plato assumes that we never get satisfied of any pleasure as we always ask for more of it or because we get disappointed after enjoying a pleasure ( specially those related with Aphrodite). Pleasure and pain are unlimited by this way although we can graduate them by numbers according to its strength, its duration and its intensity. Plato says that pleasures and pains can be good or bad, depending if the person who enjoys or suffers them , he has good or bad concepts inside his mind. Envy is the sample of a pleasure which is a pain too at the same time: we envy the success of the others and we suffer pain because that success but at the same time we enjoy pleasure when we try to diminish or to underrate or to slander or to hurt the person who is the object of our envy. So those are the themes of this Plato' s dialogue : "Philebus". The reading of this dialogue is again one of the great experience which whatever man can get along his life, although the conclusions of Plato at the end of the dialogue can be disappointing for some, as the XXI th century man always waits for more explanations. But by reading "Philebus" we follow the same process followed by thousands of men before us who have read too this dialogue , along those 2500 years gone since Plato's acme, and all those men have felt that their way of thinking was improved by its reading, although, as it happens often when reading philosophy books, the final taste is somewhat bittersweet as there are so many things on the world and on our nature which we don`t understand yet. But Plato's books are still the best, his findings are the best ever reached when trying to elucidate all those questions with the only aid of the mind. Vulgar people can call it just " mental games" without practical use, but still so, Plato's books are the best ever written and when we read him, we follow the same heroic path he followed when researching on all those difficult subjects, and Mankind is better each time it repeats the path followed by Plato ( by Socrates' mouth) at "Philebus". The dialogue begins with the statement that Philebus believes that Good is to enjoy pleasure meanwhile Socrates thinks that Good is to think, to reason, to remember and to get the right thinking on every subject by reckoning what is better ( 11b , an "avant la lettre " mention by Plato of the reckoning of Pascal and the utilitarian on what is better for the majority ) . Socrates says that the most well reckoned plans are more good than the raw pleasure (although an utilitarian would answer that the most well reckoned plans are those who bring more pleasure for the majority ). Pleasure is one, and at the same time multiple, because there are many kinds of pleasures ( 12 c). All things of this world are different, there are ten thousand differences among all the things of this world, because the many parts of each thing ( 13 a). Wisdom is too one and multiple , at the same time, and if we don't admit it, we fall into a false wisdom, we fall into the myth, into the not rational . The vulgar people misunderstands us when we say that wisdom is one and multiple at the same time, and the vulgar people thinks that it means that the things are large and short at the same time, or the men are fat and thin at the same time. It is not this, the meaning that wisdom is one and multiple at the same time ( 14 a). In 15 e, Plato explains what it means for him to think: he believes it is a passion for knowledge which has been there since ever and forever, since the coming of men on this planet, it is a need which comes naturally from the same existence of the speech itself, and for Plato the speech is not other thing than to think in loud voice, to express to the outer world what our mind is remembering . For Plato, we have a natural tendency to speak on what we think and this is the "logos". Young people get excited when then enroll for first time in philosophical research , as if they had found a treasure, and they find a pleasure in philosophical research ("enthusiasm" ) and learn how to fold or unfold their speech, how to send it towards a direction or to another one, how to bring it to a unity or to divide it into many parts. How to throw themselves into a risky "aporia" or to an uncertain sylogism, and how to attack the others, even their father or mother, and even arguing with the barbarians ( as all the philosophers want to tame the barbarians). This is the enticement which catches so many students of philosophy and which send them to devote their lives to this job. In 16 a, Plato says that the philosopher always seeks a hole, a contradiction, a bad sylogism, a "perturbation" in the speech of his opponent, a lack of accuracy or an anomaly in the theories of his opponent, to propose a new way in the research or in the argumentation, always trying to find a new argumentation which be more beautiful. In 16 c, language is one and multiple at the same time, by the vowels and consonants which limit the unlimited sounds which could expel our mouth. In 16 d, Plato talks about the need to give a form to the One ( a form for the Universe, a form to the matter of the Universe and therefore a form to our body and mind) as it is impossible that the Universe or our body and mind be a wholeness if there is not a form on it ( Aristotle will take from him his own philosophical concepts, as we know). Against the materialistic, Plato believes that the matter needs a form to come to be a being. A creationist will always think that this form is given by the DNA or the genome after God's commandment. 17 b , the voice is one and multiple at the same time , the voice would be a chaos of meaningless letters and words ( a lot of letters and words unlimited in quantity and quality by combinations at random ) if it not were a form which puts order and meaning to each word. The form allows the existence of the whole of words which we have in our dictionaries. 17 d, music itself is one and multiple at the same time, as music is sound and at the same time is a net of knots among many sounds. If music is unlimited, cannot be limited by our mind, by our reason because music cannot be numbered and the numbers are our only tools to limit music. 20 e, pleasure can be without thought and thought can exist without giving any kind of pleasure to the thinker. Pleasure without thought could be the pure Good as well as thought without pleasure could be too the pure Good. Thought and pleasure don't need each other to be the pure Good. 21 c, a life lived as a never ending chain of pleasures would be a life unaware that it is a happy life. That life would need the thought to understand that it is happy. A living being without thought is a being without memory of its past pleasures and without the ability to foresee the future, so is the life of the polypus and the oysters. 21 d, the alternative to the life of an oyster is the life of God, who is always rational and who doesn't know neither what is pleasure not pain. But for humans, such divine life would be unbearable. 23 d , for humans there is the " average life" or " meson bios" , it is the life which belongs to our planet, it is a life where are pleasures, pains and thoughts . It is the "tolerable " life which fits our "tolerable" planet. 24 d, hotness and coldness are unlimited as there is always a higher or lower degree of hotness or coldness. We limit hotness and coldness by numbering them , by sticking them a magnitude , a proportion, a measure, which stops hotness and coldness to avoid that they could grow or decrease more. By the same way, our reason acts with all the unlimited things on this universe. 26 b , all the things of our Universe are born from the mixing of the unlimited and the limited, so are born the seasons and all the beauty of our universe. So are born our health, our strength , the beauty of our soul. God limited the unlimited evilness, the unlimited greed and the unlimited seeking of pleasures and its unlimited need of satisfaction by the coming of the laws and the order, which are the limiters, our saviours. 26 d , the mix of limited and unlimited generates the being, thanks to the measures which have come by putting limits to the unlimited. Law and order are limits ( no relationship with the Law and Order of Donald Trump and the far-right political parties, here Plato observes that the chaotic matter of the Universe was brought to a form when that matter was limited by laws, measures, proportions and orders, but without destroying totally the unlimited things of this universe but mixing with them ). Plato gazes another possibility too : the "fourth one" by which the mix of limited and unlimited contains too all the unlimited things which exist in our universe, without exception. 27 e , pleasure in unlimited in degrees and kinds of pleasures. 28 b , in music , there are unlimited sounds but without a form, those sounds are cacophonic, all them sound like out of tune without an order : the unlimited sounds must be forced to follow the melody. 28 d , the universe is disordered and ruled by the strength of the irrationality and by the random which appears in all the irrational things. 29 b , we live in an universe shacked by a storm composed by the four elements, and that is the order of this universe. Ignorance is a sort of a storm too. 29 c , the soul is something small which inhabits our body , like the fire of a fireplace which is so small when compared with the fire of the stars. The soul has a strength in itself which cannot be explained by its small size. By other way, our body is composed by all the elements present in our greater body which is the Universe, all of the Universe is made by many parts too. The beauty of our body is nothing as compared with the beauty of the body of the Universe, although the beauty of our body comes from the beauty of the universe. 30 b , Plato introduces now the concept of " the cause", as he believes there is a need in this Universe of a " cause" which has put the souls inside the bodies. Given that without a soul, the body cannot be healthy, it cannot exercise in gymnastics and it cannot reach wisdom neither can cure itself and recover itself . Plato call this " cause" : the fourth class. But this "cause" never allows itself to be shown at this universe. 30 c, there is a huge amount of unlimited things in our Universe alongside with a lot of limited things too. But above all them there is the " cause". And the "cause" must be a kind of reason. By some way, when we reason, we use the same processes which have made this Universe. Reason, mind or thought or soul have been called by Plato in his many dialogues as the most divine parts of men or those parts on men which we share with God. But Plato adverts that the existence of the reason cannot be explained but by the existence of the soul. As Anaxagoras said , even God is ruled by the "cause" and He has a soul . 32 a , pain is unlimited and comes from the loss of harmony in our body. When we recover that harmony, pain ceases to be. There is a pleasure when recovering harmony. Hunger means pain, so means too coldness, and all kinds of dissolutions against nature, meanwhile the recovering of the former state means pleasure. Death is the destruction of the living form created by the union of the unlimited and the limited ( for Plato, man is a unique being midway between the limited and the unlimited things of this universe, sharing both ). 32 c, now Plato researches on those pleasures and pains which comes from the anticipation of future events or hopes ( we remember that for Epicurus the mere thinking on futures pains and pleasures brought present pain or pleasure ). Plato states that without the faculty of the memory it is impossible to anticipate future events. 32 d , pleasures and pains sometimes are good and other times are bad. Therefore they cannot be the pure Good, which is always good. Pleasures and pains are unlimited but when men says that they are god or bad, they are limiting them and by this way they make possible the existence of civilization where pleasures and pains are cataloged in good and bad ones. If we were God, we would live without any kind of problem , and without any kind of contrary or opposition or criticism or some kind of hamper. Plato calls the "third state" the life of God , who is always thinking according to the reason and who never feels pleasures nor pains. 33 d , this planet is made to change ceaseless, here happens new events all time and all of them hurt men , some hurt our body and others hurt our soul. This is a planet devised to force all living beings and all the elements to relate with each other . We perceive the reality with our body, and with the help or not of our soul. By our memory we save each perception , we gather it in our soul. By a reminiscence the souls recalls a perception or affection , gathered inside its memory, that our body has felt or suffered in the past , but the soul does this reminiscence without the help of the body at all. The soul forgets memories of past affections and feelings from time to time, but it is possible to recover those affections and feelings by the use of the faculty of the reminiscence, by which the memory , without any kind of intervention of the body, puts in front of the soul again those past records. 34 d, pleasure and pain have by themselves an intelligible form ( which means that Plato puts them at the same level than Beauty, Goodness and Truth , the other intelligible forms, so pleasure and pain exist since ever for Plato , long before the coming of our Universe). The desire is always a pain. Desires are unlimited ( Schopenhauer will repeat it many centuries later). 35 b , the new born doesn't know that he suffer thirst as he has not memory of any past experience suffered by him , concerning the lack of water inside his body. If there were not souls nor memory, the living beings would never know they have some need of food or water or else. The body cannot desire because the body knows nothing, it has no memory, it is the soul which knows and then after the soul desires an object. This is another proof by Plato of the existence of the soul. To apply an effort is to remain at the present state without any change, not forced to change by an outside thing. An effort is felt by the body without the intervention of the soul. An impulse is the opposite, an impulse forces you to change your current state against your will and we only know the existence of impulses because we think on them when we remember them by our memory. 35 d , our mind and its memory are affected by all kind of pleasures and pains present in our world. 36 a , we do suffer double pain when we suffer in our body a real pain and at the same time we anticipate by our memory future pains, as well as when desiring new pleasures which we know we cannot get. By our memory we remember that there is hope to gain pleasure again in the future. 36 d, pleasure, pain, fear, hope and opinion can be true or false. Pains and pleasures can be strong or weak, false or true according to the opinion. 36 e , to live on this planet means to experience desires, impulses, pains and pleasures. It is not at all a life of enjoying the pure Good. As we are a mix of limited and unlimited things, we are a sort of machines put on this planet to experience a life of storming facts playing with our body and our soul's mechanisms and all its interactions. 38 b , true pleasure can come by a true opinion issued from the wisdom, but false pleasure comes from ignorance and cheating. Thanks to our memory, we get opinions and by those opinions we judge our perceptions which are always dubious, as on this planet all things are never sure by the way they are perceived by our senses, we don't know with absolute certainty if we see a snake or a rope. And we need to think on a snake or a rope inside our mind thanks to our memory of past similar images of a snake or a rope. When we do this process by talking in loud voice, we call it the speech. 39 a , memory is like a book, we write in our memory our speeches about our perceptions. It is a good, truly book if our perceptions have been true and it becomes a bad, false book filled with lies if our perceptions have been false. Memory is so a writer but it is too a painter , gathering inside the memory those images perceived and rendering again them to the soul as reminiscences when the need arises. The mental image of a good is a cause of pleasure. The mental images or paintings furnishes the matter for all the hopes. 40 b , The good people only talk about true facts. But the bad ones got books and paintings inside their memories, like the good men, but those books and paintings are false. When the bad men feel pleasure, that pleasure comes from false pleasures, which are a bad imitation of the true pleasures. Once again we face the Plato's theme of the imitation, the bad men' s behavior is a second imitation of another imitation itself which is the behavior of the good ones, which is a first imitation of the intelligible form of the pure Good. By their ignorance , the bad men act in a false way, always failing at their enterprises because they don't know Plato's philosophy, which is the trick to act well. The bad men feel pleasures which are false pleasures. 41 a, those bad men who stick to the false pleasures show themselves to the people that they suffer an inner disharmony , disorder, ignorance or lack of measure in their bodies and souls ( Christian ethics will use this sentence from Plato to justify the punishment of the sins of the bad men, too often calling them lost souls struck by evil , without any kind of reform available for them ). 41 d, pleasure and pain admit degrees in more or less intensity and are thus unlimited. 42 a , on this planet, our human perception of the reality is always uncertain , if we are far from an object we are not sure if it is a tree or a man, we have the need to compare in our memory , past similar events to decide if we assent or not to our perceptions. On the pleasures and pains it happens the same, we are uncertain on their goodness or evilness unless we compare them with past similar events gathered in our memory. Sometimes a pleasure which is far in time, seems stronger or weaker than what it really was, and the same happens with a pain. Distance make us to wrongly judge the pains and the pleasures. And the pass of time makes us to wrongly judge the pains and the pleasures, too. The only way to judge rightly a pleasure and a pain is to compare it with past experiences , by our memory. The need to compare pains and pleasures arises even more by the fact that this planet changes every moment . We are really amidst a storm of pleasures and pains which we tend to maximize or minimize according to the time and the distance and the changes happening on this planet. That is our lot in this "tolerable" planet. 43 a, everything moves in this planet, up , down, to one side or the other, everything flows, there are constant changes in one sense or in another one, the small changes ( such those on our physical growing) are not perceptible, but the big changes are the cause of the pain or the pleasure. We live in a planet of mixtures, segregations, fillings, voids, growth and decreasing. 43 d, again Plato mentions the "third option", the divine life without pleasures nor pains. God doesn't even know what is a pleasure or a pain ( he has not memory or he has not desires or he has not body ? ). 44 d , now Plato attacks the masochists , later called Christians, those who say that everything on this planet is painful. The masochists live all their lives causing to themselves all kind of pains and turning by this way their own " cause" as they don't want to depend on the "cause" which did the Universe ( by a reason, says Plato), so the masochists put themselves off this Universe and off the reason. The masochists reject on their nature what is most noble and divine ( the soul) as they feel disgust even towards the soul ( and by irony it is the soul which tells them by its memory that this is a planet of sufferings) and the masochists spend all their lifetime hating all the thrills and seductions luring from the pleasures, which they don't know . Of course, Plato considers that the masochists are ignorant , not at all imitators of the divine option by the masochist 's trick of denying the pleasures to know only the pains ( a truly divine option would reject also the pains ). 45 a, the greatest pleasure is the one which we have at our hand's scope, in our body. 47 a, on this planet everything moves to relate with other things, sometimes causing pleasure and other times causing pain: what it is empty wants to be filled, what it has something in it wants to leave it to take another different thing ( this is the foundation of commerce, of relationships) , everywhere we see how things gather or disaggregate and how they cause pleasure or pain in the process. Sexual pleasure is the greatest bodily pleasure available but it can't be the pure Good . Sexual pleasure is necessary to show us how is the exact opposite to the pure Good, as it is a pleasure which needs the body to be, meanwhile the pure Good doesn't need the body to be. Diseases and its cure are like itching and scratching when you got scabies, first come the disease ( the scabies with its symptom the itching) and then follows the cure ( the scratching) , both disease and cure are perceptions of our body and phenomena which belong to our body's life and cannot be taken to define what is pure Good. People seek the greatest pleasures available on this planet ( and even the greatest pains, in case that you are a masochist) , because they got a bad state of their soul and their body , by their ignorance and vice , and they fall easily into madness when trying to get the greatest pleasures which this planet can furnish to them, as they always want more and more of them. This cannot be the way to reach the pure Good. 49 b, on this planet, strength , health and vigor are only attained by those who don't delude themselves by the ignorance and the false thoughts. False pleasures send people to madness, sickness and degeneration. 50 a, envy is a mixture of pleasure and pain, and at the same time. Envy is the usual way by which all the things of our Universe relate with each other. God doesn't feel envy as He doesn't relate with any kind of thing. As Plato tell us in his dialogue "Timaeus", God desires to create our Universe because He is good and free of envy ( as well as free of pleasures and pains). The human creators, those so called artists, are never truly creators as they act by envy and they just imitate the images and pictures saved in their memory files , from past perceptions of the reality. We cannot call the artists : "creators" as they don't create at all, the copy from their memory files. They are like all the other things of this Universe, they relate with the other things by envy. Hollywood cannot claim to be a " factory of dreams" but only a "booster station" from images, pictures and writings gathered at the moviemaker 's memory. All the artists, according to Plato, are not truly creators but just imitators of what they have saved at their memory's files after perceiving it in the world. Theatre is too a mixture of pleasure (when we watch what happens to the actors and the characters of the play ) and pain at the same time ( when watching their tragic fall or death) . We laugh and we cry at the same time. A joke is a rest in the serious mental work ( and there are many of those rests or breaks along the dialogue "Philebus" ). This is a world where everything relates by the envy and the laugh. We envy the success of someone better than us and we feel pleasure when such someone fails or when he is slandered . We laugh towards those who think on themselves that they are handsomer, smarter or richer than the others when in fact this world is filled with false beauty and false wisdom. 52 d, the pure Good is superior to the good polluted by degrees of more or less good, by quantities of good, and all the matter on our world refers to a good of this kind , a good which is always appreciated only by its size or its quantity. To forget is an evil but without pain. Everybody can suffer Alzheimer's disease, both the ignorant and the wise. No one of them is aware that he is forgetting and therefore no one of them is aware that he suffers pain by it. A new born child doesn't know he is an ignorant and suffers no pain by it. Tickles are a bodily pleasure . To research on what is pure Good we must observe those things which are the purest in our world. Colors, straights, curves, spheres, triangles... 54 b, this world is like a boat with water leakages due to a poor caulking on it or by a complete lack of caulking among the ribs of the boat. Our reason is the caulking which keeps tight the ribs, our reason avoids the leakage. 55 c, we must research on what is pure Good because once we have known it, we will be able to do better mixtures with the matter on this planet , having as a reference and guide to do this job the pure Good . In case of the genome manipulation, how can we get better mixtures of genomes ? What should be the pure Good which should mark the reference for such genome manipulation ? This is a world of generations and corruptions or destructions by the diseases and the madness but there is a third way which is akin to God who always think with the uppermost purity without knowing pleasure or pain. In our world we need religions, ethics and ideologies because we do suffer pains and pleasures. God doesn't need such at all. Religions, ethics and ideologies are mixtures of pleasure -giving things mixed with the power over the people ( which is a source or worldly pleasure itself too ). 57 c , our body reacts towards the knowledge of the pure Good by turning healthier and stronger , but it happens only in case you do the right Philosophy and not the false Sophistry as in that case your body reacts turning sick and vicious. The body is the same in case you are a true philosopher or a false sophist, but the body depends on something higher than t he body, to get health and strength and this is a proof that the body cannot be taken as the pure good. There are two kinds of mathematics : the first one only reckons numbers, the second one researches on what are the mathematical entities. There are two kinds of Philosophies too. The real philosophy is the Platonic one, the false Philosophy is the Sophistry. Plato appreciates music and architecture as the best of all the human arts, as they can achieve great precision and accuracy by their use of the measures, proportions and harmony. The only way to manage yourself on this planet is by a careful effort and this is too the only way to foresee the future. 60 b , this is world where we must remember each thing , perception , feeling or image several times to perceive it well or to know it well by our memory. This is a world where the words can be used well or bad , as the words can be intelligible or not , with a good command or without it . The music sounds can be used well or bad ( or out of tune), all the unlimited things present in our Universe can be used well or bad, depending if we observe as a reference the pure Good or else we cling to a false bodily good. When we use the unlimited matter of this Universe according to what is the pure Good, we put on the unlimited matter numbers, measures, order, harmony and proportion, turning limited by this way the matter . This is a world where we live in the past by our memory, in the present by our body and in the future by our hopes and anticipations , as when we see the pleasure that the beasts feel and we use it to think on what is the pure Good, as if that beastly pleasure were an omen brought by the birds. This is an ever changing world , unstable, not constant, changing at every present moment ( 59 b). This is a world where we must reckon everything by our sight and by our mind , and all time ( 56 a). Shame is a painful feeling which comes with the sex matters and with the sophistic rhetoric ( or false Philosophy). We feel shame because we know sex pleasures are not the pure Good. 61 b, we can research on what is the pure Good by the way it is mixed with all the things of our world. 61 d, this world is a mixture of water and wine, of pleasure and pain. This is a world of experiments and attempts with all kind of mixtures and we are the catalyst of all the mixtures which are possible with the matter of this Universe , and at the same time we suffer mixtures too of pleasures and pains. 62 c , a man who had the same knowledge which God has about what is pure Good, pure Justice , pure truth, pure Beauty and so on, would not be a man but a God and would not belong to our world at all. It is our duty as men to research endlessly on what are pure Good, pure Justice, pure Beauty by comparing and studying the things of our world . God has his own concepts on what is pure Good without any need to watch the things of our World. 63 e , the memory is a divine faculty: without memory we would be dead. There are 10.000 hurdles on this planet and the only way to avoid them is by thinking and we can think thanks to our memory. Those 10.000 hurdles bring pain , they can cause abortion, Alzheimer's disease, man can find himself alone on this planet, without company, belonging to an impossible useless race. The only way to live on this planet is by turning. The good men are the only ones who are able to know the other men by the best and deeper way . The good men turn all the men, their mates on this planet. This is a world where we can find valleys which some times converge ( it means that the same geography of this planet is a mixture ) , this is a world where there is pure knowledge and mixed knowledge, as in mathematic and architecture where we can find pure circles like those known by God and we can find too mixed circles like the ones known by the humans. Plato believes that we shouldn't aim to get only divine knowledge as we would pollute it with our human knowledge. We must aim to get a mixture of human and divine knowledge as this is our duty on this planet. Human music is not like the divine music, which is always an absolute success. Our music is an imitation of the divine music and it is made by attempts , experiments and guessing and can be successful or not. 64 d, This is a world with useful and useless things, with decisions and lack of decisions , with excellent mixtures and with other worthless mixtures . This is a "tolerable" planet where men must negotiate all time with the Universe's matter, with their own thought and memory , with their bodily perceptions and with their pleasures and pains. 65 a, on this planet everything is mixed . good and evil, pleasure and pain. It is necessary the existence of another upper world where everything be pure, not mixed at all . The upper world of the pure Good which Plato understands as proportion, harmony, measure, order, beauty , virtue , truth and limitation of the unlimited , as Plato sees that on our world the best things have such features on them, although all together mixed with the matter. Plato strives to imagine if the pure Good could be those features of order, proportion, but not mixed at all with the matter and existing as pure intelligible forms. Pain inside our soul comes when we consider the future, although our body hadn't suffered that pain yet. Inside our memory , the writings and the paintings appear related with our past and present perceptions but it is impossible that we get memory paintings and writings on what will happen in the future. The bad people have inside their memory a lot of false writings and paintings which send them to act bad. The right reform for the bad ones should be an education by new perceptions ,to raise new and right memory files of writings and paintings on those men. So this is what Plato wrote in his "Philebus", a fascinating trip by his mind and thought and through his way of developing argumentations. Now is the time that you decide if the reading of "Philebus" has been of any help to you or not, but keep in mind that even if you have been disappointed because you waited to be revealed more secrets on how is our mind and our world, even so Plato remains the highest point in Western culture and his findings have been not matched yet in the past 2500 years. Plato's philosophy can be not much if you want to know everything on what is this world, but it is still the best we have , as the books of the other current philosophers are much worse, deluding the people with false theories which , in fact, are fake philosophies which say nothing new or truly. So are the neo-positivists and the post-moderns.