PHYSIOLOGY

Pleasure and pain are pathē (singular, pathos). The term pathos is related to the Greek verb paschein (‘to undergo’, ‘to suffer a change’), and denotes effects upon a subject, usually caused by contact with an external object. Depending on the context, a pathos may occur in inanimate substances or in animate beings, and may be an entity or an occurrence of various kinds: a stone heated by the sun undergoes a pathos and becomes warm; the diagnosis of a disease is sometimes effected by observing the pathē or physical symptoms displayed by the patient; and the pain that the patient feels is a pathos as well.

Although the Cyrenaics focused on pathē in connection with perceivers, their analysis preserves physicalistic overtones. These are reflected, I believe, in the definitions of pleasure and pain as smooth and rough motions located in the flesh (Sextus, PH 1.215 [T6a]) or in the soul (D.L. 11.90 [T7c]), which are somehow related to pleasurable and painful feelings. There is little direct evidence about the nature of these motions, but, in my view, ‘smooth’ and ‘rough’ designate empirical properties of physical changes in the body and do not refer to the way these changes feel to the perceiver. First, pleasure does not feel smooth but pleasurable, and pain does not feel rough but painful.