  The two arguments that Socrates proceeds to make are frustratingly  difficult (see Gosling and Taylor 1982, Nussbaum 1986, Russell 2005, Moss 2006, Warren 2014, Shaw 2016). They are very quick, and though they concern “pleasures,”  Socrates never says exactly what pleasure is. (At one point  (585d11), the now-standard translation of the Republic by  Grube and Reeve suggests that “being filled with what is appropriate  to our nature is pleasure,” but it is better to read less into the  Greek by rendering the clause “being filled with what is appropriate  to our nature is pleasant.”) The first argument suggests that  pleasures might be activities of a certain kind, but the remarkably  abstract second argument does not provide any special support to that suggestion. Even if a convincing account of how Plato wants us to  conceive of pleasure in the Republic is wanting, however, we can get a grasp on the form of the two “pleasure proofs.”