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The Journal of Value Inquiry 32: 343356, 1998. 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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False Pleasures and Platos Philebus


DAVID A. REIDY
Department of Philosophy, Indiana University-Indianapolis, Cavanaugh Hall, Room 331, 425 University Boulevard, Indianapolis, IN 46202-5140, USA

1. Introduction In the Republic and the Philebus, Plato allows that some pleasures have a place in a good life, at least for people, if not for gods. He maintains, however, that some pleasures have no place in a good human life. They have neither intrinsic nor instrumental value. This means that the value or goodness of the pleasures which do have a place in a good life must consist of something more, or other than, their pleasantness, for the pleasures which have no place in a good human life share the property of pleasantness. In Book IX of the Republic, Plato attempts to distinguish good pleasures from bad. Apparently dissatised with this effort, Plato undertakes in the Philebus to restate his overall moral theory and its distinction between good and bad pleasures. In the Philebus, Plato argues that some pleasures are false, and that false pleasures have no place in a good life. Notwithstanding signicant scholarly attention, Platos Philebus continues to generate signicant interpretive and analytic dissensus at three levels. The rst concerns the extent to which it provides a coherent and unied general account of pleasure.1 The second concerns the extent to which it provides a coherent, unied, and normatively signicant account of false pleasures.2 The third concerns the extent to which its account of false pleasures coheres with its general account of pleasure, and with the account of true pleasures given in Book IX of the Republic. I will make an initial case for the coherence, unity, and normative signicance of the account of false pleasures given in the Philebus. I will also suggest a reading of the Philebus which minimizes conict between its general account of pleasure and its more specic account of false pleasures, while preserving a high degree of continuity between the Philebus and the Republic, especially Book IX.

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2. The General Account of Pleasure in the Philebus Socrates is the primary expositor of Platos general account of pleasure in the Philebus. When the natural combination of limit and unlimitedness that forms a live organism . . . is destroyed, this destruction is pain, while the return towards its own nature, this general restoration is pleasure.3 Despite this language, pain and pleasure cannot be identied strictly with disintegration and restoration. Instead, Socrates notes, pain and pleasure arise when the soul takes notice of a disintegration or restoration of a natural harmony or balance within the body or soul.4 Indeed, pain and pleasure just are the souls taking notice of such processes. When possessed of requisite force, such processes cause the soul to take notice of them, and we experience the perceiving activity of the soul as pleasure or pain, as the case may be. Thus, while sometimes originating in or caused by processes in our body, and sometimes originating in or caused by processes in our soul, all pains and pleasures properly belong to the soul. The soul, of course, does not notice all disintegrations or restorations, whether in the body or soul itself. Some disintegrations or restorations are too subtle for the soul to take notice of them. It is possible for the soul to perceive the restoration of a disintegration it did not perceive. The experience of such a perception by the soul constitutes a pure pleasure that is not preceded by or mixed with pain.5 Socrates distinguishes between pain, which is simply the souls perception of some disintegration, and desire, which is the longing for that which will restore unity or balance. While we may speak of bodily desires, this is misleading. The body cannot know or long for what it lacks because at the time it lacks something it has no contact with what it lacks. It is always the soul, through the cognitive faculty of memory, which identies that which will restore unity and balance, bodily or otherwise. It would seem, then, that every desire presupposes a pain, contains a cognitive element, and belongs properly to the soul. Every desire has an object, and because the soul identies the object of every desire, every desire belongs properly to the soul.6 Some pains and pleasures originate only remotely in the body. They are the pains and pleasures of expectation, which Socrates distinguishes from pains and pleasures tied more closely to bodily processes.7 Anticipatory pleasures, such as the pleasant expectation of drinking when thirsty, arise almost entirely out of the soul. Perceiving a bodily disintegration of thirst and thus feeling pain, the soul recalls memories of past restorations, which, if they include the memory that the restorations depended on securing drink, give rise to a desire for drink. If, desiring drink, we come to believe we will soon drink, then we naturally imagine ourselves drinking and experiencing a future physical pleasure as the soul takes notice of the restoration secured through the anticipated

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drink. The soul then experiences a present psychological pleasure through its perception of an imagined future restoration. In this case, the present anticipatory pleasure we experience is connected to an actual bodily process only remotely. We feel pleasure, yet there is no actual bodily restoration. The soul perceives a present bodily deciency and imagines itself taking notice of and experiencing the pleasure of an imagined future restoration. The present anticipatory pleasure we feel here is a psychological pleasure in a way that the pleasure of actual drinking is not. To be sure, the pain of thirst provides the occasion of both the anticipatory pleasure of an imagined drink and the non-anticipatory pleasure of a real drink. The anticipatory pleasure, however, can exist independently of any contemporaneous restorative bodily process, while the non-anticipatory pleasure cannot. All pleasures, then, arise out of the soul taking notice of a real or imagined restoration to the right mixture which constitutes the unity, balance, or integrity of an individuals being. Importantly, this means that if an individual could maintain without deviation the natural harmony that constitutes her identity or being as a mixture of limit with the unlimited, she would feel neither pleasure nor pain and would exist without desire. While perhaps available to the gods, this stable state of perfect balance is not available to us, however. We undergo and our souls perceive endless disintegrations and restorations. Human life is unavoidably full of pain, pleasure, and desire.8 It would appear, then, that insofar as human pleasures are good or desirable, they are so not in and of themselves but as marks of the restoration of bodily or psychological unity, balance, or integrity. Socrates conrms this when he argues that pleasures belong to the realm of becoming and derive whatever value they have from the fact that they signify a return to being.9

3. False Pleasures The discussion of false pleasures in the Philebus begins with Socrates suggesting that there are false pleasures and Protarchus claiming in response that only judgments are properly true or false. Not surprisingly, then, the analysis begins with an analogy between feeling pleasure and making a judgment. Socrates and Protarchus agree that just as when we judge, we always judge that something is the case, so also when we feel pleasure, we are always pleased about something or that something is the case. Socrates then notes that when we are mistaken about the object of a judgment, our judgment is said to be false. A false judgment, however, remains a judgment. Likewise, Socrates suggests, when we are mistaken about the object of a pleasure, we experience a false pleasure. As a false judgment remains a judgment, so too

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a false pleasure remains a pleasure. Socrates concludes tentatively that there are, or at least could be, false pleasures.10 Anticipating Protarchus resistance to the symmetrical treatment of judgment and pleasure, Socrates reminds Protarchus that he has already allowed that pleasures admit of certain qualications such as intensity and duration and that Protarchus therefore cannot resist Socrates conclusion on the grounds that pleasures take no properties other than being pleasant. Protarchus, however, resists on other grounds. He concedes that we might misjudge what a pleasure is about, even that some pleasures might arise out of false judgments, but he insists that in such cases we will nevertheless still feel pleasure and that only the judgment may properly be called false, not the pleasure. The pleasure remains just that, a pleasure, and while it may admit of certain qualications, truth or falsity is not among them.11 Protarchus adheres to an epiphenomenal view of pleasure, sharply distinguishing between a pleasure and its cause or origin. On Protarchus view, we cannot infer the properties of a pleasure from the properties of its cause or origin, for the two are metaphysically distinct and separable. Protarchus allows that pleasures may be said to be, in a loose sense, about the underlying restorative processes, real or imagined, which cause them. But he nowhere allows that pleasures may be about false propositional content in the same way that a judgment may be said to be about false propositional content. On Protarchus view, pleasures do not take intentional objects in the same way judgments do. When we inquire into what a pleasure is about, we are inquiring into its cause or origin. The cause or origin of a pleasure, Protarchus maintains, is always metaphysically distinct and separable from the pleasure itself. Thus, even if a false proposition were in some sense the cause or origin of a pleasure, we would still have no reason to think the pleasure itself false. Socrates, in contrast, appears to be arguing that pleasures may take intentional objects, and that when the intentional object of a pleasure is a false proposition, the pleasure may be properly characterized as false. This appears to be the heart of Socrates rst case of false pleasure. Socrates response to Protarchus challenge would appear to conrm this reading. In response to Protarchus, Socrates turns to anticipatory pleasures, the pleasures most clearly and intimately associated with judgments. He begins with an analysis of the role of judgment in such pleasures.12 When we judge, we commit ourselves to certain propositions which are either true or false. Our knowledge of the world consists of propositions to which we are with some justication committed and which happen also to be true. If while wandering thirsty and desiring drink along a desert highway we commit ourselves, based upon an old map we have, to the proposition that water can be had a few miles down the road, we commit ourselves to a true proposition

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just in case water, in fact, can be had a few miles down the road. In order to experience the anticipatory pleasure of having a drink, our soul must take notice of more than our commitment to this true proposition. Our imagination must take up this proposition and present our soul with an image of our securing a drink a few miles down the road and experiencing pleasure as our soul takes notice of the imagined restorative process engendered by drink. The image of our imagined future pleasure is accurate just in case the proposition it represents that we will nd water, have a drink, and experience pleasure is true. When our soul perceives an image within which we enjoy a future pleasure, we experience a present anticipatory pleasure. If our map is wrong and there is no water in a couple miles, then we judged falsely and committed ourselves to a false proposition. The image our imagination presents to our soul of securing and enjoying a drink, then, must also be a false image. To put it differently, when our soul perceives the image within which we enjoy a future pleasure, our soul perceives a false image. Because our present anticipatory pleasure just is our souls perception of a false image of a future pleasure, it cannot be separated from it. Our present anticipatory pleasure, Socrates concludes, is therefore also false. The falseness of the imagined pleasure a pleasure never experienced as such, and false because it pictures a false proposition infects the present pleasure we experience. Thus, there are, or at least may be, actual, experienced, false pleasures. They are false, it would appear, because they arise out of, are about, and are inseparable from false judgments. As stated thus far, Socrates argument for the existence of at least one kind of false pleasure suffers from several defects. Socrates appears to reject Protarchus epiphenomenal view of pleasure and his view that pleasures are not properly about anything except, loosely speaking, their cause or origin, which remains metaphysically distinct.13 But nowhere does Socrates explicitly attack Protarchus epiphenomenal view of pleasure. Indeed, he insists throughout the dialogue on distinguishing between a pleasure, the souls perception of a real or imagined restoration, and its cause or origin, the real or imagined restorative process, bodily or psychological, perceived by the soul. Moreover, Socrates provides no reason for thinking it proper on such an epiphenomenal view to draw any inference from the properties of the cause of a pleasure to the properties of the pleasure itself. Indeed, insofar as Socrates emphasizes that imagined restorative processes may give rise to real pleasures, actually experienced, he provides some reason to worry about such inferences. Nor does Socrates provide any reason for thinking that false judgments play anything other than a causal or original role in the experience of certain anticipatory pleasures. His argument does not show that certain anticipatory

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pleasures are about false judgments in any sense more robust than merely including false judgments among their causal origins. Protarchus admits this. He concedes that false judgments sometimes gure into the causal origin of experienced pleasures. A further defect with Socrates argument as presented thus far is that it leaves weak and unclear the normative force of characterizing certain anticipatory pleasures as false pleasures. That we might be wrong about whether we will secure a drink a few miles down the road hardly seems to count significantly against the anticipatory pleasure we experience when we mistakenly imagine ourselves securing and enjoying the drink. After all, we might always be wrong about the future. Are we therefore to conclude that a good human life will include no anticipatory pleasures? Socrates initial argument for at least one kind of false pleasure would seem to leave Protarchus with the upper hand. To resist Socrates argument, Protarchus need only remind him that if a pleasure is a false pleasure whenever a false judgment gures into its cause or origin, then either the properties of a pleasure understood as an effect necessarily include some or all of the properties of its cause or origin, or false judgments or propositions may play more than a causal or original role in the experience of some pleasures. But rather than so reminding Socrates, Protarchus surprisingly acknowledges the possibility of at least one kind of false pleasure. Either Protarchus has been duped or we have missed a key element of Socrates argument. My guess is that we have missed an important part of Socrates argument, specically, a point Socrates makes obliquely through his cryptic discussion of the difference between the anticipatory pleasures of good and evil men.14 This passage, which commentators often ignore, precedes Protarchus admission to Socrates that he has indeed persuaded him that there is at least one kind of false pleasure. Having secured Protarchus admission that there is at least one kind of false pleasure, Socrates moves more quickly through the other two cases of false pleasure. Let us look at his second case. You are thirsty while walking along a desert highway. You desire drink. You imagine yourself quenching your thirst in the near future and experience a present anticipatory pleasure. As it turns out, you do quench your thirst in the near future. Recalling Socrates rst case of false pleasure, this anticipatory pleasure would seem not to be a false pleasure. The image which gives rise to your present anticipatory pleasure is accurate. Nonetheless, Socrates suggests, your present anticipatory pleasure may yet prove to be a false pleasure. Socrates notes that with respect to pleasures tied to desire, pleasure and pain always exist side by side in the soul.15 We experience desire only when the soul perceives a disintegration or deciency, which it experiences as pain,

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the restoration of which it knows through memory how to achieve. When we imagine that restoration and the future pleasure we will experience in taking notice of it, pleasure and pain stand simultaneously side by side in the soul. In this case, correctly perceiving the relevant pleasures and pains in themselves becomes difcult, if not impossible. Suppose my thirst produces terrible pain and, desiring a drink, I presently imagine myself drinking a tablespoon of water twenty minutes from now. Suppose further that twenty minutes from now I actually do acquire and drink a tablespoon of water, so that the image I form of myself drinking is not inaccurate. In imagining myself drinking the tablespoon of water, I imagine a modest future restoration and a modest future physical pleasure, assuming my soul takes notice of the restoration. I cannot see the imagined future restoration and physical pleasure, however, apart from my present pain. This, Socrates maintains, makes it unlikely that I will see either one for what it is in itself. Just as the actual size of objects seen only relative to each other in a eld of vision will appear other than they truly are, so too the actual size of real or imagined pleasures and pains will appear other than they truly are when perceived by the soul only or primarily relative to each other.16 In the present case, the present psychological anticipatory pleasure of having a drink in twenty minutes just is the souls perception of the imagined future restoration and physical pleasure. Socrates point is just that insofar as the soul cannot perceive the imagined future restoration and physical pleasure apart from the presently felt pain, the soul likely will fail to perceive the imagined future restoration and physical pleasure for what it is in itself. Since the souls perception of the imagined restoration and pleasure just is the present psychological anticipatory pleasure, the present psychological anticipatory pleasure may prove to be a false pleasure. We may extend Socrates analysis also to non-anticipatory pleasures. Consider, for example, the pleasure experienced when someone scratches the itch caused by exposure to poison ivy. The pleasure gains in apparent magnitude through its simultaneous presence and intimate relation in the soul to the pain of the itch caused by exposure to poison ivy. Socrates does not claim that we cannot correct or adjust for distortions created by perspective and relation when assessing pains and pleasures simultaneously present in the soul.17 Just as we can mentally correct for the distortions of perspective and relation in the case of sight, so too we can do the same with pains and pleasures. This suggests that the simultaneous presence in the soul of intimately related pleasures and pains need not necessitate a nal misperception by the soul of either of them, and thus need not give rise to a false pleasure, anticipatory or otherwise.

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With respect to sight, while we may mentally correct for the distortions caused by perspective and relation, we nonetheless cannot resist the distortion or illusion which calls for a correction. The corrections we make are after the fact mental adjustments. We continue to see what we see. We simply identify cognitively what we see as a distortion or illusion. Thus, if we are to take Socrates sight analogy seriously, while we may after the fact cognitively correct for the misperceptions which arise when pleasures and pains stand side by side in the soul, we cannot avoid such misperceptions at the outset. Anticipatory pleasures presuppose a desire, the satisfaction of which is imagined as pleasant, for the restoration of a perceived disintegration or deciency, which is experienced as pain. All anticipatory pleasures, then, involve the simultaneous presence before the soul of an imagined future pleasure and a presently felt pain. This suggests that anticipatory pleasures will generally involve some initial misperception. We may, of course, come to expect and routinely to adjust cognitively for such initial misperceptions. However, we cannot eliminate their occurrence. But this suggests that all anticipatory pleasures are in some sense false pleasures, and this may seem too strong a claim to attribute to Socrates. Indeed, we might think Socrates would have the following reason to reject it. Some anticipatory pleasures presuppose no particular desire rooted in a perceived disintegration, a pain. In the absence of any preceding desire and pain, we might experience an anticipatory pleasure of, for example, the smell of a rose. Here the imagined pleasure would stand beside no pain in the soul, allowing the soul to perceive it for what it truly was in itself, and yielding an anticipatory pleasure that could not properly be called false in the sense under discussion. There is no reason, however, to think Socrates would allow that someone could experience an anticipatory pleasure in the absence of some desire and pain. To be sure, he allows that the soul may perceive the real restoration of an unperceived real disintegration, and thus experience a pure pleasure, one accompanied by and intimately related to no pain. We might experience the unexpected and undesired real smelling of a rose as a pure or true pleasure, a perceived real restoration of an unperceived but real olfactory disintegration or deciency. But Socrates does not discuss, and there is no reason to think him open to, the possibility of a pure anticipatory pleasure, where the soul experiences a present psychological pleasure from the perception of an imagined restoration of an unperceived and unimagined deciency. Indeed, it is difcult to understand this possibility, for the soul could not recognize an imagined state of affairs as an imagined restoration and potential future pleasure unless it already perceived that state of affairs in relation to some perceived deciency or pain, real or imagined. Unless I perceive myself to be suffering from some olfactory deciency, real or imagined, imagining myself

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smelling a rose, even imagining myself taking pleasure in smelling a rose, will produce no actual present pleasure, for the soul will fail to perceive the imagined event as a restoration of any real or imagined deciency. Thus, while there are pure pleasures, perceived real restorations of unperceived but real disintegrations, there are no pure anticipatory pleasures, perceived imaginary restorations of unperceived disintegrations or deciencies, real or imagined. Socrates second case of false pleasure, then, seems to boil down to this. The simultaneous presence in the soul of intimately related pleasure and pain results in at least an initial misperception of each, a misperception which may be identied as such and corrected after the fact, but a misperception nonetheless. Since all anticipatory pleasures involve the simultaneous presence of pleasure and pain before the soul, all of them are to some degree false pleasures in this sense. Some non-anticipatory pleasures, like the pleasure of scratching poison ivy, are also false pleasures in this sense. Socrates points out that it is sometimes said that the state of feeling no pain is pleasure. This judgment, however, cannot be right. Pleasure and pain are perceived restorations and disintegrations of our natural integrity. The absence of pain indicates only a failure to perceive disintegration. It indicates neither integrity nor restoration. The absence of pain cannot be pleasure, for the absence of pain is no perception while pleasure is a perception. To claim to experience pleasure in the absence of pain is simply to misuse words.18 This error is instructive, however, according to Socrates. What motivates the claim that the only pleasure available to people is freedom from pain is the methodological error of assuming that studying the most intense of all pleasures is the best way to identify the true nature of pleasure, coupled with a tremendous hatred of the so-called Calliclean pleasures, intense, all-consuming pleasures which seem to know no natural boundaries.19 The trouble here is that the most intense of pleasures derive their intensity from an intimate relation to pain and desire. If we mistakenly generalize this feature of the most intense of all pleasures, we come naturally to regard suspiciously the actual experience of pleasure in all cases and to think that true pleasure must be the absence of pain. If we follow Socrates dialectical method, we will not seek the unity of a genus through the examination of a single species taken, because of its intensity, to be representative of the whole genus.20 The unity of a genus can be known only after all its species have been marked and examined. People who curse all pleasures as suffering the same defect as the most intense pleasures, and then identify true pleasure with the absence of pain, fail to employ properly Socrates method. Socrates agrees that pleasures which

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reduce upon analysis to a mixture of pain and pleasure are not true pleasures. This constitutes the third case of false pleasure. Recall the earlier example given of scratching the itch of poison ivy. In this case, we experience a pleasure which can be intensied to almost unimaginable extremes. The reason for this is the simultaneous presence in the soul of the pain of the itch with the pleasure of the scratch. We do not, of course, experience pleasure and pain simultaneously. What we experience is pleasure. But the pleasure results from a mixture of the analytically distinct pleasure and pain simultaneously present in the soul. Because of its nature as essentially a mixture of pleasure and pain, however, the experienced pleasure is capable of innite intensication.21 We scratch a bit. This produces a pleasure in the soul. But if the itch remains, as it often will with poison ivy since scratching typically fails to restore the skins integrity, then some pain remains within the soul, increasing the desire for restoration. So we scratch some more. This produces more pleasure. But, again, the pain, hidden but present within the experienced pleasure, remains. As the pleasure of each scratch subsides, the pain of the itch may begin to appear to the soul more and more intensely as it outlasts any particular scratch, giving rise to stronger and stronger desires to scratch. So we scratch still more. The pleasure experienced as a result of scratching, then, likewise appears to the soul more and more intensely, for it appears to relieve, without ever fully relieving, intense pain. Eventually, through the pursuit of a false pleasure, we are reduced to the sort of mad frenzied scratching that ends only in bleeding. These most intense of the pleasures have their roots in a vicious state of the soul and body, some lack or disintegration which we attempt to ll or remedy through an activity destined to fail at its purpose.22 These most intense of pleasures reveal themselves upon analysis to be inherently a mixture of pleasure and pain. They are, Socrates maintains, a third kind of false pleasure, for rather than marking a real restoration, they mask a persistent disintegration.

4. The Unity of the False Pleasures Given Socrates emphasis on the necessity and proper use of dialectical method, it would not be unreasonable to expect some unity to emerge from his analysis of the three foregoing kinds of false pleasure. Prior to turning to the true pleasures, Socrates suggests that the idea of some pleasures reducing upon analysis to a mixture of pleasure and pain stands, perhaps, as the last word on false pleasures.23 This is the idea which unies Socrates account of false pleasures. It is certainly the underlying idea at work in the third case of false pleasure just discussed. But it is also the idea at work in the

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closely related second case of false pleasure. In the second case of false pleasure we perceive a restoration or pleasure for something other than what it truly is in itself because it cannot be seen apart from a pain. When terribly thirsty we cannot help but misperceive the imagined future restoration and pleasure of drinking a tablespoon of water. We cannot help but have a false anticipatory pleasure. Indeed, when terribly thirsty we may not be able to help but misperceive the real present restoration and pleasure of actually drinking a tablespoon of water. We may not be able to help but have a false non-anticipatory pleasure. But if what unies the false pleasures is that all of them reveal upon analysis some mixture of pain, then what are we to make of Socrates rst case of false pleasure? As we left it, the rst case of false pleasure appeared to involve only pleasures which originate in or include among their causes false judgments or propositions. The rst case of false pleasure seemed not to involve at all the idea of a pleasure which reduced upon analysis to a mixture of pain and pleasure.24 We noted, however, several reasons for thinking we had not yet captured fully Socrates point. Among them were that on the standard reading, the rst case of false pleasure presupposes either a non-epiphenomenal view of pleasure or the view that pleasures can take propositional content as intentional objects. But Socrates argues for neither of these claims. Indeed, he himself seems to have a sort of epiphenomenal view of pleasure. Also among the reasons for doubting the standard reading of the rst case of false pleasure was that it failed to provide a normatively compelling reason for excluding instances of such pleasure from a good life. Why should we worry about avoiding any pleasure which originates in some sense from a false judgment? After all, we are fallible, and some false judgments are more or less morally benign. If we are to nd the unity of false pleasures in the idea of a mixture of pain and pleasure, and if we are to nd in the idea of false pleasures a normatively compelling reason to exclude such pleasures from a good life, we must, it seems, revisit and rethink the standard reading of the rst case of false pleasure. In concluding his argument for the rst case of false pleasure, Socrates suggests that all people, good and evil alike, are full of hopes. For example, he notes, individuals often imagine themselves acquiring gold and enjoying themselves in their new wealth. But then he states that with respect to good people, the imagined pictures are true, whereas with respect to evil people, they are false.25 Socrates draws the conclusion that good people as a rule enjoy true pleasures and wicked people false pleasures.26 We might read this passage and think that because the gods favor the good and not the wicked it simply will not come to pass that a wicked person will possess the gold he imagines himself enjoying and that his present antici-

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patory pleasure is a false pleasure because it arises out of an image which represents a false proposition. But this would be to read the passage as a further development of the line of argument we have just rejected as inadequate. Moreover, Socrates does not limit his claim regarding wicked people to anticipatory pleasures. An evil person lacks knowledge of the right balance or harmony within his soul. Unaware of its own disintegration, an evil persons soul does not perceive its own state of being to be disintegrating and thus an evil person does not experience being evil as pain. Of course, if an evil person acquires knowledge which restores the integrity of his soul and his soul perceives the restoration, he will experience a pure pleasure, the perceived restoration of an unperceived disintegration. While an evil person, ignorant of the disintegration of his soul, will feel no pain from being evil, he will, because of his moral depravity, mistakenly see disintegrations where they do not in fact exist. He will, for example, believe that his lack of wealth constitutes a disintegration or deciency in need of restoration or remedy. He will even misperceive himself to be in pain, perhaps great pain, as a result of his lack of wealth. When the evil person imagines himself acquiring great wealth, he imagines himself undergoing a future restoration. But his soul will misperceive the imagined future pleasure as larger than it truly is, for it will stand in intimate relation to a misperceived false pain. Indeed, since an evil persons lack of wealth does not constitute a real state of disintegration, an evil persons pleasure in actually acquiring great wealth will lack any natural limit. An evil person will nd that as he acquires more and more wealth, the disintegration he aims to restore persists. This will place the pleasure derived from acquiring wealth among the most intense of pleasures. Upon analysis, then, a mixture of pleasure and pain are present in both the anticipatory and the actual pleasure derived by an evil person from imagining or actually acquiring great wealth. The anticipatory pleasure an evil person experiences when he imagines himself acquiring great wealth is a false pleasure in a normatively signicant way because upon analysis it reveals the simultaneous presence in the soul of an intimately related, hidden, and persistent pain, here a misperceived and illusory false pain. Of course, an evil person fails to perceive his real disintegration. Wealth cannot remedy his real disintegration. Only knowledge can do that. The anticipatory or actual pleasure taken by an evil person in an imagined or actual acquisition of wealth is normatively problematic, then, because it misleads the person into thinking that a kind or degree of restoration could take place that could not in fact take place. The two reasons to prefer this non-standard reading of the rst case of false pleasure are that it preserves falsity as a normatively signicant quality

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of certain pleasures, and that it enables us to unify false pleasures under the idea of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Against this reading there is Socrates remark that, with respect to the rst case of false pleasures, the falsity derives from false judgments, whereas, with respect to the second case, the falsity belongs to the pleasure itself.27 Socrates also speaks sometimes as if any false belief playing a causal or originating role in the experience of some pleasure renders it a false pleasure.28 On balance these minor difculties do not outweigh the advantages of the reading advanced here. We need not deny that with respect to the rst case of false pleasure an evil persons false pleasure derives in some sense from the false judgment that his lack of wealth is a deciency from which he suffers pain. We may distinguish this case of false pleasure from the second in which someone rightly judges that a restoration or a real disintegration is taking or will take place, but nevertheless misperceives the size or intensity of the pleasure involved because of its close proximity to an intimately related pain simultaneously present in the soul. There is also a third reason to prefer the non-standard reading suggested here. The reading preserves a signicant degree of continuity between the Republic and the Philebus. In the Republic, Plato identies mixed pleasures as bastard or illusory pleasures. In the Philebus, mixed pleasures are admitted to be actual pleasures in the sense that we feel pleasure when experiencing them. But they are also claimed to be pleasures lacking goodness, for they appear other than what they are. They do not truly mark a restoration to bodily or psychological integrity. They deceive the soul.

Notes
1. For the view that a coherent general account of pleasure may be extracted from the Philebus, see Dorothea Frede, Disintegration and Restoration: Pleasure and Pain in the Philebus, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, Richard Kraut, ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Dorothea Frede, Introductory Essay in Plato, Philebus, trans., Dorothea Frede (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993); and, Tom Touzzo, The General Account of Pleasure in Platos Philebus, forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy. For the view that no coherent general account of pleasure may be extracted from the Philebus, see Justin Gosling and Christopher Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 140; and, Cynthia Hampton, Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being: An Analysis of Platos Philebus (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 73. 2. For a recent statement of the view that the Philebus offers no coherent, unied, general account of false pleasures, see Dorothea Fredes Introductory Essay, op. cit., pp. xlvliii; See also, Robin Waterelds Introductory Essay in Plato, Philebus, trans., Robin Watereld (London: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 2126. For a general sense of the dissensus concerning Platos treatment of false pleasures in the Philebus, see Justin Gosling, False

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Pleasures: Philebus 35c41b, 4 Phronesis 44 (1959); Justin Gosling, Father Kenny on False Pleasures in Platos Philebus 5 Phronesis 41 (1960); Anthony Kenny, False Pleasures in the Philebus: A Reply to Mr. Gosling, 5 Phronesis 45 (1962); J. Dybikowski, False Pleasure and the Philebus 15 Phronesis 147 (1970); Terry Penner, False Anticipatory Pleasures: Philebus 36a341a6, 15 Phronesis 166 (1970); Fred Miller, Can Pleasures Be False?, 2 Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 57 (1971); and, Dorothea Frede, Rumpelstiltskins Pleasures: True and False Pleasures in Platos Philebus 30 Phronesis 151 (1985). Plato, Philebus, 32b. All references are to Dorothea Fredes translation of the Philebus, op. cit. Ibid., 33d. Ibid., 51b. Ibid., 35ae. Ibid., 32c. Ibid., 33ab. Ibid., 54a55c. Ibid., 37ae. Ibid., 38a. Ibid., 38b39e. Ibid., Introductory Essay, p. 41, n.1. Ibid., 39e40c. Ibid., 41cd. Ibid., 42a. Ibid., 42bc. Ibid., 43d. Ibid., 44e45a. Ibid., 14b31b. Ibid., 46ce, 47b. Ibid., 45e. Ibid., 50d. See, Introductory Essay in Plato, Philebus, trans. Robin Watereld, pp. 2526. Plato, Philebus, trans., D. Frede, 40ab. Ibid., 40c. Ibid., 42ab. Ibid., 40de.

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