Deceptive Pleasure in Plato’s Republic
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Derek van Zoonen
Abstract
In Republic book 9, Plato offers a puzzling argument suggesting that subjects can err even in their immediate self-ascriptions of pleasure. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis and original interpretation of this argument, which I call the Deceptive Pleasure Argument. On the reading I defend here, Plato’s Socrates argues that pleasure is more than a feeling. The raw feel of the hedonic experience – the felt sense or feeling tone of our pleasure (that which enters awareness) – just partially constitutes a pleasure; in addition, it takes an underlying restorative process in which one of our physical or psychological needs is being met. In the absence of such an underlying restorative process, we are dealing with a case of deceptive pleasure or hedonic illusion akin to perceptual illusion. My reading does not just show that Plato’s views are more subtle and cogent than often appreciated, it also elucidates how the Deceptive Pleasure Argument mounts a powerful strike against the challenge posed by Socrates’s interlocutors.
1 Deceptive Pleasure in Plato’s Republic
In Republic book 9, Socrates presents three “proofs” (ἀποδείξεις) of the superiority of the moral life. These arguments are designed to undermine Socrates’s interlocutors’ challenge against justice and their underlying ideas about what counts as a good life. Whereas book 9’s first argument had tried to settle the dispute on psychological grounds – suggesting that a person’s degree of psychological integration and self-actualization decides their level of well-being – the second and third argument change tack and try to settle the dispute on hedonic grounds.
Although both arguments arrive at one and the same conclusion, the third argument stands out in its emphasis on the link between pleasure and illusion.[1] Plato’s thesis here, put simply, is that what presents itself to us as a pleasure may not always be the real thing. Ordinary, non-ideal pleasures – or at least some of them – are not just inferior, they are inferior because they are deceptive and not what they pretend to be. To borrow Plato’s own terminology, such pleasures are mere semblances, counterfeits, or simulacra (εἴδωλα) of true pleasure. Or as Socrates puts it, “besides the pleasure of the phronimos” – the integrated, self-actualized human being – “other pleasure is neither entirely true nor pure, but like some sort of trompe l’oeil painting” (οὐδὲ παναληθής […] οὐδὲ καθαρά, ἀλλ᾽ ἐσκιαγραφημένη τις, 583b3–5).[2] More than that, and rather puzzlingly, this discovery about ordinary pleasure is hailed as the “strongest and most decisive” (μέγιστόν τε καὶ κυριώτατον, 583b6–7) strike available against the challenge first formulated by Thrasymachus in book 1 and then further developed by Glaucon and Adeimantus in book 2.
I believe neither of these features of the argument has been properly appreciated by the interpretations currently dominating the literature. The argument itself tends to be brusquely dismissed as a philosophical failure which clashes with the commonsensical thought that we cannot err in our self-ascriptions of pleasure. This dismissive reaction, in turn, explains why most existing treatments simply skate over the crucial question of how book 9’s critical account of ordinary pleasure is supposed to integrate with the Republic as a whole.[3]
It is against the backdrop of these typical reactions that the project of this paper is to be understood. My central aim is to make sense of Plato’s hedonic fallibilism – the view that what presents itself as a pleasure may not always be the real thing – in the expectation that doing so might also elucidate our understanding of book 9’s place in the economy of the Republic.
Before proceeding, some interpretive housekeeping is in order. The precise nature of Plato’s charge against ordinary pleasure is difficult to pin down,[4] but one of the things he aims to show is that one can confuse a merely apparent, fake pleasure with a genuine, authentic one.[5] While this mistaken self-ascription interpretation is most natural and straightforward, many alternative interpretations reject it. Because readers often try to save Plato from committing the philosophical blunder of defending hedonic fallibilism, my approach here is largely indirect: if we can make sense of the text on the most obvious way of reading it – as claiming we can go wrong in the immediate belief that we are experiencing pleasure – alternative interpretations should lose their appeal.
Another caveat. Like others, I divide book 9’s third argument for the superiority of the moral life into two strands – the first running from 583b1 to 585a7, the second running from 585a8 to 588a10 – both of which put forward the thesis that we can go wrong in our self-ascriptions of pleasure, using different philosophical resources.[6] This paper focuses on the first strand, what I call the Deceptive Pleasure Argument, running from 583b1 to 585a7. This bit of text has not received the attention it deserves, despite its cogency and interest. And unlike the later stretch of argumentation, it does not lean on the contested heavy-duty metaphysics of the middle books – sparing us debates on what it means to cognize the Forms – nor is it embodied in a convoluted and problematic bit of text.
What should emerge is a textually and exegetically sound, philosophically attractive, yet unexplored interpretive option concerning Plato’s thinking in book 9’s third apodeixis and its defense of hedonic fallibilism. Here is the plan for the paper. In section 2, I discuss a standard objection against hedonic fallibilism and show how this objection has given rise to two standard interpretations of the Deceptive Pleasure Argument. In sections 3 and 4, I offer a close reading of the Deceptive Pleasure Argument. Upon closer scrutiny, it turns out that this argument, which I break down into two sub-arguments, is more subtle and more cogent than typically thought. Once we see that Plato believes pleasures are not exhausted by their phenomenology, his provocative thesis that pleasures might not be what they pretend to be begins to make sense: in the absence of an underlying restorative process, what strikes us as a pleasure may just be a pale semblance or imitation – an eidōlon – of the real thing. Finally, by way of conclusion, section 5 places the argument in a wider context and discusses some of its ramifications.
2 Hedonic Fallibilism, a Standard Objection, and Two Interpretive Alternatives
The Platonic proposal that agents are hedonically fallible is typically met with resistance. According to a standard objection, Plato’s defence of hedonic fallibilism rests on a philosophical mistake. Because our pleasures and other emotions (πάθη) are transparent to us, there is no room whatsoever for doubt, ignorance, or error in the affective domain: human beings are hedonically omniscient and thus hedonically infallible. On this view, pleasure is essentially subjective and there is no appearance reality gap when it comes to hedonic experiences: something is pleasant just in case the subject of the pleasure candidly reports that it seems pleasant to them.[7] Put differently, I am always in a position to know whether I am experiencing pleasure or something else; whenever I experiencing pleasure, I will also believe (or know) I am experiencing pleasure; and – conversely and most importantly – whenever I believe I am experiencing pleasure, I am in fact experiencing pleasure.
This standard objection has generated two typical reactions to Plato’s alleged defence of hedonic fallibilism in the Deceptive Pleasure Argument. A first family of interpretations – Dismissive Readings, as I call them – holds that because hedonic fallibilism is an untenable position Plato should not hold, we can reject this argument as a failure. As Rosen puts it, to give just one example taken at random from a larger sample:
[P]lato does not, and in my view cannot, explain the difference between a fantasm or illusion of pleasure and pain and the real thing. If I believe that I am in pain, then I am, even if the source of the pain is imaginary. (Rosen 1966, 336–337)
Summarizing the scholarly communis opinio, Crombie (1962, 139) similarly claims that, in the affective domain, the distinction between appearance and reality is “quite out of place”; Grote (1875, 602) resists the proposal because a pleasure “is what it seems, neither more nor less; its essence consists in being felt”; both Gosling and Taylor (1982, 451) and Urmson (1984, 213) blame Plato’s mistake on a naïve and unsophisticated theory of pleasure; Cross and Woozley (1964, 265) think that so much as taking the pleasure arguments of book 9 seriously would be tantamount to paying Plato the “doubtful compliment” of undeserved philosophical attention; and Gibbs (2001, 33) even entertains the possibility that “the rhetorical, fragmented, and ultimately inconsistent character of [Republic book 9’s arguments about pleasure] reflects Plato’s own intellectual limitations.”
Exercising interpretive charity, a second family of interpretations – Evasive Readings, as I call them – tries to develop alternative ways of understanding book 9’s project which manage to find a way around Plato’s alleged defence of hedonic fallibilism. This type of interpretation suggests that, upon closer scrutiny, it turns out that hedonic fallibilism is a position Plato in fact does not hold. Whatever grounds the Deceptive Pleasure Argument might have for stigmatizing ordinary pleasure, it is not defending the palpably false thesis that people can go wrong in their honest, immediate reports that they are experiencing pleasure. So when Socrates concludes that normal pleasure involves “some kind of magic or trickery” (γοητεία τις, 584a10), detached from the “reality” or “truth of pleasure” (ἡδονῆς ἀλήθειαν, 584a9), the Evasive Reading maintains that Plato is merely suggesting that ordinary pleasure fails to capture genuine value, say, or goes wrong in some other way.[8]
In what follows, I aim to offer an alternative to these existing interpretations. The reading I defend takes Plato at his word while also highlighting what is most cogent and philosophically interesting about the Deceptive Pleasure Argument – understood here as a defense of hedonic fallibilism.
Before moving on, I should note that, in a series of articles, Mehmet Erginel anticipates several themes explored in this paper – most notably, the claim that the argument in question has been unfairly neglected or dismissed.[9] Nonetheless, there are important differences between our views. First, unlike Erginel, the reading I develop here places a lot of emphasis on the role of deception and illusion. It suggests that Plato criticizes the pleasures of non-integrated, non-actualized agents (such as the tyrant) on the grounds that their pleasures are misleading. These pleasures disconnect the agent from the actual state of the world, and it is this mismatch between their hedonic experience and reality that undermines their well-being.
Second, I offer a different account of the hedonic mistake at play. Whereas Erginel grounds Plato’s commitment to hedonic fallibilism in the idea that pleasures have conceptual content, my reading remains agnostic on whether hedonic content is conceptual or non-conceptual. Instead, as should become clear below, I argue that Plato treats pleasure as more than a mere feeling – he conceives of hedonic experience as an objective phenomenon, rather than a purely subjective one, and this allows him to claim that we can err in our self-ascriptions of pleasure.
3 The Deceptive Pleasure Argument
3.1 Misleading Pleasure
The Deceptive Pleasure Argument opens with the sweeping claim that all pleasure besides the pleasures of the ideal agent is “neither true nor pure but like a trompe l’oeil shadow-painting” (οὐδὲ παναληθής ἐστιν ἡ […] ἡδονὴ […] οὐδὲ καθαρά, ἀλλ’ ἐσκιαγραφημένη τις, 583b3–5). Because these charges of falsity and impurity constitute the core of Socrates’s attack on non-ideal pleasure, let me briefly gloss these notions. Plato typically calls pleasures pure when they “are not derived from pains” (οὐκ ἐκ λυπῶν, 584a12), that is to say, when they do not just consist in “an escape from pain” (τὴν λύπης ἀπαλλαγήν, 5854b9–c1) or “[a] cessation of pain” (παῦλαν λύπης, 584b2).
The notion of truth operative in Republic 9 is harder to capture, if only because the word has a variety of meanings. Crudely speaking, something can be called true or false in terms of what it represents or in terms of what it is. A belief or utterance is called false, for instance, if it fails to represent the world correctly, but we can also speak of a true van Gogh painting rather than a forgery, if it really has all the properties of a van Gogh painting.[10] To capture some sort of intuitive unity between these different senses, I want to adopt a fruitful suggestion developed by other scholars who claim that, for Plato, a pleasure is false just in case it deceives us about some way the world really is – where this includes deception about the hedonic experience itself – and that a pleasure is true just in case it does not.[11]
This understanding of the falsity of pleasure harmonizes nicely with the fact that Plato’s suspicion of pleasure stems – to a significant degree at least – from his conviction that pleasure is inexorably connected with illusion or deception.[12] In an important paper, Jessica Moss has convincingly argued that the intimate association between pleasure and illusion plays a pivotal role in Plato’s moral psychology – especially in the Republic, where “the association between pleasure and illusion that functioned almost as a background assumption of [other dialogues] is developed into a full-fledged theory.”[13]
Earlier, at 413b4–c3, Socrates had claimed that people often abandon “true belief” because they are “victims of trickery” (τοὺς γοητευθέντας) who are “under the spell of pleasure” (ὑφ᾽ ἡδονῆς κηληθέντες).[14] And later, in book 10, Socrates will locate our susceptibility to perceptual illusions and our desire for ordinary pleasure in the same part of the soul. As Moss (2006, 517) summarizes the moral psychology underlying the Republic: “[t]he Republic characterizes appetite, the pleasure-desiring part of the soul, as illusion-bound.” Although this is very often overlooked, the close link between pleasure and illusion also plays a pivotal role in book 9’s Deceptive Pleasure Argument. Indeed, as I hope to show, appreciating this connection will provide the key to unlocking the most promising interpretation of the argument. Socrates maintains that those who err hedonically are “getting deceived” (ἀπατῶνται, 585a5), he calls their defective pleasure “fakes,” “semblances,” “simulacra,” or “counterfeits (of true pleasure)” (εἰδώλοις τῆς ἀληθοῦς ἡδονῆς, 586b8 and 586c4), compares them to optical illusions or “trompe l’oeil shadow-paintings” (ἐσκιαγραφημέναις, 583b5 and 586b8), claims that they are caused by “some kind of trickery” or “magic” (γοητεία τις, 584a10), and argues that defective pleasure is the product of “untrustworthy appearances” (οὐδὲν ὑγιὲς τούτων τῶν φαντασμάτων, 584a9) rather than a manifestation of the “truth” or the “reality of pleasure” (ἡδονῆς ἀλήθειαν, 584a9).
3.2 Platonic Affective Psychology – Five Key Ideas
Appreciating the link between pleasure and illusion does not just get us to the heart of Plato’s views on pleasure in Republic book 9. Closer inspection also reveals that the Deceptive Pleasure Argument introduces a new form of hedonic deception. To see how Plato develops this new type of hedonic trickery, let us have a closer look at the text. In collaboration with his interlocutor Glaucon – who is supposed to “answer questions” (σοῦ ἀποκρινομένου) while Socrates “seeks” (ζητῶν, 583c1) – Socrates develops some basic ideas about our affective psychology. Here is the text:
[T1] [Socrates] Tell me, then, do we not say that pain is the opposite of pleasure (ἐναντίον λύπην ἡδονῇ)?
[Glaucon] Yes.
[S.] Is there not also a state of feeling neither pleasure nor pain (τὸ μήτε χαίρειν μήτε λυπεῖσθαι)?
[G.] There is.
[S.] Is it not intermediate between these two, in the middle (μεταξὺ τούτοιν ἀμφοῖν ἐν μέσῳ ὂν), a sort of calm of the soul (ἡσυχίαν τινὰ […] τῆς ψυχῆς) where these are concerned (περὶ ταῦτα)? Or would you not describe it that way?
[G.] I would. (583c3–9)
We can extract the following claims about human affectivity from this bit of text:
Pleasure and pain are opposites or contraries.
There is a third, intermediate affective experience, which is located ‘in between’ or ‘in the middle of’ pleasure and pain.
Unlike pleasure and pain, which are affectively positive and affectively negative respectively, this intermediate affective experience is affectively neutral – it consists in “neither experiencing pleasure nor pain (τὸ μήτε χαίρειν μήτε λυπεῖσθαι).”
This affectively neutral intermediate experience is “a sort of calm of the soul (ἡσυχίαν τινὰ … τῆς ψυχῆς),” that is, it is a state.
Slightly later, at 583d9–10, Socrates adds a crucially important fifth idea:
Pleasure and pain themselves are “a sort of motion or change of the soul (τό ἡδὺ ἐν ψυχῇ γιγνόμενον καὶ τὸ λυπηρὸν κίνησίς τις ἀμφοτέρω),” that is, they are a process.[15]
On the picture we are given here, pleasure and pain are two opposite ends of a scale of affective experience with positive valence (pleasure) on the one extreme of the spectrum, negative valence (pain) on the other, and neutral or indifferent valence (calm) in the middle, situated in between pleasure and pain. Apart from their differences in hedonic tone – whether they feel good, bad, or neutral – these affective experiences also differ, more essentially, in respect of the fact that pleasure and pain are processes while calm is a state, characterized more specifically – and privatively, to boot – as the absence of pleasure and pain and other affective upheaval.
3.3 Socrates’s Fallibility Cases
Between 583c10 and 583d9, the argument turns to a set of problematic cases. Although these fallibility cases, as I will call them, appear to undermine the argument’s underlying affective psychology and the clean distinctions between three different affective experiences that have just been drawn, Socrates instead treats them as evidence for our hedonic fallibility.
There are people, he points out, who mistake the affectively indifferent state of calm for an affectively positive state of pleasure when it gets juxtaposed with an affectively negative state of pain. Sick people, for instance, hold that “nothing gives more pleasure than being healthy” (οὐδὲν ἐστὶν ἥδιον τοῦ ὑγιαίνειν, 583c13) – they even go so far as to claim that health is “the most pleasurable thing there is” (ἥδιστον ὄν, 583d1) – and those who are “in great pain” (τῶν περιωδυνίᾳ ἐχομένων) report that “nothing is more pleasant than putting an end to their suffering” (οὐδὲν ἥδιον τοῦ παύσασθαι ὀδυνώμενον, 583cd3–4).
In the next step, Socrates claims, more sweepingly, that this mistake of mixing up calm with pleasure is widespread and generalizes to many other cases – including the defective, non-ideal pleasures of most people besides the phronimos:
[T2] [T]here are many other similar circumstances in which you find people who, when they are in pain (ὅταν λυπῶνται), praise not experiencing pain or freedom from that sort of thing as most pleasant rather than experiencing pleasure (τὸ μὴ λυπεῖσθαι καὶ τὴν ἡσυχίαν τοῦ τοιούτου ἐγκωμιάζουσιν ὡς ἥδιστον, οὐ τὸ χαίρειν). (583d6–9)
After a back and forth with his interlocutor, in which Glaucon’s deflationary and infallibilist take on these deviant cases is scrutinized, Socrates reaffirms his conclusion that these people are getting tricked: “there is nothing trustworthy in these [hedonic] appearances as far as the truth about pleasure is concerned, only some kind of trickery” (οὐδὲν ὑγιὲς τούτων τῶν φαντασμάτων πρὸς ἡδονῆς ἀλήθειαν, ἀλλὰ γοητεία τις, 584a9–10).
At the same time, though, he also warns Glaucon not to stray in the other direction and overgeneralize the force of these examples by offering an all too sweeping reductive theory of all and every pleasure as nothing but “a cessation of” or “relief from pain” (παῦλαν λύπης, 584b2). Socrates’s point is just that there are some cases where people fall prey to deceptive pleasure, not that all pleasures are just a trick of the mind.[16]
Influential Evasive Readings, most of which have entered the literature as a response to Plato’s problematic defence of hedonic fallibilism, interpret these remarks as follows. Going from Socrates’s warning to Glaucon and his observations about the deeper “nature” (πεφυκέναι, 584b1) of pleasure, a first type of Evasive Reading claims that Socrates is merely taking issue with rival explanatory accounts of the nature of pleasure. Thus, Dorothea Frede (1985, 158) has suggested that Socrates is basically “ruling out the paradox (he calls it ‘trickery’) that pleasure is merely the end of pain, and pain the end of pleasure” In a similar vein, Reeve (1988, 305) claims that “[Plato] is not arguing that [the subjects in Socrates’s deviant cases] wrongly find this state to be pleasant. His argument is about the nature of pleasure, about what pleasure is, about what account of it is true” and Warren (2011, 113) reads the passage as “a neat dialectical argument against a potentially troubling set of opponents” who deny the existence of an intermediate affective state and offer an alternative to Socrates’s own account of pleasure and pain.
A second type of Evasive Reading suggests that Socrates is merely repudiating ordinary pleasure on evaluative or ethical grounds, the basic charge being that such pleasure fails to get at genuine value – it misinforms us about what matters. According to Nussbaum, to give a prominent example of such a reading, Platonic talk of ‘true pleasures’ should be construed as talk of ‘truly valuable activities’ and these, in turn, refer to:
those activities that are chosen in harmony with true beliefs about value or worth, as opposed to those in which agents take pleasure because they falsely believe them to have worth. (Nussbaum 1986, 141)
In stark contrast, ordinary activities or ‘false pleasures’ – including all appetitive activities – should be rejected “as lacking in true or intrinsic value,” which is to say that the judgment that they are worth something is mistaken because it is “thoroughly based on illusion.”[17]
Likewise, on Clerk-Shaw’s account, the basic problem Republic 9 identifies with most pleasure is that “pervasive hedonic error” is the root cause of pernicious ethical error: pleasure is not “a reliable guide to what is good for us” because it offers “a distorted picture of what is noble and good” (Clerk-Shaw 2015, 151). Finally, Daniel Russell (2005, 127–135), suggests that Socrates calls certain pleasures less ‘true’ than other pleasures when they mistakenly suggest to those who experience these pleasures that their lives are going better than they actually are – thereby turning Republic book 9’s critique of pleasure into a covert critique of inferior ways of life.
Going from Socrates’s initial set-up of the argument, a third and last type of Evasive Reading sees Socrates as highlighting flaws in people’s rationality that lead to poor affective forecasting – a bit like modern behavioral economists. From the skewed perspective of being ill, for instance, sick people might come to the false conclusion that good health is the source of intense pleasure. Likewise, I might misestimate the unpleasantness of filing my tax return when I fail to compare it, more rationally, with a long-term vision of its hedonic consequences in my life as a whole.[18] In this vein, Murphy (1953, 212–213) claims that Plato’s argument is merely “attacking statements about [the] prevalence [of pleasure and pain] made at a [temporal] distance and the generalizations of those who compare one condition of life with another,” and Annas (1981, 311) grants Plato the “acceptable point” that “we do sometimes use the language of appearance and reality about pleasures when we are contrasting long and short term views of some pleasures and pains.”
What binds these various interpretive strategies is the conviction that the hedonic mistake Socrates is examining here does not concern one’s current affective experience and whether one is in a given affective state or not. On Evasive Readings, the agents targeted by Socrates’s argument do not go wrong in their honest, immediate, present-tense self-ascriptions of pleasure, they merely have false beliefs about other things which, somehow, bear on pleasure – albeit in a more derivative way.
Importantly, the falsity of these more derivative hedonic beliefs does not impinge on the hedonic experiences themselves. This is crucial. If Socrates is merely trying to expose relatively benign pleasure-related mistakes, located more downstream from one’s hedonic experiences, it follows that the pleasures themselves remain unscathed. And this means, even more importantly, that “the usual charge against [the deceptive pleasure argument] – of violating the obvious rule that pleasures and pains […] cannot be unreal since their esse is percipi – need [not] be allowed weight,” as Murphy (1953, 212–213) concludes.
Evasive Readings – especially the one put forward by Murphy – have been fairly influential, not least because they are seen as a welcome solution to the putative problem posed by the Platonic proposal that we are hedonically fallible. Although there is much to say against these evasive readings, I will confine myself to a few observations and my focus will be on Murphy whose interpretation is arguably the most widely followed line in the scholarly literature.[19]
To be sure, Murphy’s evasive reading finds some support in the text – especially Socrates’s initial remarks lend credence to the idea that he is merely arguing that people tend to go wrong in their predictions or generalizations about pleasure instead of repudiating their immediate self-ascriptions of pleasure.[20] I nevertheless believe that this type of reading faces serious difficulties, so let me give three strong reasons to think that we are instead dealing with mistaken self-ascriptions and deceptive pleasures which are not what they pretend to be.
Firstly, note that, throughout the argument, Socrates takes issue with the pleasures themselves rather than with the higher-order, derivative beliefs one might entertain about such affective states. He calls the defective pleasures themselves untrue, compares them to deceptive trompe l’oeil paintings, and denounces them as mere εἴδωλα – flimsy, insubstantial, pale semblances of the real deal, “in respect of reality three stages removed from [true pleasure]” (ἡδονῆς τρίτῳ εἰδώλῳ πρὸς ἀλήθειαν ἀπ᾽ ἐκείνου, 587c8–9). The most natural way of understanding these charges of falsity, deception, and ontological defectiveness, I take it, is to unpack them as the proposal that it is possible to conflate a merely apparent pleasure for a genuine pleasure, thereby mistakenly self-ascribing a pleasure that is not really there.
Secondly, the exchange between Glaucon and Socrates that takes place in the course of the argument strongly suggests that the error of the relevant agents concerns immediate self-ascriptions of affective experiences rather than other, more derivative types of hedonic error. Having been confronted with Socrates’s fallibility cases, Glaucon pushes back in the following way:
[T3] [a] [Glaucon] That may be the case because at that moment the state of calm turns out to be pleasant (τοῦτο γάρ τότε ἡδὺ ἴσως καὶ ἀγαπητὸν γίγνεται, ἡσυχία).[21]
[b] [Socrates] So [, if you are right,] after someone has stopped experiencing pleasure, the absence of pleasure will be painful (καὶ ὅταν παύσηται ἄρα, εἶπον, χαίρων τις, ἡ τῆς ἡδονῆς ἡσυχία λυπηρὸν ἔσται).[22]
[G.] Probably (ἴσως). (583d10–e3)
Part [a] might be taken to suggest that Glaucon is describing a future state of affairs in which – then and there, at that very moment – the calm will prove itself to be pleasant as soon as the preceding pain has subsided.
This is confirmed by part [b], which is more perspicuous and less ambiguous. In it, Socrates complements Glaucon’s remark and tries to sum up what his interlocutor thinks is going on in the deviant cases: “[on your account], then, after someone has stopped experiencing pleasure, the absence of pleasure will be painful” (ὅταν παύσηται ἄρα χαίρων τις, ἡ τῆς ἡδονῆς ἡσυχία λυπηρὸν ἔσται). Although this is often missed, the Greek suggests that we are dealing with two future states of affairs located at different times in the future: an anterior event expressed in the dependent clause and a posterior event expressed in the main clause.[23]
That is to say, Socrates’s gloss on Glaucon’s claim expresses a situation in the future where the pleasure has come to an end, after which the calm will feel painful.[24] Conversely, Glaucon’s proposal – which Socrates is after all merely complementing – is best understood in a parallel way: he must be talking about a similar future situation where the pain has come to an end, after which the calm will manifest itself as something pleasant.
What this suggests, then, is that when the irrational people engage in sloppy affective forecasting and claim that putting an end to pain is pleasant, they are doing so for the simple reason that this is how they are in fact going to experience their convalescence against the backdrop of their current state of uncomfortable sickness. They, so to speak, practice what they preach: when the moment is there, their recovery will really manifest itself as a pleasure – albeit a false, merely apparent, or deceptive one – and it will really feel good.
That we are dealing with mistaken immediate self-ascriptions rather than mistaken predictions or generalizations seems to be confirmed by what follows. When Socrates summarizes his results, he echoes his earlier exchange with Glaucon and offers a more general observation about these cases, using present-tense forms: when juxtaposed with pain, the affectively neutral state of calm “merely seems – but is not really – pleasant” (οὐκ ἔστιν …, ἀλλὰ φαίνεται, 584a7).[25]
Of course, this could again involve the juxtaposition of a present state of pain with a future state of calm – as if we are dealing with generalizations and predictions about the future made from a blurry current perspective – but the way in which Socrates explicates these mistakes by means of an analogy rules out such an evasive construal (584d1–585a7). When it comes to pleasure, Socrates suggests, ordinary people are like people who live in a house with three floors, although they are only aware of the basement and the ground floor. This tricks them into thinking they have reached the highest floor when they have in fact moved from the basement to the ground floor.[26]
Likewise, non-ideal agents are “deceived” (ἀπατῶνται, 585a5) into believing that they are experiencing pleasure, even though an affectively negative state of pain merely gets juxtaposed with an intermediate state of affective neutrality or painlessness: “whenever [non-ideal agents] are moved from pain to the intermediate state, they strongly” – but wrongly – “believe they are in a state of filling and pleasure” (σφόδρα μὲν οἴονται πρὸς πληρώσει τε καὶ ἡδονῇ γίγνεσθαι, 585a2–3).[27] Even though the intermediate state of calm is – by definition (as per 583c5) – not a pleasure, one might mistake this state of painlessness for a state of pleasure thanks to the juxtaposition with pain which creates a contrast effect.[28]
It seems fairly obvious, then, that irrational people go wrong in their first-person, present-tense self-ascriptions of pleasure.[29] Even though they sincerely believe and report otherwise, they are not experiencing pleasure: “as a matter of fact” or “in reality” (τῷ ὄντι, 585a1), they find themselves in an affectively neutral psychological condition of pain- and pleasureless calm which they mistake for a pleasure.
There is a third and final difficulty for the Evasive Readings put forward by Murphy and others. Such readings seem to be in a weaker position to deliver a cogent story about how Plato’s demonstration of the superiority of the rationally integrated life is meant to constitute the ‘strongest and most decisive’ strike against Socrates’s interlocutors’ challenge and the rival theory of the good life they seem committed to. It is hard to see, in other words, how sloppy generalizations, poor affective forecasting skills, adherence to faulty accounts of the nature of pleasure, or defective evaluative beliefs would constitute the promised knock-down argument against the life of the tyrant preferred by someone like Thrasymachus, unless such derivative hedonic errors would ultimately bleed into the hedonic experiences themselves, making them less valuable or appealing than they initially appeared to be.
It is telling that when Socrates directly targets Thrasymachus’s beloved tyrant towards the end of the Deceptive Pleasure Argument (587a4–588b5), he is not concerned with the derivative mistakes identified by the evasive readings. Instead, he goes to great lengths to point out how impoverished, flimsy, and one-dimensional the tyrant’s pleasures really are, basically arguing that the tyrant is seriously mistaken about his pleasures. The tyrant thinks he is well off, hedonically speaking, although he is not. The crucial point here – and the point that should bother someone like Thrasymachus who seems to flirt with such a way of life on hedonistic grounds[30] – is that the tyrant’s pleasures are not what they pretend to be. His pleasures are insubstantial, defective simulacra of the real deal, although this bit of information about the contents of his very own mind is not introspectively available to the psychologically fragmented tyrant whose blurred, distorted vision makes him a stranger to himself.[31]
3.4 Glaucon’s Infallibilism
In the next stretch of the argument, Glaucon pushes back against Socrates’s proposal and offers his own infallibilist explanation of the deviant cases. Glaucon objects that the people in these cases merely say these things for the simple reason that “at that moment, this is perhaps what turns out to be pleasant and desirable – [the] calm” (τοῦτο τότε ἡδὺ ἴσως καὶ ἀγαπητὸν γίγνεται, ἡσυχία, 583d10–11). Put differently, Glaucon holds that Socrates’s examples do not count as instance of serious hedonic error: the people in his deviant cases do in fact experience pleasure, just as they claim. If that is the case, though, Socrates adds, it would also follow – conversely and from the same premises – that “after someone has stopped feeling pleasure, this calm or freedom from pleasure will be painful” (ὅταν παύσηται ἄρα χαίρων τις, ἡ τῆς ἡδονῆς ἡσυχία λυπηρὸν ἔσται, 583e1–2).
Like many contemporary students of Plato, Glaucon assumes that there is a more parsimonious and more down-to-earth explanation of Socrates’s fallibility cases available which does not commit us to the counter-intuitive notion that people are hedonically fallible. This alternative take on Socrates’s fallibility cases seems best understood as driven by some kind of phenomenal subjectivism about our affective psychological states. Such affective phenomenal subjectivism, in its turn, boils down to the thesis that there is no appearance reality gap in the affective domain. When it comes to pleasure, pain, and certain other πάθη, things are to any person just as they appear to that person.[32] A pleasure’s immediate phenomenological quality – how it seems to the subject of the experience or how it feels – exhausts its reality or how it is. Pleasure is just a bit of felt experience – neither more nor less. Crucially, this picture obviously guarantees our hedonic infallibility: if the ontology of pleasure is a first-person, esse est percipi ontology, any situation in which it strikes me as if I am experiencing pleasure counts as a situation in which I am experiencing pleasure.[33]
3.5 Two Arguments Against Glaucon’s Infallibilism
In what follows, Socrates aims to show that Glaucon’s alternative explanation of these putative cases of hedonic fallibility falls apart under sharper scrutiny. Here is the text in full, broken down in four parts:
[T4] [a] [Socrates] [If what you, Glaucon, are saying is right,] then the thing we described as being intermediate between the two, the calm, this thing will be both – both pain and pleasure (ὃ μεταξὺ … ἀμφοτέρων […], τὴν ἡσυχίαν, τοῦτό […] ἀμφότερα ἔσται, λύπη τε καὶ ἡδονή).
[Glaucon] That’s what it looks like.
[S.] Now, is it possible for that which is neither to be both (δυνατὸν τὸ μηδέτερα ὂν ἀμφότερα γίγνεσθαι)?[34]
[G.] Not in my view (οὔ μοι δοκεῖ).
[b] [S.] More importantly, when pleasure and pain take place in the soul, they are both some kind of process (τό ἡδὺ ἐν ψυχῇ γιγνόμενον καὶ τὸ λυπηρὸν κίνησίς τις ἀμφοτέρω ἐστόν).
[G.] Yes.
[S.] But did not what is neither painful nor pleasant come to light just now as a state of calm and something in the middle between them (τὸ δὲ μήτε λυπηρὸν μήτε ἡδὺ οὐχὶ ἡσυχία μέντοι καὶ ἐν μέσῳ τούτοιν ἐφάνη ἄρτι)?
[G.] Yes, it did.
[c] [S.] How can it be correct, then, to think that not feeling pain is pleasant or that not feeling pleasure is painful (τὸ μὴ ἀλγεῖν ἡδὺ ἡγεῖσθαι ἢ τὸ μὴ χαίρειν ἀνιαρόν)?
[G.] There is no way it can be.
[S.] Then it is not correct. [d] But when the calm is juxtaposed with the painful it merely appears pleasant without really being pleasant (οὐκ ἔστιν … τοῦτο, ἀλλὰ φαίνεται) and when the calm is juxtaposed with the pleasant it merely appears painful without really being painful (παρὰ τὸ ἀλγεινὸν ἡδὺ καὶ παρὰ τὸ ἡδὺ ἀλγεινὸν τότε ἡ ἡσυχία), but there is nothing trustworthy in these deceptive appearances as far as the truth about pleasure is concerned, only some kind of trickery (οὐδὲν ὑγιὲς τούτων τῶν φαντασμάτων πρὸς ἡδονῆς ἀλήθειαν, ἀλλὰ γοητεία τις).
[G.] That is what our account (λόγος) suggests at any rate. (583e4–584a11)
Parts [a] and [b] contain what I take to be two separate yet closely interconnected arguments against Glaucon’s infallibilist response, designed to safeguard and reaffirm the earlier conclusion – forced upon us by the fallibility cases – that we can go wrong in our self-ascriptions of pleasure.[35] As Socrates puts it in part [c], his arguments are meant to (re-) establish the conclusion that it is not correct “to think that the absence of pain is pleasant” (τὸ μὴ ἀλγεῖν ἡδὺ ἡγεῖσθαι, 584a4). Part [d], finally, develops an explanation as to why people fail to recognize what affective state they are in, which pivots on a distinction between appearance and reality or seeming and being and introduces the notion of hedonic illusions or deceptive pleasures. These parts are best discussed in turn.
3.5.1 Sub-Argument 1: the Dialectical Argument
In part [a], Socrates offers his first-sub-argument against Glaucon’s infallibilism. At first blush, this argument seems undeveloped and commentators have struggled to make sense of it.[36] This interpretive struggle seems to stem from our inability to get a decent handle on the puzzling principle that “what is neither [F nor G] cannot γίγνεσθαι both [F and G]” (583e7) which, somehow, allows Socrates to reduce Glaucon’s initial position to absurdity and forces him to give up his hedonic infallibilism (at 584a6).
This principle is often taken to invoke book 4’s Principle of Opposites, the thought being that the principle claims that it is impossible for what is neither (an) F nor (a) G (where F and G are opposites or contraries) to become both F and G (at least not in the same respect, at the same time, and relative to the same thing). Understood that way, Socrates’s thought here would be that nothing whatsoever – including the calm – can become both pleasant and painful, at least not in the same respect, at the same time, or relative to the same thing.[37]
Socrates must be driving at something else, though. As we learn in the Parmenides, there is usually nothing “puzzling” (ἄξιον θαυμάζειν, 129c3) about the compresence of contrary properties. To unravel the superficial clash between opposites, we often just have to dig a bit deeper and add the relevant qualifiers. In this sub-argument, Socrates even supplies these qualifiers himself: he explicitly states that the calm is painful when it gets juxtaposed with pleasure and pleasant when it gets juxtaposed with pain which goes to show that the calm is not pleasant and painful in the same respect, at the same time, and towards the same thing.
Fortunately, there is a more parsimonious and more elegant reading of this passage available which does not run into these problems.[38] Note that at three points in the argument Plato shifts nonchalantly and without explanation between instances of εἶναι and γίγνεσθαι. This happens at 583e3, where Socrates’s ἔσται takes up Glaucon’s γίγνεται almost in the same breath. It happens slightly later as well: when Socrates posits his principle at 583e7, γίγνεσθαι refers back to and is meant to block the inference that the state of affective calm ἔσται both pleasure and pain (583e5). Finally, this equation occurs again in the last part of our passage, where Socrates echoes Glaucon’s initial suggestion and again picks up the latter’s γίγνεται (as well as his own ἔσται) by an ἔστιν: “the calm is not pleasant, it merely seems pleasant” (οὐκ ἔστιν […] ἀλλὰ φαίνεται, 584a7).[39]
It is obvious, then, that Socrates equates εἶναι and γίγνεσθαι in his first sub-argument against Glaucon’s infallibilism. What is not so obvious, is what we should make of this equation. Let me offer a promising way to understand this otherwise puzzling and problematic move. Because the Aktionsart of the verb εἶναι is stative or durative rather than kinetic, mutative, or dynamic, forms of the verb γίγνεσθαι are sometimes used in a dynamic sense of εἶναι.[40] When this happens, instances of γίγνεσθαι are used not in the meaning of ‘coming into being,’ ‘becoming F,’ or ‘coming into a certain state F,’ but in the meaning of ‘being F as result,’ ‘showing or proving itself to be F,’ ‘turning out to be F,’ or simply ‘being F’ (with the dynamic connotation suppressed).[41]
If we construe the principle along these lines, Socrates’s line of thought is more or less tautological: because what is not-F cannot turn out to be F or, more precisely, because what is neither F nor G cannot turn out to be both F and G, the non-pleasant and non-painful state of calm cannot turn out to be pleasant and painful – pace Glaucon, who had suggested that the neutral, painless, and pleasureless state of psychological calm will sometimes be both pleasant and painful, thanks to the juxtaposition with a contrastive affective state.
More plainly speaking, the guiding idea here must be something like the following. If we agree that an apple, say, is neither a pear nor an orange, it is trivially true that an apple cannot prove itself to be an orange – even in strange circumstances or when juxtaposed with a pear – although it might be mistaken for an orange (because it looks that way, for instance). Likewise, if we agree that the affectively neutral state of calm is neither a pleasure nor a pain, it is trivially true that the calm cannot turn out to be either of them (or both for that matter) – even though it might be mistaken for a pleasure (because it looks that way in funny circumstances, for instance).[42]
A passage from the Philebus sheds light on Socrates’s line of reasoning. In it, Socrates explains to his interlocutor Protarchus that according to the “correct explanatory account of the matter” (τὸν ὀρθὸν λόγον, 43e10), those who claim to be experiencing pleasure when they find themselves in a state of painless psychological calm are mistaken. Although they think they are experiencing pleasure, they are not. Put differently, not experiencing pain is not, and cannot be, the same as experiencing pleasure – even if there are people who suggest otherwise because they report that they experience pleasure when they are merely in a state of pain- and pleasureless calm.[43] Here is why:
[T5] [Socrates] Imagine three sorts of things, whichever you may like, and because these are high-sounding names, let us call them gold, silver, and what is neither of the two (τριῶν ὄντων οὖν ἡμῖν, ὧντινων βούλει, τίθει, καλλίοσιν ἵνα ὀνόμασι χρώμεθα, τὸ μὲν χρυσόν, τὸ δ᾽ ἄργυρον, τρίτον δὲ τὸ μηδέτερα τούτων.)
[Protarchus] Consider it done.
[S.] Is there any way conceivable in which this third kind, which is neither of these, could turn out to be the same as either of the other two sorts, gold or silver (τὸ δὴ μηδέτερα τούτων ἔσθ᾽ ἡμῖν ὅπως θάτερα γένοιτο ἄν, χρυσὸς ἢ ἄργυρος)?
[P.] How could it?
[S.] That the middle kind of life be described as either pleasant or painful would be the wrong thing to think, if anyone happened to think so, and it would be the wrong thing to say, if anyone would say so, at least according to the right explanatory account of the matter (κατά γε τὸν ὀρθὸν λόγον). (Philebus 43e1–10, my translation, loosely based on Frede)
Unlike most other translators, D. Frede construes the expression γένοιτο ἄν exactly right – as a dynamic, kinetic, or mutative version of εἶναι.[44] Plato’s suggestion is not that what is neither gold nor silver (bronze, say) cannot become gold; his more reasonable suggestion is that, while remaining itself, bronze, which is neither gold nor silver, cannot turn out or prove itself to be gold or silver, even in special circumstances or when juxtaposed with a different mineral.
Likewise, or so Socrates argues, affectively indifferent psychological calm, which is neither pleasure nor pain but something in between the two, cannot somehow turn out or prove itself to be a pleasure – even when it gets juxtaposed with a contrastive affective state and even if there are people who report that they are experiencing pleasure when they are not in pain because they find themselves in this state of calm affective indifference. This is so, Socrates adds in a crucially important rider, because “not experiencing pain and experiencing pleasure each have a different or independent nature” (χωρὶς τοῦ μὴ λυπεῖσθαι καὶ τοῦ χαίρειν ἡ φύσις ἑκατέρου, 44a10).[45]
The guiding thought here seems to be, then, that there is an intrinsic, essential, underlying feature – or cluster of such features – that is common and peculiar to all pleasures and that sets it apart from other mental states, such as affectively neutral psychological calm. Given this underlying, essential feature of the different affective states – their ‘hidden structure’ or φύσις – it is simply impossible for affectively neutral calm to prove itself to be a pleasure or a pain.
This suggests the following interpretation of Socrates’s first, dialectical strike against Glaucon’s infallibilist gloss on the deviant cases. When laying down his affective psychology, Socrates basically stipulates that the intermediate state of affective calm is neither a pleasure nor a pain. (This is thesis 3 of Socrates’s affective psychology, touched upon above). In the remainder of the argument, he then reminds Glaucon that this necessarily entails that the calm cannot prove itself to be a pleasure or a pain – on the hardly disputable assumption that it is not possible for what is not-F and not-G to be both an F and a G. Taking all this together, then, Socrates’s reductio of Glaucon’s position goes something like this:
1. The affectively neutral state of calm is neither a pleasure nor a pain.
2. Juxtaposed with pleasure, the calm is a pain.
[Assumption]
3. Juxtaposed with pain, the calm is a pleasure.
[Assumption]
4. The calm is both a pleasure and a pain.
[From 2, 3]
5. It is not possible for what is not-F and not-G to be both an F and a G.
[Assumption]
6. Contradiction.
[From 1, 4, 5]
Admittedly, this interpretation of Socrates’s first argument against Glaucon might seem a bit deflationary. From a dialectical perspective, however, Socrates’s argumentative move makes perfect sense: he is just pointing out an inconsistency in Glaucon’s belief set and reminds his interlocutor of his earlier dialectical commitments. When Socrates posited his affective psychology – including the claim that the calm is a different affective state, lying in between pleasure and pain, and characterized as neither of the two – Glaucon did not push back and immediately expressed agreement with the proposed model of human affect.[46]
That is to say, the argument just records Socrates’s attempt to trip up Glaucon in light of his earlier commitments. If he believes that calm and pleasure are different, separate affective states and that calm is not a pleasure, he cannot also believe – on pain of contradicting himself – that in some contexts the calm can turn out to be a pleasure. In still other words, and to put it as succinctly and plainly as possible, Socrates points out that the neutral state of calm cannot be a pleasure for the simple reason that it is the neutral state, and not a pleasure. Even though the calm might deceptively appear to be a pleasure, it cannot really be a pleasure: the underlying essence of our mental states or psychological conditions decides whether we are experiencing a pleasure or something else – even if introspection suggests otherwise. The Platonic view, to put it boldly, is that reality – the underlying φύσις or hidden structure – does not care about our feelings.
3.5.2 Sub-Argument 2: The Substantive Argument
Let us turn to Socrates’s second sub-argument located in part [b]. On the face of it, Socrates more or less repeats his previous dialectical strategy: his argument seemingly takes a stipulated theory of our affective psychology for granted – on which pleasure is a κίνησις and the intermediate state of affectively indifferent calm is not – from which it deduces the conclusion that the intermediate state of experiencing neither pleasure nor pain cannot be a pleasure.[47] If we understand the argument along these lines, Socrates again merely points out a clash in his interlocutor’s belief set. Glaucon’s take on the fallibility cases suggests that the calm can be a pleasure, but he also believes that something can only be a pleasure if it is a κίνησις, and that the calm is not a κίνησις.
But if this is all there is to Socrates’s response to Glaucon’s infallibilism, it would render the Deceptive Pleasure Argument rather underwhelming: the existence of false pleasures is derived from merely stipulated theses about human affective psychology which lack further argumentative support. More worryingly, perhaps, such a reading would make the argument vulnerable to argumentative pressure. For what Socrates sees as consequences of his affective psychology, Glaucon might see – or perhaps should have seen – as counterexamples. Rather than accepting that Socrates’s affective psychology entails that we are hedonically fallible, Glaucon could push back and argue that Socrates’s affective psychology simply fails to carve our affective nature at its joints precisely because it entails that we are hedonically fallible.[48]
In sharp contrast to this critical approach, I believe we can read part [b] – and what follows – in a more promising, more substantive, and philosophically more interesting way. The proposal that pleasure is a κίνησις is not just a dogmatic assumption, I will suggest, it is derived from a sophisticated and powerful theory of pleasure – albeit a theory that is still in an embryonic state. The κίνησις passage gives us more to work with than it seems, then, although it requires some effort to extract the relevant information from the text. Additionally, I want to argue that this more detailed account of pleasure sheds important light on various aspects of the Deceptive Pleasure Argument. More specifically, it does not just complement the previous line of thinking, it also lays the groundwork for a more substantive, more cogent argument against Glaucon’s infallibilism.[49]
At the heart of part [b] lies Socrates’s claim that pleasure is a κίνησις: a process (of movement or change) rather than a state (of calm). This is not just what makes a pleasure a pleasure, it also sets pleasure and affective neutrality sharply apart: the latter is not a process but a state of affectively neutral mental calm and freedom from affective disturbances such as pleasure and pain.
The claim that pleasures are – at least partially – picked out by their identity as processes rather than states must find its origin in Plato’s restorative theory of pleasure. (Indeed, Socrates’s affective psychology as a whole – including the denial that calm can be a pleasure – seems to issue from an underlying restorative theory of pleasure.) Throughout the corpus, Plato puts forward more or less developed formulations of such as restorative model of pleasure, according to which pleasure, somehow, involves a process of restoration or replenishment.[50] In the topological analogy, for instance, Socrates seemingly equates “filling” or “fulfilment” (πλήρωσις) and “pleasure” (ἡδονή, 585a3), at another point in the argument he speaks of pleasure as a “filling” (πλήρωσις, 585b1) of an “emptiness” (κένωσις, 585b9), and slightly later, Socrates maintains that “being filled with what is appropriate to nature is pleasant” (τὸ πληροῦσθαι τῶν φύσει προσηκόντων ἡδύ ἐστι, 585d11).
Although these formulations fall short of being careful definitions of pleasure – strictly speaking, it looks as if they just pick out one thing among others (getting (ful)filled) that happens to be pleasant – the context, along with the corpus as a whole, indicates that Socrates is trying to give conditions, or at least a necessary condition, on something’s counting as a pleasure. For something to count as a pleasure, it takes – at least – a restorative process. In addition, there are some indications in the text that Plato also thinks that, for something to count as a pleasure, this restorative process must be (quasi-)perceptually registered and enter awareness.[51]
In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, we find a similar definition of pleasure which combines these two elements and usefully illustrates the Platonic idea that is doing most of the heavy lifting here:
[T6] We may lay it down that pleasure is a κίνησις, a settling-down by which the soul as a whole is perceptibly brought into its natural state of being; and that pain is the opposite (τὴν ἡδονὴν κίνησίν τινα τῆς ψυχῆς καὶ κατάστασιν ἀθρόαν καὶ αἰσθητὴν εἰς τὴν ὑπάρχουσαν φύσιν, λύπην δὲ τοὐναντίον).[52] (Rhetoric 1.11, 1369b33–35)
In sum, Plato treats pleasure as a perceptually registered process of restoring a previously disrupted healthy, natural, and harmonious state.
Critics have been quick to write off Plato’s restorative theory of pleasure. This is not the place to give a full-fledged defense of this model, but two closely related observations are in order: one about the nature of this model, another about its scope.[53] Plato’s detractors often complain that his restorative model of pleasure is merely in a position to account for crude physical pleasures – the pleasure of eating when hungry, for instance, which is quite literally a filling of an emptiness – although it cannot make sense of more elevated pleasures such as the pleasure of listening to Beethoven’s brilliant late string quartets, petting your cat, or learning a new language.
This problem seems to subside, though, if we ascribe a more subtle version of this model of pleasure to Plato. The sharp insight he is trying to capture here, I argue, is that pleasure is awareness of processes of fulfilling diverse needs.[54] That is to say, pleasure indicates, signals, tracks, or represents something else – namely some kind of relative improvement, such as the restoration of a disrupted balance or harmony, a return to our homeostatic state, the satisfaction of one of our desires, an increase in our net level of welfare, or the fulfilment of one of our physical or psychological needs.[55]
The affective calm, by contrast, can be understood as a stable, homeostatic state and a neutral midpoint on the continuum in between pleasure and pain where pain should be understood as a deviation from this neutral middle state and pleasure as a return to it. That being the case, it makes sense that the state of calm was defined, more or less privatively, as the absence of psychological turbulence – such as pleasures, pains, and other πάθη reaching the mind – or “freedom from that sort of thing” (τὴν ἡσυχίαν τοῦ τοιούτου, 583d8).
Getting this restorative model of pleasure in view is important for a proper understanding of at least three aspects of the Deceptive Pleasure Argument. Firstly, the restorative model of pleasure sheds new light on the idea that pleasure and calm are two different things – the basic insight that was driving the first sub-argument against Glaucon. As Plato’s model of pleasure suggests, the former precisely consists in a reparative process during which the latter is restored.
This is not just what sets the two apart, it also explains why the homeostatic state of calm cannot turn out to be a pleasure. Given the fact that κινήσεις and ἡσυχίαι are essentially different entities with separate and independent natures – an identity claim that is rooted in an elegant bit of theory and not just plucked out of thin air – it follows that an affectively neutral state of calm (a ἡσυχία rather than a κίνησις) can never turn out to be a pleasure, even if it looks that way – thanks to juxtaposition with a contrastive condition – and even if it gets mistaken for one.
Secondly, it is in this way that we can see why Socrates claims that something only counts as a pleasure if it is a κίνησις – a claim which, in its turn, helps us understand the second sub-argument. Having laid down the claim that pleasure is a κίνησις, Socrates again trips up Glaucon on the basis of his dialectical commitments, but this time he supplies evidence for his claims. If you believe that pleasure is a restorative process and hence a κίνησις and if you also believe that the intermediate state is a ἡσυχία rather than a restorative process and hence not a κίνησις, you cannot also believe – on pain of contradicting yourself – that, in some contexts, the calm can turn out to be a pleasure. As before, Socrates reduces Glaucon’s thinking to absurdity by pointing out an inconsistency in his belief set:
1. The affectively neutral state of calm is not a κίνησις but a ἡσυχία.
2. If something is not a κίνησις, it is not a pleasure.
3. The affectively neutral state of calm is not a pleasure.
[From 1, 2]
4. Against the backdrop of pain, the affectively neutral state of calm is pleasure.
[Assumption]
5. The affectively neutral state of calm is a pleasure.
[From 4]
6. Contradiction.
[From 3, 5]
With his two sub-arguments in place, both of which lean on the claim that pleasure is a restorative process and thus a κίνησις, Socrates concludes that “it cannot be right to think that the absence of pain is pleasant” (τὸ μὴ ἀλγεῖν ἡδὺ ἡγεῖσθαι, 584a4–6).
Thirdly and lastly, appreciating that pleasures are – at least partially – picked out by their identity as a restorative process can also help us come to grips with Plato’s deeply counter-intuitive proposal that there are such things as deceptive pleasures or hedonic illusions. Spelling this out in more detail is the project of the next section.
4 Deceptive Pleasures or Hedonic Illusions
In part [d] of [T5], Socrates offers a substantive account – some kind of error theory – which explains why agents mistakenly report that they are experiencing pleasure when they actually find themselves in a state of affective neutrality, even though the two are importantly different from each other – as part [a] and [b] had suggested. Glaucon had cautiously suggested that these individuals might indeed experience genuine pleasure, arguing that “at that moment, this, the calm, perhaps turns out to be pleasant” (τοῦτο […] τότε ἡδὺ ἴσως καὶ ἀγαπητὸν γίγνεται, ἡσυχία, 583d10–11). However, Socrates rejects this attempt to defuse these alleged cases of fallibility, responding that “at that moment, this, the calm, merely appears to be pleasant” without actually “really being so” (οὐκ ἔστιν τοῦτο ἀλλὰ φαίνεται παρὰ τὸ ἀλγεινὸν ἡδὺ […] τότε ἡ ἡσυχία, 584a7–10).
Socrates suggests, in other words, that the victims of this hedonic mistake go wrong in their self-ascriptions of pleasure for the simple reason that the calm seems to be pleasant without really being pleasant.[56] Their pleasure is merely apparent – what presents itself as a pleasure is not the real thing – and this means that we are dealing here with deceptive pleasures or hedonic illusions, situations where a pleasure’s appearance and its reality come radically apart.
From a Platonic perspective, drawing a connection between pleasure and illusion comes naturally – as I previously suggested. In the Protagoras, the Gorgias, and especially book 10 of the Republic, Socrates links our susceptibility to illusions and our appetitive desire for pleasure and locates them in a cognitively impaired part of the soul.[57] As Moss and others have shown, this lowest part of the soul is stuck at the level of εἰκασία which basically means that it is out of touch with reality. Because it only exercises the lowest level of cognition and is unable to avail itself of the rational power of logismos, this psychological part is confined to the use of unreliable images which is to say that it is unable to distinguish mere appearances, imitations, or faint adumbrations from what counts as a manifestation of reality.[58]
As Socrates explains in Republic 10, “trompe l’oeil shadow-painting, conjuring, and other forms of trickery have powers that are little short of magical” (ἡ σκιαγραφία ἐπιθεμένη γοητείας οὐδὲν ἀπολείπει, καὶ ἡ θαυματοποιία καὶ αἱ ἄλλαι πολλαὶ τοιαῦται μηχαναί, 602d2–4). Exploiting the fact that most human beings have the tendency to naively accept appearances without scrutinizing them by means of their rational powers – “a weakness in our nature” (ἡμῶν τῷ παθήματι τῆς φύσεως, 602d2) – these forms of deception lure us into mistaking misleading appearances for what is real, thus causing “error[s]” (πλάνην) and “all kinds of confusions in our souls” (πᾶσά τις ταραχὴ δήλη, 602d1–2).
Although a handful of commentators have appreciated the fact that deception plays a pivotal role in the Deceptive Pleasure Argument, these scholars typically point to pleasure’s tendency to distort our view of the good and mislead us about what matters.[59] On this approach, the “confusion in our soul” caused by pleasure is an evaluative or ethical error: pleasure tricks us by making things seem good which are not really good. Moss, for instance, offers the following reading of Plato’s take on the connection between pleasure and illusion in the Republic which is mainly informed by material coming from book 4 and 10:
Plato concludes in the Republic [that] desires for pleasure are very deficient as desires for good. Illusion-bound desires, like those of the appetitive soul, are desires for what appears good, but these desires ignore the agent’s more reliable thought about what really is good. (Moss 2006, 532)
According to Moss, then, the hedonic trickery lies not in the pleasures themselves, but in the appetitive desires for pleasure. These deceptive desires mislead us about external objects beyond ourselves, portraying them as pleasant and therefore good – at least for those who cannot distinguish appearances from reality – when, in truth, they are not genuinely good. While in the grip of an appetitive desire for pleasure, say, a second helping of cake might seem good – merely because it seems pleasant – although an all-things-considered rational judgment would be able to pierce through this evaluative illusion and tell me that it would be better to abstain – perhaps because I am trying to lose weight.
This evaluative reading fits book 4 and book 10 of the Republic with no rough edges, but book 9’s Deceptive Pleasure Argument is clearly picking out another, distinct type of illusion. As we have seen, Socrates is exploring situations where the pleasures themselves are not what they pretend to be. The issue here is not that some pleasures or associated desires mislead us about what matters, but rather that what passes itself off as a pleasure may, in reality, be nothing more than a flawed imitation or hollow semblance of true pleasure.
Indeed, these cases must constitute the limiting case of hedonic illusions. When people falsely believe they are experiencing pleasure, appearance and reality come apart completely and the victims of this error find themselves behind ‘a falsifying veil’ of illusion which conceals a significant part of their world.[60] It is not just the case that they are deceived about the evaluative status, the size, the intensity, or the intentional object of their pleasure – types of hedonic illusion that receive extensive discussion elsewhere in the Platonic corpus – they are deeply mistaken about their very own affective make-up and the very affective state they take themselves to be in. Although they think they are in a state of pleasure, they actually find themselves in a state of calm which gets mistaken for a state of pleasure thanks to a contrast effect with a state of pain. When this happens, a non-pleasure successfully wears the mask of pleasure and manages to get itself mistaken for one.
To see how the restorative model of pleasure elucidates Plato’s idea that a pleasure’s reality and appearance can come apart radically, we can begin by noting that Glaucon and most modern infallibilist critics reject hedonic fallibilism on the grounds that pleasure is nothing more than a chunk of seeming picked out by its immediate phenomenological quality to which we have privileged, potentially infallible, access.[61]
On the view lurking in the background of the Deceptive Pleasure Argument, in sharp contrast, there is more to pleasure than meets the introspective eye. Plato suggests that pleasure is more than a feeling and not just a blind surge affect whose reality is exhausted by its immediate felt quality. More precisely, Plato seemingly treats pleasure as a complex consisting of two aspects or ‘faces’: there is an internal, subjective, or phenomenal face (the introspectively available features of a pleasure) and there is an external, objective face (the underlying restorative process of having one’s needs fulfilled). Both conditions – both faces of pleasure – state different, individually necessary, perhaps jointly sufficient conditions of pleasure.[62]
Crucially, though, the internal aspect – the felt quality, phenomenal dimension, or what Socrates calls the “appearance” (φάντασμα) – is not sufficient for something to truly qualify as a real pleasure. Without an underlying restorative process, we are left with a deceptive, misleading simulacrum of pleasure – a mere trick of the mind and a deficient imitation of the real thing. For an affective state to count as a real pleasure, instead, something over and beyond its subjective, experiential, raw feel needs to obtain. In more specific terms, the appearance itself must be properly brought about by an underlying restorative process: it must not just feel as if our needs are being met, our needs must also really be met.
Another way to put this is to say that, for Plato, pleasure is a veridical perception of a restorative process of return to some healthy, natural, harmonious state. This is tantamount to saying that something only counts as a pleasure if it is a veridical appearance of having one of our needs met. In the absence of the underlying process of having one’s needs met and being restored to a homeostatic state, the pleasure we think we are experiencing is actually a defective and deceptive simulacrum of the real thing.
This way of framing Plato’s proposal suggests that cases of hedonic illusion are very similar to cases of perceptual illusion where, roughly speaking, some x appears other than it really is.[63] Just as a straight stick might look bent while submerged in water and just as something concave might look convex – to use Plato’s own examples (602c10–d1) – the affectively indifferent calm might appear other than it really is. Juxtaposed with an affectively negative state of pain, the affectively neutral state might strike one as a pleasure, even though it is actually not a pleasure, but a state of calm.
More precisely speaking, the view here is that the juxtaposition of an affectively negative state of pain with an affectively indifferent state of calm creates the illusion of there really being an underlying restorative, need-fulfilling process and thus an affectively positive state of pleasure, although, in reality, there is just the neutral state of psychological calm temporarily masquerading as pleasure and tricking its victims into self-ascribing a pleasure that is not really there.
All of this is a matter of deception, though. The mere fact that a stick looks bent while submerged in water does not mean it really is bent, the mere fact that lukewarm water feels cold when contrasted with hot water does not mean it really is cold, and the mere fact that, in the Checker shadow illusion, two tiles of the exact same darkness seem to be of different color when they are partly shadowed by another object does not mean they really are of a different color – similarly, or so Plato wants us to believe, the mere fact that the state of calm seems pleasant when juxtaposed with pain does not mean it really is pleasant.
Plato can make this claim, as we saw before, because he believes that pleasure is more than just a feeling. Beyond the subjective, felt quality of the experience, there must be an underlying restorative process that ensures our needs are truly getting fulfilled. Without this objective correlate out there in the external world, one can mistakenly self-ascribe a pleasure simply because there is a felt sense, a felt appearance of such an underlying restorative process occurring.
However, as Socrates concludes in part [d], these hedonic appearances are deceptive: they are unreliable and untrustworthy, they do not reflect the truth about pleasure, and they are rooted in some kind of misleading trickery. In cases of hedonic fallibility, the appearance is present – it feels as if one’s needs are being met, and there is something it is like to experience the misleading pleasure – but the actual restorative process is absent. This makes the pleasure a deceptive rather than a truthful, authentic pleasure.
5 Conclusion
The Deceptive Pleasure Argument in book 9 of Plato’s Republic is often dismissed scornfully. Because it is hard to see how the introspectively based belief that I am currently experiencing pleasure could be mistaken, many interpretations dismiss Plato’s argument outright – even though it is intended to be the “greatest and most decisive” blow against the challenge posed by Socrates’s interlocutors. Another set of interpretations attempts to rescue Plato from himself by proposing readings that lack textual support, suggesting the argument actually defends an entirely different yet philosophically more palatable thesis.
In this article, I have proposed an alternative interpretation that is rooted in the most natural and straightforward reading of the text, while also aiming to clarify Plato’s concept of hedonic fallibilism. The key to understanding this puzzling idea lies in recognizing that, for Plato, pleasures are not exhausted by their phenomenology. For something to count as a pleasure, it takes something over and above and external to the feeling of the relevant experience to turn that experience into a genuine pleasure. In addition to the phenomenal aspect – the pleasurable felt sense of the experience – an underlying restorative process of having one of our needs fulfilled is required.
Deceptive pleasures thus mislead us about some way the world really is – they trick us into believing our needs are being fulfilled when, in fact, they are not. Because any representation can misrepresent, and any appearance can fail to latch onto reality, Plato believes there is nothing weird or counter-intuitive about the idea that there can be errors in our hedonic tone. When not brought about in the usual way – that is, by a genuine underlying restorative process in which one of our needs is getting satisfied – our so-called pleasures are not what they seem to be.[64]
If there is the felt appearance of having one’s needs fulfilled without the underlying restorative process, we are dealing with a case of hedonic illusion akin to perceptual illusion. It seems as if we are experiencing pleasure – as if we undergo some relative improvement – although we are not. In such a situation, as Plato has it, our putative pleasure is a mere trick, eidōlon, or trompe l’oeil painting: an insubstantial, deficient, specious, false simulacrum of the real deal that drives a wedge between our experience of the world and what is actually going on out there. Importantly, the impoverished status of these pseudo-pleasures is not introspectively accessible: like any other illusion, a deceptive pleasure cannot be directly seen for what it is – and this adds to the tragic foolishness of those who are taken in by these untruthful pleasures.
This interpretive option is attractive and deserves more scholarly attention than it has received. If my reading is correct, Plato’s hedonic fallibilism is not only more intelligible and cogent than commonly assumed, but it also fits seamlessly within the overarching aims of the Republic. For unlike the first argument of book 9, and like the arguments of book 1, the Deceptive Pleasure Argument can be read as an immanent critique of a particular ethical outlook – one initially articulated by Thrasymachus and later refined by Glaucon and Adeimantus.[65] Like “the majority of people” – who regard their pleasures as “important things” (μεγάλων τινῶν) and maintain that without pleasure one is “hardly living at all” (οὐδὲ ζῶντες), let alone “living well” (εὖ ζῶντες, 329a7–8) – Socrates’s interlocutors appear to operate under a tacit commitment to hedonism.[66] Seen this way, the Deceptive Pleasure Argument targets the internal incoherence of a popular (hedonistic) evaluative framework: by defending the possibility of deceptive pleasures – pleasures that are not what they pretend to be – Plato shows that pleasure and authentic happiness or well-being can come apart. The argument thus meets Socrates’s interlocutors on their own ground: even if one grants their evaluative framework, which equates or at least strongly links pleasure and well-being, the argument shows that the unjust life fails to deliver what it promises – its pleasures cannot be trusted.
But even if implicit or explicit hedonists remain unmoved by this argument – perhaps they refuse to accept the idea that pleasures are picked out by an underlying restorative process rather than the phenomenal quality of the experience – the later parts of Republic 9 will tighten the screw. There, in a dense and vexed passage, Plato appears to suggest that the phronimos experiences a distinctive kind of ecstatic pleasure – “the pleasure of the soul itself by itself” (τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ἡδονὴν αὐτῆς καθ’ αὑτὴν, 485d11) – which is phenomenally superior to non-ideal pleasures. When the soul rises above the sensible world and gains cognitive access to the unseen order of the Forms – “getting near what really is and having intercourse with it” (πλησιάσας καὶ μιγεὶς τῷ ὄντι ὄντως, 490b4–5) – this transcendent experience brings about a kind of supreme restoration. The resulting pleasure is, Plato claims, no less than 729 times more pleasant than the shallow and distorted pleasures experienced by the tyrant.
That the interpretation I defend here can explain why Socrates calls the argument the “strongest and most decisive” of book 9’s strikes against his interlocutors’ challenge to justice is an important second benefit of my reading, besides the fact that it can respect the text as it stands. There is a third and final advantage. On the reading defended here, Republic book 9 develops a historically influential idea that is not just interesting, but also worth taking seriously. In brief, Plato is suggesting that our pleasures are a form of openness to the world: when things go well – when our pleasures are true rather than false, as a Platonist would put it – they do not cast a veil between us and reality, but supply us with a fragment of the world.[67] The Deceptive Pleasure Argument thus marks the earliest attempt in Western philosophy to formulate the striking idea that, like our beliefs, our pleasures should get things right.
Acknowledgement
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Oxford Graduate Conference (with special thanks to Roger Crisp for his critical comments and helpful discussion), the Annual Ancient Philosophy Workshop in Austin (online), Lust und Unlust in der antiken Philosophie in Erlangen–Nuremberg (online) (with thanks to Dorothea Frede for generously reading a full draft), two events in Groningen, and the Annual Modeling Human Happiness Conference in Oslo. I am grateful to all these audiences for their input. Special thanks to Adriaan Bon and Marleen Ritzema – who midwifed the central idea of this paper (many, many years ago) – as well as to Job van Eck, Thomas Johansen, Jessica Moss, Lodi Nauta, Tamer Nawar (more than anyone else), Katja Vogt, Gerry Wakker, and Stephen White. Some of the research and writing for this paper was carried out in the context of the Modeling Human Happiness project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. I also thank an anonymous referee for Archiv for their careful reading and constructive suggestions as well as Carlo DaVia for his editorial assistance.
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