Derek van Zoonen

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.

At Philebus 53c4–55a12, Plato’s Socrates identifies pleasure as an ontologically inferior “becoming” (γένεσις) rather than a “being” (οὐσία) and then uses this information to infer that pleasure, somehow, lacks value. This paper argues that Plato’s γένεσις argument is not about the goodness of individual, particular episodes of pleasure but instead targets the identification of pleasure as the good around which we ought to organize our lives. It also shows that the argument is made up of two subarguments—the argument from finality and the argument from a life not worth living—both of which conclude that, as a γένεσις, pleasure cannot be the good our life as a whole is aimed at reaching. Read in this way, the much maligned γένεσις argument turns out to be more cogent and more interesting than is usually thought.