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Your Arms Too Short to Box with God: False Pleasures in Plato’s Philebus

At a certain point in the dialogue, Socrates asks Protarchus whether “in the case of the experiences of any ensouled beings,” that is, in the case of human beings, “the one experiencing them is always aware of all of [our pleasures and pains]” (43b). This question points to the beginning of a discussion on the role of attention and cognition in the realization and categorization of pleasures and pains, a role that turns out to be very large indeed. In answering Socrates’ initial question, Protarchus replies that no, of course it is not so that we are aware of all them. Indeed, as says, we are “almost entirely unaware of everything of the kind” (43b). This seems correct as, to a large degree, we do categorize pains and pleasures according to a cognitive classification.

For example, knowing that our muscles are tense and stiff, we undergo painful massages, and seem to greatly enjoy the experience. The enjoyment of a massage depends on recognizing that one is being healed, knots released from our muscles, or we could easily surmise that we were being injured. Even more straightforwardly, we are often unaware of some of the vast number of stimuli, pleasant and painful, that flit across our bodies, due to the overwhelming number of sensations that we are constantly being exposed to. It requires a shift in attention to the sensation in question, along with the second, already stated judgment, to determine whether any sensation or action is indeed pleasurable or painful. Quite a complex apparatus for such an apparently simple, passive act such as perception.

Continuing on this point, once we have been shown the cognitive element in our perception of pleasure, the possibility of false pleasure can be raised. If perception requires cognitive processing, a failure to process correctly could lead to falsely perceiving something painful as pleasurable. If we base our cognitive analysis on a false premise, for instance, we might wrongly say something we feel is pleasurable, when it really should not give us pleasure at all.

This type of false judgment is what Socrates is getting at in naming the series of false pleasures he does. He names a list of feelings that include: “anger, fear, longing, dirge, eros, emulation, envy, and everything of the kind” (47E), all of them examples of false pleasures. It is unnecessary to discuss every one. Even taking one examples, anger, sufficiently capture the sense in which these can be said to be cases of mistaken cognitive judgment. In describing anger, Socrates asks: “Isn’t it the case that we’ll find [anger] full of indescribable pleasures?” (48a). It is not immediately obvious that anger is a pleasure, in all or even most cases. Anger is generally thought of as a negative emotion. Someone wrongs me. The injustice causes a welling up of emotion, along with physical symptoms that are rather like being ill. Perhaps the stomach drops, the face pales, the fists shake, and the jaw tightens painfully. Certainly none of these are pleasant sounding, or feeling. What, then, is the pleasure involved?

Socrates goes on, as if in response, that if we are doubtful about the pleasure of anger, we “have to recall” a certain set of phrases, taken from Achilles: “which sets even the very wise to anger/And is far sweeter than dripping honey” (48a). There is something familiar about the idea of anger being sweet, even as it scorches the one feeling it. In many cases of anger, there is a pleasurable feeling rather like a rush of adrenaline. In our moments of rage, we imagine that we are powerful, strong in response to the wrong that harms us. In our anger, it is not uncommon for us to imagine that the one who has wronged us is in pain, or punished. Thus, the pleasure of anger lies chiefly in imagining that we have the power to see those who wrong us punished, even if it is simply in our minds and we never attempt any physical action.

It is this pleasure, the pleasure that comes from imagined power, that leads to the falsity of the pleasure. When we imagine the pleasure of righting a wrong against us, we imagine that there is an injustice to which we are deserving of reparation. We imagine that we have the power to right the wrong, in the retributivist sense, by causing the one who wronged us to be punished. This imagining, however, is based on the idea that we actually have the power to right wrongs done to us. In most cases, we do not have that power. Say there is a hurricane that causes my expensive sports car to flip over and bash itself against a telephone pole. When the storm is over, and I see my car destroyed, my anger is directed at—what? The pleasure comes in imagining the situation righted, but who or what exactly do I imagine is being punished for destroying my car? The storm? The anger in this case seems to be directed at the world in general, a world which should seek to treat me justly. But why would I think the world is structured that way, to give me a special place in its order where my wishes are never to be countermanded? To think so appears to be a kind of egoism impossible to sustain.

This is true even in so-called cases of “righteous anger.” Elie Wiesel describes the moment when American soldiers came to liberate Auschwitz . Upon entering the camp and seeing the devestation inside, one of the American soldiers falls to his knees and flies into an absolute fit of rage, rising and tearing at everything around him, screaming and swearing. This case of seemingly pure anger, regarded by Wiesel as a sign that humanity had returned to his life, is a case of anger at broad human injustice, stemming from a sense of empathy and human brotherhood—the sense that humanity itself has been wronged. The anger here appears to have a clearer, more human target—the Nazi party, perhaps especially the SS guards who kept the concentration camp running, the kapos who made the prisoners’ lives even more hellish, or even Hitler himself. But this anger too seems to assume that there can be an undoing of such a horrific situation. The idea is that this should not be allowed to happen: “I care about this, so it should not have been allowed;” or perhaps, in this case, more “this should not have been allowed” more generally. But to say that is to think that one had the power to stop it. Clearly, no single American soldier, including the one in this story, had that power.

Stepping back, what then is the falseness of the pleasure? It is based on a mistaken view of human power. Rather, if the one feeling anger realized the truth of his own limitations, what he can do and what is impossible for him, he would receive no pleasure. The processing of something that happens to him, something that should be a pain (the pain of being wronged, being hurt, having one’s plans fail, etc.) becomes a pleasure due to a mistaken sense of self.

Saying that the pleasure of anger is based on incorrect assumptions about the world seems correct, but to say that, because the pleasure is based on incorrect knowledge, it is somehow not true is a strange idea. Surely when I feel pleasure, though I may be imperfect or even twisted, the pleasure itself is real. Right? Imagine another scenario in which someone were to say that the pain I feel is incorrect. Imagine that I broke my knee, an activity that assuredly is quite painful. If someone were to come up to me as I yelled (“Oh God, my knee!” or something to that effect) to tell me that I was incorrect, that I was not in pain and my knee was fine, I would surely think that man mad (or perhaps simply in very bad taste). Similarly with pleasure. Though the object of the pleasure felt in anger may be nonexistent (as my broken knee in the above example was not), to say that the feeling itself is invalid should strike the reader as odd. How could Socrates truly say that something straightforwardly perceived is false?

To say that it is false is to say that a true perception of the world would erase the pleasure. We have seen how pleasures and pains are inseparable from cognition. We see here how inseparable they are, and if our cognition is based on false pretense, then the pleasure is false, or mistaken. If we are to base our observations and pleasures on the truth of the world, then surely the pleasure would be absent with proper understanding.

But to say that they cloud the truth—is that to say that they are escapable, or undesirable? Imagine someone without such emotions. Is there not something inhuman about such a creature? A creature who is unaffected when wronged, unmoved when those close by die.

Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras was confronted with his son's death, he replied stoically, I knew my child was mortal.

Surely these false pleasures are negative in that they cloud our sense of the truth, keep us from knowing and feeling in a way that is congruent with nature.
But is the point that anger would cease, that sorrow would cease, or that they would simply lose the tinge of pleasure that is based on our incorrect assumptions. What would they change about our humanity? We would feel emotions still, simply emotions with true targets. There would still be anger and sorrow, perhaps, but without the hints of pleasure that make the emotions so powerful. That seems to be a more powerful suggestion. In this way we retain the affective nature of our humanity and the importance of reacting to our loved ones, oriented on a correct acknowledgement of our limited scope of power in the world. By acknowledging the limits of our power, we can know in a way that we might not be capable of without knowing our limits. We can see the truth, and come closer to our own truth, perhaps.


It's not done, as you can see, but I find the question interesting. Can we actually say that the pleasures are "false?" Incorrect, sure, but false? They wouldn't exist with a proper view of the world, sure, but they don't exist now? I still have my doubts.