Plato’s Philebus: What Is False Pleasure?

Plato’s Philebus is a dialogue about the value of pleasure, knowledge, wisdom, and reason. Which should be pursued for their own sake, and which should be prioritized last? Throughout the debate with his interlocutor about the nature of pleasure, Plato argues that pleasure, like judgments, can be true or false. But feelings can’t be true or false—they just are. So, is pleasure just a feeling, or was Plato correct? This article analyzes Plato’s argument for false pleasures in greater detail.

In the Philebus, we follow a dialogue between Socrates and Protarchus, where each offers an answer to what, for humans, is the best sort of life. Or, what kind of life is most akin to the Good? Socrates (to everyone’s surprise) argues for wisdom, while Protarchus argues that pleasure is actually closer to the Good.

Amid this contest, Socrates, somewhat out of nowhere, asserts that there are “false pleasures” in the same sort of way that we say that there are false sentences.

SOCRATES: Shall we say that these pains and pleasures are true or false, or rather that some of them are true, but not others?

PROTARCHUS: But how could there be false pleasures or pains, Socrates?

SOCRATES: Well, how could there be true or false fears, true or false expectations, true or false judgments, Protarchus? (36c – d)

The Book, the Scribe, and the Painter

In an effort to show Protarchus that pleasures can indeed be true or false, Socrates tells him that the “soul is comparable to a book” and proceeds to give us the Scribe/Painter analogy:

SOCRATES: If memory and perceptions concur with other impressions at a particular occasion, then they seem to me to inscribe words in our soul, as it were. And if what is written is true, then we form a true judgment and a true account of the matter. But if what our scribe writes is false, then the result will be the opposite of the truth.

PROTARCHUS: I quite agree, and I accept this way of putting it.

SOCRATES: Do you also accept that there is another craftsman at work in our soul at the same time?

PROTARCHUS: What kind of craftsman?

SOCRATES: A painter who follows the scribe and provides illustrations to his words in the soul.

PROTARCHUS: How and when do we say he does this work?

SOCRATES: When a person takes his judgments and assertions directly from sight or any other sense-perception and then views the images he has formed inside himself, corresponding to those judgments and assertions. Or is it not something of this sort that is going on in us?

PROTARCHUS: Quite definitely.

SOCRATES: And are not the pictures of the true judgments and assertions true, and the pictures of the false ones false? (39a – c)

What should we make of this analogy? It is far from clear what Socrates was trying to illustrate, so it can be helpful to try and make parallels between the analogy and the ideas being debated. We have three parts—scribe, painter, and book—so let’s analyze the role of these parts in more detail.

The Book

This one is fairly easy to determine—the Book is an analogy for our souls. In this analogy, the soul is a recording of our beliefs, knowledge, passions, and fears.

It isn’t the role of the Book to be a record of only the true judgments we make. It’s more like a stream of consciousness of everything flowing through our minds. From your deepest desires to the awful memory of saying “you too” when someone wished you a happy birthday, it’s all in the Book of your soul.

One interpretation is that the Scribe corresponds to our judgments, which can be true or false, uncontroversially. For example, if you think about the sentence “Tolkien wrote The Lord of The Rings,” you would have a true judgment. If you consider “C.S. Lewis wrote The Lord of The Rings,” you would have a false judgment.

An interesting point is that sometimes we cannot know whether a judgment is true or false. However, there is still a fact of the matter. If you attempt to make a judgment of the number of hairs on your head, you are sure to make a false judgment (unless you are Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). However, there is still a true number that would result in a true judgment.

In any case—true or false—the Scribe writes down these judgments, which include our beliefs, memories, and hopes for the future. The Scribe will write true things in my soul if I make true judgments. When I make false judgments, the Scribe will proceed to write false things in my soul.

The Painter

Moving on to the other side of the analogy, the role of the Painter still needs clarification. Later in the Philebus, Socrates says that the “wicked people nevertheless have pleasures painted in their minds,” which leads most to conclude that the Painter corresponds to the pleasures.

After the Scribe has written down the judgment, the Painter will then create imagery of this judgment. This might seem redundant at first blush; after all, we already have the Scribes written recording of the judgment. However, the role of the Painter is to record a representation of pleasure, not our judgments.

Here is an example to illustrate how this could work. If my cat flips over and shows me his belly, I may make the judgment, “My cat is going to let me give him a belly rub.” Since this is a rare treat, I experience the pleasure of anticipation. The Scribe will then take the judgment and write it in the book of my soul. The Painter will then take this judgment and paint it. It’s a happy, beautiful image of my hand on my overweight cat’s big, furry belly.

If my cat, indeed, allows me to rub his belly, then the judgment would be true, and so would the object of the painting—just because the painting corresponds to the judgment, which correctly corresponds to reality. So, in this instance, I have had a true pleasure.

However, if I go to rub my cat’s belly and am instead met with teeth and claws, then the written judgment would be false. The Painter’s art is still the same beautiful image of what I believed would be a wonderful moment. However, this moment would, once again, fail to become reality. So, the pleasures of the painting would be false—the painting corresponds to the judgment, which does not correspond to reality. This would be a case of false pleasure, according to Socrates.

In both cases, I did indeed experience a sense of pleasure; however, only the first scenario was a case of true pleasure. At this point, Protarchus concedes and agrees that pleasures can be categorized as true or false.

If we take these ideas and attempt to integrate them into our modern world, is there room for the idea of pleasures as true or false? The recent existence of virtual objects in video games, the cloud, or even movies complicates this conception of pleasure.

What would Plato say about pleasures that arise from virtual entities? The intuitive answer is that the pleasure derived from a virtual object would always have to be of the false variety. It’s not, strictly speaking, real. We may even turn to the following passage from the Philebus to justify this intuition:

SOCRATES: Do you really want to claim that there is no one who, either in a dream or awake, either in madness or any other delusion, sometimes believes he is enjoying himself, while in reality he is not doing so, or believes he is in pain while he is not? (36e)

I am neither mad nor deluded when engaged in a virtual fantasy world (i.e., Skyrim, The Witcher Series, Stardew Valley, etc.). However, there is still a distinct break between what happens in reality and the pleasures experienced in this virtual world. In physical reality, I am curled in my armchair with a game controller in hand; in virtual reality, I am crouched in the shadows, aiming my arrow at a bandit’s heart.

Are Virtual Worlds Compatible With Plato’s False Pleasure Argument?

Even though it seems plain that he would have condemned virtual experience as false, Plato could not have dreamed of the world’s technology as it is today. So, maybe we are drawing too hasty a conclusion. Possibly, there is an interpretation that would not banish all pleasures of virtual reality to the realm of the false.

It is true that, in reality, those entities are just strings of ones, zeros, polygons, and logic gates. But when I say, “There is a bandit behind that rock,” I am not trying to convey something about computer programming that these objects can be reduced to. I want to say that there is a truth about the bandit and the rock, a truth that I can make decisions with—should I throw a dagger around the rock or cast down some magical fire from above?

The information about the binary code is irrelevant to answering these questions because it has very little to do with the truth about the virtual scenario I’m making a judgment about. The truth of this belief is not reducible to the ones and zeros.

So, how could there be room for both? Ultimately, this would depend on how one enters the virtual world, the nature of one’s belief in virtual events and entities, the boundaries of one’s mind, and the interpretation of pleasure in Philebus.