Mis-apparent Pleasure: Philebus 41a7-42c3

Central to Plato\u27s conceptualization of the nature of pleasure is an engagement with visual imagery. For instance, in Protagoras Socrates\u27 use of the hedonic calculus in his argument against the possibility of akrasia employs a visual perspectival analogy. In Republic 9, Socrates\u27 argument for false pleasures employs a metaphor from visual illusion in painting. Once again, in Philebus Socrates\u27 argument for false anticipatory pleasure employs the metaphor of a painter in the soul whose pictures have truth-apt content. The present paper focuses on another passage, at Philebus (41a7-42c3), that appeals to visual imagery in its attempt to explain a certain form of pleasure. Here too the argument concerns the possibility of false pleasure. In the course of explanation, Plato has Socrates recycle visual imagistic ideas from all of the earlier treatments, that is, from Protagoras, Republic, and earlier in Philebus. This itself is noteworthy. But more significantly, from the perspective of Plato\u27s fundamental philosophical commitments, is the argument Socrates makes for the truth-aptness of the pleasure. Precisely, Socrates argues that the pleasure in question is truth-apt insofar as its appearance (phaenomenon) is truth-apt. What is remarkable about this claim is that Socrates regards appearance here as independent of belief (doxa). This is in striking contrast to the Eleatic Stranger\u27s view in Sophist that phantasiai may be truth-apt insofar as they are hybrids of belief and appearance. If my construal of the Philebus passage is correct, then, Plato here commits to the view that (a) there are belief-free appearances and (b) these appearances have truth-apt content