Deceptive Pleasure in Plato’s Republic

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.