Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 52 by Victor Caston;

Author:Victor Caston; [Caston, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192528339
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

This describes being pleased that (as one supposes, truly or falsely) one is about to enjoy oneself. Yet that is to be distinguished from enjoying oneself in one’s imagination. It suits the former that I should picture myself doing something (which is what Socrates describes); integral to the latter is picturing doing something. As Richard Wollheim distinguished, picturing doing a thing exemplifies central imagining, within which one assumes the point of view of a subject, whereas picturing oneself doing a thing exemplifies acentral imagining, within which one imagines a scene from no point of view that is occupied within it.10 What might aptly be called a pre-experiencing of an anticipated pleasure would share a point of view with that pleasure: imagining enjoying myself in some way, I already enjoy myself in that way within my imagination.11 Yet what Socrates describes is seeing oneself represented within a picture—an imagining that, in Wollheim’s terms, is not central but acentral.12

Thus it appears that Plato’s conception of an anticipatory pleasure is not actually one that brings forward the pleasure anticipated either psycho-physically or experientially. So we should count it neither as a full pleasure of replenishment nor as its equivalent within the mind.13 Rather, we should accept that these pages of the Philebus in effect distinguish two varieties of pleasure, the one primary, the other derivative, of which only the first is a pleasure of restoration. Given that the one variety depends upon the other, this conception of pleasure is so far unified to a degree. It is later reiterated that anticipatory pleasures arising from physical depletion involve a mixture of pleasure and pain:

When there is pain over and against pleasures, or pleasure against pain, both are finally joined in a mixed state … It is the deprivation that gives rise to the desire for replenishment, and while the anticipation is pleasant, the deprivation itself is painful. (47 c 4–7)

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