Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog

During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)

You can download the pdf version here.

The table of contents looks like this:

Preface

Activities

  Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · Philosophy

Goals

  Beauty · Excellence of character · Eudaimonia

Theory

  Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · Present

References

Time-traveling to the sequoia trees

Vertigo (from which the visual motto of this blog comes) has sparked quite some reflection, both in discussions, aesthetic and otherwise, and in movies themselves, as intertextual references.

The most directly inspired follow-ups are of course Chris Marker's La Jetée and Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. The memorable scene under the sequoia trees in Vertigo, in which Kim Novak's character points out the dates of her birth and death (and we get the feeling that she really is possessed by a ghost in this moment, a ghost who reflects on its own former life, its beginning and end), returns in both later science fiction movies as a quotation.

The past and the future, two forms of unreality which we can become particularly desperate wishing to travel to, are never out of sight in all three films; but the two later ones are imaginative science-fiction films that use time travel whereas Vertigo was based on other motifs.

More precisely: the past and the future are expressly sought in both movies; their character as unreal is dramatized by first making them accessible (and apparently even changeable), which is made possible by the device of time travel, and then bringing them into the paradoxical shape of a story knot.

Vertigo, on the other hand, never focuses so baldly on either the past or the future. In Vertigo, the past exerts its influence in the shape of history (personal history, as in Scottie's fear of heights; family history, as in the fake Madeleine's unhappy and mad ancestor; and local history, as illustrated in the melancholic reflections in Gavin Elster's office, the San Francisco bookstore, or finally under the sequoia trees); the future looms in deceptive suggestiveness, in dreams, and in the shape of a plot which drives relentlessly towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion. Character traits and dramatic constellation have in Vertigo the function that in La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys is taken over by the science-fiction devices of time travel and story knots.

Eros and in-betweenness

In my recent post on the connection between lack (and unreality) to eros in the Symposium, I probably went way too fast. Let's look more carefully into this.

So, in the text we repeatedly find this idea of something being 'in between' two opposite extremes. Love of wisdom is 'in between' wisdom itself and ignorance (Symp 203e–204b); eros is neither a god nor a mortal, but 'in between' (202d); and he is also not ugly nor beautiful, but again he's 'in between' (201e–202b). The whole setup is of course designed to explain the drive that our love (for beauty, or for wisdom) so obviously has: by attributing some characteristics to eros as a god (or whatever he is if he's not a god but something 'in between' gods and mortals) we get some clarity about our idea of love. So let's get clear about in-betweenness as a first step.

1) When it is suggested (by Diotima, who is teaching Socrates here) that eros is in fact a philosopher, the full text reads:

He is in between wisdom and ignorance [...] In fact, you see, none of the gods loves wisdom or wants to become wise — for they are wise — and no one else who is wise already loves wisdom; on the other hand, no one who is ignorant will love wisdom either or want to become wise. For what's especially difficult about being ignorant is that you are content with yourself, even though you're neither beautiful nor good nor intelligent. If you don't think you need anything, of course you won't want what you don't think you need. (204a)[1]

What does it mean to be 'in between' wisdom and ignorance? Sometimes being 'in between' can mean to take a position on some spectrum, being neither at one nor the other extreme, but somewhere in the middle. For instance, water (under normal circumstances such as pressure and so on) will have some temperature between the freezing point and the boiling point: a given bit of water will usually be 'in between' these two extremes.

But that seems not to be a good model for what we're talking about here: it's not as if the amount of wisdom in a given person were somewhere on a spectrum between zero (total ignorance) and some maximum value (full wisdom). Not only is wisdom surely not the sort of thing that can be quantified in this manner, but this model also doesn't include the element of wanting that seems to play a role: those who are ignorant aren't just ignorant (at zero position), they also don't want any wisdom, and likewise, those who are wise are not just at the saturation point (or maximum position), but they also don't want any wisdom. So there is another dimension here that we have to consider.

Let's try and plot this on a diagram. There are the two dimensions of in fact having wisdom and wanting it, and so we can find four principal constellations:

First, there are the gods who both have and don't want wisdom (on the upper left), and second the ignorant who don't have but also don't want wisdom (on the lower left).

Now, third, we also have the lovers of wisdom, who are neither wise nor ignorant, and those occupy the lower right.

There is a fourth position in this diagram, and we (and Plato) must ask ourselves whether it would be a possible constellation, and if so, what about those who would occupy it. Could someone be both already wise and still wanting to be wise?

This is an interesting question, and it has an interesting answer: in general, Plato thinks that, yes, this is a possible constellation, and those who already have something can at the same time desire it — but it is a desire not to get that thing, but a desire to keep it in the future. Socrates discusses this earlier on (in his interchange with Agathon), and he brings examples such as "maybe a strong man could want to be strong [...], or a fast one fast, or a healthy one healthy: in cases like these, you might think that people really do want things they already are and do want to have qualities they already have". In these cases, Socrates argues, "what you want is to possess these things in time to come, since in the present, whether you want to or not, you have them." (200b–d)

But even though in general there seems to be such a position as the upper right in the diagram, in the specific case of wisdom it's not acknowledged: none of the gods loves wisdom. What makes the case of wisdom special, I suspect, is that in this case who is already wise are the gods, and they are immortal and presumably will remain wise indefinitely, for all time anyway, so there is no point in attributing them a desire for continued wisdom. (Still, I think, even if this conjecture is correct, there would be the theoretical possibility of a mortal becoming wise, in which case that mortal could have the valid desire to remain so in the future, and then that wise person might have a love for wisdom even in being wise already. Since this is denied explicitly in the text, my guess is probably false, but then I don't see what makes the case of wisdom special compared to those other cases Socrates lists.)

I think this understanding of in-betweenness in the philosophy (love of wisdom) case is a good start. Let's check next how it fares with the other examples in the text.

[1] I'm using the Hackett edition by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Indianapolis: Hackett 1989.

Eros, lack, and unreality

Wherever there is love, Socrates demonstrates,[1] there is a lack of something; for that there is love means that there is desire (which is what gives love its drive, its dynamic); and desire can only be for something that is lacking.

In other words, you can only want something that you don't have; if you already had it, there would be no point in desiring it. At the same time, you have to be aware that you are lacking it: if you didn't, you couldn't have a desire either. A good example is love of wisdom: you can only be a lover of wisdom if you are not wise yourself, for if you had wisdom already, there wouldn't be a need to strive for it any more; but at the same time, you cannot be a lover of wisdom as long as you are totally ignorant: because then you wouldn't know anything of such a thing as wisdom, and hence you couldn't desire it.[2] For love to be in play, there must be something you lack and therefore desire, something that you want, but know you do not have.

Something that is very important to understand about a line of thought such as this is that it's nothing that we can detect by simply observing what's going on: it's not merely a fitting interpretation of the facts of human behavior. It follows from our idea of love, the concept that we have in mind when we talk and think about it. (Behind that concept, there is much more than just the single linguistic item, of course: a sea of cultural background lies behind it, centuries of love poetry and reflective philosophy, stories and dramas, millions of lived and experienced love relationships have formed our idea of love, and also transformed it over time.) The dramatic means by which Plato makes this clear is by having Socrates insist on clarifying whether it's just 'likely', or whether it is necessary that there is a lack in someone who desires something, a lack of the very thing that is desired.[3] (It's necessary not necessarily because there is a mystical, metaphysical force behind it; it's necessary because, as I said, it follows from how we think about love. If there were a situation in which it looked like someone was loving something or someone, and there was in fact no lack of what was desired, then it simply wouldn't be a case of love, as we use the term.)

Love implies, then, that there is an instance of unreality in play. In order to form the desire that is the basis of love, we need to form an idea of something that is not the case (but which we desire to be the case). It's not love if there isn't a lack, and we must come up with an idea of that lack; it's unreality, because we're thinking of something that isn't so (yet), and we must produce it (it wouldn't be unreality if we didn't produce it). We must be both lacking something and be aware of the lack.

(This is the formulation I would give it in the terms I've been using in this blog; for reasons that will emerge soon, Plato would certainly be suspicious, to say the least, of that way of putting it.)

[1] Symp 200a–e. We should keep in mind that, throughout this discussion, the focus is on eros, which is only one of the various forms of love. Both in ancient Greek and modern thinking there's much complexity to the concept of love; we might distinguish different forms to the extent that it could even appear that there really is a multitude of different concepts behind the single word. But I'm not going into that variety here.
[2] Symp 204a
[3] Symp 200a–b. Moreover, Socrates doesn't just get Agathon (his partner in the discussion) to confirm this stronger claim (of a strictly conceptual necessity), but he also discusses an obvious objection. Sometimes it might seem that a person has a for something that he already has; but this, Socrates argues, cannot really be a desire for getting that thing; instead, what the desire really points to is a future continuation of these attributes: you desire to keep that thing which you already have (200b–d).

The unreality of the past

There is an old suspicion that the past and the future are not real: the only reality is the present. What has been is no longer; what will be is not yet. Over the centuries, there have been many different formulations of this view (in twentieth-century philosophy, it's often called 'presentism'); and I have myself given a version of it earlier when I counted the past and the future among the forms of unreality.

The view that only the present is real has its roots in some familiar common sense observations. People and objects cease to exist: people can die, objects can be destroyed. We have all been witness to processes of that sort. And likewise, we also have seen humans being born and growing into persons, objects being produced. Thus it's a fact of everyday life that many people and things we can refer to are only accessible from memories, records, by inferences from past actions and so on; something similar holds for future people. (You can talk about your great-grandfather or about your great-grandchildren, and it's perfectly clear that they are past and future respectively, and you'll never encounter them directly.)

Of course, this denies only some reality to the past or future. In some sense, your great-grandfather is still more real than, say, a character in a novel will ever be. Even if you know next to nothing about him, there is still some impact he has made: at the very least in having a part in the events that brought about your own existence. And yet, the more you think about it, the more difficult it seems to grasp exactly where the difference lies. For a start, fictional characters also can change the world in many ways. Children may be named after them, people may find inspiration in them, or they might become an element of the popular imagination (genres as different as the James Bond movies or Joyce's Ulysses have had that effect, as can be read off clearly from the teenage girls in the audience of a Connery-Bond screening or the crowds at the Bloomsday parties every year). If there is a difference between a person who really existed in the past and a character in a novel who never existed, it can't simply lie in the influence that (past or fictional) person had on the world.

There is such a difference for present people who really exist and fictional people: an existing person you can encounter, talk to them, shake their hands, interact with them in many ways; you can never do that with a fictional character. (You can shake Goofy's hand at Disneyland; but that statement is only true in a loose sense of speaking: we all know that it's an actor playing a role, and anyway you can have an actor play your great-grandfather's part at a family party and shake his hand, too.) But there is no such difference between past people and fictional people.

You could say that there is no such difference any more, and perhaps that would be a clue to a better candidate for the difference we're looking for: for people who once existed there has been a time when you actually could interact with them, while there has never been, and never will be, such a time with respect to a fictional character. Even this line of thought needs a lot of refinement, though. It works only partially. For instance, many of us have known their own grandfather, some have perhaps even known their own great-grandfather, talked to them, interacted with them. But once you get to a generation sufficiently removed in the parental chain, there is no more overlap period where you could have a direct interaction with your ancestors. To make the account work fully, it has to include some transitivity: a whole chain of potential direct interactions would connect you to a person who existed, while there is no such chain that can connect you with a fictional person. Take an example.

You can't have a conversation with Jane Austen; your mother couldn't, either; but your great-great-...-grandmother of some degree just might have — she didn't live in England maybe, but if she had traveled there and if she had done this and that, it would have been possible. And you're connected with that interaction via all the links between you and your mother, her and your grandmother, and so on. In that sense, there is a chain of potential direct interactions (they don't have to have happened in actuality) between you and Jane Austen, who, after all, really existed. There's no such chain between you and Elizabeth Bennet, whatever your great-great-...-grandmother of some degree would have tried. Elizabeth Bennet never existed. She's fictional.

But then again, notice that we had to make heavy use of the notion of possibility in this account. Now think about this: you don't have an older brother (if you have, suppose you haven't), but you can easily imagine what the world would be like if you had one; think about the interactions you'd have with your possible brother. Of course, since that brother doesn't exist, we're talking about an unreal person. However, in terms of the possibilities we had to invoke, he seems to be much closer than Jane Austen was. And she did exist. So where exactly does that leave our account of the reality of persons who existed in the past in terms of possible interactions?

If you've made it here, you're probably beginning to sense that there are interesting things to explore about the reality (if any) of the past and the future. They have been, of course, extensively discussed in the philosophical literature over the past twenty-five centuries or so, and there's a lot of fascinating things to learn from all this for the philosophy of unreality. Stay tuned...

Lost time, sedimentation, and the future as a form of unreality

A few days ago I had a business appointment at the company headquarters which was scheduled to start at ten in the morning. I planned to be there half an hour early to prepare a few things for the presentation I was to give; since I was going there by public transport which normally takes about 40 minutes, I left home at 8:40 and walked to the tram station.

As I found out, the workers of all the public transport firms were on strike, and there was no tram arriving for the next half hour; then a defect along the way forced the train to take a detour; in between I had to sprint across the street from one stop which was temporarily out of order to another one. When I arrived at the office, I was half an hour late and the meeting had already started; I was just in time to give my presentation. It went well, and there wasn't really any harm done; still it wasn't exactly my favorite sort of morning: I had lost some time I would have rather spent otherwise than standing around at train stops in the cold or sitting in overcrowded trains among angry commuters, I'd felt some nervousness and anger myself during the journey, and afterwards I looked back at it as somewhat stressful; I had probably caused some (minor) unplanned re-organizing at the office when I called in to give notice I would be late; and I was forced to improvise a little in my presentation which I had to do without the planned preparation.

Things like that happen all the time, and they're a good example of how we have to adjust our plans when events turn out unexpectedly. There is often some discomfort to it when that happens: when reality diverges from what we planned (or hoped), we feel negative about it. (Depending on one's temperament, and the amount of difference between expected and actual course of events, the feeling will be more or less intense, ranging from slight irritation to being outright annoyed or angry.) And although we might take measures in advance to prevent unpleasant surprises, we'd normally do that only in special cases, when the outcome is particularly important to us. It's impossible to do that for every imaginable circumstance, and even where it is possible, the risk, although it is real, is often simply to small to bother.

If it's not avoidable to run into situations like that from time to time, and if it's not a big problem (after all, the resulting problems in my example were all easily handled), then what is the source of the negative feeling?

At the base of it seems to be a comparison: between a more favorable situation (the planned one) and a less favorable one (the one that actually obtained). So there seems to be some judgment in play, a judgment of the relative values of those two versions. Since the actual outcome is seen to have less value for us, the difference is perceived as negative. Thus in my example, the loss was primarily one of time: I spent about an hour in traffic that was planned to be used for business. The planned outcome would have been more valuable compared to the actual outcome, it would have been an hour better spent. So the overall judgment of that course of events is naturally a negative one.

However, that seems to be only part of the story. Compare it with a different example: the weather. Sometimes we expect nice weather and are then surprised by sudden cold or rain. One could make a similar calculation, then, about those two situations (the expected and the actual situation), and again the difference in value would be negative, since the actual bad weather would have a lower value than the expected nice weather. Yet, with respect to the weather, people rarely react annoyed — everyone knows that the weather isn't reliable, after all.

A key difference between the tram example and the weather example is the kind of value we're talking about: our time is generally (and rightfully) seen to be of a higher sort of value than mere physical comfort. Overall, life time spent well adds up to a successful life in a way in which the pleasantness of feeling in nice weather doesn't.

(Our time is also something we're responsible for in a way in which weather conditions aren't. Using it well is up to us to a higher degree than the external conditions around us are. This aspect, however, doesn't account for the difference between the two examples: in the tram example, the external circumstance weren't really something I could influence any more than I could influence the weather. I could have informed myself better about them in advance; but then, one can normally inform oneself about the weather in advance, too.)

Life time is not simply something that passes by; it consists not simply of events that happen. Life time is something that is made up of our own actions and their results as much as of circumstances external to those actions (i.e. things out of our direct control, things that simply happen to us.) In the tram example, the sequence of events that I had planned was not simply different from what actually happened: what I had planned was active and productive use of my time, where one step built onto the other. What happened instead wasn't just something else; it was precisely no longer a sequence of productive, constructive action, but mostly reactive and unproductive. And this is what lies at the root of the uneasiness: when reality runs counter to plans or projections, it runs counter to a form of unreality. More precisely: it runs against what has already partially sedimented from an instance of that form of unreality.

Source: http://www.windows2universe.org

Thinking about the future is a form of unreality. Just like other such forms, future-related unreality is produced when we make up, in our thoughts, a version of reality that differs from it in some respects. When we make plans, we envisage a future state that is different from the present state as we conceive of it. When we begin acting out such plans, this is sedimentation of unreality: if everything goes by plan, the present situation transforms gradually into what we've planned. One action builds on the results of the preceding actions, and the whole course gets its direction by the projected future state we envisaged first (the instance of unreality). We might make some adjustments along the way, but as long as we can keep the original goal it remains that same instance of unreality gradually sedimenting itself into reality.

If, on the other hand, the plan breaks down and it becomes clear that it won't be realized, the original instance of unreality gets abandoned, and as far as the sedimentation has already taken place, it becomes a write-off, a misspent investment. Whatever time and effort has gone into it is recognized as wasted or misdirected in retrospect — and since that is a precious resource for each of us, that hurts.

There is a great variety in thinking about the future, and it still remains to be shown that they all constitute yet another form of unreality. If they do, then the process I've called sedimentation is something very common; whenever it is frustrated, the situation is akin to what I've described in my example. Thus, one thing this account can serve to explain is the negative feeling we might feel in such situations; another one is the hesitation we often experience to engage in what I've called reflection, i.e. cutting down instances of unreality in living our lives. (In reflection, we deliberately act against already partially sedimented unreality, so in a sense we have to bring ourselves into the unpleasant situation described in the tram example.)

Plato, Poe, and Perception

In Edgar Allan Poe's satirical short story "The Spectacles", a young man falls in love with a woman and hurriedly marries her, without ever having had a good look at her. That's mostly because he is extremely shortsighted yet too vain to wear glasses. And ... what can I tell you? The whole thing turns out to be not quite what he expected.

Myopia

1. Mistaken perception is one of the most common sources of unreality: we see, hear, smell something and take it to be something different than it really is; sometimes we even act on misperceptions, and then we have to correct not only our erroneous views, but also take responsibility for our misguided actions. In our everyday lives, of course, mistake and correction happen in quick sequence (for instance, when you think you see a person whom you know from a distance, and wave a greeting, merely to discover after a few quick steps towards them that it wasn't your acquaintance after all); the consequences are mostly negligible, or corrected without much effort. The basic pattern, however, is still the same as in Poe's story: we take in some sketchy information, interpret the situation wrongly, and then act in line with our false views. (The fault, dear reader, is of course not in our perception, but in ourselves; I've emphasized that point in an earlier post on "The Spectacles" and perception.)

Observations such as these suggest that we generally have a certain practical interest in keeping close to reality, which is why in our everyday lives we usually try to double-check whatever we perceive (or remember, learn by hearsay from others, hypothesize, or otherwise get out of sources which we know may mislead us on occasion). We seek small reality-checks in much of what we do, in order to navigate our surroundings without drifting too far into unreality, because we know from experience that we are likely to be more successful in everyday life if we go with the flow of what's really going on, and adjust our course if necessary. We have a constant habit of eliminating unreality from our views in order to succeed in our activities and reach practical goals, a habit I call reflection. (In some areas of philosophy, there's a much more narrow and technical use of the term 'reflection'. That's not the sense I have in mind here; reflection, in the way I've introduced it, has more to do with the common sense notion of taking a step back and a deep breath, and calmly checking things over before forming a view or taking action.) Reflection has the function of keeping us close to reality in what we think and do.

2. In an interesting passage in the Philebus[1], Plato starts out with a perception example not unlike the one I've used (and the one that is, greatly exaggerated, at the basis of Poe's story as well), and generalizes this to other forms of unreality. Most interestingly, he discusses forms of unreality connected to the past and future, and that's what I'd like to take a closer look at here.[2]

In that passage, Socrates (Plato's lead character) sketches an account of what happens when we perceive something. For example, "it often happens that someone who cannot get a clear view because he is looking from a distance wants to make up his mind about what he sees"; when making up his mind, the perceiver would ask himself: "'What could that be that appears to stand near that rock under a tree?'". This way of describing it emphasizes the process character of what goes on: we take in the scene, and sometimes, when it is not clear and obvious what it is we perceive, we first have to decide what to make of how things seem to us. Only then it becomes a judgment (whether it is spoken out loud or remains implicit in what we feel and how we behave). And of course, judgments can be correct or incorrect; we might misjudge the situation, which happens all the time with perception: it can lead us astray. In the example, the man might correctly judge that it is a person what he sees; "he might also be mistaken and say that what he sees is a statue, the work of some herdsmen".

In both cases, the judgment can be neatly expressed as a sentence, as I just did at the end of the previous paragraph for both the true and the false version. It has, to put it in philosophical jargon, propositional content. However, Socrates makes it clear that this is not all there is to a particular act of perception. There is also all the sensual input itself, which is in this case visual input (but it could also be input from other senses, i.e. auditive, tactile, or olfactory).[3] The content is not exhausted in the mere word-content. There are also the images that you see. If you'd write down the sentence and then text it to someone, you would have transferred only part of the content. (Maybe if you'd take a photo and send it along with the text, you'd have transferred more, or even most of it.) So, in addition to the propositional content (the 'word' content), there's also what we might call pictorial content.

Right from the beginning, Socrates stresses that his account also applies to what happens when we remember something. Again, memory can fail us, and we might remember something incorrectly. And once more, to our false memory, there is not only the propositional content of what we remember ("I remember having seen this street at daylight.") There are also the images, which we can revive in our mind's eye. And as we all know, vivid and even convincing-seeming as such images can be, they're extremely unreliable.

Having covered the present (in perception) and the past (in memory) in their function as "lead[ing] to judgment or the attempt to come to a definite judgment, as the case may be" (38b), Socrates finally extends this to an analogue in the future: in hopes. (It seems to me he should better have used a neutral term, such as 'projections' or 'expectations', since hopes normally are associated with positive expectations only. I presume this choice is because what interests Socrates is the pleasure that we take in them, and we wouldn't find that in negative expectations, thus the restriction. For a general account, however, hopes would be only one side of the medal, the other being fears and the like.) As with memories and perceptions, hopes (which Socrates identifies with "assertions in us", that is, presumably the sentence formulations of what we expect to happen to us in the future) are associated with images: "someone often envisages himself in the possession of an enormous amount of gold and of a lot of pleasures as a consequence. And in addition, he also sees, in this inner picture himself, that he is beside himself with delight."[4]

The structural claim here is that if there is a kind of unreality we have to cope with in the present (in the form of false perception) and in the past (false memories), then there must also be something similar in the future (false hopes). This premise is emphatically confirmed by Socrates' interlocutor, which probably indicates it's an uncontroversial premise; at least Plato wants to take it as one for the purposes of this dialogue. (Compare also La. 198d for a similar structural claim about knowledge of present, past and future.)

When we're looking for unreality, then, be it in small and simple instances as in everyday life or even in elaborate illusions as in Poe's story, we must check for all areas: not just what's directly before our eyes, but also what's before us in time, and what has been before. A phenomenology of the unreal will thus have to cover the future and the past in addition to the present.

[1] 38c–39e. All quotes (unless otherwise indicated) are from that passage, taken from the Hackett edition: Plato, Philebus. Translated, with introduction, by Dorothea Frede. Indianapolis: Hackett 1993.

[2] The context is the notorious discussion of 'false pleasures', where Socrates argues that pleasures can be literally false, just in the same sense in which opinions can be false. He lists four different classes of false pleasures, and our passage here is taken from the exposition of the first of these classes. For my purposes, the connections to the theory of pleasure aren't relevant, and I've systematically left them out.

[3] Plato's argument is sketchy, and it proceeds by analogy; of course, much more would be needed for a full-blown account of perceptual content, and from a modern point of view, several serious questions would have to be raised. I won't discuss the question whether the account Socrates gives is sufficient for the purposes of his own argument; for me, the important aspect is rather the parallel with other forms of unreality, such as false memories and hopes, which we'll get to in a moment.

[4] Socrates goes on to claim that what causes us pleasure is within the pictorial content, and thus if the pictorial content is false, i.e. an instance of unreality, then the pleasures are 'false' in his sense. As noted above, I'm not interested in pleasure here. If you want to look further into this debated notion, a good place to start is Dorothea Frede's introduction (and its bibliography) to the Hackett edition. See note [1] above for the bibliographical reference.