Chapter 5

PLEASURE

“. . . pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and . . . all desirable things . . . are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”

- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Utilitarianism, 1861 (Mill 1972:6)

Hedonism

            Hedonism, in its crassest form, actually tempts very few people; a life of selfish sensual indulgence is almost the paradigm of a meaningless life. The pursuit of pleasurable experience appeals most to people when they are young, and discovering its limitations often precipitates a crisis of meaning. Nevertheless, subtler forms of hedonism tempt even the sophisticated. Some people believe that their life would become meaningful if only they could experience the joys of a perfect romantic relationship. Others seek meaning in blissful states of transpersonal consciousness, or they seek the oceanic feeling of union with the world. Forms of hedonism that emphasize the avoidance of suffering also tempt us. The followers of the ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus, sought serenity in rational control over desires for worldly pleasures. The Buddha taught that all life is suffering, and taught a path to the cessation of suffering.

            All such views have in common that they locate meaning in having certain types of psychological states. What is of value, they say, is our psychological response to something, not the thing itself. Only psychological states are inherently valuable or inherently evil. If we respond with delight to a lovely view of the ocean, it is not the ocean or its loveliness that is inherently valuable; it is the state of delight that it causes in our minds. The world outside our mind is never more than instrumentally valuable. Objects in the world are valuable only for the psychological responses they cause in sentient creatures. Only conscious experience matters.

            In one way, this is a strength of hedonistic theories. It would be wonderful if, at the end of our searches for meaning, we could find an answer that not only truly mattered, but that also mattered to us. Imagining pleasurable or painful experiences not mattering to people is difficult. If we did discover that pleasurable experience was the true meaning of life, then it would immediately strike us as meaningful. Pleasurable experiences always matter to us.

            Cosmic purpose and self-realization theories have the corresponding weakness. For instance, suppose that Marx had been right, and that cooperative production in a social setting was the true human potential, or what he called our “species-being.” Now think of an individualist, someone who likes to write poetry by herself, and not as a member of a committee. She will be very alienated from what Marx thought was her true human potential. Developing her potential for cooperative production is not something that is going to matter to her. Even if she came to believe that Marx was right about the meaning of human life, his answer would not feel meaningful to her. All purpose theories have this weakness: Even if we discovered the purpose of life through rational thought, we could always still ask why it should matter to us.

            Despite this difficulty, self-realization theories are right that people do often develop their human potential for reasons that are independent of the pleasure which self-development brings. Athletes spend long hours suffering through anaerobic workouts for the mere chance of a fleeting victory. Artists and writers agonize over their work, not for the pleasure of it, but because they think it is worth doing. Professionals and craftspeople enjoy the exercise of their skills, and the money they make, but they also value what they do for its own sake. Conversely, some people take pleasure in activities that they do not value; a gambling addict may take pleasure in his use of a video lottery terminal while judging it a worthless and a waste of his time. Saying that people only act for the sake of pleasure trivializes human motivation.

False Experience

            The quest for meaning proceeds on two fronts. It looks both for what feels meaningful and for what is truly meaningful. Feeling meaningful is not enough; something must really be meaningful in order truly to matter. We can point to just too many cases where something else matters besides pleasurable experiences, no matter how meaningful they may feel.

            The Pleasure Centre: Electrical stimulation of a small area in the middle of the brain located near the front of the thalamus will produce intense feelings of pleasure. Science fiction writers have imagined “wire-heads,” people who have an electrode surgically implanted in their “pleasure-centre” so that they can stimulate themselves at will. Imagine being a wire-head. We can easily imagine becoming obsessed by the wire to the exclusion of anything else. Yet, we cannot imagine the life of a wire-head as a meaningful one.

            Freud’s Pain: Even those theoretically committed to the importance of pleasure do not value pleasure alone. Freud thought that the pleasure principle governed a child’s mental processes; the primary processes always strive toward gaining pleasure. Initially the child finds pleasure through fantasy and hallucination, but this eventually leads to disappointment. Childhood development introduces a reality principle, and the child starts to represent reality even when it is disagreeable. (Freud 1958:219) Yet, for Freud, the reality principle never deposes the pleasure principle. It helps the child defer small, uncertain, but immediate gratifications for large, certain, but delayed gratifications. (Freud 1958:223)

            At the end of his life, when he was dying of cancer and in great pain, Freud refused to take any painkilling drugs except aspirin. Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, reports him to have said, “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.” (Jones 1964:655-6; Griffin 1986:8)] On his deathbed, Freud preferred clear thought to absence of pain. Despite the pleasure principle, Freud judged that clarity of thought was ultimately more meaningful to him than was the absence of pain. We can understand Freud’s choice better through the framework of Victor Frankl’s logotherapy than through Freud’s pleasure principle. Frankl wrote:

It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning. (Frankl 1959:136)

Freud valued the use of his tremendous intellect, and was not willing to lose its use merely to avoid pain.

            Virtual Reality: The following thought experiment, due to Robert Nozick, is evidence against the hypothesis that feeling pleasure is all that matters:

Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire. When connected to this experience machine, you have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel “from the inside.” You can program your experience for tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest of you life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams “from the inside.” Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? If not, why not? (Nozick 1989:104-105)

The point of the thought experiment is to bring our intuitions regarding meaning into sharp relief. Nozick asks us to imagine a machine-created virtual reality that produces all the pleasurable sensations and emotional responses anyone could want. We might enjoy the machine for a few hours. We might even get addicted to it. Nevertheless we would not, in answer to Nozick’s question, choose a life spent only connected to the machine. Something is still missing. Such a life might feel meaningful, yet it is almost a model of a meaningless life. In the virtual reality of the experience machine we are not truly great poets, we do not truly bring about world peace, and no one truly loves us. There is more to meaningfulness than how things feel; there is more to value than finding enjoyment.

            Buddhists and Epicureans preach the avoidance of suffering as a path to meaning in life. Still, Nozick’s virtual-reality thought experiment tells against this hypothesis too. The machine could protect us from ever experiencing suffering, and give us the benefits of nonattachment without the hardship of years of meditation practice. We need never grieve; our virtual loved ones would never die. We need never know the discomfort of illness, the fear of death, the distress of failure, or the heartache of unrequited love. Yet, even if the machine would never allow us to suffer, none of us would think it brought true meaning to our lives. Avoiding suffering is not enough. James Griffin writes:

I prefer, in important areas of my life, bitter truth to comfortable delusion. Even if I were surrounded by consummate actors able to give me sweet simulacra of love and affection, I should prefer the relatively bitter diet of their authentic reactions. (Griffin 1986:9)

We must ground our lives in truth. How our lives feel to us is not the only standard of value, or even the most important one.

            Counterfeit Spiritual Experience: Some gurus preach a spiritual state of unending joy as a path to meaning. However, creating similar states of mind using modern technology may also be possible. Scientists have invented a device called a “transcranial magnetic stimulator” that, applied to the scalp, uses powerful, fluctuating magnetic fields to cause electrical stimulation of the brain immediately beneath. Applied above the motor cortex, it will cause muscles to contract. Applied above the temporal lobe, it causes seemingly spiritual experiences similar to those sometimes had by temporal lobe epileptics. (Ramachandran 1998:174-175; Buckman 2000:113-146) The experience can be that of being in the presence of the divine, of the cosmic significance of everything, and of absolute certainty in the validity of the experience. Could such a machine be an answer to our search for meaning? If not, it must be because meaning has more to it than just the experience of bliss and joy. Perhaps what is important is the object of our spiritual experience and not just the feel of the experience. Technology may be a path to blissful consciousness and the absence of suffering, yet it is the wrong path to meaning.

The Complexity of Mental Life

            What is going wrong in these cases? It is just false that only pleasurable experiences are meaningful or that only the avoidance of suffering matters. All the above technological solutions to the riddle of life’s meaning presuppose an impoverished picture of human nature. They see human nature as nothing but a purely mental world of sensations and feelings. These sensations are not sensations of anything, or feelings about anything. They are just pure experiences. If human life consisted in nothing but conscious experiences, then only conscious experiences could matter in human life.

            On this view, the problem of meaningfulness comes down to dividing experiences into good, bad, and neutral ones. To divide experiences into good, bad, and neutral we must find something in common among good experiences, and something in common among bad experiences. One hypothesis is that all good experiences share a common, pleasurable feeling tone. (Moore 1903:12-13) On this view, pleasure gives meaning to mental experience, and mental experience is all there is to life. On reflection, however, the hypothesis that all enjoyable experiences have the same feeling tone seems implausible. Consider a list of pleasurable experiences and see if they share some sensation in common: Eating a good meal when hungry, enjoying a movie, having a massage, looking at a beautiful view, making love, experiencing a foreign culture. Yes, they are all pleasurable, but no, they share no common feeling tone that we can use to say why they are pleasurable. Pleasure is not another, but distinct, sensation added to our experiences. We do not experience both the taste of food and a sensation of pleasure as well; we just taste the food. Being pleasurable does not define a kind of sensation. Being pleasurable is not an intrinsic property of some sensations and feelings. The hypothesis that valuable experiences all share a pleasurable feeling tone does not work.

            Another hypothesis regarding what is common to good experiences is that the person who experiences them wants to have them. Pleasurable experiences are the ones that a person wants to have and desires to continue to have. Similarly, painful experiences are the ones that a person wants not to have and, if experienced, desires to end quickly. Being wanted is what all pleasurable sensations have in common, and being desired makes them count as pleasurable. (Sidgwick 1962:127)

            This new hypothesis moves us away from the internal sensation view of human nature. Desiring something is not just having a feeling. Desiring something involves taking an attitude toward it. Feelings, like the sensation of thirst or hunger, are complete in themselves. Desire, however, is always directed toward something else. We desire that such-and-such happen. We want to experience so-and-so. This new view makes human nature more complicated because it allows that psychological states have structure. They are not mere conscious sensations. Instead, they are psychological attitudes directed toward some object, or they are about some state of affairs. (Philosophers call this feature of psychological states, “intentionality.” Though it seems an obvious notion, working out what it means is a huge and unfinished task of contemporary philosophy.)

            This new hypothesis, that our pleasurable experiences are experiences that we want to have, raises two important issues. The first is that having particular conscious experiences is not the only thing that we can want. As a source of value, desire points beyond mental experiences. We want not only states of mind, but also states of the world. Besides desiring to experience the taste of chocolate, we can also desire that the snow stop falling by tomorrow. In fact, one upshot of the inadequacy of technological solutions to the meaning problem is to make clear that we want more than just the experience of a virtual reality. We want the world truly to be a certain way. Why should we confine our desires to having certain states of mind? Could not states of the world also satisfy our desires? If being wanted is what make things valuable and meaningful, why could not other things besides conscious experience also be valuable? We will examine the route to meaning through fulfilling desires in the following chapter.

            The second important issue raised by the new hypothesis is this: Wants and desires are not the only psychological attitudes that have this feature of intentionality, of ‘aboutness,’ or of being directed toward objects and states of affairs. We have a whole range of emotional attitudes that are also directed toward the world as it is, toward the world as it might become, and toward our mental life. We not only want things, but also admire them, are proud of them, are in awe of them, enjoy them, love them, despise them, and hate them. Why should we single out just one attitude among many – desire – and privilege it as the sole way of identifying value? We will examine the route to meaning through the emotions in later chapters.

            To make progress, we have already abandoned the conceptual framework of purposes that dates from Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. We should equate meaning neither with alignment to a cosmic purpose nor with the development of human potential. To make further progress, we must now abandon the sensation view of human nature that dates from the Enlightenment era. Human nature consists in more than a bundle of conscious experiences and sensations. Human nature is directed both outward to the world and inward to experience. Pleasure and pain are still important. Our ability to experience pleasure may be necessary for our lives to feel meaningful. Nonetheless, pleasurable experience is neither all that matters nor the source of what matters.