To know what the good is, and to live well.
That's a quote from TGW in another thread. I'd like to explore what that means. If hedonism is the case, then pursuing pleasure would be to live well, right? And what is the best way to do this? Also, is it just my pleasure or the pleasure of others as well?
One might also retort that people already pursue pleasure and avoid pain. So why is it that we need to know something we're already doing? Do we get confused as to what the good which leads us to suffering?
One might also retort that people already pursue pleasure and avoid pain. So why is it that we need to know something we're already doing? Do we get confused as to what the good which leads us to suffering?
Comments (61)
What does it mean to pursue pleasure?
What pain is to be considered pain to be avoided?
What does it mean to live well?
I find all of these to be very vague notions and generalizations; thus next to impossible to find any consensus, so making a sort of all inclusive claim of what it pleasure, pain or living well is a futile effort.
In addition to this, making such all inclusive claims of value are at the same time all exclusive claims, as when something is included rather than something else, that something else is what is excluded.
I find the statement "to know what good is, and to live it well" is very shortsighted. What is good in one moment is not always what is good in the next moment or even in the next similar moment. Also, is "to live it well" a state of being (a status) or is it perhaps a dynamic process of constant change and adaptations? I feel it is the latter; thus making any fixed points of status (including what one believe one knows as what is good) when it comes to notions of value are shortsighted, as it would have to 'disinclude' the accumulation of any information/experiences that might cause a change in what one deems (attributes/asserts) to be what they 'know' as good.
Such a quote seems to be rather a hasty comment and a very vague notion with far too many holes holding it together. It's a (mis)fortune cookie that I'll pass on.
Meow!
GREG
A non-hedonistic approach to living well might be more complicated, at least in concept. I wanted to know how one was supposed to live well by knowing what is good, which of course depends on what it means to "live well" and "good".
This doesn't account for physical training for sports or sports in general, people who enjoy S&M, as well as lots of necessary medical procedures where pain is indeed quite necessary. Pain as an important indicator of illness or disease cannot be ignored.
I find that this notion of "pleasure good - pain bad" is overly simplified and full of obvious errors.
Quoting Marchesk
Perhaps this is just me, but being told "how I'm supposed to live" is not really what I'd view all too often as 'good'.
Life means far less for me when it is measured out by someone else's time or standards of measure.
This all reminds me of those who deal with happiness in the manner in which we are attempting to deal with 'what is good':
I suppose I'd continue this thought to include:
You will never know good if you continue to for what goodness consists of...
... good is not a static thing or a static quality. It is a value notion subject to a relative process.
Attempts to define for all cases what 'the good' is or what 'living well' consists of amounts to chasing a rainbow. Why not enjoy looking at the rainbow, as one will never catch it?
Just a passing thought... take it with a grain of salt. ;)
Meow!
GREG
Meow!
GREG
Pleasure/pain are feelings we generate. They are indeterminate, unbound, you can always get higher or feel more pain. Pleasure/pain provide us with information, they drive us towards and away from things, activities ideas, they pervade life. You can be both in pain and feel pleasure at the same time, they form a kind of continuum.
Plato thought pleasure was a 'becoming', a genesis, a coming to be, If so, then its coming to be is for the sake of something else, and if it is for the sake of something else then it, in itself, cannot be that choice worthy goal. Its value is derivative. If something is for the sake of something else then it is categorically different from what it for the sake of.
If living well is good, what we desire, our goal, then pleasure may be somewhat constitutive of living well, but it cannot encompass it, it can only be for the sake of it.
But then if I could be wireheaded to sit on my couch all day, everyday, doing nothing but blissing out, and assuming my needs were met, is that what I really want?
I don't think so. So then it becomes the question of whether pleasure is what I want, or pleasure is an indicator of what I want. And I think it's often the latter.
That being said, there have been experiments with rodents in which they push a button that induces intense pleasure from electrodes in their brain directly stimulating their pleasure center. The rodents will do this at the expense of eating or drinking until they die.
Sure, in the daily grind of life hedonism more or less makes sense. You eat a cookie because a cookie tastes good. You don't stab yourself because pain feels bad.
However, more extreme cases bring to light not only new problems but also the superficiality of the prior thinking.
Scenario: A woman is raped by a man. For all intensive purposes, the woman feels hardly any pain at all during the act and it fact feels great sensual pleasure; regardless, she does not want to be raped. A hedonist, however, would have to concede that this act was perfectly okay because the woman (and the man for that matter) both feel only pleasure.
Obviously, the act of rape is still causing the woman severe psychological trauma, which I agree would be pain. But the only reason she is feeling psychological trauma is because her preference (to not be raped) is being disregarded.
Now, back to the prior examples. Do you eat a cookie because the cookie tastes good, or do you eat a cookie because you desire the taste of the sweetness of the cookie? Do you abstain from stabbing yourself because it will hurt, or because you desire to not feel pain?
People get meaning out of a struggle or some sort of "cross to bear"
People like pleasure. People might also find meaning in pleasurable things.
People will balance life with meaning-through-struggle with meaning through pleasurable feelings. Boredom and a sense that one needs to feel like one accomplished something more than anything drives the "meaning from struggle" aspect.
Of course my pessimism comes in with the notion that we must find meaning through struggle, and that we cannot simply be without some source of stimulus or excitation. Existence without any need, desire, goals would simply be enough. However, this is for all intents and purposes an impossibility from the start and incomprehensible as to how that sort of existence even looks like.
Well, if you let go of the narcissistic expectation that life was supposed to be perfect, much of the philosophy of pessimism melts away.
We can't think ourselves into a purely blissful state where nothing affects us. By definition, if we need to struggle and need some pain for meaning, it is inbuilt. The evaluation is that this is no good. Sure we can accept the situation, but we much pretty do that by default. If life isn't perfect, I see no reason why we need to embrace it. Accept it we do by merely survival, so that isn't saying much. It doesn't mean we can't enjoy things. I never said that (though you might try to strawman me). Pessimism is more of an evaluative standpoint from a meta-perspective. So, though one may use any methodology that one needs to get by (Stoicism, self-help, therapy, what have you..), it is not about a methodology as much as a recognition that there structures of the world that are not good. It is the recognition of this that is most important. The way we deal with this is a bit more complicated. Like I said earlier, I am not sure how much asceticism will actually work (or work for most people) in really getting rid of desire or any contingent pains (if that truly is the root cause of suffering). I have the same doubts with other methodologies like Stoicism. The paradox is, of course that, some suffering (grieving over a loved one), though painful, might be meaningful. Also, caring about people and things and even being attached to them (to the point that one would actually grieve and feel sad at its loss) in some way brings meaning as well (contra Stoicism and other self-denial type philosophies). I do have more sympathy for asceticism though than something more tepid like Stoicism because asceticism at least tries to deny everything outright thus ending the "becoming" cycle. This may be a pipedream, but I see what they are trying to do.
Thus betraying your narcissism.
Have you considered what a purely blissful state actually is? I would argue that a blissful state is not necessarily one in which nothing affects us (although that wouldn't be horrible either).
Quoting schopenhauer1
Nor did I, though you might try to strawman me.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Not good from a lowly human perspective. The universe is not benevolent nor malevolent, merely indifferent. How this manifests can be malignant, and it also be benign only to the perspective of a person.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It doesn't. It merely gives the person the facade that they are away from their pains, as well as a boost to their ego, oftentimes the same ego they claim they are trying to extinguish.
Asceticism doesn't work because it is not natural. You are constantly reminded why you are pursuing the ascetic lifestyle (suffering).
You asked why I don't like dealing with you, and these kind of remarks are one of several reasons. How is that not inflammatory? I'm sure your response to this will be in the same vein, thus betraying a bit about yourself.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Well, a blissful state is probably something along the lines of all preferences being satisfied in the way we want them satisfied. This includes meaning-through-pain, if one so chooses. This also, I guess, includes a certain amount of unexpected pain, that one could stop whenever they wanted and restart if it suited them. Of course, this all sounds like wishful thinking because we are talking utopias here.
An absolute version, if one buys into the Schopenhauer perspective would be pure being without becoming (something that doesn't exist and can only be thought of in its negative).
Quoting darthbarracuda
I never said it wasn't indifferent (though it can't really even be that either but I get the sense you are conveying). Since we are the recipient of how it manifests, that is why it matters. The universe isn't for us, but we certainly must deal with what happens to us and thus why it matters to usQuoting darthbarracuda
I could agree with that in a way. As I said earlier, I think it's a pipedream but I see what they are trying to do.
When I say you are narcissistic, I don't mean it as an insult. I'm trying to argue that you have placed too much value on your opinion on how things "should be". I'm not calling you a pig, I'm saying you are existentially narcissistic.
Quoting schopenhauer1
All preferences being satisfied is impossible. To expect this is to set oneself up for failure and disappointment. Understanding this brings about enlightenment (not the supernatural woo kind). Simply peace.
Also, from a Buddhist perspective, if you mitigate desires (and preferences), you mitigate the suffering you feel when you don't get what you want. Wanting something, achieving that thing and getting a quick dopamine hit is really just prolonging the rat race, if you get my drift, since it all just goes back to the striving anyway.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Sure. I agree, we are aliens to an indifferent cosmos.
I need you to understand that I am extremely sympathetic to the perspective of a pessimist; I might as well call myself a pessimist. But my pessimism is rooted in the fact that it is the unfortunate fact that we suffer too much because we accidentally expect too much. We are accidentally narcissistic, and we can't help it. The universe is ill-suited for an self-reflecting ego. If it were possible to extinguish the ego in all its forms, we wouldn't suffer, for what would there be to suffer?
Something I have noticed is oftentimes, the fear of suffering is greater than the actual experience of suffering. This of course doesn't apply to every scenario, which is why you shouldn't just go jump off a canyon thinking you'll be okay.
I think the only kind of pain that actually constitutes as suffering (I think BitterCrank said something along these lines) is any kind of suffering that cannot be redeemed in any way. Terminal illness that leaves a person in a state of misery is one example. But again, remember that the Stoics advocated that as soon as life gets this bad, you are to exit gracefully.
This seems like a good start to me.
A correction here: the kind of hedonism I defend doesn't say that the maximization of pleasure or the minimization of pain are good, because this assumes that pain and pleasure can be quantified, and usually that they are are fungible over time or between persons, which they are not.
Again, the demand that a philosophy tell you what to do specifically with your life does not make sense -- a "do" cannot be derived from a "should," so it's not possible for a philosophy to dictate what you do. Only your actually doing it can do that.
Of course, the problem is that if your philosophy is bad, what you decide to do will be self-contradictory on its own terms. In the Socratic tradition, the focus moves away from 'evil' to ignorance. By removing our ignorance about what is good, we ipso facto remove our temptations and inclinations to do things that, by the very standards we couch them in, make no sense or don't work. If something is actually bad, understanding why it's bad will destroy the temptation to do it.
One is "supposed to get pleasure" from art. That's what the teacher said. Didn't happen. Not, at least until much later when I knew more about art, cared more about it, had much more specific tastes, and so on. Same with music, but much faster. In my old age I have started to get a great deal of pleasure out of architecture that I never had before, but now I have more understanding. Same with science. I find much more pleasure in (accessible) science than I did once.
The "good" in pleasure is gaining more capacity to have 'complicated' pleasure. Food and sex are still good, still pleasurable, but they haven't (in my case, anyway) gotten much more complicated. What I want from music is much more complicated. What I want from a novel now is more than I wanted 50 years ago.
Pain is a bad thing, for the most part, real pain, not just the soreness and fatigue after doing what one really wanted to do. Pain from tumors, pain from broken bones, gout, rotting teeth, shingles, bee stings, etc. Pain and sickness are, I think, inevitable, and are generally endured. Does it do us good to endure pain and sickness? I don't know. I think it is better to be able to cope with pain, because most likely one will be in serious pain at some point. I don't thin pain makes us "better". Good people before pain are good people after pain, and shit heads before pain are shit heads after pain. Too much pain might turn a good person into a shit head, perhaps, but the opposite seems very unlikely.
Boredom can be a quite serious pain, I think. Really bored people have difficulty connecting to pleasure, moving toward pleasure, having pleasure. Instead they have anhedonia.
Sleep is a pleasure and it is time to get on with it.
It is. In some ways it might be the most complete and sublime of 'earthly' pleasures, since when it sets in it has an all-encompassing character, something like bliss.
Generally I think the 'low' pleasures benefit from the fact that, even though they do not increase in complexity or sublimity over time like the 'high' pleasures do, the body forgets them as soon as they're done, making them rise afresh each time they're experienced. A warm shower in the morning doesn't stop feeling good. Unless, of course, you're hitting the hard shit that makes you blow out your fuses, like heroin.
Whereas with the 'high' pleasures, they can genuinely peter out over time, and not as a result of simple bodily exhaustion. It is possible, through too fine an appreciation of music, to cease to enjoy music that you once loved, because your palette becomes too discriminating for it. Many people take a sort od aesthetic pride in this kind of devaluation.
I agree. This has happened to me and I feel anything but pride in it. I find prose fiction in general terrifically hard to enjoy - I used to write it, enjoy reading it and savour it - and for a while it felt tragic to me that I'd lost a taste for its flavour.
One reason I came to philosophy late in life was to try out a new taste. It's helped me to feel that one can find new 'high' pleasures - my tastes in music are somewhat different too, for instance - and yet still grieve sometimes for the old.
I haven't found however that the 'low' pleasures remain either. An appetite can get jaded. But maybe that's just me :)
To be a hedonist means to believe that pleasure and pain are the only good/bad (respectively). So it makes sense that a hedonist would want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
You said:
Quoting The Great Whatever
And then:
Quoting The Great Whatever
Which strikes me as dodging the question.
No, that simply doesn't follow, since the position says nothing about maximization, and doesn't even say whether the notion is coherent.
Quoting mcdoodle
I am not sure what you think a "fine appreciation of music" consists in TGW, that is whether you think it is necessarily confined to some genre(s). In my late teens I liked rock music, the 'heavier' and more progressive the better, then in my twenties I 'progressed' on to explore, learn about and cultivate a taste for classical music and modern jazz. Now I go through phases where I listen to rock, particularly metal, then I listen to classical, then jazz, punk or whatever. I am always able to rekindle my love of all the different genres, but when I am engrossed in one genre I find that I have almost zero interest in the others, and the thought of listening to them can be almost repulsive to me.
Mcdoodle, I have experienced exactly what you have with reading fiction. I used to read a lot of fiction in my late teens and early twenties (mostly the 'classics'; Dostoevsky, Balzac, Melville, Gogol, Gorky, de Maupassant, Stendhal, Flaubert etc). Since then I have gone through a few phases of reading fiction (mostly science fiction and fantasy).
I have written poetry since my early teens (I am now 62) and still enjoy reading poetry and I have always read philosophy of one kind or another. It used to be Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, Zen and so on in my hallucinogen-using days, and I kept reading them as well as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, shamanism, Gurdjieff, Freud, Jung, and so on for years, then I later discovered Western philosophy (although I had read some Western philosophy before all this when I was about 16 or 17, mainly in a book my mother gave me, Western Philosophy from Leibniz to Nietzsche, but I didn't understand it in any rigorously contextualized way.
Now I find I can only read poetry and philosophy, the rest seems a waste of time. Anyway all this preamble was to support the point I want to make that I think it is likely the reason you have "lost the taste" for reading fiction is that it cannot give you what philosophy can, and it therefore seems a waste of time.
Don't mean to butt-in but isn't that one of the problems with Hedonism...the Good can't be 'Gooder', but pleasure can always be more pleasurable.
Not if it's something that doesn't make sense to maximize. You can maximize the profits of a business because there's some quantitative measurement of profit, and a time during which it has to be accumulated. Pleasure isn't like that. For instance, if I live for three years, and I have a hot shower every day, then that may make life better at the time of the showers, but it doesn't mean that, at 'the end of life,' I will have lived 'better' than someone who only took one once every two days because I 'racked up more pleasure.' Pleasure does not 'rack up' -- it is good insofar as it is pleasant, which is precisely insofar as it's being experienced, now. We live on a razor's edge in the moment and always act in that moment, not across a span of time where we have to 'accumulate' the best results.
Well, I think my and John's experience differs from yours: perhaps we're a lot older :) I think the question of 'caring' about something is what we're debating, and there is a quality to 'caring' about some things that, for me, has diminished as far as the appetitive pleasures go, and has become enhanced in respect of (for example) philosophy and more difficult music - including the difficulties of making and harmonising music.
I agree. Aristotle argues for a 'mean' as the 'virtuous' act, and for me there's also a mean in the taking of pleasure. A 24-hour marathon of Schubert might put me off for life. Each in its measure. And then a little light relief. Even frivolity, in your phrase, TGW.
I think TGW is saying all pleasures are inherently good, but this doesn't mean all pleasures are not dynamic. For example, a warm bath might be pleasurable for a while, but too long, it becomes boring or not pleasurable anymore. So the pleasures change with circumstance.
Also, BitterCrank brings up an interesting point about complicated pleasures. Let's say someone would get enormous pleasure out of inventing something innovative and groundbreaking. However, they lack the capacity to do so. Not everyone can be an Einstein or an Edison. This complicated pleasure may never be achieved. The struggle for this complicated pleasure doesn't get at it. Only having attained it does in this scenario. So, due to various capacities (based on contingent factors of environment and aptitudes), one may never fully gain the kind of pleasures that one wants. This frustration goes nicely with pessimism's understanding that goals/desires are often frustrated and that suffering is not distributed evenly.
Even if pleasure is the only inherent good:
It can certainly be stated that:
-pleasures can change with circumstance.
-preferred pleasures can often be frustrated or not achieved
-some pleasures lead to pain
-preferred pleasures are not distributed evenly in human lives.
Perennial strategies for dealing with non-evenly distributed pleasures include:
-trying not to be attached to achieving pleasures
-trying to aim one's focus on something different than one's preferences for pleasure
Possible complications with strategies:
-trying not to be attached to achieving pleasures may be an impossibility in terms (except if one has conditions like anhedonia or are on certain drugs perhaps?)
-trying to aim one's focus on something different than one's preferences for pleasures may be an impossibility. One may SUPPRESS one's pursuit of one's preferences for pleasures, but it may not really get rid of one's frustration. One can conceive of a sage that suppresses all pursuits of pleasure, but then even this is a preference for the pleasure of not having pleasure, and this too can be frustrated thus going back to the idea that not all suffering is distributed evenly.
The accumulation of money might make someone happy, thereby granting an example of quantitative happiness.
I agree that there isn't some kind of measurement device, a "Utilometer 2000", that racks up happys.
But you said that Quoting The Great Whatever
So one could instead focus on maximizing the time spent experiencing such pleasures.
No -- time doesn't rack up either. We live within a moment.
By all means this is how people today tend to think of pleasure -- as a subjective experience that can be maximized or minimized -- but there's more to pleasure than this. For instance, Epicurean pleasure is had in the fulfillment of natural and necessary desires. It's not along a spectrum, and I would argue that it's not specifically a subjective experience as the British Empiricists imagine it, but that pleasure, in this formulation, has an objective quality to it [hence, why the master could teach others the ways of pleasure, rather than everyone going about individually needing to see "what they happen to like"]
Another sort of pleasure is the pleasure in fulfilling some task -- playing the piano masterfully is a usual example here. There is a pleasure derived by doing, but it is not quantifiable -- we are just fulfilling a desire [something we lack], or reproducing desire [and so it becomes more pleasurable over time]. It's something experienced in the act, and it is experienced because we find fulfillment in doing things well [or, to take an Aristotelian stab, because we are fulfilling our human nature in excellence]
I actually think a good deal of confusion arises because we lack the cultural resources to discuss the complexity of pleasure. In common it's thought of subjective, and along an axis. But there's so much more to pleasure and desire. But I suppose I'm getting off track with that comment. It's just something that's been flitting around in my brain-box for awhile.
Ahh Mayor! We're very close to agreeing here, but not quite... Indeed, I agree that "to live it well" is a dynamic process of adaptation, in the words of the Daoists, a way without a way, and a path without a path. But perfecting this process requires principles, which unfortunately would have to be fixed. While the strategies/techniques/tactics used at different points in time need to always change, and one cannot rely on the same techniques for all time (hence a way without a way, a doing without a doing), this does not include principles, whose nature is entirely negative, and whose role is entirely regulative (hence why the way without a way is still a way). Negative in-so-far as they do not arbitrate between possibilities (but merely rule out impossibilities), and regulative in-so-far as they focus the mind clearly and distinctly on real possibilities and away from impossibilities which could distract and confuse it, and thus render it less efficient. Principles are free to be fixed since they are not bound by the conditions of being true (or pointing to any particular real). They are merely those things which regulate and focus the mind on that which is true (or real). For example, Marcus Aurelius states:
"On the occasion of everything that causes you sadness, remember to use this "dogma": not only is this not a misfortune, but it is a piece of good fortune for you to bear up under it courageously"
Notice the statement doesn't arbitrate between possibilities, as any negative actuality necessarily entails the possibility of one practicing to bear it courageously. Also notice the statement plays a regulative role for the mind; refocusing it on the possibilities that can always be implemented, and away from those which are impossible - such as for example, remaining sad and thinking over and over how misfortune could have been prevented.
As such, principles cannot be questioned, once one has understood their essence and function. Principles are also tautologies at base, which are entirely empty. However, this emptiness plays a regulative role for the mind, hence they are useful and must not be given up.
But, having said this, principles are not enough. Strategies, techniques, tactics, etc. are also required to be a master at something. These latter are acquired empirically, through experience, while the latter are acquired rationally, through pure reason. However, both of them are necessary, with the former (principles) often becoming the factor which makes the difference at the highest levels of performance in any domain. However, principles don't necessarily have to be learned formally, and could indeed end up abstracted from experience, although this is slower.
I agree, I'm not a bare hedonist.
So what the hell does it mean to live well then? We might live moment by moment, but we're constantly thinking about the past and the future, and we make choices based on that.
Quoting The Great Whatever
What I was thinking with the OPs question is that, if one is a hedonist, how might one go about having as much pleasure as they can with as little suffering? And of course there is a time element involved, where the hedonist is planning on how they might make choices or structure their life to accomplish that. It's not about keeping score, although it certainly helps to have more pleasurable memories. There is also a satisfaction with life element. The happy hedonist planned well and maximized their opportunities for pleasures while minimizing pain (perhaps in the form of negative consequences). They can feel good about that.
So for example, a hedonist might ask themselves if habitual drug use will bring them the most enjoyment, but then they might calculate that the negative consequences would make it not worth becoming addicted.
We can imagine being hurt by the presence of pleasure if we do not desire it. For example, our husband/wife offering sex right after one of our parents died will not probably make us happy. Neither would someone having sex with us by force as @darthbarracuda has argued; unless of course we secretly harbour a fantasy (read desire) to get raped, in which case we may enjoy it, even greatly enjoy it, provided that our sense of morality permits it, and would not get in the way of the actualisation of our fantasy.
I think @The Great Whatever has hit the nail on the head with life not being a score-board, as well as with pleasure not accumulating, and with the idea of maximising pleasure not being necessitated. Contra @darthbarracuda, it may be that the enemy of pleasure is more pleasure in certain instances ;) . TGW's ideas instead force us to refocus on the present moment, which is truly the only moment we ever have, instead of attempting to judge life as a whole, which is indeed incoherent.
And now, we finally get to @mcdoodle who has argued along with Aristotle that excellence is the goal of life, and for humans, this consists in character building (virtue), which is not accumulated over a life-time, but rather is something that exists in the moment. As such, virtue is what best enables one to enjoy life in the present moment; it is the skill with which one handles the present. Hence, as TGW tells us, ethics is not about specific ways in which to live your life, it's not a self-help guide. It is, I would say, a character building act, which ensures that one has the right character (as opposed to rule book) to handle best different situations.
Quoting Marchesk
Maybe it's to think about the past/present only so-much as we need it in order to make a decision, and the rest of the time live focused on the present. Living in the present, and doing so with excellence, is, I think, a good life. Nothing more could be added at that point. Extending that life, or shortening it can do nothing to take away its excellence, which is a quality that is independent of time, just as a geometric figure being a circle is independent of the length of its radius.
Quoting Marchesk
I think this would be the wrong question because it assumes that pleasure and suffering accumulate in time. A better question would be how to have pleasure right now? To which no specific answer could be given. I could say you go about it with skill. But that will be of no help.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Hence, TGW, even you are forced to admit here of philosophy as a therapy, which does indeed lead us to the good life - similar, but not exactly the same as self-help :)
The kind of mastery attributed to the sage in my tradition is one of lack of superstition, adaptability, and enjoyment. Most thinking about the past and future is not helpful,and where it is it is because that thinking is in the present. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow unclear. Our aiming at tomorrow itself comes from a mastery within the moment. The sage naturally secures the future without having to worry about it by his momentary mastery.
Quoting Marchesk
I don't think that question has a straightforward answer, because people's constitutions are very different, and so what is good advice for one person will be bad for another. This is why philosophy cannot coherently be a self-help guide. What it can do is attack the roots underlying error and inconsistency, insofar as one commits themselves to them.
Quoting Marchesk
I agree that you can make a decision about whether to use drugs from a hedonist standpoint, but I disagree that you can do it by calculating. Again, it has to do with a kind of momentary mastery -- whether one can 'smell' a bad idea or not. And acquiring that kind of bodily taste is what living well involves.
If I implied this momentary notion, I didn't mean to. Aristotle expressly argues that the state of character is accumulated over a lifetime, and is careful to speak of living well 'in a complete life'. He doesn't mean there's a calculus over a life, though. He means that experience over a complete life, and the deliberation you undertake based upon that experience, prepares you for the moments when your choice of action will matter to you, and to others.
No doubt - but the value exists in the moment, not in the future.
Aristotle wanted to look cool in front of his philosopher friends.
When I listen to a song I enjoy, presumably I assume you would agree that I am experiencing pleasure.
Stopping the song and turning off my music player would not be something I desire, because I enjoy the prolonged experience of the song. The song is pleasurable over a course of several minutes.
This means that pleasure can be, and should be, (under your [vague] hedonism) maximized and measured by how long a pleasurable experience is and the intensity of this experience.
Presumably if it were possible for a person to experience a never-ending, constantly increasing amount of pleasure, that would be (under your hedonism) the best thing possible. I don't see how you could object to this without contradicting your hedonism.
We make judgement calls (i.e. what we should do in a situation) often by predicting how long a certain experience will last and the intensity of this experience, and whether or not the cost to experience this experience is worth it. For example, buying a fifty-dollar ice cream cone would be absurdly irresponsible, because you would be using a rather large amount of money for a simple pleasure that lasts but a few minutes. And we decide to get immunization shots because, although they do indeed hurt, they only hurt for a short amount of time and the intensity is not high enough for us to fear, while at the same time we are doing much good because we will not get sick in the future.
Well, on the Aristotelian model one cultivates the habits of virtue by doing virtuous acts. One learns to live well by doing the things that enable a person like oneself to live well. Perhaps one savours the pleasure of them more, thanks to habit and deliberation. He's certainly not arguing for the 'momentary', which has a feeling of the appetitive, the hedonist. 'One day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.' (Ethics 1098a 17-19)
Yes but you feel pleasure in the moment. Therefore your aim is to feel pleasure right now. The fact that you add up the minutes afterwards, and think "oh, I've felt pleasure for 10 mins" is not itself pleasurable. Therefore this does not follow:
Quoting darthbarracuda
Instead, what follows is that you must strive such that every single moment you feel pleasure. That is the goal. Not that you accumulate the maximum number of pleasurable moments, since the accumulation itself adds nothing to your pleasure and is not a pleasure in and of itself.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The length of the experience itself is not the source of pleasure. Neither does one get more pleasure because one felt it over a longer time. You feel pleasure in the moment, therefore pleasure can only exist at the moment when you feel it, hence pleasure just cannot add up.
Quoting darthbarracuda
This is factually wrong to begin with. Many people (such as myself) have always refused immunisation shots. Neither are the scientific findings strong enough to support them, in my humble opinion.
Thus, the goal is to maximize your [future] time spent experiencing pleasure.
Quoting Agustino
Please note that you are potentially endangering the lives of people who cannot get immunized.
No. The goal is merely to have pleasure now. That is my concern, not "future" pleasure which doesn't exist. It's a moment by moment mastery.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Hm?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, I'm trying to argue with the position that TGW has.
But either way if you are a hedonist, then pleasure is good. Presumably this means that you would strive to maximize the amount of time spent experiencing pleasure in the future, so that when the future comes to be the present, you are experiencing pleasure in the now.
Without the accumulation over time there is no pleasure in the moment. The moment, as a point instant in time, is a chimera.
Your enjoyment of pleasure now is partly resulting from an accumulation of the effects of past pleasurable moments and the anticipation that pleasure (in the sense of joy) will continue, and grow into the future. Think about when you are in love.
I think this is still a slave to future expectations. Why must I seek to strive for pleasure at every moment? If I am always seeking to gain pleasure, I'm clearly not feeling it at any moment. At any point were I was feeling pleasure, striving for pleasure is exactly what I would NOT have to do, as I already had it. Striving to feel pleasure in every single moment is, just another attempt to accumulate the maximum number of pleasure points. One is still thinking in terms of gaining the most number pleasure points possible. Mastery of the moment, of feeling pleasure or contentment in one's present in exactly what it is not.
Describing "the good life" in terms of feeling pleasure works I think. To be good always feel nice. But it is always about feeling pleasure, not gaining pleasure. Getting some amount of pleasure is not what makes life good. It is the moment of feeling it which does. (thus, hedonism sort of gets it wrong in a significant way).
This is a good point in principle, but I doubt any of us actually live in the moment entirely without anticipation of future joy (or suffering).
The true part of what you say is that we do not find pleasure through seeking it, which produces tension and emotional shrinkage, but rather through acceptance of where we are, which produces relaxation and emotional expansion.
Where we are always involves retention and protention, though; there is no 'pure living in the moment', even for those suffering from brain disorders like anterograde and retrograde amnesia, although the former loses the ability to form new memories while retaining memories prior to the onset of the disorder and the latter is the opposite; they form new memories but all past memories are gone. These conditions affect in different ways the quality of experience of the present.
Anticipation of future joy or suffering isn't prohibited. We do that all the time. Even those who have mastery of the moment. What matters is for the state of anticipating future joy or suffering to be, itself, a state of feeling pleasure, rather than a desperation for something which is yet to occur.
Mastery of the moment is, I think, is frequently characterised by feeling pleasure in the moment while also holding anticipation or knowledge about the future of the past. When someone can know of the past of future, but not let that control their sense of worth in the moment, they have learnt to live and feel in the moment. They get everything inescapable as thinking feeling humans, the knowledge of joy and pain, of the future and the past, of gain and loss, without the destructive stipulation obtaining something when it is not present or losing a state when it is is yet to pass. Tragedy without despair. Fear without panic. Desire without anxiety. Inevitable suffering without the sense it is all that characterises life.
The idea there is no "living in the moment" because of our recall of the past and anticipation of the future is just another example of thinking we need to be something we are not. It supposes the past or future is so compelling that we couldn't possibly think about it without wanting it immediately. In the strongest sense, it is a failure to live in the moment. Supposedly, we want the future or the past so strongly, we cannot possibly be content with our present. It is to hold we must be always be desperate for the past or future because are present can't be anything but unbearable. It is to still view ones worth about obtaining something you don't have rather just being yourself. Obviously, this will never work because if one is seeking to obtain, they lack what need. The past and future never arrive.
Of course we do live in the moment or better we do live now (where 'now' is not understood to be some incoherent 'point-instant') that is trivially true.
I have no serious argument with what you say here though; I think it is all pretty sensible.