(March 8, 2026 at 10:43 am)Disagreeable Wrote: That sounds to me like you are saying that pleasure is intrinsically valuable. Because a pleasurable activity, or experience, is something that is enjoyable in itself, rather than a reward you get from doing/experiencing something.
I mean, this is perfectly compatible with the notion that maybe the whole experience or whole activity isn't intrinsically pleasurable, but just some aspect of it. The key point is that it's not like you do/experience something and then it produces pleasure. It's that the activity/experience itself, or an aspect of it, is the pleasure.
Yes, I think that for the kind of thing we're talking about, pleasure is an aspect of an activity, rather than payment later received.
I wanted to avoid making an absolute distinction between utilitarian activities and activities-for-themselves. I think that both can give us pleasure. So listening to music is an example of activity-for-itself. And walking to the store on a sunny day is utilitarian. But both give pleasure in different ways. In both cases it is some aspect of the activity, rather than a reward that you purchase through labor.
I think that the Paradox of Hedonism is bound to come up when we're trying to define what pleasure is. Because the next step, after we've (more or less) agreed on what pleasure is, is to argue about whether pleasure is what a good life is all about. The character Philebus makes the case (in the dialogue named for him) that the best life is the one with the most pleasure, and therefore the key to a good life is to spend our time maximizing our pleasure. Naturally Socrates argues against this.
It seems to me that the so-called Decadent writers, as well as the Aestheticists, dramatize this question best. Dorian Gray, for example, is given unlimited time and money, and chooses to use it to pursue as much pleasure as possible. But of course he comes to a bad end, so that even though Wilde is seen as advocating a life of the highest aesthetic experience, he shows us that Gray would have been better off, and happier, if he had become a philanthropist or something. (I read this book with a group of Japanese people in their 70s and 80s, and asked them what they would do with unlimited time and money. I assumed they would travel the world or some other fun thing, but they all immediately said they'd do some kind of difficult research to cure cancer or something.)
Huysmans' characters are the same -- the most decadent one just gets sick. The others end up realizing that they have been selfish, and turn toward the church. And I'm NOT saying that we should all become Catholic, but the realization that there is something more important than our own pleasure is what it adds up to.
Quote: If we treat pleasure as an end in itself then it's hard to achieve it, but if we focus on activities/experiences themselves then they're more likely to be pleasurable. Quite interesting.
Yes, I think this is what the smart guys end up teaching us. (And of course both Wilde and Huysmans knew the work of Plato and Aristotle backwards and forwards.)
