What is pleasure?

[Disagreeable]

Yes but the pleasurable experience is good in itself, intrinsically. It's not like you experience the pleasurable experience and then that pleasurable experience leads to pleasure. The pleasurable experience *is* the pleasure. Hence why it's intrinsically good.

Think of tasting chocolate: the sweetness isn’t something that comes after you eat it — the sweetness is the experience of eating chocolate itself. Similarly, the goodness of a pleasurable experience just is the pleasure you feel while having it.

But if you seek out experiences that give you pleasure - even if that pleasure is concurrent with the experience - you’re doing it for that reason. It may be an instant reward, but your motivation in doing so is what makes it instrumental.

Boru

That's just talking past me. Again, I'm not talking about the instrumentality of motivation, I'm talking about intrinsic value versus instrumental value when it comes to experiences.

The motivation may be instrumental but that doesn't mean that the experience is instrumentally good. It's good in itself, intrinsically, rather than good because it leads to something else. And that makes it an example of intrinsic value, not instrumental value.

Instrumental reasons for acting do not affect the intrinsic goodness of the experience itself.

[Belacqua]

[...] I'm not talking about the instrumentality of motivation, I'm talking about intrinsic value versus instrumental value when it comes to experiences.

The motivation may be instrumental but that doesn't mean that the experience is instrumentally good. It's good in itself, intrinsically, rather than good because it leads to something else. And that makes it an example of intrinsic value, not instrumental value.

Instrumental reasons for acting do not affect the intrinsic goodness of the experience itself.

I've been thinking about this. I'm glad you brought it up. 

I think we don't have to differentiate strictly between instrumental and intrinsically good activities. Both may allow us to feel pleasure in doing them. What's different is that the aspect of the activity we enjoy is not the same as the instrumental result. 

Here's a thing from a paper I found:

Pleasure, for Aristotle, is not something that we experience as a result of performing an activity, as a sort of reward or incentive. 

It may be that in our transactional, business-oriented, you-get-what-you-pay-for society, this seems counter-intuitive. It feels more normal to say that you pay for your pleasure. I put in X, Y, and Z effort and my reward is a good feeling. Aristotle is denying this. The paper goes on:

Rather, pleasure is identified with an aspect of the activity itself, namely, the perfection that it gains in virtue of the fit between the condition of the subject’s capacity and the object it is active in relation to.

Which is a typically difficult Aristotelian way of phrasing things. But I take it to mean that the pleasure is not a pay-off but an aspect of the thing we're doing. And that the feeling of pleasure has to do with the fit between us (the subject) and the thing being done (the object). 

So for example in good weather my wife and I will walk to the only store in my town that carries Campari. It's about a half hour walk. We invent an instrumental excuse to take a walk (getting the Campari) but the pleasure of the experience isn't in the fact that I achieve this goal. The pleasure comes from being with my wife and walking in good weather along the river bank. If the instrumental goal failed (e.g. if the store were out of Campari) the pleasure would be unchanged. I could also order Campari from Amazon or just do without it (I don't actually NEED a Negroni every evening) -- that is, there are different instrumental ways to achieve the same goal which don't include pleasurable aspects. 

So the pleasure is an aspect of the action, it has no real goal other than itself, and it comes about through the relation of my mental state, the pleasure of being with my wife, the beauty of the river bank, etc. Aristotle calls this the "perfection" of the fit among all these things, and that seems like a strong word to me, but if we just say "the fortunate combination" that seems good enough. 

In contrast, many instrumental activities don't enjoy this fortunate combination, and therefore don't give pleasure in themselves. A root canal, for example, allows the cessation of pain, which is pleasant, but the activity itself contains no aspect at all which we enjoy. This is a more transactional kind of event -- you pay X to get Y. 

Here's the paper:

https://philarchive.org/archive/STRAOT-6

[Disagreeable]

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.

A separate, but interesting, point: Have you heard of the paradox of hedonism?

It's the following:

The paradox of hedonism (or pleasure paradox) is the concept that directly pursuing pleasure or happiness as a primary goal often makes achieving it impossible. Coined by Henry Sidgwick, it suggests that focusing too intensely on becoming happy or experiencing pleasure actually prevents those states, whereas happiness is usually found as a byproduct of pursuing other, meaningful goals.

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.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's possible that our reward systems produce a hedonistic gloss in order to compel us towards biologically advantageous behaviors. We seek out fats and sugars to stave off starvation. Coca leaves were used for thousands of years to battle fatigue, hunger, and thirst. That we find ourselves enjoying them should not surprise us. Maybe doing coke (or eating cake) is both intrinsically and instrumentally good. Food for thought.

[Disagreeable]

When it comes to the instrumental goodness of doing cocaine, sometimes it might be instrumentally good and sometimes not. Consequences vary. But generally speaking I'd say that it's instrumentally bad. At least because you might get caught doing it and go to prison!

[The Grand Nudger]

Is the alleged intrinsic goodness of cocaine different in that regard? Pleasurable™ to some biology, for seemingly instrumental reasons, and not so much to other biology. We enjoy salt. Slugs do not. Prison, fwiw, isn't a consequence of doing cocaine at all. It's not like the minute you do coke a prison falls on your head. It's a consequence of living in this society or that one. Out In The Wild, as it were, it's just one of many performance enhancing drugs.

Personally, I don't think we need to overcomplicate it. We know pleasure when we experience it.

[Angrboda]

My issue is that there are other things we seek out because of their intrinsic qualities besides pleasurable experiences. There's some evidence that people find meaningful experiences worth seeking regardless of the emotional concommitants. And a recent scientific article pointed out that while emotionally pleasurable and meaningful experiences are typical drivers of behavior, novelty and exploration is a generally unacknowledged third rail. Regardless, none of this armchair philosophising necessarily holds up under the biological microscope. Neurology doesn't admit of the simulteneity proposed here, and depending upon your theory of emotion and feeling, the characteristics which we associate as pleasure may be secondary characteristics. As a strict matter, we engage in behaviors that evoke emotions or feelings; the emotions or feelings aren't properly speaking a part of the experience itself.

[Paraselene]

I'm reminded of the phrase, "If it pleases you..."

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm reminded of the phrase, "If it pleases you..."

I’m reminded of the phrase, ‘It’s like pornography. I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.’ 😉

Boru

[Belacqua]

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. 

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.)