Pleasure and Pain

In the Philebus, Socrates asks whether pleasure or wisdom deserves the name of the good, and the inquiry ends by awarding first place to neither. The life of pleasure without mind and the life of mind without pleasure are each judged deficient, so that the good life must be a mixture. But the mixture requires a principle of order. Pleasure, on Plato's analysis, belongs to the class of the unlimited or indefinite, admitting of more and less without any measure of its own, whereas wisdom belongs to the class of what is definite. Pleasure must therefore be measured by something outside itself, as wealth must, and it falls to wisdom to determine which pleasures enter the mixture and in what proportion.

Because pleasure resembles opinion in admitting of truth and falsity, Plato distinguishes true from false and pure from mixed pleasures. The bodily pleasures are for the most part mixed, since they arise out of a prior lack and are accompanied by the pain of that lack. The relief of an itch by scratching is his example, and it serves to show both that a bodily pleasure may be taken as an object of desire and that it may be considered simply as the satisfaction of a desire. Pure pleasures are those which presuppose no want: the pleasure taken in learning, in shapes and sounds, in beauty apprehended by the mind.

The ranking of pleasures according to the parts of the soul is carried further in the ninth book of the Republic. The pleasures of the appetitive part attach to objects which come to be and pass away, while those of the philosophic part attach to what always is, and are on that account judged truer as well as greater. The Gorgias presses a related point against Callicles, who identifies the good with the largest appetite and its fullest satisfaction: the man perpetually thirsty and perpetually drinking exhibits not flourishing but a condition of need. Whether the tyrant who indulges every desire can be called happy is a question treated more fully under the idea of Happiness.

The terms Plato sets remain in use long after the dialogues: whether pleasures differ in kind and not merely in amount, whether some are false, and whether pleasure can measure itself or must be measured by wisdom. Aristotle takes up the first of these questions, Aquinas the account of appetite that underlies it, and Mill the distinction between higher and lower pleasures.

Aristotle treats pleasure twice in the Nicomachean Ethics, in the seventh book and again in the tenth, and readers have long disputed how far the two accounts agree. In both, pleasure is denied to be a process or a coming to be. It is rather that which completes an activity, arising when a faculty in good condition is exercised upon a worthy object. Sight is pleasant when the eye is sound and the thing seen is fine; thought is pleasant when the mind is unimpeded. Pleasure supervenes upon the activity, he writes, as bloom supervenes upon those in their prime. It follows that there are as many kinds of pleasure as there are kinds of activity, and that the quality of a pleasure is fixed by the character of the activity it completes.

From this Aristotle concludes that pleasures may be good or bad. Activities differ in worth, some being choiceworthy, some to be avoided, and some neutral; the pleasure proper to a worthy activity is good, and that proper to an unworthy one bad. Pleasure and pain are accordingly measured by virtue rather than virtue by pleasure and pain. They are found alike in the good life and the bad, and only the pleasures the good man takes and the pains he willingly bears can themselves be called good. This is why Aristotle assigns so large a place to pleasure and pain in the training of the young, who are steered by these rudders until they come to enjoy what they ought and to hate what they ought.

The moral virtues are defined by reference to these two passions. Temperance is a moderation of the bodily pleasures, and courage a governing of the fear of pain and its avoidance. Pleasure enters likewise into the account of the happy life, though Aristotle denies that happiness consists in amusement. Men require relaxation because they cannot work continuously, and play has the character of an end, being engaged in for its own sake; but it would be strange, he observes, if a man were to labor and suffer all his life in order to amuse himself. Since the happy life is a virtuous life and virtue requires exertion, serious things are held better than laughable ones.

Aristotle's ordering of pleasures by kind rather than by amount passes into the Christian tradition through Aquinas, who adopts both the definition of pleasure as the completion of activity and the doctrine of temperance. The same distinction is invoked on quite different premises when Mill separates higher pleasures from lower and so departs from Bentham's calculus of quantity.

Lucretius appears to give a purely physiological account of pleasure and pain, referring both to the effect upon the sense organs of various configurations of atoms. Things which touch the senses pleasantly are made of smooth and round bodies, while those which seem bitter and harsh are composed of particles more hooked, which tear a way into the senses. Hot fire and cold frost have particles fanged in different ways to prick us. Nothing in this explanation requires reference to good or evil, and to that extent the doctrine belongs with the analysis of sensation and of the atomic constitution of things, which is pursued under the ideas of Sense and of Matter.

The physics is not left standing alone. Lucretius wishes to exhibit the tendency of all sentient things to avoid pain as the one besetting evil. Nature cries aloud, he writes, for nothing else but that pain be kept far sundered from the body, and that the mind, withdrawn from care and fear, may enjoy the sense of pleasure. The first maxim is therefore not to seek pleasure but to avoid pain, and among pleasures to seek only those which are unmixed. What nature asks is little: freedom from hunger, from thirst, from cold. Whatever exceeds this is supplied by opinion.

The pleasures of the mind are set above those of the body, though Lucretius offers no psychological explanation of them, because bodily pleasures appear to be followed by bodily torment or to be mixed with it from the first. The fourth book, treating of love, is meant to show as much: the lovers cannot possess what they pursue, and the pleasure is attended throughout by frustration. Set against such pleasures is the untroubled condition of one who has learned the nature of things and is released from the fear of the gods and of death. That release, rather than any positive gratification, is what the poem holds out.

The distinction between mixed and pure pleasures, and between those of the body and those of the mind, is drawn by Plato before Lucretius and by Mill long after him, and it tends in each case to carry a psychological and a moral significance at once. Hobbes and the later writers who make pleasure the appearance of good retain the naturalism without the counsel of abstinence that accompanies it here.

Among the Stoics, pleasure and pain are placed with the things indifferent. They are neither good nor evil, according to Epictetus, because they belong to the class of things not in our power. Opinion, choice, desire, and aversion are our own; the body, property, reputation, and office are not. The Enchiridion opens with this division and applies it at once to the passions. A pain in the leg is an affection of the body, whereas the judgment that this affection is an evil is an act of the man himself, and it is the judgment rather than the affection which disturbs him. The whole of good and evil is thus made to turn on the use made of impressions.

The reasoning by which pleasure and pain are excluded from good and evil rests on an observation that other writers make and employ differently. Pleasure and pain, like life and death, honor and dishonor, happen equally to good men and bad, and therefore, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, make us neither better nor worse. Plato and Aristotle draw from the same observation the conclusion not that pleasure is indifferent but that there are good and bad pleasures, distinguished by the activities to which they attach. Whether the difference between these positions is one of doctrine or of emphasis is not readily settled, since the Stoics also recommend a life ordered by reason in which many pleasures are in fact forgone.

Epictetus does not deny that pain is contrary to the nature of the body, nor that men are moved by it. What he denies is that anything befalling the body can be an evil to a being whose proper nature is reason. Sickness impedes the body, not the will, unless the will consents. The discipline which follows consists in rehearsing this distinction until it is ready at hand, and in withdrawing desire from whatever lies outside one's control. Adherents of the teaching have often been charged with insensibility, to which the reply is that the sage feels the sensation while withholding the judgment.

The Stoic separation of moral worth from feeling reappears in Kant, who holds that the line of duty is always set against the seductions of pleasure and that reason will not allow intrinsic worth to a life lived for enjoyment. The contrary view, that pleasure and pain are the very substance of good and evil, is taken by Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, and the issue between them is joined under the ideas of Duty and of Good and Evil.

Aquinas treats pleasure and pain as conditions of the appetite. In Questions 31 through 39 of the Summa Theologica I-II, delight (delectatio) is defined as the repose of the appetite in a suitable good obtained, and pain (dolor) or sorrow (tristitia) as its contrary when evil is present. Because he distinguishes the sensitive appetite from the rational, the same division runs through the passions: what is delight in the one is joy (gaudium) in the other, and joy may be an act of the will, a spiritual state, when the will comes to rest in the possession of its object. Pleasure and pain accordingly represent the satisfaction or frustration of desire rather than the objects desired or shunned.

The distinction between two senses of pleasure is one Aquinas is careful to keep. He speaks of the desire for pleasure and the aversion to pain, and also of the pleasure and pain of satisfied and unsatisfied desire; since the same words serve for both, the difference is easily lost unless the context marks it. He draws a parallel distinction on the side of pain, between the pain of sense and the pain of loss or deprivation, which bears on the doctrine of punishment as well as on the analysis of grief. The suffering the poets chiefly describe is of the second sort, a torment of the spirit rather than of the flesh.

Since pleasure and pain are responses to what the appetite takes to be good or evil, they can be judged by the character of their objects. A man may take pleasure in sin, and that pleasure is bad, not because delight is in itself disordered but because the good in which the appetite rests is an apparent one. Sorrow for sin, on the other hand, is directed to a genuine evil and accompanies virtue. Following Aristotle, Aquinas holds that pleasure attends virtuous activity and that habitual delight in right action is a sign of virtue formed, while denying that pleasure is the end for which the virtuous man acts.

The scholastic analysis of the appetites supplies the vocabulary in which later writers state their disagreements, even where they abandon the framework. Hobbes retains the connection between pleasure and the good while dropping the distinction between real and apparent goods, so that whatever a man desires is what he calls good; Locke retains the language of delight and uneasiness while making happiness the utmost pleasure of which we are capable. The questions raised here about appetite and its object are considered further under the ideas of Desire and of Will.

Hobbes states the connection between pleasure and the good as a matter of definition. Whatsoever is the object of a man's appetite he calls good, and the object of his aversion evil; pleasure is the appearance or sense of good, displeasure the appearance or sense of evil. These names, he insists, are always used with reference to the person using them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor any common rule of good and evil taken from the nature of the objects themselves. The account belongs to a general doctrine of the passions in which appetite and aversion are small beginnings of motion within the body, before they appear in walking, speaking, and other visible acts.

On this basis the several passions are treated as varieties of one mechanism. Love and hate are appetite and aversion with the object present; hope is appetite joined to an opinion of attaining, fear aversion joined to an opinion of hurt. Deliberation is the alternate succession of appetites and aversions concerning one thing, and the will is the last appetite in deliberating. Because felicity is a continual progress of desire from one object to another, Hobbes denies that there is any finis ultimus or summum bonum such as the older moral philosophy spoke of. Repose of mind, on this view, belongs to the dead rather than the living.

The political consequences are drawn without hesitation. If good and evil name nothing but private appetite and aversion, then men in the natural condition, having no common measure, fall into contention, and the measure must be supplied by the civil sovereign whose law determines what shall be called just. The doctrine bears also on rhetoric and on the passions employed in governing, since a ruler who understands the springs of appetite may move men without persuading them of anything. Whether a common measure of good can be established otherwise than by authority is a question pursued under the ideas of Good and Evil and of Law.

The reduction of good to the object of desire is resisted by every writer who holds that desires themselves may be good or bad, as Aristotle holds. Locke keeps the premise that things are good or evil only in reference to pleasure and pain, adding a doctrine of uneasiness to explain what moves the will. Mill keeps it while insisting that pleasures may be ordered as higher and lower, an ordering which on Hobbes's terms would express a preference rather than record a fact about the objects preferred.

Pleasure and pain, Locke holds, are like other simple ideas in that they cannot be described nor their names defined, the way of knowing them being only by experience. He uses pleasure and delight, pain and uneasiness, as pairs, and remarks that satisfaction, delight, and happiness on the one side, and trouble, torment, and misery on the other, are but different degrees of the same thing. Delight or uneasiness joins itself, he observes, to almost all our ideas of sensation and reflection, there being scarce any affection of the senses which is not able to produce one or the other in us. So understood, pleasure and pain are less opposite sensations than contrary attributes which sensations of every sort may carry.

The passions are then defined by reference to these two ideas. Love is pleasure taken in a thing, hatred the pain it causes; desire is the uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it. Uneasiness has a further office in the account of the will, for Locke holds that what determines the will to action is not the greater apparent good but some present uneasiness. A man may judge a distant good to be greater and remain unmoved, while a present want moves him at once. The bearing of this on liberty and on the suspension of desire is treated under the idea of Will.

Happiness Locke describes as the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain, the lowest degree of happiness being so much ease from pain and so much present pleasure as a man cannot be content without. Since men place their satisfaction in different things, one in sensual pleasure and another in the delight of knowledge, he denies that there is any summum bonum the same for all. The philosophers of old, he says, might as reasonably have disputed whether the best relish is to be found in apples, plums, or nuts. Degrees of happiness are on this view determined by larger and smaller quantities of pleasure.

Locke's denial that happiness is the same for all men takes explicit issue with Aristotle, and the issue turns on whether pleasures admit of ordering by quality. Mill, who accepts much of Locke's psychology, holds that they do, and so allows himself to say what Locke could not, that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Kant rejects the premise common to both, maintaining that no principle drawn from the feeling of pleasure can serve as a law binding on the will.

Kant's treatment of pleasure begins from a division of practical principles into the formal and the material. Every material principle, whatever object it proposes, determines the will through the pleasure expected from that object's existence, and all such principles therefore fall under the single heading of self-love or private happiness. The objection is not that men fail to seek pleasure but that pleasure furnishes no ground of universality. What gratifies one man leaves another indifferent, and what gratifies him today may not tomorrow; a rule drawn from such a source can direct prudence, but it cannot bind as law. The moral law must accordingly be formal, determining the will by the mere form of universal legislation rather than by any matter of desire.

The distinction between acting from inclination and acting from duty follows. An action done because it accords with interest, however correct, has no moral worth, since the will is in that case determined by an expected satisfaction. Worth belongs to the action done from respect for the law, and Kant allows that the case is clearest where inclination pulls the other way. His tribute to duty is that it embraces nothing charming or insinuating. Even the greatest aggregate of life's pleasures, taking duration as well as number into account, though it might seem to merit the name of the highest good, is something against which reason sets its face, refusing intrinsic worth to a man who merely lives for enjoyment.

Kant does not on that account dismiss happiness. He regards it as something every finite rational being necessarily seeks, and he makes it a component of the highest good, though only as apportioned to worthiness to be happy. Virtue is the supreme condition and happiness the consequence which reason demands but nature does not supply, from which he derives the postulates of immortality and of God. There is also a pleasure he admits without prejudice to the doctrine, the disinterested satisfaction taken in the beautiful, which belongs to the idea of Beauty rather than to the theory of conduct.

The opposition Kant draws between duty and inclination is taken by the utilitarians as a challenge rather than a refutation. Mill replies that a law so conceived is empty, and that Kant, when he comes to apply it, appeals covertly to the consequences of universal adoption. Freud, without entering the moral dispute, describes a comparable conflict in psychological terms when he sets the reality principle against the pleasure principle.

Mill states the principle of utility by reference to pleasure. Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse, happiness being understood as pleasure and the absence of pain. Pleasure and freedom from pain are on this statement the only things desirable as ends, all other things being desirable as means to them. He is at pains to answer the charge that such a doctrine is fit only for swine. The accusation, he replies, supposes human beings capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable; but since men have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, they have sources of gratification not open to the beasts.

The reply requires a distinction Bentham had not drawn. Pleasures differ in quality as well as in quantity, and where two pleasures are such that all or nearly all who have experience of both give a decided preference to one, that one is the more desirable, even if it is attended with a greater amount of discontent. The judgment of those acquainted with both sorts is the only evidence admitted. From this Mill derives the saying that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, a preference he explains by the sense of dignity which the higher faculties carry with them.

Mill also allows that many things are desired for their own sake and not as means, naming money, power, and fame, and holding that virtue itself may come to be so desired. He accounts for this by saying that such things become parts of happiness rather than exceptions to the principle, which raises the question whether pleasure is here named as an object of desire or as the satisfaction accompanying any desire fulfilled. The fourth chapter offers what he calls a proof, resting on the claim that the sole evidence anything is desirable is that men do in fact desire it. Whether such an argument can establish the principle has been much disputed.

By admitting differences of quality among pleasures, Mill brings the utilitarian doctrine nearer to Aristotle, who ranks pleasures according to the activities they complete, and further from Hobbes and Locke, for whom the amount of satisfaction is all that can be weighed. Whether the qualitative test can be applied without appealing to some standard other than pleasure is the question his successors inherit, and it is examined further under the ideas of Happiness and of Good and Evil.

Freud offers his account of pleasure and pain as psychology rather than as moral doctrine, and it is perhaps the nearest thing in the tradition to a treatment divorced from ethical considerations. The pleasure principle, he holds, automatically regulates the operation of the mental apparatus; our entire psychical activity is bent upon procuring pleasure and avoiding pain. He nevertheless admits how little can be said about the conditions under which these feelings arise. We may venture to say, he writes, that pleasure is in some way connected with lessening or extinguishing the amount of stimulation in the mental apparatus, and that pain involves a heightening of it, but on the conditions themselves we fall short.

The pleasure principle is not the only regulator of mental life. Alongside the sexual instincts, which aim at gratification, Freud sets the ego-instincts, which under the influence of necessity learn to replace the pleasure principle by a modification of it. The task of avoiding pain becomes nearly equal in importance to that of gaining pleasure, and the ego learns to go without immediate satisfaction, to postpone gratification, to endure a degree of pain, and to renounce certain sources of pleasure altogether. So trained, it follows the reality principle, which at bottom also seeks pleasure, though a delayed and diminished pleasure assured by its relation to fact.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle the account is complicated further. Patients in analysis repeat the experiences which gave them pain, a compulsion that yields no satisfaction and cannot be referred to the pleasure principle. Freud postulates an instinct more primitive still, a tendency in organic life to restore an earlier state, and concludes that the aim of all life is death. The social consequences are drawn in Civilization and Its Discontents, where the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction on which civilization rests is shown to generate guilt and aggression.

Freud does not amplify his observation of the conflict between pleasure and reality into a moral doctrine. It bears a resemblance nonetheless to the teaching of moralists who oppose duty to pleasure, as Kant does, and to that of Aristotle and Aquinas, who conceive virtue as the forgoing of certain pleasures and the endurance of certain pains through a reasonable and habitual moderation of the passions. The questions his hypotheses raise about instinct and repression are pursued under the ideas of Desire and of Habit.