Pleasure (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Pleasure (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Pleasure
First published Wed Nov 23, 2005; substantive revision Fri Jun 17, 2016
Pleasure, in the inclusive usages important in thought about
well-being, experience, and mind, includes the affective positivity of
all joy, gladness, liking, and enjoyment – all our feeling
good or happy. It is often contrasted with the similarly inclusive
pain
, or suffering, of all our feeling
bad.
Nowadays
happiness
is often used similarly, which leads to confusion with older uses
signifying overall good fortune or success in life that figure in
self-reports of happiness and in ‘happiness studies’ of
the diverse sources of these.
Pleasure presents as good and attractive – itself, when it
comes to our notice, and all else that appears aglow in its light.
This suggests simple explanations both of why people pursue pleasure
and why there are reasons to do so. That we may prefer and choose
something for its pleasure suggests that there are facts about
pleasure that make some such choices better than others. Philosophers,
taking this suggestion further, have sometimes taken pleasure to be a
single simple (feature of) experience that
makes
experiences good and attractive to the extent it is present
This
simple picture
has often been associated with more
sweeping normative and psychological claims, all ambiguously called
hedonism
”.
These take pleasure’s goodness and attractiveness (and
pain’s badness and aversiveness) to (between them) explain
all
of human value, normative practical reasons, and
motivation. Pleasure and pain would, if views of
all
three
kinds were true, be
the only ultimately good- and bad-making
features
of human (and relevantly similar animal) life and also
both
the only actual ultimate ends
and
the only justified
ultimate ends
of all our voluntary pursuit and avoidance. The
simple picture and related hedonistic claims and explanations were
especially prominent in the psychology, economics, and philosophy of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but were widely rejected in
the twentieth.
Contemporary science partly restores pleasure’s importance but
also suggests that pleasure’s relations to awareness and
motivational attraction are more variable than many hedonists and much
ordinary thinking supposed. Contemporary philosophers continue to
debate what pleasure is but are only beginning to address scientific
advances that are slowly filling out what age-old use of psychoactive
substances to enhance mood and newer drug therapies for depression
already presupposed – pleasure is a biological
phenomenon.
Guide to the Contents
: Notes should be omitted by the
typical reader; see the advice that precedes these. §1 discusses
the simple picture (boldface, two paragraphs above). §1.3
suggests how the objections earlier considered may be mitigated
sufficiently to save the simple picture’s experiential core as a
live theoretical possibility. The difficulty and fallibility of
introspection and perhaps especially of introspecting affective states
is appealed to. §2.3.2 discusses the recent attitudinal approach
in the form developed by Fred Feldman. Its difficulties are discussed
at length and both neoAristotelian and more simple-picture-like
alternatives (§2.3.3) suggested. More complex medieval accounts
of pleasure’s intentional relations are also noted (§2.3.1)
and likewise contrasted with more nondual views. §3, especially,
aims to integrate philosophical and scientific, historical and
contemporary contributions.
1. A Feature of Momentary Experience
1.1 Pleasure as a Simple but Powerful Feeling
1.2 Rejections of the Simple Picture
1.3 More Modest Roles for Experience
2. Finding Unity in Heterogeneity
2.1 Seeking a Universal Account
2.2 Classical Accounts: Functional Unity with Difference
2.2.1 Plato: Noticing Different Restorations to Life’s Natural State
2.2.2 Aristotle: Perfecting Different Activities
2.2.3 Epicurus: Savoring the Activity of Life’s Natural State
2.3 A Kind of Directedness toward Objects or Contents?
2.3.1 Liking, Loving, Savoring
2.3.2 A Content-Involving Attitude, Like Belief?
2.3.3 Welcoming-Whatever-Comes that May Float Free?
2.3.4 Intentionality, Subjectivity, and Consciousness
3. Pleasure, Motivation, and the Brain
3.1 Motivation-Based Analyses and Their Problems
3.2 Is Pleasure’s Goodness Independent of Motivation?
3.3 Dividing Pleasure or Finding True Pleasure?
4. Conclusion: Looking Inward, Looking Forward
Bibliography
Canonical Religious Texts, by Tradition
References, by Author
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
1. A Feature of Momentary Experience
Pleasure seems obvious and even intimate in a friend’s smile,
posture, or manner and when we notice we are having a good time and
enjoying ourselves. To some in the grip of the simple picture (¶2
above) it has seemed introspectively obvious that pleasure is a simple
feeling we know directly in momentary conscious experience and almost
as obvious that it is something we often do, and should, pursue. But
Gilbert Ryle, writing when behaviorism ruled psychology, maintained
that pleasure is never any episode of conscious experience at all
(1949, IV, 6) and Fred Feldman (2004, discussed in §2.3.2 below)
maintains that it is a pure propositional attitude of which feeling is
no essential part. Other opponents of the simple picture maintained
that pleasure requires a much larger cognitive context than, on the
simple picture, it does. Elizabeth Anscombe thereby helped refocus
philosophers’ attention on the foundational question that
uncritical acceptance of the simple picture had led many modern
philosophers to neglect, What is pleasure?
1.1 Pleasure as a Simple but Powerful Feeling
Pleasure most commonly backgrounds the experience of someone cheerful
by temperament or in a good mood. Such baseline affect and small
deviations from it cumulatively matter most to the affective quality
of life (Watson 2000; Diener, Sandvik, and Pavot  1991; cf.
Coan and Allen 2003, Rachels 2004). That pleasure includes these has
been prominently noted (e.g.: Duncker, 1941, 404; Alston, 1967, 341;
Gosling, 1969, 135 ff.) but often slips from mind. Exclusive focus on
salient episodes with acute onset caused by typically pleasant
stimulation, as from sweets and caresses, may mislead one to think
such episodes or sensations are the main topic of hedonic discussion
or to misread others as making this mistake.
Pleasure neither easily fits, nor has been widely thought by theorists
to fit, the standard paradigms of sensation, whether of qualities of
outward things or of those of either localized or diffuse bodily
sensation, since it seems any typically pleasant sensory state or
quality may be enjoyed less or even not at all on occasions, while its
sensory quality and intensity remain much the same (Ryle 1949, p. 109;
1954a, p. 58; 1954b, p. 136). The pleasantness of tastes is modulated
by nutritional state and experience (Young 1959, Cabanac 1971, Bolles
1991). And differences in mood, temperament, personal history, and how
one feels toward a particular person in a specific social context may
make all the difference between feeling great pleasure or great
distress from what seems the same sensation of touch (cf. Helm 2000
pp. 93–94; 2002, pp. 23–24). Both science and
reflection on everyday experience thus distinguish
mere
sensation proper from hedonic reaction (cf. Aydede 2000). Allowing
that there may be ‘sensations of pleasure’, its
occasionally accompanying somatic symptoms, is consistent with this
distinction between sensation, narrowly conceived, and affective
response. John Locke’s (1700/1979, II, xx, 1) picture of
pleasure and pain as “simple ideas” learned and understood
“only by experience” of “what we feel in
ourselves”, distinguishable from any “sensation barely in
itself” they may accompany, seems consistent with this
distinction between affective feeling and sensation proper made more
prominently
later.
Locke and many of his time and tradition seem to have held views close
to
the simple picture
of pleasure (of this entry’s
second introductory paragraph), joined to an empiricist picture of our
concepts of pleasure and good as similarly simple because acquired
from the simple experience of pleasure. Their view that pleasure is an
(at least cognitively) isolable conscious event or feature has
counterparts among those ancient hedonist materialist philosophers who
thought of pleasure as some smooth or gentle stimulation, motion, or
physiological change (see Gosling and Taylor 1982, pp. 41, 394)
and also among those nowadays who regard it as some short-term
activity of the brain. Hedonist views that explain human value,
motivation, and concepts of good and evil in terms of such supposedly
simple affective feelings of pleasure and pain (e.g., Locke 1700/1979,
Essay
II, xx and xxi, 31 ff.) were also widespread,
especially among writers in English, in the following two centuries.
Pleasure was widely taken for granted as foundational in this way by
the nascent behavioral and social sciences, until more demanding
standards, first for stricter introspection and later for more
objective (in this use: not based in experimental subjects’
judgments on the topic) methods, were
adopted.
1.2 Rejections of the Simple Picture
The last great nineteenth century utilitarian moral philosopher, Henry
Sidgwick, failed to find any constant felt feature in his experience
of pleasure. He therefore proposed that “pleasure” picks
out momentary experiences not by any specific introspected quality but
rather by their intrinsic desirability, as may be cognitively
apprehended at the time of experiencing (Sidgwick 1907, pp.
125–31, 111–5). He thus took the concept of pleasure to be
irreducibly evaluative and normative, but still to apply to
experience; experience is pleasant to the extent it wholly grounds
reasons to desire, seek, or actualize it merely in how it feels.
Mid-twentieth-century British and American philosophers departed still
farther from the simple picture and associated empiricist traditions,
influenced in part by behaviorism in psychology.
Gilbert Ryle (1949, 1954a, 1954b) accordingly argued that
“pleasure” designates no occurrent experiences at all, but
(in a central use) heedfully performed activities fulfilling unopposed
dispositional inclinations and (in others) equally dispositional
disturbances of, or else liabilities to, such
dispositions.
The preferred first of these was a near transposition of Aristotle’s
account of pleasure (in
NE
VII) as the unimpeded conduct of
activities into the language of dispositions to behavior or action
(since heed, or attention, was also taken dispositionally).
Ryle’s logical dispositionalism was soon rejected (Nowell-Smith
1954, Penelhum 1957, Armstrong 1968, Lyons 1980). His constructive
suggestion that pleasure be understood as a form of heed, attention,
or interest builds on Aristotle’s observation that pleasure
strengthens specific activities in competition with others and his
arguing from this that pleasure varies in kind with the different
activities on which it depends, each being strengthened by its own
pleasures but weakened by others and also weakened by its own pains
NE
X, 5:1175b1–24). On Ryle’s view, this is
because to do something with pleasure just is to do it wholeheartedly
and with one’s absorption in it undistracted by other activities
or by feelings of any kind.
Justin Gosling, insightfully appraising the Ryle-inspired literature
toward the end of its run, argued that it had largely missed the
ethical and psychological importance of pleasure by neglecting the
conceptually central cases of positive emotion and mood. (For a
forthright denial of pleasant occurrent mood, see Taylor 1963.) He
concluded that our being pleased in these ways shows pleasure to be,
in a relaxed way of speaking, a feeling, after all, and that the
concept is extended from these cases to include enjoyments that may
please one at the time or else cause or dispose one to be pleased
later. Wanting things for their own sake, which hedonists often seek
to explain in terms of their being pleasant, is actually connected to
the central cases through its often being caused by being pleased at
some prospect. While Gosling used such distinctions to block some
arguments for hedonist theses, he also defended the importance of
pleasure in both moral psychology and ethics (1969, chapters 9 and
10).
Elizabeth Anscombe, like Ryle and his followers, rejected any account
on which pleasure is a context-independent ‘internal
impression’, whether affective or sensory. But while Ryle
substituted a neoAristotelian account of enjoyments to fit his
‘anti-Cartesian’ philosophy of mind, her main reason was
that any such feeling or sensation would be quite beside what she took
to be the concept’s explanatory and reason-implying use. She
influentially judged the concept so obscure and problematic that
theories placing weight upon it, such as hedonistic utilitarianism,
should be rejected out of hand. John Rawls, quoting her even more
influentially, did just that, abandoning utilitarianism for a more
constructivist and less realist approach to
ethics.
Anscombe (interpreting and expanding on her very brief remarks on
pleasure, guided by the larger context of her 1963/1957 and also by
her later 1981d/1978) reasoned that since ascribing pleasure gives a
reason for action, and reasons for action are intelligible only given
a context of intelligible evaluation and motivation that no feeling of
the moment could supply, pleasure cannot be anything picked out only
by how it feels in the moment and regardless of its larger context.
Attributing pleasure to a subject, rather, involves understanding what
it is for a subject to regard and behave toward something as good
(however nonconceptually represented) and this in turn involves
background knowledge of the ways something may intelligibly be
considered good and an object of voluntary pursuit. Thus the
possession of the concept of pleasure presupposes the presence of a
rich and contextually embedded concept of the good that no mere
momentary qualitative experience could supply. Therefore no such
experience could serve as the origin of our concept of pleasure or of
our concept of good, as empiricists aiming to account for these
concepts as acquired from a feeling of pleasure had supposed.
Bennett Helm, beginning in the 1990s, developed a positive view much
in the spirit of Anscombe’s sparse critical remarks, although
perhaps different in
detail.
For Helm (2002), pleasures and pains alike are ‘felt
evaluations’ that impress themselves on our feeling (in contrast
to our activity in evaluative judgment) by virtue of larger patterns
of evaluation, emotion, and motivation they partially constitute. Our
feeling pleasure or pain is just our having our attention and
motivation directed in this way (1994, 2001a, 2001b, 2009).
While Helm’s view of pleasure and pain accommodates
Anscombe’s constraint that pleasure provide holistically
intelligible reasons for action and also fits his larger agenda, it
implausibly makes a kitten’s or an infant’s hurting from a
bruised limb or deriving pleasure from nursing depend on their having
appropriate large patterns of background concerns including, as he
tells us, in cases of bodily pain, background concerns for the
integrity of their bodies (2002, pp. 24–27). If such a
larger pattern of concern for one’s body is necessary for the
affective component of pain, both should together fade away in, for
example, a terminally ill patient who now wants mainly a speedy
natural death, rather than the continuance of whatever bodily
integrity remains. To the extent that someone has predominantly such a
pattern of desire and emotion, it would seem, on this view, that
sensory pain (or, as Helm has it, the stimulation that would otherwise
have been painful) must, as signaling the approach of the desired end,
be if not purely then at least on balance pleasant. And in the
unconflicted limiting case, we need not offer palliative analgesia for
relief of pain, since experiencing pain is supposedly unintelligible
lacking an appropriate larger pattern of desires and emotions. Lacking
this, as Helm claims in renewing the ancient Stoic claim about the
sage under torture, one’s writhing and screaming fail to signify
that one is suffering pain (2002, p. 24). No need for morphine to
palliate any such seeming pain of our patient, it seems. And Richard
Moran would add that morphine should be equally useless for providing
the solace of pleasure, as this similarly always depends on
appropriately connecting with a patient’s cognitively complex
normative space of skills and reasons (Moran 2002, pp. 209–14).
Such views may have testable consequences. They may predict that broad
attitude changes accompany effective antidepresssant therapy and, less
plausibly, all transient enjoyments and lightening of mood.
But as Helm perhaps halfway acknowledges by deferring in passing to
biological constraints, we may not be as unitary and governed by a
coherent pattern of feelings, desires, and evaluative judgments as he
seems officially to propose. Pleasure and pain sometimes seem to
impose themselves on us absent any connection with any large pattern
of evaluations we can identify with, but rather from below, out of
proportion to any plausible role in larger patterns of preexisting
concerns and standing desires, as when we spontaneously take pleasure
in a fragrance, sunset, or landscape –or just find
ourselves, unaccountably, in a good mood. In such cases, at least, it
seems plausible that our relevant concerns and practical reasons are
small and local, centered on the pleasure and perhaps a perception
(Sidgwick 1907, 127-31, 110-113; Goldstein 1980, 1989, 2002) or
appearance (Plato and Aristotle, according to Jessica Moss 2012) of
its goodness, rather than necessarily embedded in a much larger
package deal. Even if pleasure is or involves a functional role of
some kind, this may be a relatively small and local one of a kind
shared with simpler animals, constituted by intrinsic functions of
brain and
mind.
Hedonists in the grip of the simple picture regard pleasure-seeking as
uniquely intelligible and demand that all motivated action and all
reasons for action be fitted to this mold. Opponents who privilege a
holistic model of evaluation and deliberation may demand, instead,
that all feeling be made intelligible in its terms. We should be
equally skeptical of both demands and also of the claims for special
and exclusive intelligibility on which they trade. It appears that
affective experience is present in infants who have as yet no large
pattern of desires and concerns and also in dying people who have lost
any relevant ones or even the capacity for them. The default
presumption seems to be that in many cases such as these and of
ordinary ‘simple pleasures’ and of elevated mood as well
no relevant large integrated pattern of evaluative attitudes or of
aesthetic aptitudes need obtain. We thus have some reason to return to
something closer to the simple picture that retains its momentary
experiential core.
1.3 More Modest Roles for Experience
The child acquiring the ability to refer to pleasure has more to go on
than the concept empiricist’s untutored inward recognition when
learning to sort together sweets, hugs, and play and to name something
common these typically cause or sustain. The great medieval lyric poet
Walther von der Vogelweide paraphrases joy as “dancing,
laughing,
singing”.
And Darwin writes, “I heard a child a little under four years
old, when asked what was meant by being in good spirits, answer,
‘It is laughing, talking, and kissing.’ It would be
difficult to give a truer and more practical
definition.”
As Darwin also observes, “[W]ith all races of man, the
expression of good spirits appears to be the same, and is easily
recognized.”
10
The contrast with the negative affects develops very early in the
expressive behavior of the child and is also early and easily
perceived. While a mature conception will distinguish behavioral
expression from its inward cause (as Walther does, in lines
28–29, quoted in note 8), the very young child may possess a
less differentiated conception in which the salient contrasts between
smiling or laughing and crying (Walther, line 29), and generally
between the external expressions of the positive and negative affects,
are prominent. Labeling and reporting one’s own hedonic states
presumably develop alongside attribution to others, from innately
prepared capacities for affective feeling, expression, and perception
that must work together early to facilitate early emotional
communication and bonding between infant and parent and, later, mutual
understanding with
others.
11
To a slightly older child, pleasure may signify at once feeling that
is good and behavior expressing it and goodness of life no more than
these. From such a liberalized Lockean basis, not based solely or
mainly in phenomenal similarity but not arrived at without experience,
a child may progress to a more mature conception of good and thence to
the common adult conception of pleasure as feeling that is good
(Sidgwick, discussed in §1.2, ¶1; §2.3.1, ¶1; n.
5, ¶4; and n. 18) or at least naturally presents as such
(Aristotle according to Moss, n. 7 above), with hedonic experience
having had some place among these concepts’ sources.
Saving the core of the simple picture, pleasure as a relatively
unmediated momentary experience, in some such way, however, may
abandon the obviousness of pleasure’s nature, goodness, and role
in motivation that complete introspective transparency and
intelligibility was supposed to provide. Experience of pleasure may
thus play a role in allowing direct reference to pleasure and also in
forming our concept of the good without its giving us any deep
knowledge or justified confidence about either. Even whether there
actually is such a kind as pleasure, as there appears to be, is open
to refutation by new science. But if introspection is thus fallible,
then Sidgwick’s failing to find a single feeling of pleasure,
Ryle’s finding it a behavioral disposition, and Feldman a pure
propositional attitude like belief (§2.3.2) separable from having
any feeling at all, are not decisive objections to pleasure feeling
like something or at least some things (Labukt 2012). The immediacy of
phenomenal experience may not make for obviousness to cognition
§2.3.4, ¶2), as on the full-blooded empiricist construal of
the simple picture. (For recent defenses of aspects of such an
experiential approach to pleasure, see, e.g., Crisp 2006, Labukt 2012,
and Bramble 2013).
There may be reason, moreover, to believe introspection of affective,
as opposed to, for example, sensory, experience, to be especially
prone to errors of omission. Focal awareness of specific information
content and the experience of affect have long been thought to compete
with each other – and not merely as different sensory or cognitive
contents do. Competitive alternation between the two modes of
experience was a commonplace of past psychology and is receiving
increasing
confirmation.
12
Ongoing research initiated by Marcus Raichle and his collaborators
indicates default, resting state, or monitoring modes of brain
activity, perhaps including representations of one’s current
hedonic state, that are typically turned down by attention-demanding
tasks (Gusnard
et al
2001, Gusnard and Raichle 2004, Fox
et al
2005), perhaps even by some ways of attempting to
introspect one’s current affective state. If so, the very
focusing of introspective scrutiny on pleasure provoked by the demand
to accurately report it, may, thus, sometimes turn down the gain on
systems involved in representing it. If this is so, it may explain
some of the inconsistency of views mentioned in the previous paragraph
and those of the 1930s introspectionist psychological laboratories (n.
3) as well. However that may be, pleasure seems generally to attach
attention and motivation to salient stimuli and especially toward ends
it is pleasant to envision, rather than to itself (e.g., Schlick
1930/1939, Ch. II, §§4–10, pp. 36–55).
Such a perspective may answer the objection to experiential views of
pleasure that if pleasure were felt, it would divert our attention
from what we are enjoying, such as music, to itself (Ryle 1954a,
Madell (2002, pp. 90–93). Pleasure may typically be easier
to notice sideways than straight on. And as task demands increase,
these may degrade our ability to even cognitively notice our affective
state, so that the pleasure we phenomenally experience is out of (the
limited-capacity cognitive awareness of our) mind (cf. §2.3.4,
¶2).
From a contemporary fallibilist perspective on introspection, we
should not then be surprised at its failures or take them to be
decisive against pleasure’s being a single experiential kind, as
Sidgwick did. And even if it is not, the possibility of its containing
a limited heterogeneity remains (Labukt 2012, §3.3 below).
Neither should it be surprising that introspectionist psychologists
(n. 3, ¶ 3) and philosophers failed to agree on whether
pleasure has one phenomenal feel, a diversity, or none at all and that
bodily sensations (which are not similarly resistant to inspection)
may show up instead. If diligent introspection of some kinds tends to
make momentary feeling cognitively inaccessible, then such
introspection will often be a worse guide than untutored experience
about it. Rather than relying exclusively on introspection (and
unknowingly on the naive or trained intuitions and prejudices that may
shape reports of it) we should bring the totality of our evidence to
bear, drawing on psychology and biology as well as direct experience,
as the best philosophers before the heyday of modern empiricism and
introspectionism did.
2. Finding Unity in Heterogeneity
There are four chief pleasures, a saying among Afghan men goes: of the
hot bath, of a youth with his friends, of a man with a woman, and of
seeing one’s son grown to manhood. What might these share, not
only with each other, but also with otherwise gendered social and
sexual pleasures and with the horror movie goer’s joyous thrill
in frights and those of hot spice, as well?
2.1 Seeking a Universal Account
On the simple picture, pleasure itself is always the same; when it is
bound up with the different
pleasures
of sweets or philosophy
it is only
caused
(however cognitively, reciprocally, or
recurrently) in different ways. Philosophers have often aimed to
respect, more equally with pleasure’s obscurely felt unity, also
the diversity manifest in its occasions. Thus Plato speculated that
pleasure is a sensing, perceiving, or awareness of improvement, in
varying respects, in one’s condition; Aristotle, that it arises
in the unimpeded functional fulfillment of varying life capacities in
their characteristically different activities (e.g.; perceiving
particular things, theoretically contemplating their natures); and
contemporary writers that it is a welcoming attitude (had toward
different contents) or some underlying stance of openness to
experience generally that may waver between different objects and
having none at all. Such questions have been explicitly contested at
least since Plato had his Socrates suggest that pleasure is so
extremely heterogeneous that no simple generalizations about it will
hold, such as the hedonist’s claim that all pleasure is good,
especially given the very large differences between the things that
very different sorts of people enjoy (
Philebus
12C–13B).
2.2 Classical Accounts: Functional Unity with Difference
Plato and Aristotle aimed to understand pleasure’s value,
biology, and place in psychology and experience in an integrated way,
in the context of the science of their day.
2.2.1 Plato: Noticing Different Restorations to Life’s Natural State
Plato built on the ancient common sense that connected pleasure with
the satisfaction of felt longing, or appetitive desire
epithumia
), and also on early scientific speculation
equating pleasure with the fulfillment of bodily needs. He observed
that simple personal-report level motivational accounts fail because
we may experience pleasure without any previously felt distress,
desire, or noticed need, as sometimes when looking, listening,
smelling, or learning, and also that one may fulfill physiological
needs without experiencing pleasure in the process of so doing
Philebus
51A–52C). He therefore refined and
generalized the current physiologically-influenced account of pleasure
as restoration of bodily imbalance or deficiency, on the model of
hunger and thirst, to make it instead the sensation, perception, or
consciousness (all
aisthēsis
in Greek) of return from a
(possibly unnoticed) state of deficiency to a naturally healthy
state.
13
The ‘pure’ (‘unmixed with pain’) pleasures of
knowing and perceiving were apparently construed as signaling the
satisfaction of needs we are unaware of, and so not pained by,
acquiring or having. A unified account of all pleasure was thus
achieved, as
awareness of processes of fulfilling very diverse
needs
, systematically accounting for both pleasure’s unity
and diversity. Pleasure could be accorded a place in the best life
attainable for beings like ourselves, imperfect enough to have
recurrent needs but sometimes aware of their however partial and
temporary satisfaction. But the absolutely best life would be a divine
one of permanent perfect knowing without the possibility of further
learning or any other improvement, and in which there would therefore
be no pleasure at all – and presumably we would do well,
insofar as we are able, to approximate to this (
Philebus
33B). Descartes’ views of the function or content of pleasure
and Spinoza’s official definitions of pleasure as an affect of
transition to greater perfection are close to Plato’s, as also
are one of Kant’s
characterizations,
14
one of Elijah Millgram’s (2000, pp. 122–26), and
Timothy Schroeder’s (2001, 2004, discussed in §3.1). Such
Improvement Indicator Views
may account for diversity within
pleasure by the different species of improvements indicated. But they
need not attribute explicit awareness of needs or of their
fulfillments
as such
to the experiencing subject. A modern
version might attribute only biological functions, without requiring
any
explicit representation of departures from or
restorations to one’s natural state at either personal or
subpersonal levels.
2.2.2 Aristotle: Perfecting Different Activities
Aristotle rejected Plato’s assimilation of enjoying sights,
sounds, smells, and intellectual activity to the satisfaction of
homeostasis-serving appetites and also his view of the best, divine,
changeless life we should aspire to approximate to as one of
pleasureless cognition. Yet he adopted as his own the project of
finding a
unitary
account of pleasure that would fit the
teleological metaphysics and intellectualist value theory he inherited
from Plato – and also Plato’s strategy of giving a generic
formal account that allows for specific variation. He thus rejected
Plato’s restoration process account totally to substitute his
own equally general account of pleasure as arising rather from the
activities of animals, or of their parts or faculties, when these are
already, at least in part, in
good
condition.
Aristotle’s account of life as a teleologically and
hierarchically unified system of biological capacities allowed him to
give a unified account of pleasure while discriminating systematically
among different kinds and instances according to their ranks in his
value-laden hierarchy of life capacities and their functionings. Each
activity, when unimpeded and perfected, on his view, gives rise to its
own specific ‘supervenient’ (arising from a preexisting
ground) pleasure, differentiated in kind from those belonging to other
kinds of activity (
NE
X, 5). The different pleasures thus
have a generic unity, as belonging to perfected activities of
developed life capacities – a unity ultimately deriving
from the generic unity of life itself. The differing causal powers of
different kinds of pleasure, each supporting engagement in its own
specific activity, but interfering with others, could thus be
accounted for, and their higher-level functional and felt similarity
as well, by regarding instances of pleasure as experiences of the
success of one’s life’s, or soul’s, fulfillment in
particular activities of its constitutive perfected
activity – but in different activities that, according to
the differing teleological ranks of their life capacities and objects,
have correspondingly differing degrees of pleasure and value. Pleasure
is thus no accidental addition to life; it naturally reflects and
tracks success in living and its value. This value is teleologically
explanatory of our biological development and of the lower animal
desires in which we share, but also gives to human life and rational
human action their own characteristic higher ultimate goal and point.
Living a life that brings its biologically highest constitutive
capacities to their complete development and then exercises them
without impediment upon their naturally best and most suitable objects
is success in life and brings the most pleasant pleasure with it.
Trivial or ignoble pleasures are sought instead by those who are
stunted in their capacities for higher activities, having failed to
develop the intellectual and moral virtues needed to use these well,
and consequently fall short of the highest natural human fulfillment
and goal. That is the fully human happiness which consists in using
reason well, which at its best approximates to the best and
pleasantest life form of all, the changeless purely intellectual
activity of God. Our pleasure tracks the perfection of our current
activities and thus our proximity to this, life at its cognitively
clearest, most awake, and best (
Protrepticus
B87–B91,
1984, p. 2414;
Nicomachean Ethics
VII, 11–14 and
X, 1–6).
Aristotle’s theory, which we may call a
Perfection in
Functioning View
, accommodates both pleasure’s generic
unity and specific diversity by making pleasure and its value vary
together, with the varying nature and value of animals’ various
life activities, and these, in turn, with those of their objects or
ends. It has had a deservedly great influence on later accounts, from
later antiquity to recent philosophy and welfare
economics.
15
Recently the prolific social psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi’s studies mainly of self-reports of the
‘flow experience’ of engaged absorption in activities have
provided some empirical support for flow’s connection with
enjoyment, but also, perhaps, for its not, despite its advertising,
being the very same thing – as he, like Aristotle, in his
improving exhortation, sometimes seems to want it to
be.
16
John Stuart Mill followed Aristotle in endorsing a rational preference
for ‘higher’ pleasures over those we share with
‘lower’ animals, but objected to Aristotle’s tying
pleasure to objective functional standards. He and more recent writers
have posed simple counterexamples to these being even sufficient or
necessary conditions for pleasure, using perceptual examples such as
Aristotle used in expounding his theory. Mill’s objection may be
interpreted and expanded upon as follows. Aristotle’s theory
implies that, other things equal, the more precise and informative of
two perceptions or cognitions must be the more pleasant. But this, it
seems, may be the worse of two bad smells. The excellent acuity of the
olfactory system and even its unimpeded operation and the mutual
suitability of faculty and object (
NE
X,
4:1174b14–1175a3) seem not to exclude this. So Aristotle’s
conditions seems insufficient for pleasure, if excellence of object is
filled out in cognitive or functional rather than in hedonic terms.
(Neither is any such condition necessary for pleasure, as in a relaxed
and lazy mood.) Of course, we might downgrade or upgrade sensory
interactions ad hoc, counting those we enjoy as excellent, but then we
move in a small circle and offer no independent characterization of
pleasure.
17
Perhaps a quasi-neoAristotelian might acknowledge all this and
abandon the claims that led to the falsified predictions, while still
believing pleasure is
some
way activities are performed (to
be filled out empirically). But whether any plausible way can be found
remains to be shown. The same holds all the more for Aristotle’s
ambition of
explaining
pleasure’s value by some more basic
independently defined value in biological functioning.
2.2.3 Epicurus: Savoring the Activity of Life’s Natural State
Epicurus took a less elitist and less intellectualist view of pleasure
according to which it is available to its greatest extent to any
animal free from bodily and emotional pain (Cooper 1999a), with no
highly developed distinctively human capacity or functioning in
principle required. Epicureans cultivated philosophy, however, to free
people from groundless fears of afterlife suffering and death, and
inculcated habits of living enabling one to live simply and thus
securely because not needing, and thus not fearing loss of, luxuries.
Varying pleasant activities was also recommended, perhaps because this
is needed to maintain requisite awareness of our stable natural
state’s unimpeded life activity by varying its expression (cp.
Gosling and Taylor, 1982, 374 and Erler and Schofield, 1999, 653 and
further references cited there; for further references supporting a
variety of interpretations see n. 30 below). While emphasizing his
differences with Epicurus, as he interpreted him (1790/1976,
294–300, 307), Adam Smith rather similarly believed that someone
“who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear
conscience” is in “the natural and ordinary state of
mankind” to the widespread happiness typical of which nothing
important can be added (45).
2.3 A Kind of Directedness toward Objects or Contents?
Many ordinary mental states recognized by common sense, such as
particular beliefs and desires, are essentially directed upon their
object or content. Could pleasure’s unity be that of such a
kind, and its diversity derive from from that of its intentional
contents or objects? If not always of Aristotelian activities we
enjoy. or real people or things, perhaps prospects or propositions or
impossibilities that are abstracta or have their being as objects of
thought alone? According to a Christian philosophical tradition,
pleasure constitutively depends on a mental act of willing or loving
that may be directed toward different cognitively presented things.
And according to the contemporary analytic philosopher Fred Feldman,
pleasure itself is a single propositional attitude, like belief, that,
similarly, may be directed toward diverse propositional contents. The
tenability of such accounts concerns not only philosophers primarily
interested in pleasure but also those more generally concerned with
the nature of mind. Brentano claimed that all mentality is intentional
and some recent analytic philosophers that the phenomenal character of
experience is constituted by its representational content (e.g., Lycan
2005). If there are representationally contentless but phenomenally
conscious pleasant moods, such claims and theories cannot be
correct.
2.3.1 Liking, Loving, Savoring
The lack of a precise account of pleasure’s nature presented no
scandal so long as pleasure was thought of as an experience, however
variable and generic, typical causes of which might be roughly
characterized but for which no verbally explicit real definition was
to be expected (Locke and Kant, cited in n. 2; Mill 1872/1979,
p. 430). Perhaps this is all an account short on biological or
computational detail, and on the deep functional insight these might
offer, can provide. However, taking introspection to be a source of
scientific knowledge led to disquiet when introspectors failed to
agree about what, if any, distinctive introspectible item they had
found in experiencing pleasure. Even before this method had run its
course in psychology (see n. 3 above), the philosopher Henry Sidgwick
had failed to find any distinctive uniform quality in his own
experience of pleasure. His normative account of pleasure, as
“feeling, apprehended as desirable by the sentient individual at
the time of feeling it” (1907, p. 129; see n. 5,
¶4 above), led C.D. Broad to suggest, in passing, that the
pleasant experiences might be just those we
like.
18
Ambiguity in academic use of this colloquial language of
“liking” has led to equivocation in the literature. Some
authors use it for an intrinsically hedonic state distinguished from
wanting or desiring but not from pleasure. Others use it instead for
an attitude (such as desire) they suppose either to constitute from
within, or else to pick out and thus unify from outside, experiences
of pleasure as such and sometimes to insist wrongly that their
opponents, by using the same language, have conceded their view.
(Problems with such language were flagged by Zink 1962, 90–2;
Trigg 1970, 52–3, 116–19; Katz 2008, 414–17; Tanyi
2010; and Labukt 2012, 158 but still afflict the ethics literature.
This issue is also often run together with that of whether the related
reasons are value- or desire-based, but distinguished from it by
Heathwood 2011.)
Franz Brentano, Sidgwick’s close contemporary, brought explicit
concern with such intentional (act/object or attitude/content)
structure to the attention of Western philosophers outside the
continuing Catholic intellectual tradition. The involvement of
pleasure and emotions with beliefs and desires had been a starting
point for discussions in Plato (
Philebus
36ff.) and Aristotle
Rhetoric
II, 2–11). In the following tradition
pleasure was often regarded as, in part, a bodily phenomenon not
belonging to our true, nonbodily, self or true
good.
19
Scholastic philosophers of the Western Christian high middle ages
accordingly regarded bodily pleasure as occurring in a sensory soul or
power, caused directly by sensory awareness. They debated competing
views concerning the causation and intentionality of thought-mediated
pleasure, regarded as occurring in the intellectual soul or power. On
William of Ockham’s account, such pleasure causally depends
directly on the will’s loving acceptance, as good in itself, of
an object intellectually presented. For Ockham, this pleasure is
distinct from the loving acceptance on which it depends, as is shown
by the example (used similarly earlier by John Duns Scotus) of a
cognitively pleased scholar in a depressed mood, in which the normally
resulting pleasure fails to occur. Others denied these two were
distinct. Some of them allowed, however, a distinct second-order
loving taking the original loving as its object and thus as that of
its pleasure; another thought this higher-order loving and pleasure
might be included in the original act of
loving.
20
Descartes rejected
this
dualism, regarding
all
pleasure (as all else mental) as essentially thought (and,
specifically, as at least often involving thinking that some good
pertains to oneself) and sensory, or bodily, pleasure as pleasing the
immaterial thinking mind by informing it of its body’s
sufficiency to withstand the mild challenge to its integrity that the
sensory stimulation presents (see n. 2, ¶2, for references).
For Brentano, sensory pleasure takes as its intentional content,
rather, the sensuous experiencing of sensory qualities. It is a loving
directed toward a sensory act. In intellectually-caused pleasure, our
purely spiritual (nonbodily) loving (as it seems:
nonaffective
liking, approving of, or being pleased by) the
content of a thought causes us to
affectively
love a sensory
experiencing – i.e., to experience bodily
sensory
pleasure
21
Brentano seems in these views to have followed his medieval
Scholastic models, without taking on board the standard modern notion
of affective consciousness that is neither conative nor sensory nor
coldly intellectual (Kant 1790/2000 and its Bibliography note).
Caution is required when appropriating the medieval language of
intentionality in contemporary non-Scholastic use. In the older
deployments considered above, in the context of an Aristotelian
teleological metaphysics of mind and nature in which minds and natural
forms were made for each other and their moving toward perfected acts
of knowing did explanatory work, naive realism about content
ascriptions had a fundamental place. In contemporary cognitive
sciences and analytic philosophy, they are sometimes understood more
instrumentally than as expressing precise ground-level
truths.
22
It’s often not clear what ascribing a content or object to,
say, pleasure involves. There’s also no standard single use of
attitude language in academic Philosophy. Uses predominant in the
analytic philosophy of language and thereby in the philosophy of mind
usually involve relations to propositions, about which there is much
literature but no standard account of what they are or what ascribing
relations to them involves. Belief is standard example. A different or
narrower use more influenced by psychology and common in ethics
involves being motivationally, affectively, or evaluatively (rather
than cognitively) for or against (e.g., Nowell-Smith 1954,
111–115, the source of the term “pro-attitude” and
of classifying pleasure as one of these).
2.3.2 A Content-Involving Attitude, Like Belief?
Fred Feldman identifies pleasure (in the relevant inclusive use) with
an occurrent propositional attitude comparable to Brentano’s
loving.
23
If
an act/object analysis applies uniformly to
all pleasure
and if
we must then choose
between the objects and how we take them
then
opting thus, for how we take them, would seem the correct
choice
. Accordingly, on Feldman’s view, the act or attitude
type, rather than its diverse objects or contents, would be what all
episodes of pleasure have in common and makes them such, while its
objects, including instances of ‘sensory pleasure’ (in use
2 of n. 1, ¶8), are brought together and unified only by way
of their relation to it, so that this attitude is, in the important
sense, what pleasure is (cf. Feldman 1997a, 2004).
Unlike Brentano, for whom even human intellectual pleasure turns out,
in the end, to be sensory, bodily, and affective, Feldman, in
attempting a similarly unifying account, moves in the opposite
direction; his attitudinal pleasure is not supposed ever to
essentially involve as such any feeling at all. (For this reason, his
saying it is an attitude like belief communicates his intention more
clearly than his going on sometimes to add hope and fear, without
making explicit that he intends these latter, also, to be pure
propositional attitudes not essentially or centrally involving
feeling, as he perhaps, like the Stoics, does.) Friends of the simple
picture’s experiential core, of pleasure conceived as involving
felt momentary affective experience, will want to resist this denial
of the centrality of feeling in pleasure. But there are also other
grounds for skepticism about the uniform attitude approach, since an
act/object or attitude/content account, again, seems not to fit the
phenomenology of someone enjoying a pleasant nap, daydream, or diffuse
good mood, as it must if it is to be an account of inclusive
pleasure – as must be intended given Feldman’s larger
aim of formulating hedonism as a view of ‘the good life’
in ethical theory. Taking all pleasure to be a single special kind of
propositional or
de se
(directly attributing a property to
oneself) attitude, as in Feldman 1997c/1988, in all human and animal
pleasure alike, also strains intuitive plausibility by requiring
cognitive powers of propositional representation or self-reference
even in young children and animals (as in Feldman 2002, p. 607),
if these are not to be denied pleasure. And the belief we must choose
between pleasure feeling like something and its having intentionality
also seems questionable. Bennett Helm, as we have seen (§1.2),
and also other contemporary philosophers, including Geoffrey Madell
(2002, chs. 5 and 6) and Timothy Schroeder (§3.1), reject this
exclusive disjunction of the two in proposing accounts on which both
belong to pleasure, as did many medievals and, following them,
Brentano.
The single uniform attitude approach also faces a problematic tension
between its intuitive motivation and its technical adequacy. The
natural and intuitive assignment of contents that makes plausible
construing pleasure
sometimes
as an attitude with
propositional content runs into problems when it is extended to a
uniform propositional attitude theory of all pleasure, as Anscombe
(1981c/1967) first observed. To use and develop further her line of
reasoning using her original example: her enjoying riding with someone
is different and separable from her enjoying reflecting then on the
fact that she is (and, if the latter is distinct from that, also from
her being pleased then that this is the case). But on a single uniform
attitude analysis, applied in what seems the natural and intuitive
way, it seems these should consist in her directing the same attitude
on the same proposition (or, alternatively, on her self-attributing
the same property). But this doesn’t seem to allow that she
might enjoy one but not the other, as she surely may. A technical
problem may have a technical fix. Perhaps one may thus regard the
activity of reflecting as a different mode of presentation (or the
like) of the same propositional content that Anscombe more directly
enjoys to the same attitude, while retaining something of the
approach’s intuitive motivation. However, it seems more natural
and intuitive to say the attitude is directed, instead, primarily
toward these different activities, including some naturally described
as themselves taking propositional or
de se
(property-self-attributing) contents, such as Anscombe‘s
reflecting that
she is riding with someone, but also to
others that don’t, such as her
just riding
Anscombe’s earlier work, apparently provoked by proposals
similar to Feldman’s, suggests such a way out. As she noted,
cases described as enjoying a proposition or fact seem to involve our
thinking about it or being in some state or the like (1981c/1967).
These seem to be activities or experiencings that we may (following
Aristotle) regard as activities, at least for present purposes. We
may, then, let the different activities make the needed distinctions,
by saying that enjoying riding is one thing and enjoying reflecting
that one is riding is another. Such an approach also handles the
pleasure of prancing puppies and of suckling babies without seeming to
ascribe to them the general and logically combinatorial
representational capacities that may be involved in having attitudes
toward propositions, attributing properties to oneself, or the
like – capacities that puppies and babies may lack and that
even human adults may not always exercise when enjoying a nap or a
warm bath. The most natural and uniform attitudinal view of pleasure
would thus seem to be not Feldman’s propositional view but
rather one on which to enjoy a sensation is just to enjoy sensing it
and that similarly to enjoy any cognitive content or object of thought
as such is just to enjoy thinking about it or the like –
and that these are all actual activities. But this seems at least very
close to an ‘adverbial’ (activity-dependent)
neoAristotelian view on which particular instances of pleasure are
modes of their activities (without the need for any special single
kind of attitude).
Feldman, in an encyclopedia treatment that perhaps presents the
attitudinal approach to pleasure more broadly than the works cited
above presenting his own propositional version, allows attitudinal
pleasure to take among its objects or contents activities and
sensations as well as facts (2001, p. 667). Elsewhere he allows
nonactual states of affairs among the objects of attitudinal
propositional pleasure (2002, p. 608). Presumably he will need
distinct impossible propositions, so that Hobbes’ pleasure in
contemplating the (supposed) geometrical fact (actually, a
mathematical impossibility) that the circle can be squared may be
distinguished from his pleasure in his having (equally impossibly)
discovered this. (Surely the magnitude of his taking pleasure in these
two may change in opposite directions, as his focus shifts, as he
first loses all thought of himself in the mathematics, but later
swells with self-regarding pride.) Whether there are such distinct
impossible states of affairs or propositions (between which Feldman
may not distinguish) seems especially controversial. Feldman tells us
that pleasure is an attitude like belief, so it may seem we may rest
content to have pleasure no worse off than belief and leave it to
theorists of belief to solve such shared problems generally. But
pleasure must be even more general than belief if, as in Feldman 2001,
it takes as its objects not only the contents of belief (often thought
of as abstract entities, which as we have seen need to at least
represent, if not include, nonactual and even impossible objects) but
also sensations and activities that, for us to enjoy them, must be not
only
actual
and
concrete
but also
present
and
our own
. The supposedly single attitude of pleasure thus
seems to come apart along this line, in part corresponding to one
between sensory and intellectual pleasure that many medievals and
Brentano respected, by complicating their theories at this point, as
Feldman does not. The move from Locke’s distinctive feeling of
pleasure to Feldman’s stipulated distinctive attitude does not
obviously help with the unity problem for pleasure that he supposes it
to solve; similar doubts arise about pleasure’s unity and, it
seems, more besides.
Further, pleasure differs from belief and similar nonaffective
propositional attitudes in seeming to be more locally biological and
less broadly functional. It often seems to spill over promiscuously
from one object to another as belief logically cannot; it is generally
suppressed by depressed mood, as belief in general is not; a
diminished capacity for pleasure may be restored by antidepressant
drugs and other therapies, while there are neither specific deficits
affecting all and only beliefs (but not other attitudes taking a
similar range of contents) nor specific remedies for them. Belief and
the like are thus plausibly thought of, at least in large part, as
broadly functional states neither simply localized in any single
discrete neural system nor susceptible to being capable of being
similarly caused directly by similar chemical interventions in all
physiologically similar individuals. If psychological realism and
parsimony are to constrain our theory, the evidence would seem to
favor an account more like Ockham’s on which objects presented
by thought
may
be loved consequently, with pleasure
often
resulting. We may thus more plausibly theorize that
sophisticated intentionality belongs primarily to the cognitively
representational powers of mind, also to the loving that uses these in
referring to and acting toward its objects, but is ascribed to
pleasure only derivatively through functionally appropriate causal
connections by way of these and the like. Then we can distinguish
Hobbes’ two pleasures in thinking of different impossibilities
and also Anscombe’s in riding and reflecting on it derivatively,
by way of the differences in the relevant activities, whatever view we
take about thinking and its contents.
2.3.3 Welcoming-Whatever-Comes that May Float Free?
On the other hand, if something in the spirit of Feldman’s
welcoming attitude were freed from the requirement of always taking a
content or object, and might obtain on its own, then it could capture
not only all of the above but also cases in which we seem to have
pleasure when doing nothing at all and attitudinizing toward nothing
at all. Perhaps, then, pleasure is a
stance
(for lack of a
better place-holding term) of affective openness, welcoming, or
immediate liking with which we may wholeheartedly engage in the
activities and experiences we enjoy, from thinking to swimming to just
lying about and ‘doing nothing’, but that may also (unlike
ordinary propositional attitudes or
de se
[reflexively-centered] attitudes) obtain without having any object or
content at all. Like many experiential features and mental processes,
it might be sometimes integrated and bound with others, but sometimes
not, and the same episodic instance might survive as the variable
binding and integration develops, decays, and shifts over time
(perhaps varying without increasing the pleasure, as the Epicureans
said) while the underlying mood or stance of readiness for pleasant
engagement remains, rather than being individuated in term of its
contents or objects as particular intentional mental acts are. Rather
than being an attitude of taking pleasure in some specific or
particular content or other, pleasure itself could be a central state
independent of such attitudes from which they arise and perhaps
include as their common inner ground.
Empirical evidence that affect can exist separated from what under
normal conditions would have been its object supports thinking of it
in such less object-bound ways. In experiments the nonconscious
mechanisms that bind pleasure to objects can be fooled about the
pleasure’s source (which presumably they evolved to track),
resulting in personal-level ignorance or error about this and even the
unconscious formation of arbitrary new preferences through
experimental manipulations. For example, experimental subjects may be
caused to like a beverage better by initial exposure to it after a
photograph of a smiling face under conditions in which there is no
awareness of the face being seen or of the affective response it
caused. This presumably works by pleasantness being
‘misattributed’ by unconscious cognitive mechanisms that,
ignorant of any more appropriate cause for the positive affect,
attribute pleasantness to the next salient stimulus they find, with an
enduring liking for the beverage resulting from this. Similar
spillover of affect from unattended sources, for example, of
unattended physical discomfort leading to anger at a salient target,
seems common in everyday life. Such phenomenona are all presumably
explained by affective processes being detachable from what would have
been their objects under more cognitively optimal
conditions.
24
On the basis of this and other science (e.g., Shizgal 1997, 1999) it
seems that affect, may, like color and many other features, be
processed separately in the brain from representations of any objects
to which the feature in question (e.g., color or pleasantness) really
belongs or is later assigned. Such assignment presumably requires
active binding to object representations, however fused with these in
our experience of liking or hope our affect may often seem. Cases of
objectless ‘diffuse’ mood in which, rather than the
binding of affect being displaced to an object that did not cause it,
the affect rather remains objectless and unbound (if only for lack of
a suitable cognitively accessible object), seem clear and common
enough not only in unusual experiences but also in everyday dreamy
life to establish object-independence at the personal level, even if
the experimental evidence for misplaced affect is rejected. That
positive affect is often diffuse (objectless) seems uncontroversial in
the psychology of mood (Watson 2000; Thayer 1989, 1996). That pleasure
is in itself objectless is sometimes supposed in theorizing in
behavioral neuroscience, as well (e.g., Robinson and Berridge, 1993,
pp. 261ff.). The same assumption is the basis for the psychologist and
emotion specialist James Russell’s notion of core affect, which
places an in-itself objectless feeling good at the ground level of the
construction of more complex positive emotion (Russell 2003).
We may call all views sharing the general approach on which pleasure
is either a welcoming attitude (with instances individuated, in part,
by their contents or objects) or a potentially freestanding welcoming
stance,
Welcoming Views
– and only those latter, on which
it is such a stance that can float free,
Welcoming-Whatever-Comes
Views
25
The latter capture something of the connections biologists and
psychologists have made with approach behavior, and past philosophers
and common sense with desire, while still allowing pleasure to be
sometimes a freestanding welcoming mood and nonintentional, but with
the potential for becoming bound to representational states and
presenting objects as good then. Such a stance could be unified and
recognized in part by way of an experiential core.
2.3.4 Intentionality, Subjectivity, and Consciousness
Brentano influentially claimed that
all
mental phenomena
exhibit intentionality as their distinctive mark (Jacob 2014). (The
ancient roots of the philosophical concepts of mind and consciousness
on which Brentano drew were cognitive.) Contemporary philosophers
seeking a unified account of all phenomena covered by the inclusive
modern Western notion of mind often follow Brentano in hoping to do
this in representational terms and to account in this way for
consciousness. In this they may turn for support and guidance to
neuroscientific accounts of the remapping of information from
peripheral receptors to the brain and from one brain region to
another. Thus Michael Tye, in discussing mood, appeals to Antonio
Damasio’s account of feelings as representing conditions of the
body (Damasio 1994, 1999, 2003; Tye 1995, pp. 128–30; Craig
2002, 2009, 2015).
Intentional structure has also been motivated by a subject/object
duality that may seem metaphysically necessary or even given in
subjective awareness itself. Pleasure has often been thought of as
immediately, essentially, and even wholly conscious in itself.
However, some philosophers have distinguished pleasure from
consciousness of pleasure. And this may introduce a layer of
intentional structure otherwise not found in pleasure itself. Seventh
century India saw Nyāya and Vaiśesika criticisms of the
views of some self-denying Buddhists that all awareness, and therefore
all pleasure, is self-disclosing, without any need for a higher-order
cognitive act of an ulterior self. And G. E. Moore, following Plato,
argued that we must decide whether pleasure or cognitive awareness
(or, as Moore put it, “consciousness of pleasure”) is the
locus of hedonic value and that this is properly located in the
consciousness of pleasure rather than in bare pleasure
itself.
26
Perhaps our concept of consciousness comes apart at this juncture and
pleasure may be immediately or ‘phenomenally’ experienced
while unnoticed and without its being generally cognitively
accessible. Someone sympathetic to the simple picture who applies this
distinction of Block’s (Block 1995, 1997, 2002; Katz 2005b; cp.
Haybron 2007) might locate hedonic value in bare pleasure, rather than
in any cognitive awareness of it. Then we might mediate between the
Buddhists and their opponents by allowing nondual phenomenal
experience without insisting that it need be cognitively
self-disclosing and respond to Moore by saying that hedonic
experience, even when unmonitored, may be phenomenally conscious and
valuable nonetheless. And indeed scientists increasingly regard
pleasure, like many cognitive states and processes, as separable from
awareness.
27
3. Pleasure, Motivation, and the Brain
The simple picture of pleasure as valuable and attractive due to its
own experiential nature may survive the objections considered so far,
at least as theoretical possibility. However, looking more closely at
our experience of pleasure, its long-noted but variable connections to
motivation, and at the sciences studying these raises further
questions. Pleasure itself, or at least pleasure and forms of
motivation with which it is typically integrated and easily confused,
may come apart, on closer analysis. The search for true pleasure that
is really as good as it seems, beyond taint of compulsive craving or
biological illusion, now continues in the studies of the brain. These
give us reason to think that, if there is some single experience of
true pleasure, its relations to motivation may be more heterogeneous,
complex, and contingent than naive versions of the simple picture,
hedonism, and common sense supposed. But perhaps the deeper
philosophers and yogis knew this all along.
3.1 Motivation-Based Analyses and Their Problems
Pleasure has traditionally been connected with motivation, although
traditions differ on how. Plato (
Charmides
167e1–3),
Aristotle (
Rhetoric
I, 11:1370a16–18;
DA
II,
3:414b2–6 and II, 9:4332b3–7;
EE
II,
7:1223a34–35), and the common sense for which they speak are
pluralist about human motivation. For all these, while
one
salient kind of motive involves longing for pleasure or pleasant
things, people also have
other
ultimate goals. They compete
for honors and other purely competitive goods, seek revenge, and
pursue and avoid other things as well. And sometimes they do so
because of evaluative judgments based in ultimately nonhedonic
grounds. Hedonists argued that spontaneous pleasure-seeking is
evidence of pleasure’s unique status as our ultimate goal and
good, as evidenced by the unenculturated and therefore uncorrupted
appetites and values of infants. The ancient Stoics interpreted these
phenomena so as to block this hedonist appeal to nature’s
authority: pleasure is rather a by-product of the achievement of
other
ends, starting right from the infant’s innate
impulses, not toward pleasure, but rather toward biological goods such
as food, guided by a natural instinct directed toward its
preservation, which rational motivation may later supersede (Long and
Sedley, 1987, 65A3–4; Brunschwig 1986). Augustine influentially
built on the Stoics in attributing pleasure to the will (
CD
XIV,6); later Western Christian thought mainly followed him.
Modern Western philosophers, following Aristotle’s account of
the unity of motivation (
DA
433a30–b13) and
Augustine’s counting all motives as loves of the will (but often
ignoring the pluralism about kinds of motive on which they and their
traditions equally insisted), have often treated ‘desire’
as including all motivation and as of a single kind to be explained on
the same pattern. Between 1600 and 1900 they often regarded desire as
uniformly directed toward one’s own pleasure, along lines
suggested by the simple picture. Joseph Butler (1726) responded to
this view of human nature as hedonistically selfish by renewing the
Stoic insistence on the priority of motivation to pleasure and also
the related medieval view that pleasure always consists in the
satisfaction of some appetite. He thereby could argue that
pleasure-seeking without prior motivation would be impossible since
pleasure always consists in the satisfaction of some motive (in his
language, ‘passion’) and that altruistic motives are thus
in principle as capable of leading to a high level of fulfilled
desire, and thus of pleasure, as any others.
There are, however,
prima facie
counterexamples to taking
desire satisfaction to be a necessary condition for pleasure, as Plato
long ago pointed out (
Philebus
51A–52C): we often enjoy
things such as sights, sounds, and fragrances that may surprise us
without our having wanted them before, clinging to them when they are
with us, or craving them after they are gone. But Butler presumably
followed Plato and his medieval successors in implicitly understanding
unconscious internally represented needs as of a kind with desires.
Timothy Schroeder does similarly today (2001, 2004), but in an account
on which pleasure does not require the actual existence of desires or
their satisfaction, but is rather a defeasible sensing of an increase
in their net satisfaction. However, the basis for such an
informational interpretation in the neuroscience appealed to seems
very slim (Katz 2005c). Older desire satisfaction accounts of pleasure
were susceptible to counterexamples based in desires that expire
before their satisfaction (Brandt 1982). Recent writers avoid these by
proposing instead the satisfaction of current desires, such as
affective desire for the continuation of one’s present
experiences (Madell 2002, pp. 97–98). Other contemporary
writers on pleasure, with analytic reductionist projects in folk
psychology (Davis, 1981a, 1981b, 1982) and metaethics (Heathwood 2006,
2007), have claimed that pleasure is definable as believed
satisfaction of current desire. However, we often don’t enjoy things
that we continue to desire, at least for a time. And addiction offers
salient cases of such cravings that hang around for a very long time
without leading to pleasure when indulged. And distinguishing
believing or sensing that we are now getting what we want from now
actually getting it doesn’t generally solve this class of
problem. So it appears that it won’t do to make either desire or
its satisfaction or sensings or beliefs in that satisfaction
sufficient for pleasure, let alone identical to it, as these
philosophers have variously proposed.
One cannot help suspecting that the attraction of such desire
satisfaction related views of pleasure owes something to unconscious
equivocation between someone’s
feeling satisfied
and
desires’
being satisfied (i.e., fulfilled)
merely by
their satisfaction conditions coming to pass, as they might long after
the desirer is dead and gone. (This latter use is analogous to the way
logicians speak of satisfaction, without any felt contentment or
happiness of the linguistic objects considered being in question.) One
may view someone’s
success
in a way that makes
mere
project fulfillment count toward it, but it is hard to
see why anything like that, or sensing (Schroeder 2001, 2004) or
believing (Davis and Heathwood) it, should figure directly in an
account of someone’s
pleasure
even while alive. To
adapt the example of Plato’s Socrates that scandalized his
Callicles (
Gorgias
494A–495A) to apply to Madell, one
may intensely and affectively desire to continue one’s
experience of scratching one’s itch or rubbing oneself, which
desire is simultaneously fulfilled, without oneself experiencing
pleasure in so doing. Fulfilling compulsive or addictive cravings in
their time need not be pleasant. And
appropriately
limiting
the kind of desires, to avoid all such counterexamples, would seem to
require building a relation to pleasure or the like into the desires,
thus giving up the reductive project. Consonantly with the foregoing,
decades of social psychological research using self-ratings of
happiness (e.g., Strack, Argyle, and Schwarz 1991) indicates a hedonic
component (or two, one for positive and one for negative affect)
underlying such self-reports that tracks how good people feel but that
is independent of the component tracking their beliefs about their
achievement of desired or valued goals. People care about both, but
for different reasons.
Problems also face analyzing pleasure in motivational terms other than
“desire” more closely tied to behavior. Henry Sidgwick
rejected simple relational accounts of pleasure as “a feeling we
seek to bring into consciousness and retain there” or the
“motive power” toward this as incapable of giving the
correct ‘quantitative’ answers about degree of pleasure
demanded of any serious definition. He argued that, while
“pleasures of repose, a warm bath, etc.” might be handled
by moving to an account in terms of motivational dispositions,
excitement often adds motivation disproportionate to
pleasure – an
objection that applies to similar behavioral and motivational accounts
current
today.
28
3.2 Is Pleasure’s Goodness Independent of Motivation?
On the other hand, if there is no close connection between pleasure
and motivation, why pleasure should be more likely to become an object
of pursuit rather than of avoidance or indifference seems mysterious.
Natural selection may explain why animals that
already
pursue
pleasure and avoid pain should come to enjoy foods that are nutritious
and to feel pain when they begin to be injured. But it’s not
clear how it could explain why animals pursue pleasure and avoid pain
rather than the other way around. Philosophers are well acquainted
with the problem of evil in a world created by an all-knowing,
all-powerful and all-good God or in any similarly good-directed
teleological order. It’s hard to explain why there should be any
evil in such a world. But on a completely nonteleological view of
nature it seems as hard to see why animals especially pursue their own
or any good (cf. Plato,
Phaedo
97B8–99C6). Both
problems depend on our having an independent grasp of the relevant
normative notions. If evil were just whatever God won’t will,
and an animal’s good or pleasure were just whatever it tends
toward or has been naturally selected to pursue, both puzzles would
dissolve.
This Problem of Good was, in the past century, raised specifically
against views akin to the simple picture of pleasure, on which
pleasure is valuable by virtue of its intrinsic nature, perhaps just
because of the way it feels in its moment, and independently of our or
other animals’ actually desiring or pursuing it. It was argued
that such a picture of pleasure leaves our pursuit of pleasure an
apparently miraculous conicidence crying out for explanation. This was
urged not in favor of theology or teleology, but rather in arguing
that pleasure must be connected to animal impulse or desire by its
very nature (Alston 1967, pp. 345–46; Findlay 1961,
pp. 175–78; McDougall, 1911, pp. 324–25.) It may
help to see this puzzle as a human counterpart of Socrates’
question to Euthyphro, about which comes logically first, the
righteousness of pious acts or Divine love of them (Plato,
Euthyphro
, 6E11–11B1). Which comes logically first,
hedonic value or motivation? Perhaps science, by revealing the
constitution of pleasure and of its enmeshment with motivation, will
tell us which of these answers to give to this human Euthyphro
question or else will suggest some third way out. Some value hedonists
are inclined to answer that we and other animals simply respond to
pleasure’s value by rationally apprehending, and accordingly
pursuing, it (Goldstein 1980, 1989, 2002). While ancients and
medievals inhabiting a teleological worldview (on which attraction
toward the good required no further explanation) could answer thus, to
that extent, it seems, they faced no Problem of Good, which arises to
the extent one abandons unexplained teleology. In principle, however,
nondebunking explanations seem possible. For example, perhaps brute
identity or natural relations of pleasure and pain with good and bad
nutritional or metabolic states provided a basis for natural
selection, starting from feelings of energy and fatigue representing
only themselves, to enable these to progressively connect with and
represent more, and then entangled these representations with
motivational reward systems, resulting in the biology discussed in the
next section.
3.3 Dividing Pleasure or Finding True Pleasure?
Plato and later Greek thinkers, as also many of ancient India,
distinguished kinds of pleasure connected with craving kinds of desire
from kinds of pleasure that involve no desire or need and hence none
of the suffering, tension, or stress connected with these. Similar
questions arise in interpreting the neuroscience of affect,
motivation, and addiction today.
According to Adam Smith (1790/1976), “[h]appiness consists in
tranquillity and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no
enjoyment; and where there is perfect tranquillity there is scarce any
thing which is not capable of amusing.” (III, 3, 30, p. 149) And
in
Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill distinguishes between
excitement and tranquillity as two sources of contentment, the first
allowing us to tolerate pain and the second the absence of pleasure
(1971, Ch. II,
¶13).
29
They thus draw on distinctions prominent in Hellenistic traditions,
such as those of Epicurean and Stoic
thought,
30
which (unlike Mill) advised against the more activated and
desire-driven forms of pleasure and took the happiest life to be one
of calm and tranquillity. (Cf. Haybron, 2008 on attunement and
tranquillity,
passim.
) Such advice had antecedents in
Plato’s hostility to pleasure connected with strong desires and
in Aristotle’s ranking the calm pleasure of reviewing already
possessed knowledge over those of attaining and producing new
knowledge, of competitive achievement, and of satisfying worldly
desires.
31
Making such distinctions is consonant with Ivar Labukt’s recent
suggestion (2012) that experiential views of pleasure may err not in
being experiential but in neglecting the possibility that pleasure may
be more than one kind of experience.
Indic traditions are rich not only in recommendations of nonattachment
as a path to tranquillity but also in their long history of analysis
of experiential states associated with traditional meditation
practices. The Pali Canon of the Theravadin Buddhists, in passages
that have parallels in other Buddhist traditions, describes
progressively deeper stages of meditative concentration
jhana
), passing through which one first stops initiating and
sustaining thought, then ceases also activating joyful interest
pīti
), and finally loses even the underlying feeling of
(perhaps nonintentional) pleasure, bliss, or ease (
sukha
, in
a narrow sense), so that one then abides in a state of equanimous,
all-accepting
upekkha
(etymologically, ‘looking
on’), sometimes traditionally described as without pleasure
sukha
) or pain (
dukkha
) but occasionally as
pleasant (
sukha
). The difference between joyful interest and
(mere) pleasure (traditionally classified as a feeling rather than
with the predominantly intentional states such as joyful interest) is
explained in the commentary tradition by the contrast between the
state of a hot and weary desert traveler when first hearing of, and
then seeing, a pool of water in a shady wood and the state of one
actually enjoying, or resting after, using
it.
32
The latter is said to be preferred by the meditator as less coarse,
presumably because it is a purer and more restful pleasure in that it
is less mixed with eager interest and motivation, which seem tainted
with stress, strain, or pain. Similar distinctions, between appetitive
states that prepare animals for anticipatory, preparatory, or
instrumental action and functionally later consummatory states that
end these and initiate consummatory behaviors and end in repose, have
been used for at least the past century in the scientific studies of
behavior and mind (Sherrington 1906/1947, pp. 329 ff.; W. Craig 1918;
Davidson 1994).
In contemporary affective neuroscience, similar interpretative
questions arise. Here also we find a condition of activated interest
and motivation that many have been tempted to identify with pleasure.
Activation of the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine system organizes many
especially of the instrumental pursuits that bring our lives not only
ulterior rewards but also meaning. However it seems also to drive our
compulsions and the craving desire unrelieved by euphoria typical at
times of withdrawn cocaine addicts. The apparent paradoxes facing a
general pleasure interpretation of such dopaminergic activity have led
many scientists studying these systems, including former advocates, to
back off from that and similar interpretations (e.g., Wise 1994). The
distinction between pleasure and pain may be made elsewhere in the
brain.
The theoretically inclined affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge has
for decades influentially argued that mesolimbic dopamine itself gives
no true pleasure, but that a core neural basis for a state of
‘liking’ involved in conscious pleasure is mediated by
other brain activity, including some involving opioid receptors and
sometimes cannabinoid receptors as well. These seem to be involved in
organizing the circuit and network activity that makes possible the
savoring more prominent in the consummatory, satisfying, and relaxing
phases of meals, sexual activity, and personal relations and, so far
as we know, all other pleasure and enjoyment as well, even as
mesolimbic dopamine ’wanting’ seems typically more
prominent in the earlier and more exploratory, appetitive,
instrumental, and approach phases of these. Berridge and his
collaborators persuasively argue that without the participation of
localized hedonic ’hotspot’ activity there is no true
pleasure, with specific transmitter activity in these small areas
always required. While so far as is known such results may apply with
generality, the preponderance of evidence as of yet comes from
invasive experiments on rodents, and therefore relies on expressive
and voluntary behavior to indicate pleasure. (See Berridge references
and his website linked below for new review articles, Kringelbach
references, papers in their jointly edited 2010. For a complementary
perspective on relevant opioid systems, see Depue and
Morrone-Strupinksy 2005, especially §6.1.2,
pp. 323–25). The emerging picture seems not one of
’pleasure centers’ or ’pleasure transmitters’
but of diverse neurons capable of behaving flexibly, in different
modes, and thus able to collectively self-organize into different
circuits and different networks with changing input and
neuromodulation, some of which differences make the differences
between feeling happy, so-so, or sad. But we must remember that this
science is still very much a work in progress and that the picture
is growing more, not less, complex at this time.
Perhaps the two normally functionally integrated modes of activity,
Berridge’s ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’,
organize fundamentally different affective, motivational, and
experiential states that, however often they occur mixed or temporally
intermeshed, should be considered distinct successors to our naive and
undiscriminating common conception of pleasure. However, to the extent
that the relevant concept of pleasure is a normative one, so too will
this question of succession be. It is tempting to regard
Berridge’s ‘liking’, when unmixed with
‘wanting’and pain, as the undriven, pure and true pleasure
that contemplatives and philosophers have long been seeking, and to
follow Berridge in regarding this ‘liking’ detachable from
any object (cf. the stance of 3.3 above), as (true)
pleasure – and dopaminergic ‘wanting’ as the
fool’s pleasure dross from which it and we ideally should be
freed to live like Epicurean gods. However, we may still, in practice,
need to alternate between the preponderance of the two (cf. Mill,
1871, Ch. II,¶13). Pleasure may thus commonly arise as a
relatively fragile and transient outgrowth of a larger biological
syndrome of pursuit and temporary attainment, much as in
Aristotle’s analogy of pleasure’s perfecting an activity
with the bloom of youth ‘coming on top of’ biological
maturation, using a term,
epigignomenon
, earlier applied in
medicine to an aggravating symptom arising from a grounding and
underlying diseased state (
NE
X, 4:1174b31–33, Liddell
and Scott, 1940, ad loc.
epigignomai
).
Based on the scientific evidence, if pleasure comes apart, it will be
along such lines, and not along those suggested by concern with
intentional structure (between attitude and object) or between sensory
pleasure, enjoyment of activities, and so-called propositional
pleasure that armchair philosophical and linguistic analysis suggests.
But this should come as no surprise. Mood disorders and their
therapies do not discriminate along such a priori lines either
(Millgram 1997, 124 citing Katz 1986, 119).
4. Conclusion: Looking Inward, Looking Forward
Perhaps there is only one true pleasure of blissful freedom from
stress, present in all apparently diverse pleasures, including those
of the hot bath, sexual consummation, youthful friendship, and freedom
from responsibility for children which figured in the short Afghan
list of §2.1 – and its impure mixtures with frights
and with the burning pains of hot spice are only due to ways it can be
caused due to our biology and past conditioning. Or perhaps there will
be much more intrinsic, and not merely causally relational, diversity.
How we and our hedonic experience are situated or constituted in our
brains and organisms remains to be seen. And bringing normative wisdom
to bear on emerging physiology will presumably be called for,
at least to the extent that the concept of pleasure, at least in its primary use by
naive experiencers (who seem to fix the reference of the term in part through
pleasure presenting as good to them), is an evaluative and
normative one, however legitimately this may bracketed by scientists
and philosophers when theorizing about it. (Cf. Sidgwick 1907, 129, on
the Stoics taking this appearance to be an always deceptive one, and
not only, perhaps like Plato [Moss 2006] and Aristotle [Moss 2012], as
an occasionally corrigible one.)
In doing so we may aim to capture much in earlier views while keeping
in mind that pleasure is something biological, psychological, and
experiential which remains in large part unknown, the nature or
category of which it is inappropriate to stipulate a priori. Perhaps
pleasure expresses the unimpeded functioning (Aristotle) of our
Natural anxiety-free and pain-free State (Epicurus) by which we are
able to reach outward from our hedonic core to engage with more
representational brain processes – and through these, with
love, to all the world (citations in n. 25). But perhaps pleasure has
a more complex reflexive intentional structure, as suggested in some
of the medieval literature mentioned in §2.3.1 and
n. 20
ad loc.
, and understanding the
self-organization of recurrent neural activity will someday help us to
introspect this better. Elements at least of these suggestions and
others are compatible. Or perhaps pleasure divides in two, perhaps
along the lines between the ‘wanting’ and
‘liking’ discussed in the preceding section, no one
natural kind responding to all we intuitively seek, with dopaminergic
reward needed to organize our exploratory pleasures of pursuit until
we are ready for opioid bliss and repose. But we should also not
forget more humble and basic biological facts: that mood varies with
energy and thus with circadian rhythms affecting body temperature and
also with the current availability of nutrients in the blood (Thayer
1989, 1996); that how much pleasure we experience also depends on
getting enough, and good enough, sleep; that pleasure increases immune
response (Rosenkranz
et al
, 2003), and that how we feel may
grow in part out of monitoring bodily homeostasis (Craig 2002, 2009,
2015). These facts are telling about what may, perhaps, turn out to be
more a syndrome of typically causally connected features than a simple
or unified psychobiological phenomenon, such as would better fit
philosophers’ penchant for simple kinds and simple
explanations.
The prospects seem good for new and deep scientific understanding of
pleasure and of how it is organized in the brain. We may have much
to gain from the practical results of this new
understanding – especially if, as Voznesensky says,
The main thing in living is human feeling: Are you happy? just fine?
or
sad?
33
But pleasure should also be of special interest even to philosophers
of mind not especially interested in value or affect, in part for the
strong challenge that apparently contentless moods pose to
representational accounts of mind. Deeply subjective or phenomenal
aspects of our experience, that may more easily be ignored elsewhere
in the philosophy of mind, seem to stare us in the face here, where
what is at issue centrally seems no informational content or broad
functional role but simply “whether you’re happy or sad”.
However, appearances of bare intrinsic fact and simple pictures taken
for firm foundations have often proved misleading in the studies of
mind. As the sciences of mind and brain mature, they will offer new
evidence about pleasure and its roles in our and kindred minds and
about whether and how these roles may pull apart, perhaps making
pleasure more than one natural kind. Real answers to major questions
about the unity, diversity, and nature of pleasure and its relations
to pain, motivation, awareness, and value must likely await further
results of this new science and their scientifically informed and
philosophically sensitive interpretation.
Bibliography
This will gradually be supplemented by linked lists of suggested
readings divided by subject.
Canonical Religious Texts, by Tradition
Buddhist Canon (Theravadin, Pali in original), 1974 translation,
(1st ed. this trans., 1900),
A Buddhist Manual of Psychological
Ethics, Being a Translation, now made for the First Time, from the
Original Pali, of the First Book of the Abhidhamma Pitaka entitled
Dhamma-sangani
, Caroline A.F. Rhys Davids (ed.) and Introductory
Essay and Notes, 3rd ed., London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul
for the Pali Text Society.
Buddhist Canon (Theravadin, Pali in original), 1995 translation,
The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of
the Majjhima Nikāya
, trans. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and
Bhikkhu Bodhi, Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Christian Bible.
Hebrew Bible.
Upanishads.
References, by Author
Adolphs, Ralph and Damasio, Antonio, 2001, “The Interaction
of Affect and Cognition: A Neurobiological Perspective”, in
Forgas 2001, pp. 27–49.
Algra, Keimpe; Barnes, Jonathan; Mansfield, Jaap; and Schofield,
Malcolm, 1999,
The Cambridge History of Hellenistic
Philosophy
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alston, William, 1967, “Pleasure”, in
The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, Paul Edwards (ed.), London and New
York: Macmillan, Vol. 6, pp. 341–347. A clear and concise
account of some reasons driving changes in philosophers’ and
introspectionist psychologists’ views of pleasure through the
preceding century and also of some main competing views and objections
to them, as seen at the time of writing.
Anscombe, G.E.M., 1963/1957,
Intention
, 2nd ed. (1st ed.,
1957), Oxford: Blackwell. Seminal work in philosophy of action by a
leading disciple of Wittgenstein. A very short but deep and
influential discussion of pleasure leads up to a dismissal of ethical
hedonism in particular, and perhaps of any appeal to pleasure in
theory quite generally, on p. 77.
Anscombe, G.E.M., 1981a,
The Collected Papers of G.E.M.
Anscombe
, 3 vols., Oxford: Blackwell.
Anscombe, G.E.M., 1981b/1958 “Modern Moral
Philosophy”, in Anscombe, 1981a, Vol. III, pp. 26–42. A
summary version of the relevant 1963/1957 passage is in this paper’s
seventh paragraph at p. 27. Original publication:
Philosophy
33(124) (1958): 1–16.
Anscombe, G.E.M., 1981c/1967, “On the Grammar of
Enjoy”, in 1981a, Vol. II, pp. 94–100. Original
publication:
Journal of Philosophy
, 64(19): 607–614.
Anscombe, G.E.M., 1981d/1978, “Will and Emotion”, in
1981a, Vol. I, pp. 100–107. Original publication:
Grazer Philosophische Studien
, 5 (1978): 139–148.
Aquinas, Thomas, 1975 (written 1268–71),
Summa
Theologiæ
(‘ST’) 1a 2æ (first division of
second part), questions 31–39. The Blackfriars edition, vol. 20,
“Pleasure”, has the Latin text and an English translation
of these by Eric D’Arcy. New York: McGraw-Hill and London: Eyre and
Spottiswoode. Also relevant is question 11 in vol. 17, on
fruitio
, enjoyment in possession of something prized as
ultimately valuable (correctly, only of God, as by the saints in
Heaven, in their beatific vision of God), following Augustine (see
n. 20, para. 4).
Argyle, Michael, 2001 (1st ed., 1987),
The Psychology of
Happiness
, 2d ed., New York: Taylor and Francis; Hove, East
Sussex: Routledge. Chs. 2 and 3 are cited as especially relevant; its
subject is broader than ours.
Aristotle, 1984,
The Complete Works of Aristotle
Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Aristotle,
De Anima
(‘DA’).
Aristotle,
Eudemian Ethics
(‘EE’).
Aristotle,
Magna Moralia
(‘MM’). II, 7.
Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
. (‘NE’) VII,
11–14; X, 1–6.
Aristotle,
Politics
Aristotle,
Protrepticus
. Fragment B87 in its context, a
reconstruction from quotations of this presumably relatively early
popular work of Aristotle’s. B87 may be found in the 1984
Complete
Works
at p. 2414.
Aristotle,
Rhetoric
I: 11 gives a version of the standard
Platonic-Academic definition of pleasure rather than that of the
ethical works listed just above. Book II: 1–11 discusses
specific emotions, characterizing most as forms of pleasure and
pain.
Aristotle,
Topica
Armstrong, D.M., 1968,
A Materialist Theory of the Mind
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and New York: The Humanities Press.
Pp. 175–79 on pleasure and pp. 85–89 identifying
dispositions with their categorical basis.
Ashby, F. Gregory; Isen, Alice M; and Turken, And U., “A
Neuropsychological Account of Positive Affect and Its Influence on
Cognition”,
Psychological Review
, 106(3): 529–50. A
dopamine-pleaure interpretation lies, in part, behind the title.
Augustine,
De Civitate Dei contra Paganos
The City
of God, ‘CD’
). XIV,vi on pleasure as belonging to the
Will and XIV,vii elaborating this ethically and theologically as a
form of love (into which is packed not only all motivation but all
natural motion and a tie to the Holy Spirit of Trinitarian theology as
well). Augustine’s sparse remarks here and elsewhere were taken as
authoritative in the ensuing Western medieval Christian tradition.
There are many editions and translations.
Augustine,
De Doctrina Christiana
On Christian
Instruction/Doctrine/Teaching)
Augustine, 1963,
De Trinitate
, trans. Stephen McKenna,
The Trinity
, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America
Press. This translation is now available in a paperback edition from
Cambridge University Press, 2002, with an editor’s note by Gareth
Matthews on the merits and demerits of this and other English
translations, p. xxxii.
Aydede, Murat, 2000, “An Analysis of Pleasure
Vis-à-Vis Pain”,
Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research
, LXI(3): 537–70. Distinguishes affective reactions
from sensory states in this discussion only of physical (bodily)
pleasure, with reference especially to the 1949–1973
Anglo-American philosophical literature.
Aydede, Murat, 2013, “Pain”,
The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta
(ed.), URL =
>.
§§5 and 6.1 contain discussion of the distinction between
pain sensation and pain affect discussed in n. 1; comprehensive
pain bibliographies are linked to at that entry’s end.
Bain, Alexander, 1876,
The Emotions and the Will
, 3rd
ed., New York: D. Appleton and Co.
Bargh, John A. and Deborah K. Apsley, 2002,
Unraveling the
Complexities of Social Life: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert B.
Zajonc
, Washington: American Psychological Association.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Niedenthal, Paula M; and Winkielman, Piotr
(eds.), 2005;
Emotion and Consciousness
, New York and London:
The Guilford Press.
Bartolic, E.I.; Basso, M. R.; Schefft, B.K.; Glauser, T.;
Titanic-Schefft, M., 1999, “Effects of experimentally-induced
emotional states on frontal lobe cognitive task performance”,
Neuropsychologia
, 37(6): 677–83.
Beebe-Center, J.G., 1932 ,
The Psychology of Pleasantness and
Unpleasantness
, New York: Russell and Russell. Summarizes and
discusses results and controversies in the introspectionist academic
experimental psychology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
Beebe-Center, J.G., 1951, “Feeling and Emotion,” in
Harry Helson (ed.),
Theoretical Foundations of Psychology
, New York:
D Van Nostrand & Co., pp. 254–317.
Berridge, Craig W.; España, Rodrigo A.; and Stalnaker,
Thomas A., 2003, “Stress and Coping: Asymmetry of Dopamine
Efferents within the Prefrontal Cortex”, in Hugdahl and Davidson
2003, pp. 69–103.
Berridge, Kent C., 1996, “Food Reward: Brain Substrates of
Wanting and Liking”,
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
20(1): 1–25.
Berridge, Kent C., 1999, “Pleasure, Pain, Desire and
Dread”, in Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz, 1999, pp.
525–557. Excellent and accessible review emphasizing the
distinction between consciously reportable affect and underlying
‘core processes’ that are supposedly in themselves
unconscious. One wonders, however, whether Block’s (1995, 2002)
phenomenal consciousness might be present in the activity of some of
these.
Berridge, Kent C., 2003a, “Comparing the Emotional Brains of
Humans and other Animals,” in Davidson, Scherer, and Goldsmith
2003 (
Handbook
), pp. 25–51,
Berridge, Kent C., 2003b, “Pleasures of the brain”,
Brain and Cognition
, 52: 106–128. Sophisticated review of
the case for a distinction between ‘liking’ and
‘wanting’ within the supposedly unconscious ‘core
processes’ of the brain.
Berridge, Kent C., 2004, “Pleasure, Unfelt Affect, and
Irrational Desire”, in Manstead, Frijda, and Fischer 2004, pp.
243–62.
Berridge, Kent C. and Morten L. Kringelbach, 2015, “Pleasure
Systems in the Brain”,
Neuron
86:646–664.
Berridge, Kent C. and Robinson, Terry E., 1998, “What is the
role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or
incentive salience?”
Brain Research Reviews
28
,3:309–69. After Robinson and Berridge 1993, perhaps
still the best place for a rigorous statement of the theoretical
approach behind the developing research program discussed in
§3.3, last three paragraphs.
Berridge, Kent C. and Robinson, Terry E., 2003, “Parsing
Reward,”
Trends in Neurosciences
, 26(9): 507–13.
Berridge, Kent C. and Winkielman, Piotr, 2003, “‘What
is an unconscious emotion?’ (The case for unconscious
‘liking’)”,
Cognition and Emotion
17(2): 181–211.
Block, Ned, 1995, “On a Confusion about a Function of
Consciousness”,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
18: 227–47. This is here followed by many peer
commentaries and the author’s reply. Block’s paper is updated in Ned
Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere (eds.),
The
Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates
, Cambridge. Mass.:
MIT Press, 1997.
Block, Ned, 1997, “Biology versus computation in the study
of consciousness”,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
20: 159–65. Contains responses to additional
commentaries.
Block, Ned, 2002, “Concepts of Consciousness”, in
David Chalmers (ed.),
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and
Contemporary Readings
, New York: Oxford University Press, pp.
206–18. Abridged and revised from Block 1995.
Bolles, Robert C. (ed.), 1991,
The Hedonics of Taste
Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bourdon, 1893, “La Sensation de Plaisir”,
Revue
Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger
36: 225–37.
Bramble, Ben, 2013, “The distinctive feeling of
pleasure”,
Philosophical Studies
, 162: 201–17.
Brandt, Richard B., 1979,
A Theory of the Good and the
Right
, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brandt, Richard B., 1982, “Two Concepts of Utility,”
in Richard B. Brandt, 1992,
Morality, Utilitarianism, and
Rights
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196–212.
Original publication: Harlan B. Miller and William H. Williams, eds.,
Utilitarianism and Its Limits
, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 169–85. An objection to
desire-fulfillment views of pleasure is based in desires’
changing over time.
Brandt, Richard B., 1993, “Comments on Sumner” in Brad
Hooker (ed.),
Rationality, Rules, and Utility: New Esssays on the
Moral Philosophy of Richard B. Brandt
, Boulder: Westview Press,
pp. 229–32. A reply to objections in a volume with a useful
bibliography and critical papers, among which that by L.W. Sumner,
“The Evolution of Utility: A Philosophical Journey”, pp.
97–114, traces changes in, and appraises, Brandt’s views bearing
on our subject.
Brentano, Franz, 1907/1979,
Untersuchungen zur
Sinnespsychologie
, 2nd ed., with additions, Roderick Chisholm
and Reinhard Fabian (eds.), Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag (1st. ed.: Leipzig:
von Duncker & Humblot, 1907). Note 39 on pp. 235–40 (pp.
119–25 of 1st ed.), referenced here, is key for a precise
interpretation of Brentano’s views on pleasure and their divergence
with those of his former protegé Karl Stumpf. The
Brentano-Stumpf controversy obviously bears a close analogy and
historical relation to medieval debates on pleasure such as those,
mentioned in §2.3.1, ¶2 and in n. 20
ad loc.
discussed in McGrade 1987. Many of the same questions explicitly or
implicitly arise: Is pleasure a distinct act? If not, what is its
relation to the acts to which it belongs? What are its relations to
sensation and thought? Does a conscious act always or sometimes take
itself as an object (in a different way from any others it has) or is
another act always required to reflect on or take pleasure in it?
Brentano, Franz, 1921/1969, “Loving and Hating”,
Appendix IX, in his
The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and
Wrong
, (Oskar Kraus, ed., 3rd German edition, 1934), Roderick
Chisholm (ed.), Roderick Chisholm and Elizabeth H. Schneewind (trans.),
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and New York: Humanities Press, pp.
137–60. Original German publication: “Vom Lieben und
Hassen”, Anhang, IX, in
Vom Ursprung sittlicher
Erkenntnis
, 2nd ed., Oskar Kraus, (ed.), Leipzig: Felix Meiner,
1921; this was dictated by Brentano in 1907. A source especially for
Brentano’s view of bodily pleasure being involved even in cognitive
pleasure, by being caused by one’s judgment or loving, exposited with
further references in Chisholm 1987.
Brentano, Franz, 1929/1981,
Sensory and Noetic Consciousness:
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint III
, Oskar Kraus (ed.),
Margarete Schättle and Linda L. McAlister (trans. ed.),
Linda L. McAlister (trans.), London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul and
New York: Humanities Press. Original German publication:
Vom
sinnlichen und noetischen Bewußtein
, Leipzig: Felix Meiner,
1929. Pp. 14, 16, 59 in Part I, iii, 5 & 7 and Part II, i, 28 are
a source for Brentano’s complex intentional theory of pleasure as
loving one’s loving of one’s experiencing and also that experiencing
itself, exposited with further references in Chisholm 1986 and
1987.
Brink, David O., 1989,
Moral realism and the foundations of
ethics
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contains critical
discussion of Moore’s naturalistic fallacy charge against value
hedonism, at pp. 151–54.
Broad, C.D., 1930,
Five Types of Ethical Theory
, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bruder, Gerard E., 2003, “Frontal and Parietal Asymmetries
in Depressive Disorders: Behavioral, Electrophysiologic, and
Neuroimaging Findings”, in Hugdahl and Davidson, 2003, pp.
719–42.
Brunschwig, Jacques, 1986, “The Cradle Argument in
Epicureanism and Stoicism,” in Malcolm Schofield and
Gisela Striker (eds.),
The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic
Ethics
, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press; Paris:
Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 113–44.
Buddhaghosa (c. 400 CE Buddhist), 1920–21,
The
Expositor
Atthasālīni: Buddhaghosa’s Commentary on
the Dhammasangani, the First Book of the Abhidhamma Pitaka
), 2
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Buddhaghosa (c. 400 CE Buddhist), 1979,
The Path of
Purification
Visuddhimagga
), tr.,
Ñâṇamoli, 4th ed., Kandy: Buddhist Publication
Society.
Butler, Joseph, 1726,
Fifteen Sermons Preached in the Rolls
Chapel
. There have been full and partial reprintings of these
sermons. Using the Augustinian language of love, he argues that
self-interest (the object of self-love) is dependent on there being
specific passions (i.e., desires, but perhaps in a richer than
functionalist sense) to satisfy. Classic refutation of drawing selfish
consequences from hedonistic egoism: satisfying altruistic desires may
advance one’s happiness as much as any self-regarding project
does.
Cabanac, Michel, 1971, “Physiological role of
pleasure”,
Science
, 173(2): 1103–1107.
Cabib, Simona and Puglisi-Allegra, Stefano, 2004, “Opposite
Responses of Mesolimbic Dopamine Neurons to Controllable and
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Annual Review
of Psychology
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Campos, Belinda and Keltner, Dacher, 2014, “Shared and
Differentiating Features of the Positive Emotion Domain”, in
Gruber and Moskowitz 2014, 52-71.
Caston, Victor, 2003, “Intentionality in Ancient
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
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, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
>.
Chisholm, Roderick M., 1986,
Brentano on Intrinsic Value
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 3, pp. 17–32, is
mainly a shorter, earlier version of his 1987; the rest provides
context.
Chisholm, Roderick M., 1987, “Brentano’s Theory of Pleasure
and Pain”,
Topoi
, 6: 59–64. Accessible exposition
of Brentano’s theory.
Christiano, Thomas, 1992, “Sidgwick on desire, pleasure, and
the good”, in
Essays on Henry Sidgwick
, Bart Schultz
(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 261–78.
Churchland, Paul M., 1979,
Scientific Realism and the
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Cicero,
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On Ultimate
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). A recent translation is entitled
On Moral
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Clore, Gerald L. and Colcombe, Stanley, 2003, “The Parallel
Worlds of Affective Concepts and Feelings”, in Musch and Klauer,
2003, pp. 335–69.
Clore, Gerald L.; Gasper, Karen; and Garvin, Erika, “Affect
as Information”, in Forgas 2001, pp. 121–44.
Coan, James A. and Allen, John J.B., 2003, “The State and
Trait Nature of Frontal EEG Asymmetry in Emotion”, in Hugdahl
and Davidson, 2003, pp. 681–715.
Cooper, John M., 1996a/1999, “An Aristotelian Theory of the
Emotions”, in
Essays in Aristotle’s Rhetoric
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pp. 406–23.
Cooper, John M., 1996b/1999, “Reason, Moral Virtue and Moral
Value”, in
Rationality in Greek Thought
, Michael Frede
and Gisela Striker, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
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101–2/269–70 for citations on pleasure as an apparent
good.
Cooper, John M., 1998/1999, “Posidonius and the
Emotions”, in
The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy
Juha Sihvola and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, (eds.), Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, pp. 71–111; repr. in Cooper 1999b, pp.
449–84.
Cooper, John M., 1999a, “Pleasure and Desire in
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Cooper, John M., 1999b,
Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient
Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory
, Princeton: Princeton
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Craig, A.D., 2002,“How do you feel? Interoception: the sense
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Nature Reviews
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Craig, A.D., 2009, “How do you feel – now? The
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Nature Reviews
Neuroscience
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Craig, A.D., 2015 ,
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Press.
Craig, Wallace, 1918, “Appetites as Constitutents of
Instincts”,
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Crisp, Roger, 2006,
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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 1990,
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Optimal Experience
, New York: Harper and Row.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 1996,
Flow and the Psychology of
Discovery and Invention
, New York: Harper Collins. A list of nine
characteristics of ‘flow’, his longest I know of, is at
pp. 123–24.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 1997,
Finding Flow: The Psychology
of Engagement with Everyday Life
, New York: Harper Collins. Also
published as:
Living Well: The Psychology of Everyday Life
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997.
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, Chichester, England and New York:
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Damasio, Antonio R., 1994,
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Damasio, Antonio R., 1999,
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Brace.
Damasio, Antonio R., 2003,
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Darwall, Stephen; Gibbard, Allan; Railton, Peter, 1992,
“Toward
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Reprinted in: their (as editors)
Moral Discourse and Practice:
Some Philosophical Approaches
, New York and Oxford: Oxford
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Darwin, Charles, 1998,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals
, 3rd ed., with Introduction, Afterword and
Commentaries by Paul Ekman, New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press. Now widely thought correct in its main direction, although of
course dated in evidence and detail. But a great Darwin read! And
Ekman brings the science almost up to date in his notes.
Davidson, Richard J., 1994, “Asymmetric brain funtion,
affective style and psychopathology: the role of early experience and
plasticity”,
Development and Psychopathology
6: 741–758.
Davidson, Richard J., 2000a, “Affective Style, Mood and
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Davidson, Richard J. (ed.), 2000b,
Anxiety, Depression and
Emotion
, New York: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, Richard J., 2000c, “The Functional Neuroanatomy of
Affective Style,” in Lane and Nadel, 2000, pp.
371–88.
Davidson, Richard J., 2001, “Toward a Biology of Personality
and Emotion”,
Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences
, 935: 191–207.
Davidson, Richard J., 2002, “Toward a Biology of Positive
Affect and Compassion”, in
Visions of Compassion: Western
Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature
, Richard J.
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pp. 107–130.
Davidson, Richard J., 2003, “Seven sins in the study of
emotion: Correctives from affective neuroscience”,
Brain and
Cognition
, 52(1): 129–32.
Davidson, Richard J. and Irwin, William, 1999, “The
functional neuroanatomy of emotion and affective style”,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
, 3: 11–21.
Davidson, Richard J.; Jackson, Daren C.; and Kalin, Ned H., 2000,
“Emotion, Plasticity, Context, and Regulation: Perspectives From
Affective Neuroscience,”
Psychological Bulletin
126(6): 890–909.
Davidson, Richard J.; Pizzagalli, Diego; and Nitschke, Jack B.,
2002, “Depression: Perspectives from Affective
Neuroscience,”
Annual Review of Psychology
53: 545–74
Davidson, Richard J.; Scherer, Klaus R. and Goldsmith, H. Hill,
2003,
Handbook of Affective Sciences
, New York: Oxford
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Handbook
’)
Davidson, Richard J. and Sutton, Steven K., 1995, “Affective
neuroscience: The emergence of a discipline”,
Current
Opinion in Neurobiology
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Davis, Wayne, 1981a, “A Theory of Happiness,”,
American Philosophical Quarterly
, 18(2): 111–20. An
analysis in terms of beliefs about the satisfaction of desires.
However, while the self-report literature on subjective judgments of
happiness often shows one component depending on beliefs about how
well one’s life is objectively going, there are also other components
reflecting how one feels that this analysis does not account for, and
these others seem to be pain and pleasure (or feeling happy, where
this is the same as experiencing pleasure). See Bibliography
annotation to Strack, Argyle, and Schwarz 1991.
Davis, Wayne, 1981b, “Pleasure and Happiness,”
Philosophical Studies
, 39: 305–17. (Identifies the two,
so the analyses of the other papers, too, apply to our subject.)
Davis, Wayne, 1982, “A Causal Theory of Enjoyment,”
Mind
, XCI: 240–56. Extends his 1981 to analyze enjoyment
as experiences causing beliefs about the satisfaction of one’s
desires.
Depue, Richard and Paul F. Collins, 1999, with commentaries by
others, “Neurobiology of the structure of personality: dopamine,
foundations of incentive motivation and extraversion”, with
extensive peer commentary,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
22: 491–569. Defends a dopaminergic view of all these and, in
part, of positive affect as well.
Depue, Richard A. and Jeannine Morrone-Strupinsky, 2005, “A
neurobehavioral model of affiliative bonding: implications for
conceptualizing a human trait of affiliation”, with extensive
peer commentary by many others,
Behavioral and Brain
Sciences
, 28(3): 313–95. Defends a μ-opioid-system theory
of the trait of affiliation, while suggesting, more tentatively, such
a view of similar consummatory-phase pleasure more generally.
(Typesetting errors resulted in “u-opiates” and the like
here for “μ-opiates” and the like in most places.)
Descartes, René, 1984–91,
The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes
, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald
Murdoch, and (also, for Vol. III) Anthony Kenny, trans., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 3 vols. (‘CSM’ in citations,
where ‘AT’ precedes page numbers of the standard edition
of the original French and Latin, often noted in the margins of this
and other recent editions:
Oeuvres de Descartes
, Charles Adam
& Paul Tannery, eds., J. Vrin, 1908–1957.)
Diener, Ed; Sandvik, Ed and Pavot, William, 1991, “Happiness
is the frequency, not the intensity, of positive versus negative
affect”, in Strack
et al.
1991, pp. 119–139.
Diener, Ed (ed.), 1999, Special Section on the Structure of
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
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Drevets, Wayne C. and Raichle, Marcus E., 1998, “Reciprocal
Suppression of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during Emotional versus
Higher Cognitive Processes: Implications for Interactions between
Emotion and Cognition”,
Cognition and Emotion
, 12(3):
353–385.
Duncker, Karl, 1941, “On Pleasure, Emotion and
Striving,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
1(4): 391–430. Classic paper on the relations of pleasure and
motivation, by a psychologist well-versed in the history of thought
about this topic generally and especially in the traditions of
introspectionist psychology and phenomenology. His many distinctions
seldom connect obviously to later neuroscience; any validity may come
at higher levels of brain/mind organization than this has yet reached.
A source for some early twentieth century psychological literature in
German. Through this paper this German literature may have influenced
philosophers writing in English in the following decades, and what
they found to be obvious in experience or in ordinary English.
Edwards, Rem B., 1979,
Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of
Qualitative Hedonism
, Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press.
Ekman, Paul, 1999a, “Basic Emotions”, in Dalgleish and
Power 1999, Ch. 3, pp. 45–60.
Ekman, Paul, 1999b, “Facial Expressions”, in Dalgleish
and Power 1999, Ch. 16, pp. 301–20.
Ekman, Paul and Davidson, Richard J., eds., 1994,
The Nature
of Emotion: Fundamental Questions
, New York: Oxford University
Press. Question 8: “Can Emotion Be Nonconscious?”,
pp. 283–318, affords a mix of empirical and conceptual
considerations.
Ellsworth, Phoebe C. and Klaus R. Scherer, 2003, “Appraisal
Processes in Emotion”, in Davidson
et al.
2003,
Handbook
, pp. 572–95.
Emilsson, Eyójolfur Kjalar, 1998, “Plotinus on the
Emotions”, in Juha Sihvola and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, (eds.),
The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy
, Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, pp. 339–63.
Empedocles (c. 500 B.C.),
Fragments
, in Kirk, Raven and
Schofield (1983). Fragment 17, cited here, and others may be found
also in other collections including selections from the presocratic
Greek philosophers‘ surviving writings and in editions of
Empedocles.
Epicurus (d. 300 B.C.E.), 1994,
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Writings and Testimonia
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Erler, Michael and Malcolm Schofield, , 1999, “Epicurean
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Malcolm Schofield (eds.),
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, Cambridge
& New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 642–674.
Feldman, Fred, 1997a, “On the Intrinsic Value of
Pleasures”, in Feldman 1997c, pp. 125–47. Original
publication:
Ethics
, 107 (April 1997): 448–466.
Feldman, Fred, 1997b, ”Two Questions about Pleasure,“
reprinted in Feldman, 1997c, pp. 79–105. Original publication:
Philosophical Analysis: A Defense by Example
, David Austin
(ed.), Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988, pp. 59–81. Clearly reviews some
main kinds of account given by twentieth century philosophers and
proposes that the central kind of pleasure is a special attitude and
that others are its intentional objects.
Feldman, Fred, 1997c,
Utilitarianism, Hedonism and Desert:
Essays in Moral Philosophy
, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Feldman, Fred, 2001, “Hedonism”, in Lawrence C. Becker
and Charlotte B. Becker (eds.),
Encyclopedia of Ethics
, 2d
edition, 3 vols., New York: Routledge, Vol. II, pp. 662–669.
Clearly reviews some kinds of twentieth century philosophers’ views of
pleasure including his own ‘attitudinal’ view, before
going on to expound versions of hedonism based on them.
Feldman, Fred, 2002, “The Good Life: A Defense of
Attitudinal Hedonism,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research
, LXV(3): 604–28. Part of a 2000 symposium at Brown
University.
Feldman, Fred, 2004,
Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning
the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism
, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Findlay, J.N., 1961,
Values and Intentions
, New York:
Macmillan. Pp. 175–78 argues against the mere feeling view
of pleasure as nonexplanatory and running into what is here called
”the problem of good“. The argument is strongly
reminiscent of one used by the psychologist William McDougall (e.g.,
in his 1911), on behalf of his Stoic-influenced hormic psychology,
against the simple picture of pleasure.
Forgas, Joseph P., ed., 2001,
Handbook of Affect and Social
Cognition
, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fox, Michael D., Abraham Z. Snyder, Justin L. Vincent, Maurizio
Corbetta, David C. Van Essen, and Marcus E. Raichle, 2005, “The
human brain is intrinsically organized into dynamic, anticorrelated
functional networks”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America
102: 9673–9678.
Fredrickson, Barbara, 1998, “What Good Are Positive
Emotions?”
Review of Positive Psychology
, 2(3):
300–19. Claims there are many positive emotions, although not as
well discriminated as negative ones; joy, interest contentment and
love (as a complex of these and others) are mentioned. Plausible but
vague view that positive emotions serve to broaden attention and
cognitive style, which seems to fit a broader range of phenomena than
cited. While repeated in later publications, the view seems not yet to
have been worked out in greater detail.
Frijda, Nico, 1993, “Moods, Emotion Episodes and
Emotions”, in
Handbook of Emotions
, Michael Lewis and
Jeannette M. Haviland, eds., New York and London: The Guilford Presss,
pp. 381–403. Not in the 2nd ed. of this.
Frijda, Nico, 1999, “Emotions and Hedonic Experience”,
in Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz, 1999, pp. 190–210.
Frijda, Nico, 2001, “The Nature of Pleasure”, in Bargh
and Appley, 2001, pp. 71–94.
Frijda, Nico and Marcel Zellenberg, 2003, in
Appraisal
Processes in Emotion: Theories, Methods, Research
, Klaus R.
Scherer, Angela Schorr and Tom Johnstone, eds., New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 141–55.
Fuchs, Alan E., 1976, “The Production of Pleasure by
Stimulation of the Brain: An Alleged Conflict between Science and
Philosophy”,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
36: 494–505.
Gardiner, H.M., Ruth Clark Metcalf and John G. Beebe-Center, 1937,
Feeling and Emotion: A History of Theories
, New York:
American Book Company. The most thorough historical account to date in
English.
Gardner, Eliot L. and James David, 1999a, “The
Neuorobiology of Chemical Addiction”, in
Getting Hooked:
Rationality and Addiction
, Jon Elster and Ole-dørgen Skog,
eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–136.
Gardner, Eliot L., 1999b, “The Neurobiology and Genetics of
Addiction: Implications of the ‘Reward Deficiency
Syndrome’ for Therapeutic Strategies in Chemical
Dependency”,
Addiction: Entries and Exits
, Jon Elster
(ed.), New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 57–119.
Gazzaniga, Michael (ed.), 2004,
The Cogntive
Neurosciences
, 3rd ed., Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT
Press.
Gibbard, Allan, 2003,
Thinking how to live
, Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003. Ch. 2 has an excellent treatment
of Moore’s criticism of value hedonism, distinguishing his
well-supported claim for a conceptual distinction between pleasure and
good from his further claim that these are distinct properties.
Ginsborg, Hannah, 2014, “Kant’s Aesthetics and
Teleology”,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
>.
§2.31 discusses aesthetic judgment’s relation to aesthetic
pleasure and §2.33 whether, on Kant’s view of this, aesthetic
pleasure is intentional. References to recent philosophical literature
on these controversial questions are provided.
Glare, P.G.W. (ed.), 1968–82, Oxford Latin Dictionary,
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Good on etymology, too.
Goldstein, Irwin, 1980, “Why People Prefer Pleasure to
Pain”,
Philosophy
, 55: 349–62.
Goldstein, Irwin, 1985, “Hedonic Pluralism”,
Philosophical Studies
, 48: 59–55.
Goldstein, Irwin, 1989, “Pleasure and Pain: Unconditional
Intrinsic Values”,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
50(2): 255–276.
Goldstein, Irwin, 2000, “Intersubjective Properties by Which
We specify Pain, Pleasure and Other Kinds of Mental States,”
Philosophy
, 75: 89–104.
Goldstein, Irwin, 2002, “The Good’s Magnetism and Ethical
Realism”,
Philosophical Studies
, 108(1–2):
1–14.
Gosling, Justin, 1998, “Hedonism”,
Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, London: Routledge,
ad
loc
Gosling, J.C.B., 1969,
Pleasure and Desire: The Case for
Hedonism Reviewed
, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The best
introductory book on pleasure, too. Uncluttered and engagingly
written, but with only a short select bibliography by way of
references. The aim is to distinguish disparate uses and claims run
together in the hedonist tradition, without denying the existence or
importance of occurrent positive affect in our emotional or active
lives. Distinctions made in the course of the twentieth century
reaction against hedonism are used to dissect hedonist claims and
arguments while excesses of the ordinary language literature
(mentioned especially toward the end of n.1 above), then near the end
of its run, are largely corrected. A work for undergraduates that
wears its wisdom and scholarship lightly while attentive to the
intuitive sources and motivations of hedonism in human life.
Gosling, J.C.B. and Taylor, C.C.W., 1982,
The Greeks on
Pleasure
, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thorough and
scholarly, but sometimes the interpretations are controversial.
Gruber, June and Moskowitz, Judith Tedlie, 2014,
Positive
Emotion: Integrating the Light Sides and Dark Sides
, New
York:Oxford University Press.
Gusnard, Debra A., Erbil Akbudak, Gordon L, Shulman, and Marcus E.
Raichle, 2001, “Medial prefrontal cortex and self-referential
mental activity: Relation to a default mode of brain function”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
U.S.A.
, 98: 4259–4264.
Gusnard, Debra A., and Marcus E. Raichle, “Functional
Imagery, Neurophysiology, and the Resting State of the Brain”,
in Gazzaniga 2004, pp. 1267–80.
Haber, Suzanne N., Julie L. Fudge, and Nikolaus R. McFarland,
“Striatonigrostriatal Pathways in Primates Form an Ascending
Spiral from the Shell to the Dorsolateral Striatum”,
The
Journal of Neuroscience
, 20(6): 2369–2382.
Haidt, Jonathan, 2003, “The Moral Emotions,” in
Davidson, Scherer, and Goldsmith (
Handbook
),
pp. 852–70. Claims there are distinct moral emotions
reflected to differing extents in different enculturated
moralities.
Halbfass, Wilhelm, 1997, “Happiness: A
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika Perspective, in Mohanty, J.N. and
Bilmoria, P., eds.,
Relativism, Suffering and Beyond: Essays in
Memory of Bimal K. Matilal
, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp.
150–163.
Hamlyn, David, 1978, “The Phenomena of Love and Hate”,
Philosophy
, 53: 5–20.
Harkins, Jean and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.), 2001,
Emotions in
Crosslinguistic Perspective
, Berlin and New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Haybron, Daniel, 2001, “Happiness and Pleasure,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
LXII(3): 501–28.
Haybron, Daniel, 2007, “Do We Know How Happy We Are? On Some
Limits of Affective Introspection and Recall”,
Noûs
41(3): 394–428
Haybron, Daniel, 2008,
The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive
Psychology of Well-Being
, New York: Oxford University Press.
Heathwood, Chris, 2006, “Desire satisfactionism and
hedonism”,
Philosophical Studies
, 128:
539–63.
Heathwood, Chris, 2007, “The reduction of sensory pleasure
to desire“,
Philosophical Studies
, 133:
23–44.
Heilman, Kenneth M., 2000, “Emotional Experience: A
Neurological Model”, in Lane and Nadel, 2000, pp. 328–44.
Well-informed hypotheses on where to look in brain systems’ activity
for dimensions of affect, similar to Wundt’s (1896/1897).
Hejmadi, Ahalya, Richard J. Davidson and Paul Rozin, 2000,
“Exploring Hindu Indian Emotion Expressions: Evidence for
Accurate Recognition by Americans and Indians”.
Psychological Science
, 11(3): 183–187.
Suggests there are a plurality of basic positive affects. Requires
corroboration by other methods, if additions are to be regarded as
affects and as basic, rather than just as social signals; e.g, of
submission, which may secondarily feel good to people who have been
socialized to regard it as appropriate to their age, sex, class or
caste status. The classical Sanskrit treatise on dramaturgy
Nāṭyaśāstra
, cited as a source, may not
support the whole list of principal affects it is credited with here,
at least in all versions; its Chapter Seven seems not to mention
dhyana
, contemplation or meditation, translated as
“peace” in this paper. See
Nāṭyaśāstra: English translation with
Critical Notes
, rev. ed., 1996 (1st ed., 1986), trans. and notes,
Adya Ragacharya, New Delhi: Munishiram Manoharlal,
pp. 66ff..
Heller, Wendy; Koven, Nancy S.; and Miller, Gregory; 2003;
“Regional Brain Activity in Anxiety and Depression”, in
Hugdahl and Davidson, 2003, pp. 533–64.
Helm, Bennett W., 1994, “The Significance of
Emotions,”
American Philosophical Quarterly
, 31(4):
319–31.
Helm, Bennett W., 2001a,
Emotional Reason: Deliberation,
Motivation and the Nature of Value
, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Helm, Bennett W., 2001b, “Emotional and Practical Reason:
Rethinking Evaluation and Motivation,”
Noûs
, 35(2):
190–213.
Helm, Bennett W., 2002, “Felt Evaluations: A Theory of
Pleasure and Pain,”
American Philosophical Quarterly
39(1): 13–30.
Helm, Bennett W., 2009, “Emotions as Evaluative
Feelings”,
Emotion Review
, 1(3): 248–55.
Hirvonen, Vesa, 2004,
Passions in William Ockham’s
Philosophical Psychology
, Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hobbes, Thomas 1651/1994,
Leviathan: with selected variants
from the Latin edition of 1668
, Edwin Curley (ed.), Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Hobbes, Thomas, 1658/1991, Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig,
and Bernard Gert, trans.,
De Homine
(in part), in
Man and
Citizen: Thomas Hobbes’s De Homine and De Cive
, Indianapolis:
Hackett. Contains translation of
De Homine
, chs. x–xv,
drafted 1641, published 1658.
Hoebel, Bart; Rada, Pedro V.; Mark, Gregory P.; and Pothos,
Emmanuel N., 1999, “Neural Systems for Reinforcement and
Inhibition of Behavior; Relevance to Eating, Addiction and
Depression” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz 1999, pp.
558–77.
Houk, James C.; Davis, Joel L., and Beiser, David G., 1995,
Models of Information Processing in the Basal Ganglia
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hugdahl, Kenneth and Davidson, Richard J., eds., 2003,
The
Asymmetrical Brain
, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hume, David,
A Treatise of Human Nature
Hundert, E.J., 1994,
The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard
Mandeville and the Discovery of Society
, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hursthouse, Rosalind, 2002, “Emotional Reason: Deliberation,
Motivation and the Nature of Value”,
Mind
111: 418–422. A review of Helm 2001a.
Ikemoto, Satoshi and Jaak Panksepp, 1999,“The role of
nucleus accumbens dopamine in motivated behavior: a unifying
interpretation with special reference to reward-seeking”,
Brain Research Reviews
, 31: 6–41.
Isen, Alice. M., 2002, “A Role for Neuropsychology in
Understanding the Facilitating Influence of Positive Affect on Social
Behavior and Cognitive Processes”, in
Handbook of Positive
Psychology
, eds., C.R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez, New York:
Oxford University Press, pp. 528–40.
Ito, Tiffany A. and Cacioppo, John T., 1999, “The
Psychophysiology of Utility Appraisals”, in Kahneman, Diener,
and Schwarz 1999, pp. 470–88.
Ito, Tiffany A. and Cacioppo, John T., 2001, “Affect and
Attitudes: A Social Neuroscience Approach”, in Forgas 2001, pp.
51–74.
Izard, Carroll E., 1991,
The Psychology of Emotions
, New
York and London, Plenum.
Jacob, Pierre, 2014, “Intentionality”,
The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Winter 2014 Edition), Edward
N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
Johnston, Victor S., 1999,
Why We Feel: The Science of Human
Emotions
, A review of some relevant science by a research
psychologist written for a general audience. More daring in its
interpretations and evolutionary speculation than the literature
written for scientists.
Kagan, Shelly, 1992, “The Limits of Well-being”,
Social Philosophy and Policy
, 9: 169–89. Also published,
with identical pagination, in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr.,
and Jeffrey Paul (eds.);
The Good Life and the Human Good
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 169–189.
Section II, Hedonism, discusses well some options for relating
pleasure and desire.
Kahneman, Daniel, 1999, “Objective Happiness”, in
Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz, 1999, pp. 3–25. A program for
getting from momentary self-reports to somethingmore. Excellent and
accessible. See §3.1, last ¶, n. 5 last ¶, and
n. 28 on Kahneman’s motivational definition of “instant
utility” (p. 4), which seems subject to the objections Sidgwick
raised against its Victorian predecessors, 1907, p. 127.
Kahneman, Daniel, 2000, “Experienced Utility and Objective
Happiness: A Moment-Based Approach”, in Kahneman and Tversky,
2000, pp. 673–92.
Kahneman, Daniel; Diener, Ed; and Schwarz, Norbert (eds.), 1999,
Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology
, New York:
Russell Sage Foundation. Contains contributions from psychologists and
others representing different subfields and literatures, generally
more accessible than papers written for specialists. Probably the best
single place to start reading scientfic literature on the
subject.
Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky (eds.), 2000,
Choices,
Values, and Frames
, New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, Daniel, Wakker, Peter P., and Sarin, Rakesh, 1997,
“Back to Bentham? Explorations of experienced utility”,
The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112
, 2: 375-406.
Kant, Immanuel, 1790/2000,
Kritik der Urteilskraft
trans. as
Critique of the power of judgment
, Paul Guyer (ed.);
Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000. See especially, with pages in the Academy edition,
referenced in the entry just below, in parentheses: p. 33 (20: 231)
from the First Introduction; pp. 105 (5: 220, 222) and Guyer’s
notes at p. 361, n. 24 and p. 366, notes 3 and 4 for
citations to other writings of Kant’s. For references to recent
secondary literature on the relations of aesthetic judgment and
aesthetic pleasure in Kant, and on the latter’s possible
intentionality, see Ginsborg 2005. Kant’s First Introduction (which
some editions follow Kant in omitting) gives his fullest account of
the influential division of mind into Cognition, Conation or Desire,
and Feeling (involving pleasure or pain). Adding the last of these
formally to the medieval Intellect and Will may be new with him,
although eighteenth century predecessors, perhaps especially J.G.
Sulzer, came very close (Gardiner, Metcalf, and Beebe Center, 1937,
ch. ix, pp. 244–75).
Kant, Immanuel, 1800/1974 (first ed., 1798),
Anthropologie in
pragmatischer Hinsicht
, English trans.:
Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View
, trans. Mary Gregor, The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1974. The relevant passage is on p. 100 there and at
vol. VII, pp. 231–2 of the standard complete edition
of Kant’s works,
Gesammelte Schriften
, Prussian/German
Academy of Sciences, Berlin: G. Reimer/W. de Gruyter,
1902–    , the pagination of which is often
included in the margins of later editions and translations.
Kapur, Shitij, 2003, “Psychosis as a State of Aberrant
Salience: A Framework Linking Biology, Phenomenology, and Pharmacology
in Schizophrenia”,
American Journal of Psychiatry
160(1): 13–23.
Katkov, G., 1940, “The Pleasant and the Beautiful”,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
, XL (1939–40):
177–206. Pp. 179–87 may provide the account in English
closest to Brentano’s intentions, based on the relevant passage of
Brentano’s untranslated 1907 and other works that may yet be
unpublished (Katkov’s note, pp. 178–79). The loving is itself
part of the act of sensing at which it is directed. One suspects this
may be all the reflexivity intended; Chisholm has a loving of a loving
in his analysis, which seems a permissible, but not a mandatory,
reading of other Brentano texts.
Katz, Leonard D., 1982, “Hedonic arousal, memory and
motivation,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
, 5(1): 60. A

commentary on Wise 1982 by a philosopher, showing how to interpret and
state Wise’s scientific views in a way friendly to elements of the
simple picture of pleasure.
Katz, Leonard D., 1986,
Hedonism as Metaphysics of Mind and
Value
. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, published and
distributed through ProQuest/UMI (URL =
pleasure-centered theorizing in both areas, in the spirit of the
simple picture of pleasure. Includes discussion of the ancients,
utilitarians, and of neuroscience through 1985. The last is updated in
§3 below. Some points are used and some improved upon or
corrected here.
Katz, Leonard D., 2005a, Review of Fred Feldman,
Pleasure and
the Good Life
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2005.03.02.
Available online
Katz, Leonard D., 2005b, “Opioid bliss as the felt hedonic
core of mammalian prosociality – and of consummatory pleasure more
generally?”,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
, 28(3): 356.
(Short commentary on Depue and Morrone-Strupinsky 2005 by a
philosopher).
Katz, Leonard D., 2005c, Review of Timothy Schroeder,
Three
Faces of Desire
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2005.09.09.
Avaialble online
Katz, Leonard D., 2008, “Hedonic Reasons as Ultimately
Justifying and the Relevance of Neuroscience”, in Walter
Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.),
Moral Psychology
, Vol. 3:
The
Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders and
Development
, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp.
409–17.
Kenny, Anthony, 1963,
Action, Emotion and the Will
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ch. VI, pp. 127–50, is
most relevant and includes a pithy statement of Anscombe’s central
point.
Kirk, G.S.; Raven, J.E.; and Schofield, M., 1983,
The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with Selected
Texts
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1st ed., 1957.
Knuuttila, Simo, 2004,
Emotions in Ancient and Medieval
Philosophy
, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Kraye, Jill (ed.), 1997,
Cambridge Translations of Renaissance
Philosophical Texts
, Vol. I,
Moral Philosophy
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Part VI translates extracts
from works of Petrarch, Filelfo, Raimondi, and Quevedo partially
rehabilitating Epicurean hedonism in a Christian context.
Kringelbach, Morten. L., 2009,
The Pleasure Center: Trust Your
Animal Instincts
, New York: Oxford University Press.
Kringelbach, Morten L. and Kent C. Berridge (eds.), 2010,
Pleasures of the Brain
, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press.
Kringelbach, Morten L. and Kent. C. Berridge, 2015,
“Motivation and Pleasure in the Brain”, in Wilhelm Hofmann
and Loran F. Nordgren (eds.),
The Psychology of Desire
, New
York and London: The Guilford Press, 129–45.
Labukt, Ivar, 2012, “Hedonic Tone and the Heterogeneity of
Pleasure”,
Utilitas
, 24(2): 172–99.
Lamme, Victor A. F., 2003, “Why Visual Attention and
Awareness Are Different”,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
7(1): 12–18.
Lamme, Victor A. F., and P. R. Roelfsema, 2000, “The
Distinct Modes of Vision Offered by Feedforward and Recurrent
Processing”
Trends in Neurosciences
23(11): 571–579.
Landfester, Manfred, 1966,
Das griechische Nomen
«philos» und seine Ableitungen
, Hildesheim:
Olms.
Lane, Richard D., 2000, “Neural Corelates of Emotional
Experience”, in Lane and Nadel, 2000,
pp. 345–70.
Lane, Richard D, and Nadel, Lynn, eds., 2000,
Cognitive
Neuroscience of Emotion
, New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lane, Richard D., Lynn Nadel and Alfred Kaszniak, “Epilogue:
The Future of Emotion Research from the Perspective of Cognitive
Neuroscience”, in Lane and Nadel, 2000, pp. 407–12.
Larue, Gerald A., 1991, “Ancient Ethics”, in
Companion to Ethics
, Peter Singer (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
29– 40.
LeDoux, Joseph,
The Emotional Brain : The Mysterious
Underpinnings of Emotional Life
New York: Simon &
Schuster.
LeDoux, Joseph, 2002
The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become
Who We Are
, New York and London: Viking Penguin. Ch. 9, pp.
235–91 has further discussion and references on relevant
neuroscience, especially of dopamine ‘reward’, by an
affective neuroscientist who takes a fairly dim view of it – an
eminent amygdala specialist who thinks that what pays off is studying
specific emotion systems, such as that supposed to be specifically for
fear conditioning in the amygdala. (Many now take a less specific view
of amygdala function.)
Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott, rev. Henry Stuart Jones,
1940, 9th ed. (1st ed., 1843),
A Greek-English Lexicon
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lieh-tzu, 1960,
The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of the
Tao
, trans. A.C. Graham, New York: Columbia University Press.
Reports of the naive libertine hedonism of Yang Chu, apparently rare
in extant ancient Chinese prose, are in chapter 7.
Locke, John, 1700/1979, reprinted with corrections from 1975
edition; following mainly 4th ed., 1700; 1st ed. 1689),
An Essay
concerning Human Understanding
, Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford:
Oxford University Press. II,xx and xxi are most relevant.
Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. (eds., trans., commentary and notes),
1987,
The Hellenistic Philosophers
, 2 vols., Vol. I
containing English translations and Vol. II containing Greek texts.
Texts and notes in §21 (Epicurean) and in §§57 and 65
(Stoic), in both volumes, are relevant.
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, 1st c. B.C.E.),
De rerum
natura
. This exposition of Epicureanism in verse is available in
many editions and translations.
Lycan, William, 2015, “Representational Theories of
Consciousness”,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
>.
Lyons, William, 1980,
Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to his
Philosophy
, Brighton: Harvester and Atlantic Highlands, N.J:
Humanities. Chapter 11 critically discusses Ryle 1954a and 1954b but
overlooks the relevant chapter in his 1949.
Madell, Geoffrey, 1996, “What Music Teaches about
Emotion,”
Philosophy
, 71: 63–82.
Madell, Geoffrey, 2002,
Philosophy, Music and Emotion
2002, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Manstead, Antony S. R.; Frijda, Nico and Fischer, Agneta (eds.),
2004,
Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matilal, Bimal Krishna, 1986,
Perception: An Essay in
Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge
, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986.
McDougall, William, 1911,
Body and Mind
, New York:
Macmillan. There have been several identically paginated reprint
editions.
McGrade, Arthur Stephen, 1981, “Ockham on Enjoyment: Toward
an Understanding of Fourteenth Century Philosophy and
Psychology,”
Review of Metaphysics 33
: 706–28.
“Enjoyment” is the traditional but misleading translation
of the technical use of “
fruitio
” and cognates in
these medieval texts. In the text I prefer “valuing” for
this act of the Will distinguishable from pleasure and arguably
antecedent to and dissociable from it, as on Ockham’s own view.
McGrade, Arthur Stephen, 1987, “Enjoyment at Oxford after
Ockham,” in Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, eds.,
From Ockham
to Wyclif
, Oxford: Blakwell, pp. 63–88. An excellent and
clear discussion of the alternatives to Ockham’s view in the
fourteenth century debates. But see note on his 1981 above.
Merlan, Philip, 1960, “
Hēdonē in Epicurus and
Aristotle
”, in his
Studies in Epicurus and
Aristotle
(Klassich-Philologische Studien, Volume 22),
Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, pp. 1–37.
Mill, James, 1829/1869,
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human
Mind
, 2nd ed., 1869, John Stuart Mill (ed. and annot.) (1st
ed., London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1829), London: Longmans Green Reader
& Dyer, 2 vols.
Mill, John Stuart, 1872/1979 (1st ed., 1865),
An Examination
of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Questions
Discussed in his Writings
, 1872 4th ed. text, J. M. Robson (ed.),
Toronto: University of Toronto Press and London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979. Chapter XXV, pp. 430–436, is the classic rejoinder
to Aristotelian views in a principal but now little-read work of
Mill’s.
Mill, John Stuart, 1871 (1st ed., 1861),
Utilitarianism
4th ed., London: Longmans Green Reader & Dyer. Many recent
editions based on this are available.
Millgram, Elijah, 1997,
Practical Induction
Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Chapter 6, pp. 105–40, gives an
indicator of well-being theory of pleasure.
Millgram, Elijah, 2000, “What’s the Use of Utility?”,
Philosophy and Public Affairs 29
,2:114–36. An indicator
of change for the better account of pleasure.
Mitsis, Phillip, 1987,
Epicurus’ Ethical Theory
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Monier-Williams, Monier, 1899,
A Sanskrit-English Dictionary,
Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with special reference to
Cognate European Languages
, new ed., Oxford: Oxford University
Press. This standard is available in both British and Indian
reprints.
Moore, George Edward (G.E.), 1903,
Principia Ethica
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. III,
“Hedonism”, pp. 59–109 and especially the
distinction between pleasure and consciousness of pleasure at pp.
87–89, influenced by Plato’s discussion in
Philebus
21A. Plato’s distinction there between pure pleasure and cognition,
however, may differ from Moore’s in leaving what Block calls
“phenomenal consciousness” on the pleasure side. Moore
uses an undifferentiated concept of consciousness.
Moran, Richard, 2002, “Frankfurt on Identification:
Ambiguities of Activity in Mental Life”, in Sarah Buss and Lee
Overton (eds.),
Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry
Frankfurt
, pp. 189–217. Pp. 209–14 contain
a sensitive discussion of ways pleasure may be regarded as
norm-governed and active, much in the spirit of Aristotle and of
Anscombe. A controversial inference that pleasure cannot be the sort
of thing that could be directly caused by drug action is drawn.
Morillo, Carolyn R., 1990, “The Reward Event and
Motivation”,
Journal of Philosophy
, 87(4):
169–186. Material from this is included in her 1995.
Morillo, Carolyn R., 1992, “Reward Event Systems:
Reconceptualizing the Explanatory Roles of Motivation, Desire and
Pleasure,”
Philosophical Psychology
, 5(1): 7–32.
Material from this is included in her 1995.
Morillo, Carolyn, 1995,
Contingent Creatures: A Reward-Event
Theory of Motivation and Value
, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &
Littlefield. Includes material from her 1990 and 1992 in Chapter 2.
Defends a hedonistic view of motivation and value (but an avowedly
nonnormative and naturalist one) in the light of the brain reward and
conditioning literature. Clearly develops a view of motivation like
the motivation by pleasant thoughts view put forward by Schlick
(1930/1939) and discussed by Gosling (1969), while also emphasizing
that pleasure is itself intrinsic and nonrelational, as in her
1992.
Moss, Jessica, 2006, “Pleasure and Illusion in Plato”,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
, 72: 503-35,
Moss, Jessica, 2012,
Arisotle on the Apparent Good:
Perception
, Phantasia,
Thought
, &
Desire
, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Mulligan, Kevin, 2004, “Brentano on the mind”, in Dale
Jaquette (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Brentano
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 66–97.
Pp. 83–86 summarize and reference Brentano’s views on
pleasure and pain – his earlier views as well as the mature ones
discussed in §2.3.1, ¶2 and n. 21.
Murphy, Sheila T., Jennifer L. Monahan and R.B. Zajonc, 1995,
“Additivity of Nonconscious Affect: Combined Effects of Priming
and Exposure”,
Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology
, 69(4): 589–602.
Murphy, Sheila T. and R. B. Zajonc, 1993, “Affect,
Cognition, and Awareness: Affective Priming With Optimal and
Suboptimal Stimulus Exposures”,
Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology
, 64(5): 723–739.
Murray, James Augustus Henry; Henry Bradley, William Alexander
Craigie and Charles Talbut Onions (eds.), 1884–1928,
The
Oxford English Dictionary
(original title:
A New English
Dictionary on Historical Principles
), Oxford: Oxford University
Press. ‘OED’. A uniform corrected edition appeared in
1933, a 2d ed. in 1989.
Musch, Jochen and Klauer, Karl Christoph, 2003,
The Psychology
of Motivation: Affective Processes in Cognition and Emotion
Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Nader, Karim; Bechara, Antoine; and van der Kooy, Derek, 1997,
“Neurobiological Constraints on Behavioral Models of
Motivation”,
Annual Review of Psychology
48: 85–114.
Nettle, Daniel, 2005,
Happiness: The Science behind Your
Smile
, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Neumann, Roland; Förster, Jens; Strack, Fritz, 2003,
“Motor Compatibility: The Bidirectional Link between Behavior
and Evaluation”, in Musch and Klauer, 2003, pp.
371–391.
Nichols, Herbert, 1892, “The Origin of Pleasure and Pain,
I”,
The Philosophical Review
, 1(4): 403–432.
Nowell-Smith, Patrick Horace, 1954,
Ethics
Harmondsworth: Middlesex. Especially pp. 111–115 on
‘pro-attitudes’, including pleasure, as explanatory (i.e.,
involving conation of various kinds, as it seems) and pp. 127–32
on enjoyment. He seems thus to seek some middle way between Ryle’s
dispositional view and older experiential episode views, but to leave
any filling out of the details to psychology.
Nussbaum, Martha C., 1994,
The Therapy of Desire: Theory and
Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C., 2001,
Upheavals of Thought: The
Intelligence of the Emotions
, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nyanatiloka, 1980,
Buddhist Dictionary: Manual of Buddhist
Terms and Doctrines
, 4th ed., Nyanaponika, Kandy (ed. and rev.),
Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society Valuable for its doctrinal
summaries and translation suggestions, such as “joyful
interest” for
pīti
, p. 168, adopted here; the
work of Theravadin Buddhist monks of German and German-Jewish origin,
respectively, a teacher-student pair; the original version was done by
Nyanatiloka during their World War II internment as enemy aliens in
British India.
Ockham, see William of Ockham.
Olds, James, 1958, “Self-Stimulation of the Brain: Its Use
to Study Local Effects of Hunger, Sex, and Drugs”,
Science
, 127: 315–24.
Olds, James, 1965, “Pleasure Centers in the Brain”,
Scientific American
, 195: 105–16.
Olds, James, 1977,
Drives and Reinforcements: Behavioral
Studies of Hypothalamic Functions
, New York: Raven Press.
Olds, James and Milner, Peter, 1954, “Positive reinforcement
produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of
rat brain”,
Journal of Comparative and Physiological
Psychology
, 47: 419–27.
Oliver, Alex, “Facts,”
Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
, London and New York: Routledge, Vol. 3, pp.
535–37.
Onions, C.T., 1966,
The Oxford Dictionary of English
Etymology
, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Owen, G.E.L., 1971–72,“Aristotelian Pleasures,”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
, 72: 135–52.
Reprinted in his
Logic, Science and Method: Collected Papers in
Greek Philosophy
, Martha Nussbaum (ed.), Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1996.
Panksepp, Jaak, 1998,
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations
of Human and Animal Emotions
, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Panksepp, Jaak, 2000a, “Emotions as Natural Kinds within the
Mammalian Brain”, ch. 9, in
Handbook of Emotions
, 2nd
ed., Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (eds.), New York and
London, The Guilford Press, pp. 137–156.
Panksepp, Jaak, 2000b, “The Riddle of Laughter: Neural and
Psychoevolutionary Wellsprings of Joy”,
Current Directions
in Psychological Science
, 9(6): 183–186.
Panksepp, Jaak, 2014, “Understanding the Neurobiology of
Core Postive Emotions through Animal Models: Affective and Clinical
Implications“, in Gruber and Moskowitz, 116-36.
Panksepp, Jaak, Brian Knutson and Jeff Burgdorf, 2002, “The
role of brain emotional systems in addictions: a neuro-evolutionary
perspective and new ‘self-report’ animal model,”
Addiction
, 97: 450–469.
Panksepp, Jaak, and Biven, Lucy, 2012,
The Archaeology of
Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions
, New York:
Norton.
Parfit, Derek, 1984,
Reasons and Persons
, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Peciña, Susana and Berridge, Kent C., 2000, “Opioid
site in nucleus accumbens shell mediates eating and hedonic
‘liking’ for food: map based on microinjection Fos
plumes”,
Brain Research
, 863: 71–86.
Peciña, Susana; Cagniard, Barbara; Berridge, Kent C.;
Aldridge, J. Wayne; and Zhuang, Xiaoxi, 2003, ”Hyperdopaminergic
Mutant Mice Have Higher “Wanting” But Not
“Liking“ for Sweet Rewards,”
The Journal of
Neuroscience
, 23(28): 9395–9402.
Penelhum, Terence, 1957, “The Logic of Pleasure”,
Philosophy and Phenomenlogical Research
, XVII: 488–23.
Classic critical discussion of Ryle, accepting his positive account of
enjoyment as a form of effortless attention but rejecting his claim
that this is always a disposition rather than an episode.
Perry, David L., 1967,
The Concept of Pleasure
, The
Hague: Mouton. Uses the method of British ordinary language philosophy
but often takes issue with predecessors in it, as well as with the
earlier hedonist tradition.
Pfaffmann, Carl, 1960, “The pleasures of sensation”,
Psychological Review
, 67: 753–68.
Pizzagalli, Diego; Shackman, Alexander J.; and Davidson, Richard
J.; 2003, “The Functional Imaging of Human Emotion: Asymmetric
Contributions of Cortical and Subcortical Circuitry”, in Hugdahl
and Davidson, 2003, pp. 511–32.
Plato, 1997,
Complete Works
, trans. by many hands, with
notes by John M. Cooper (ed.); D. S. Hutchinson (assoc ed.),
Indianapolis and Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Company.
Plato,
Definitions
. Generally regarded as not by Plato
himself, but a record of work done by those in his circle. It is
included in the 1997
Complete Works
in a translation by D.S.
Hutchinson.
Plato,
Gorgias
, in Plato 1997.
Plato,
Philebus
, trans. with notes and commentary by
J.C.B. Gosling, London: Oxford University Press, 1975. A large and
ongoing secondary literature debating the interpretation of the
section on false pleasures exists.
Plato,
Protagoras
, 1991/1976, trans. and notes, C.C.W.
Taylor, Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. ed., 1991 (1st ed.,
1976). 352B–357E apparently adopts a summative hedonism about
individual welfare and prudential rationality in this supposedly
relatively early work, but likely only for the purposes of the
argument, ironically or to lead protreptically toward views defended
later; this hedonism seems to be rejected in the
Gorgias
and
most explicitly at
Phaedo
68Ef. and also seems clearly
inconsistent with what are thought to be Plato’s later writings. A
large and continuing secondary literature exists on the interpretation
of this latter section of the dialogue and on whether and how it can
be reconciled with view defended inj other dialogues.
Plato,
Republic
, in Plato 1997.
Potter, Karl (ed.), 1977,
Encyclopedia of Indian
Philosophies
, Vol., II,
Indian Metaphysics and Epistemology:
The Tradition of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika up to
Gaṇgeśa
, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass.
Preston, Stephanie D. and Frans B.M. de Waal, 2002,
“Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases”,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
, 25: 1–72. With peer
commentaries and the authors’ reply.
Preuss, Peter, 1994,
Epicurean Ethics: Katastematic
Hedonism
, Lewiston, New York; Queenston, Ontario; Lampeter,
Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press. Ch. Six: Kinetic and Katastematic
Pleasure, pp. 121–77, critically reviews earlier
interpretations and presents his own at pp. 162–77.
Prinz, Jesse, 2004,
Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of
Emotion
, New York: Oxford University Press.
Provine, Robert J., 2000,
Laughter: A Scientific
Investigation
, New York: Viking.
Puccetti, Roland, 1969, “The Sensation of Pleasure”,
The British Journal of the Philosophy of Science
, 20(3):
239–245.
Putnam, Hilary, 1975,
Mind, Language and Reality
(Philosophical Papers, Volume 2), London: Cambridge University
Press.
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Moore, Charles A., eds., 1957,
Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy
, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Rachels, Stuart, 2004, “Six Theses about Pleasure”,
Philosophical Perspectives
, 18: 247–67.
Rainville, Pierre, 2002, “Brain mechanisms of pain affect
and pain modulation,”
Current Opinion in Neuorbiology
12: 195–204.
Rawls, John, 1999,
A Theory of Justice
, 2nd ed. (1st
ed., 1971); Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. §84 is
most directly relevant.
Rhys Davids, T.W. and Stede, William,
Pali-English
Dictionary
, Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1921–1925, repr.
1998. There are also other reprint edition, British and Indian, of
this old standard; a new dictionary in progress has not yet reached
the terms of most interest here.
Rilling, James K., David A. Gutman, Thorsten R. Zeh, Giuseppe
Pagnoni, Gregory S. Berns, and Clinton D. Kilts, 2002, “ A
Neural Basis for Social Cooperation”,
Neuron
35(2): 395–405. A study purporting to show how cooperating in a
seeming Prisoner’s Dilemma really pays off because it makes
cooperators happier than defectors. Based on interpretation of
functional brain imaging supported by subjects’ self-reports.
Robinson, Terry E. and Kent C. Berridge, 1993, “The neural
basis of drug craving: an incentive-sensitization theory of
addiction”,
Brain Research Reviews
, 18(3): 247–91.
Probably their most explicit and interesting to philosophers; a useful
Glosssary clearly explains both the standard uses of relevant terms in
their field and their innovations, pp. 279–81.
Robinson, Terry E. and Kent C. Berridge, 2000, “The
psychology and neurobiology of addiction: an incentive-sensitization
view”,
Addiction
, 95 (Supplement 2):
S91–S117.
Robinson, Terry E. and Kent C. Berridge, 2001,
“Incentive-sensitization and addiction”,
Addiction
, 96: 103–114. A shorter version of their
2000.
Rolls, Edmund T., 1999,
The Brain and Reward
, New York:
Oxford University Press. This book is not really about emotion, as
conceived by philosophers or in ordinary language, but mainly about
brain systems for reward (what an animal can be trained to perform an
operant task in order to get) and motivation, thoroughly reviewed by a
senior experimenter on the brains of nonhuman animals – roughly,
in older psychological jargon, the territory of reinforcement and
drive. Chapter 9 is on pleasure.
Rolls, Edmund T., 2000, ”The Orbitofrontal Cortex and
Reward,“
Cerebral Cortex
, 40: 284–94.
Rosenkranz, Melissa A., Daren C. Jackson, Kim M. Dalton, Isa
Dolski, Carol D. Ryff, Burt H. Singer, Daniel Muller, Ned H. Kalin,
and Richard J. Davidson, 2003, “Affective style and
in
vivo
immune response: Neurobehavioral mechanisms”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
U.S.A.
, 100: 11148–11152.
Russell, Bertrand, 1921,
The Analysis of Mind
, London:
Unwin and New York: Macmillan. Pp. 69–72 are relevant;
Russell defines pleasure behaviorally and, quoting the neurologist
Henry Head, adopts his distinction between pain and
‘discomfort’, based on observations of soldiers wounded in
World War I.
Russell, Bertrand, 1930/1968,
The Conquest of Happiness
New York: Liveright, 1930 (New York: Bantam Books reprint, 1980).
Ostensibly written as a self-help book free of deep philosophy, it is
still worth reading, not only for its wise practical advice,
nonetheless.
Russell, Daniel, 2005,
Plato on Pleasure and the Good
Life
, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Russell, James A., 1991, “Culture and the Categorization of
Emotions”,
Psychological Bulletin
, 110(3):
426–50. Survey of wide array of evidence supporting
positive/negative categorization of affect, by a major and
sophisticated proponent. Wierzbicka’s later synthesis of the
linguistic data (1999) should be more up-to-date on that.
Russell, James A., 2003, “Core Affect and the Psychological
Construction of Emotion,”
Psychological Review
110(1): 145–72. Russell’s core affect is supposed to be in
itself objectless but always conscious, whereas Berridge’s core
affective processes are supposed to be in themselves unconscious as
well.
Russell, James A. and Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 1999, “Core
affect, prototypical emotional episodes, and other things called
emotion: Dissecting the elephant”,
Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology
, 76(5): 805–819. A sophisticated
attempt to show how apparently competing approaches to the
classification of emotion, the dimensional approach to which Russell
is a major contributor and the discrete emotions approach supported,
for example, by Ekman and Panksepp, can fit together. This special
journal section (Diener 1999), mainly on the dimensional approach, is
a good place to see the state of play then on Russell’s
‘bipolar’ (positive vs. negative affect on the same
dimension) approach.
Ryle, Gilbert, 1949,
The Concept of Mind
, London:
Hutchinson, 1949. Chapter IV, ”Emotion“, and especially
its §6, “Enjoying and Wanting”, started the
mid-century Anglo-American literature with its quasi-behaviorist
strong denial that there are occurrent episodes of pleasure. Often in
an assertive rhetorical tone.
Ryle, Gilbert, 1951, “Feelings”,
Philosophical
Quarterly 1
,3:193–205, repr. in his 1971, pp.
272–86.
Ryle, Gilbert, 1954a, “Pleasure”, Ch. 4 in
Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures
, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 54–67. His largest collection of
considerations against the view that pleasure is an occurrence in
experience, mainly at pp. 58–61. Some strong claims taken by
followers to be obvious and based on ordinary English usage may,
perhaps, be traced to other sources. That pleasure is inseparable from
its object (p. 61) may derive (aside from grammatical transitivity)
from the supposed results of intropectionist psychology reported in
Duncker 1941 (see annotation there). The very strongly hedged claim,
that pleasure is not an episode since it cannot be independently
clocked and one cannot be pleased quickly (pp. 58–60), seems to
draw a conclusion that pleasure is not an occurrent state in part from
Aristotelian premises that do not, at least obviously, support it. The
relevant Aristotelian view is that pleasure is not a process but an
activity that, like seeing, is complete in each of its (experiential?)
moments. E.g., at any moment of seeing or enjoying one can truly say
that one has already seen or enjoyed oneself, while it is not
generally true that when one is building a house that one has already
built it (e.g., NE 1174a13–b14). It has not, apparently, been
similarly argued on such grounds that there are no experiential
episodes of seeing (an example of Aristotle’s which he sees as
parallel to pleasure) or of tasting, or that a dispositionalist rather
than an occurent state account of these is therefore true, although
these would seem equally to follow. But Ryle may be more influenced by
the difficulty of attending to describable features of pleasure (on
which see §1.3, last two paragraphs) and by its consequences in
introspectionist psychology.
Ryle, Gilbert, 1954b, “Pleasure”,
Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society
, 28 (Supplementary Volume):
135–146; repr. in his 1971, pp. 325–35. Ryle’s most
tentative yet most constructive treatment, emphasizing more than his
other writings on pleasure his positive view that pleasure is a manner
or kind of attention or interest. It is strongly reminiscent of
Aristotle.
Ryle, Gilbert, 1971,
Collected Papers
(Volume II:
Collected Essays, 1929–1968
), London: Hutchinson &
Co.
Scanlon, T.M., “Replies”
Social Theory and
Practice
, 28(2): 337–58.
Scherer, Klaus R., 2003, Introduction to “Cognitive
Components of Emotion” section in Davidson, Scherer and
Goldsmith 2003, (
Handbook
), pp. 141–55
Schlick, Moritz, 1930/1939,
Fragen der Ethik
, Vienna:
Springer, 1930. Trans. by David Rynin as
Problems of Ethics
New York: Prentice-Hall, 1939. The classic statement of the motivation
by pleasant thoughts variety of hedonist motivation psychology is in
Ch. II.
Schroeder, Timothy, 2001, “Pleasure, Displeasure and
Representation,”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
31(4): 507–30.
Schroeder, Timothy, 2004,
Three Faces of Desire
, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Schultz, Wolfram, 2000, “Multiple Reward Signals in the
Brain”,
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
, 1:
201–7.
Schultz, Wolfram and Dickinson, Anthony, 2000, “Neuronal
Coding of Prediction Errors,”
Annual Review of
Neuroscience
, 23: 473–500. Leading scientists review the
literature on how dopamine neurons serve as teachers or critics in
learning and also show this function is not unique to dopamine neurons
but is widespread.
Scitovsky, Tibor, 1992/1976,
The Joyless Economy: The
Psychology of Human Satisfaction
, rev. ed, New York: Oxford
University Press. An economist’s case against what he takes to be the
counterproductive contemporary pursuit of stable comfort at the
expense of pleasure, which he takes to be felt transition toward
optimal arousal level. The revised edition contains no updating of the
old science. Kahneman 1999, pp. 13ff., provides some discussion and
references toward updating the science and reappraising Scitovsky’s
claims, discussed briefly in n. 31.
Sen, Amartya, 1985,
Commodities and Capabilities
Amsterdam: North-Holland. An Aristotelian-type view of well-being is
deployed to produce a measure of social distributive justice.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 1917–25 (1st century B.C.E.),
Ad
lucilium epistolae morales
, with trans. by Richard M. Gummere, 3
vols., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press and London:
Heinemann. The influential Roman Stoic’s mature reflections on ethics
in the form of letters to a young friend.
Shackman, Alexander J., “Anterior Cerebral Asymmetry,
Affect, and Psychopathology: Commentary on the Approach-Withdrawal
Model”, in Davidson 2000b, pp. 104–32.
Sherrington, Charles, 1906/1947,
The Integrative Action of the
Nervous System
, New Haven, Yale University Press. (Original
publication: New York: Scribner, 1906.) Later reprints follow the
pagination of the 1947 edition, which prefixes a new author’s Foreword
to the reset 1906 text.
Shizgal, Peter, 1997, “Neural basis of utility
estimation”,
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
7: 198–208.
Shizgal, Peter, 1999, “On the Neural Computation of Utility:
Implications from Studies of Brain Stimulation Reward”, in
Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz, 1999, pp. 500–524.
Sidgwick, Henry, 1907,
Methods of Ethics
, 7th ed.,
London: Macmillan; 1st ed. 1874. The culminating work of the British
hedonistic utilitarian tradition and one of the all-time greats of
moral philosophy. Book I, ch. iv and Book II are especially
relevant.
Siewert, Charles, 2011, “Consciousness and
Intentionality”,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
(Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
>.
Smith, Adam, 1790/1976,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, eds., London, Oxford University
Press.
Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard, 1973,
Utilitarianism: for
and against
, London: Cambridge University Press.
Smuts, Aaron, 2011, “The feels good theory of
pleasure”,
Philosophical Studies
, 155:
241–65.
Sobel, David, 1999, “Pleasure as a Mental State”,
Utilitas
, 11(2) (July 1999): 230–234. Criticism of Katz
1986 and Kagan 1992 from a desire-based standpoint on both pleasure
and reasons.
Solomon, Robert C. and Stone, Lori D., 2002, “On
‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Emotions”,
Journal of the Theory of Social Behavior
, 32(2): 417–35.
While many of their complaints about failures to distinguish different
psychological and evaluative distinctions in the softer psychological
literature and about the misleading terminology (seeming to presuppose
these are opposite poles or contraries) are well-placed, the seeming
rejection of the centrality of a single distinction between positive
and negative affect in the affective sciences is at least very
premature. The harder evidence supporting it (e.g., opposite immune
system effects, cerebral asymmetries in studies of mood, temperament
[see Rosenkranz
et al.
2003 for recent results and earlier
references] and psychopathology [Davidson and Pizzagalli 2002]) is not
even considered here.
Sorabji, Richard, 2000,
Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic
Agitation to Christian Temptation: The Gifford Lectures
, New
York: Oxford University Press. Part I, Emotions as Judgments versus
Irrational Forces, pp. 16–155, summarized in the Introduction at
pp. 2–7, is a good discussion of whether all affect can be
reduced to judgment. While Sorabji emphasizes the important ancient
debate provoked by the claim of Chrysippus that emotions (including
pleasure and joy) are judgments, there is some discussion of recent
philosophical and scientific literature as well.
Spinoza, Benedictus de (Baruch), 1677,
Ethica Ordine
Geometrico Demonstrata
in Carl Gebhardt, 4 vols.,
Spinoza
Opera
, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925. Cited passages in Vol. II,
pp. 148–49, 191. Of the recent English translators, Richard
Shirley (Hackett, 1982) and G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford, 2000) translate
Spinoza’s “
laetitia
” by “pleasure”,
but Edwin Curley by “joy”, following the
joie
” of Descartes’
Les Passions de
l’Âme
(Princeton University Press, in
Collected
Works
, Vol. I, 1985, pp. 500–501, 531; also in his
Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works
, Princeton,
1994).
Stocker, Michael with Hegeman, Elizabeth, 1996,
Valuing
Emotions
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strack, Fritz; Argyle, Michael; and Schwarz, Norbert, eds., 1991,
Subjective well-being: an interdisciplinary perspective
Oxford: Pergamon. Provides an entry into the social psychology
self-report literature, some of which deals with pleasure. This
literature tends to show subjects’ self-ratings of well-being or
happiness are based partly on pleasure, partly on the absence of
negative affect, and partly on their views of how well they are
achieving the ends they regard as important in life (their ‘life
satisfaction’). For new publications in this literature, check
the
Journal of Happiness Studies
, (Kluwer, 2000+).
Strick, Peter L., 2004, “Basal Ganglia and Cerebellar
Circuits with the Cerebral Cortex”, in Gazzaniga 2004,
pp. 453–61.
Striker, Gisela, 1993, “Epicurean Hedonism”, in
Passions and Perceptions; Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of
Mind; Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum
Jacques Brunschwig and Martha Nussbaum (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 3–18. Reprinted in her
Essays on
Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics
, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996, pp. 196–208.
Sumner, L. W., 1996,
Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ch. 4, “Hedonism”, pp.
81–112 defends an attitude view (of ‘enjoyment’) and
opposes others on the way to theses in ethics.
Sutton, Steven K. and Davidson, Richard J., 1997,
“Prefrontal brain asymmetry: A biological substrate of the
behavioral approach and inhibition systems”,
Psychological
Science
, 8(3): 204–10.
Sutton, Steven K. and Davidson, Richard J, 2000, “Prefrontal
brain electrical asymmetry predicts the evaluation of affective
stimuli”,
Neuropsychologia
, 38(13): 1723–1733.
Tanyi, Attila, 2010, “Sobel on Pleasure, Reason, and
Desire”,
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
, 14:
101–15.
Taylor, C.C.W., 1963, “Pleasure”,
Analysis
, 23
(Supplement): 3–19. Refines Ryle’s account of enjoyment while
admitting other supposedly less central or important kinds of pleasure
as well.
Thayer, Robert E., 1989,
The Biopsychology of Mood and
Arousal
, New York: Oxford University Press.
Thayer, Robert E, 1996,
The origin of everyday moods:
understanding and managing energy and tension
, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Titchener, Edward Bradford, 1908,
Lectures on the Elementary
Psychology of Feeling and Attention
, New York: Macmillan. Ch. IV,
“The Tridimensional Theory of Feeling and Emotion”, is a
long, chatty, account of the evolution of Wundt’s writings and views,
with extensive quotations in his original German, by the last major
representative of the introspectionist school of early academic
experimental psychology.
Tomkins, Silvan S., 1962,
Affect, Imagery, Consciousness
Vol. I:
The Positive Affects
, New York: Springer Publishing
Company.
Tracy, Jessica L. and Robins, Richard W., 2004, “Show Your
Pride: Evidence for a Discrete Emotion Expression”,
Psychological Science
, 15(3): 194–97.
Trigg, Roger, 1970,
Pain and Emotion
, Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Ch. VI, “Is Pleasure a Sensation”, pp.
102–24, is most relevant. The most substantial contribution of
the ordinary language tradition to the study of affect. An excellent,
underread book, perhaps still the best philosophical discussion of the
dissociation of emotional reactions from sensory pain, which
neurologists and some philosophers became saliently aware of in result
of reactions to battlefield injury and evacuation in World War I. What
he says about pain seems mainly to be consistent with science to
date.
Tye, Michael, 1995,
Ten Problems of Consciousness: A
Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind
, Cambridge, Mass.
and London: MIT Press. Pp. 128–30 are on our topic.
Urry, Heather L.; Nichols, Jack B; Dolski, Isa; Jackson, Daren C.;
Dalton, Kim M.; Mueller, Corrina J.; Rosenkranz, Melissa A.; Ryff,
Carol D., Singer, Burton H.; and Davidson, Richard J., “Making a
Life Worth Living: Neural Correlates of Well-Being”,
Psychological Science
, 15(6): 367–71.
Van Riel, Gerd, 1999, “Does a Perfect Activity Necessarily
Yield Pleasure? An Evaluation of the Relation between Pleasure and
Perfect Activity in Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
VII and
X”,
International Journal of Philosophical Studies
7(2): 211–24.
Van Riel, Gerd, 2000a,
Pleasure and the Good Life: Plato,
Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists
, Leiden: Brill, 2000. Especially
pp. 7–37 on Plato and 43–78 on Aristotle. Concise account
of the Epicureans and Stoics, too.
Van Riel, Gerd, 2000b, “Aristotle’s Definition of Pleasure:
a Refutation of the Platonic Account”,
Ancient
Philosophy
, 20(1): 119–138.
Vasubandhu (c. 400 C.E. Buddhist), 1923–31.
L’abhidharmakośa de Vasubandhu
, tr. and annotated in
French by Louis de la Vallée Poussin, Paris and Louvain: Paul
Geuthner, 1923–31, 6 vols., repr. Brussells: Institut Belge des
Hautes Études Chinoises, 1971. A less satisfactory translation
into English from this French translation, itself based mainly on an
ancient Chinese translation from the original Sanskrit which has since
been largely recovered, is that of L.M. Pruden,
Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam
, Berkeley, California:
Asian Humanities Press, 1988–90.
Vasubandhu (c. 400 C.E. Buddhist), 1984, “A Discourse of the
Five Aggregates” (
Pañcaskandhaka
), in Stefan Anacker (trans. and ed.),
Seven Works of Vasubandhu, The Buddhist
Psychological Doctor
, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, pp.
65–82.
Voruganti, Lakshmi; Slomka, Piotr;, Zabel, Pamela; Costa,
Giuseppe; So, Aaron; Mattar, Adel; and Awad, George A., 2001,
“Subjective Effects of AMPT-induced Dopamine Depletion in
Schizophrenia: Correlation between Dysphoric Responses and Striatal
Binding Ratios on SPECT Imaging”,
Neuropsychopharmacology
, 25(5): 642–50. Has relevant
recent references. Supports the dopamine pleasure interpretation.
Caution: Wise 1996 is reported in terms of pleasure, whereas he had by
then abandoned such interpretation and uses there only the behavioral
term “reward”. But in this study, with human patients,
feeling bad when dopamine-depleted by anti-psychotic medication may be
checked more directly than in Wise’s animal studies.
Voznesensky, Andrei (1967/1966), “Oza”, in
Antiworlds and the Fifth Ace: Poetry by Andrei Voznesensky: A
Bilingual Edition
, Patricia Blake and Max Hayward (eds.), New
York: Basic Books.
Wacker, Jan; Heldmann, Marcus; Stemmler, Gerhard, 2003,
“Separating Emotion and Motivational Direction in Fear and
Anger: Effects on Frontal Asymmetry”,
Emotion
, 3(2):
167–193.
Walther von der Vogelweide, c. 1227, “Elegie”. There
are many editions and reprintings in anthologies.
Warner, Richard, 1987,
Freedom, Enjoyment, and Happiness: An
Essay in Moral Psychology
, Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy
Press. A cognitive definition of enjoyment, in terms of belief and
desire, is at p. 129. Purports to develop a ‘Kantian’
approach, but this is an analysis in terms of belief and desire quite
unlike Kant’s own treatment, which provides rough functional
characterizations but no analysis because he took pleasure to be
undefinable. See under Kant for citations.
Watkins, Calvert rev. and ed., 2000,
The American Heritage
Dictionary of Indo-European Roots
, 2d ed. Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Much of its content is available as an
appendix to the
American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language
Watson, David, 2000,
Mood and Temperament
, New York and
London: The Guilford Press. A very accessible summary of some of the
easier relevant science.
Wierzbicka, Anna, 1999,
Emotions Across Languages and
Cultures: Diversity and Universals
, Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences
de l’Homme.
Wierzbicka, Anna and Jean Harkins, 2001, Introduction to Harkins
and Wierzbicka, 2001, pp. 1–34.
William of Ockham, 2001, (c. 1317–26), “Using and
Enjoying”, trans. Stephen Arthur McGrade, in Arthur Stephen
McGrade, John Kilcullen and Matthew Kempshall, eds.,
The Cambridge
Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts
, Vol. Two,
Ethics and Political Philosophy
, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 351–417. This translates Questions
1–4 and 6 of Distinction 1 of his
Ordinatio
, a
commentary on the first book of the
Sentences
of Peter
Lombard. Original Latin text: Guillelmi de Ockham (William of Ockham),
Scriptum in librum primum Sententiarum Ordinatio
, Gedeon
Gál (ed. with the assistance of Stephen Brown), 4 vols., St.
Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute, 1967, Vol. I,
Prologus et Distinctio Prima
, pp. 371–447,
486–507. These are Vols. I-IV in their edition of Ockham’s
Opera Theologica
Williams, Bernard, 1959, “Pleasure and Belief”,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
, 73 (Supplement):
73–92; reprinted in
Philosophy of Mind
, Stuart Hampshire (ed.),
Philosophy of Mind
, New York: Harper and Row, 1966,
pp. 225–42.
Willner, Paul, 2002, “Dopamine and Depression”, in
Gaetano Di Chiara (ed.),
Handbook of Experimental
Pharmacology
, Vol. 154/II:
Dopamine in the CNS II
Berlin: Springer, 2002, pp. 387–416.
Winkielman, Piotr; Berridge, Kent C. 2004; “Unconscious
Emotion”,
Current Directions in Psychological Science
13(3): 120–23.
Winkielman, Piotr; Berridge, Kent C; and Wilbarger, Julia L. 2005;
“Emotion, Behavior, and Conscious Experience: Once More without
Feeling”, in Barrett, Niedenthal, and Winkielman 2005,
pp. 335–62.
Wise, 1982, “Neuroleptics and operant behavior: the
anhedonia hypothesis”,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
5(1): 39–87. With peer commentaries. A case for the pleasure
interpretation of activity in the midbrain dopamine projections. The
bold interpretation is withdrawn in his 1994 and 1999, which give some
reasons, but others still hold similar views and there seems to be at
least some causal connection.
Wise, Roy A., 1994, “A brief history of the anhedonia
hypothesis”, in
Appetite: Neural and Behavioral Bases
Charles R. Legg and David Booth (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 243–63. A former leading advocate of the pleasure
interpretation of the consequences of mesolimbic dopamine, in the
1980s, recants, with reasons, more of which may be found in his
1999.
Wise, Roy A., 1999, “Cognitive factors in addiction and
nucleus accumbens function: Some hints from rodent models”,
Psychobiology
, 27(2): 300–10. This journal
issue has articles presenting various views on the functions of the
mesolimbic dopamine system, none of which support the pleasure
interpretation.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1968,
Philosophical Investigations
trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd ed., Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1980,
Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology
, Vol. 1, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (eds.),
Oxford: Blackwell. From his notebooks. Overlaps with material
published as
Zettel
Wolfsdorf, David,
Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Wundt, Wilhelm, 1896/1897,
Grundriß der
Psychologie
, 1896, Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann; Trans. as
Outlines of Psychology
, Charles Hubbard Judd, trans.,
Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1897. Many libraries have reprint
editions. Later editions and other writings of Wundt’s are compared
with this first edition’s original presentation of the tridimensional
view of affect (in its §7; Judd trans., pp. 74–89,
especially pp. 82–85) in Titchener, 1908, ch. IV.
Young, Paul Thomas, 1959, “The role of affective processes
in learning and motivation”,
Psychological Bulletin
66: 104–25. Distinguishes hedonic from sensory intensity.
Zajonc, Robert B., 1980, “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences
Need No Inferences”,
American Psychologist
35: 151–175.
Zajonc, Robert B., 1984, “On the primacy of affect”,
American Psychologist
, 39: 117–124.
Zajonc, Robert B., 1994, “Evidence for Nonconscious
Emotions”, in
The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental
Questions
, Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson, eds., New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 293–97. (This and the other
short papers and the editors’ Afterword in the same section of this
reader, Question 8: “Can Emotion Be Nonconscious?”, pp.
283–318, afford a mix of empirical and conceptual
considerations. The term “nonconscious” is sometimes
misleading in the work of Zajonc and his collaborators when what is
clearly established in the experimental results referred to seems to
be rather affect that is not firmly bound to an object when explicit
awareness was earlier lacking either of the thing that fails to be the
affect’s object or of its causing the affect. Cf. Zajonc 2000, pp.
47–48; Berridge and Winkielman 2003, pp. 185–86; Berridge
2002. Some phenomena Zajonc is concerned with seem to be only
nonconscious causation, or conditioning, of future emotional memory or
reactions. But Zajonc, whose major 1980s claim was about the
independence of affect from (sophisticated) cognition, apparently
wants to emphasize that point by calling this fast and automatic
processing of stimuli without awareness of these or of their result
“emotion”. Beyond this, it may be necessary to distinguish
different uses of “nonconscious emotion”, corresponding to
distinctions between phenomenal and cognitive concepts of
consciousness made, for example, in Block 1995 and 2002. For an
empirically-founded attempt to connect a related distinction to the
neurobiology of the cingulate cortex, see Lane 2000, pp. 358–60.
For perspectives on relevant observations, beyond those cited by
Zajonc, see the discussion in Berridge 1999, 2004 and Shizgal
1999.
Zajonc, Robert B., 1998, “Emotions”, in
The
Handbook of Social Psychology
, 2 vols., 4th ed., eds., Daniel T.
Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske and Gardner Lindzey, Boston: McGraw-Hill, Vol.
1, pp. 591–632. Good overall review of the evidence for the
relative independence of affect systems from sophisticated cognition
by an early advocate of this in an introduction to many aspects of the
subject, including cultural influences and the differences these may
make for affect.
Zajonc, Robert B., 2000, “Feeling and Thinking: Closing the
Debate Over the Independence of Affect”, in
Feeling and
Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition
, Joseph P.
Forgas (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de
la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 31–58.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ned Block, David Chalmers, and Daniel Stoljar for
their suggestions during an earlier revision and to Arindam
Chakrabarti and Arthur Stephen McGrade for the help acknowledged in
notes 26 and 20, respectively.
Copyright © 2016
by
Leonard D. Katz
ldkatz86
gmail
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