# Ethical Studies/Essay 3 note

There are two questions suggested by the above—(1) Is pleasure good, and if so, in what sense is it good? (2) Is pain evil, and in what way is it evil? Let us take the latter first.
Considered psychically pain is an evil, because it is the feeling of the negation of the self or life. The good is the affirmation of the self, and hence pain is counter to the good. If we are asked to suppose a pain which is a feeling of negation, but not a felt negation, i.e. which is not really in any way the negation of function or the cause of such negation, and are then asked, Is such hypothetical pain an evil? we can not say it would be, because we can say nothing about it at all. It seems to us to be an unreal abstraction. Real pain is the feeling of the negatedness of the self, and therefore, as such, it is bad. It is bad also, because it further acts in the direction of the general lowering of life. Both as felt diminution of the good, and as the cause of further diminution, it is an evil.
If, where pain comes from negated function, but the function is supposed to be indifferent, we are asked, Is then the pain bad? we reply that it is so, because the whole self is negated; I feel pain, and am therein lowered directly or indirectly.
In passing we may ask, Is then pain on the whole an evil? We can not say that. We know that pain often is a good; and we should have a right to say of any pain that it was an absolute evil, only if we knew that it was pain per se, i.e. mere negation. But that is what we can not know. Speaking generally, you can not have mere pain, the negative without the positive; painlessness means death; pain appears to involve reaction; and again, wherever there is an active conscious self, it seems there must be pain. To say that pain is an absolute evil, we should have to answer in the affirmative the question, Can you have the positive without the negative, or the negative in this form? And I do not see how we can give this answer. We know that pain is often a stimulus; without some pain little is produced—perhaps nothing. We know that the pain of the part is often the good of the whole; that that good demands sometimes even the destruction of the part. The life of the whole is the ​end, and for this all must be sacrificed. And so the question is, Is the negation of the part always a condition of the affirmation of the whole, or is it sometimes not? (And we should remember that the affirmation of the whole may be in the part, or without the part.) Can we ever say, Here is an overplus of the negative; here is negation of function, which, in itself and its results, is negation of the good, or of life as a whole? I do not see how we are to say this, because I do not see how we can know enough about the whole of things. For anything I can tell pain per se may be always an unreal abstraction, as I know it often is. What is bad for this or that relative totality may be good for a higher; and above the highest relative totality may be (for anything I know to the contrary) an absolute totality, in which and for which pain is the mere condition of affirmation and in no sense the diminution of life, but whose life (as I suppose all life) involves in itself a subordinated negation. This I do not assert to be the case; but I wished to point out that no man has a right to say pain is an evil absolutely, unless he knows that there is no such life of the whole, or that pain is a negative which limits its functions, and is not a negative condition of those functions.
To return from our digression. We have seen that pain is bad whenever it is not necessary as a condition of good. Turning now to pleasure, we ask, Is pleasure generally speaking good? Doubtless it is good. It is the felt assertion of the will or self. It is felt self-realizedness. It is good because it accompanies and makes a whole with good activity, because it goes with that selfrealization which is good; or secondly, because it heightens the general assertion of self, which is the condition of realizing the good in self.
Pleasure is the psychical accompaniment of exercise of function, and a distinction is required in order to think of function apart from some pleasure. Perhaps there is really no such thing. The function brings its own pleasure, however small, though the whole state may be painful.
Pleasure, then, is generally good; but the questions which now arise are, Can pleasure exist without function? If so, is it good? Or to put it otherwise; Are all pleasures of activity good? Are all pleasures of passivity good? Are any pleasures neither good nor bad? And finally, Is any pleasure good per se, or simply as pleasure?
Can pleasure exist without function? We could not enter here on a psychological investigation of the point, even were we able to treat the matter satisfactorily. But taking pleasure to be the feeling of the realizedness of the will or self, we should doubt if ​apart from some present function or activity pleasure could exist. The questions to be answered would be, how far in what seem the most, or mere, ‘passive pleasures’ of sense function is concerned; how far in contemplative pleasures activity of contemplation comes in; how far, lastly, the very feeling of self, which is pleasure, in being felt implies an activity. To a tired man, for instance, the pleasure of lying down in bed is great; he wants no more; it is complete affirmation of his will, perfect satisfiedness. But as he grows more and more sleepy, does his pleasure increase? When he is asleep does he feel pleasure? On the other hand, is he less satisfied? and if so, in what sense? If his pleasure has been diminished or has ceased, is not that because the reaction, the function of the feeling centre has ceased or been diminished; and is not that reaction what is felt when pleasure is felt?
Let us, however, pass by this question, as without answering it decidedly we hope to show how far pleasure is good. Roughly speaking, we can distinguish pleasures of activity and passivity; pleasure which comes with our doing something, and pleasure which we do nothing to get. Let us ask with each class when pleasure is good, and when it is bad, if it is bad. We will first take pleasures of activity.
(1) (a) When are they good? When the activity is good the pleasure is good, because the two are a psychical whole. You can not have the function without the pleasure: the absence of the pleasure would weaken and perhaps destroy the function, and also generally lower the self to the detriment of other functions; whereas presence of pleasure tends to the heightening of functions in general, beside its own function.—Then what activities are good? Detail is impossible; but, generally, those which directly realize the good will in a living man, or which indirectly increase life and so the possibility of a higher realization of the good in a living man or men. Or rather the two can not be divided. Life is a whole; and life is not only the condition of the good, but may be taken as another name for it. ‘The end of life is life,’ and (speaking generally) what heightens life heightens the good. Pleasure then is not a means to the good, but is included in it and belongs to it.
(b) What pleasures of activity are bad then? for admittedly there are such. The pleasure is bad when the activity is bad; and the activity is bad when, in its immediate or ulterior results, it lowers ​the life of the individual, or of a larger totality, and so diminishes realization of good, or prevents a higher and fuller realization. Here pleasure is bad because it strengthens and intensifies a bad activity. The pleasure per se is not bad, but then there is no such thing except in our heads.
(2) Next as to pleasures of passivity. Let us for shortness’ sake exclude artistic pleasures, and take pleasures of sensuous satisfaction. Are passive sensuous pleasures good or bad? In themselves, I think, they are neither good nor bad. Or we may say roughly, they are good when they are not bad.
(a) When are they bad? This is not hard to answer. They are bad when they prevent or retard the realization of the good life in us by preventing action. This they do when they produce special results which hinder the good, or when they generally contribute towards a habit of self-indulgence, which is bad because it retards or opposes the activity of the good. In short, they are bad when they lower life or prevent its progress. They are not bad per se, but then here again they do not exist per se.
(b) When are they good? They are good when (without the evil results just mentioned) they increase what is ordinarily called happiness, a feeling of general content with one’s existence. That is good, because existence is good, and because without happiness existence is impaired, and with it the good; and because happiness (generally speaking) increases activity. Discontent and unhappiness are great evils, for (even if they do not lead to immorality) they lower life and activity for good. ‘Life is the end of life,’ and so what makes life more liveable is good; and life further must be realized in living men, the basis of whose nature is and must remain animal. To neglect the basis is to make as great a mistake as to regard it as the crown and summit. Life is a whole; and hence pleasures inseparable from life, and pleasures that maintain and heighten a feeling of well-being and joy in living (which again heightens life) are good, because life is good—supposing, that is, that they are not bad, in the sense described above.
We come now to the two questions—Are any pleasures neither good nor bad? Are any pleasures good per se?
(1) Are any pleasures neither good nor bad? The ordinary man would say Yes. A certain amount of pleasure is undeniably good; and (as a rule), if you want more, the more is good (where it is not bad), and this because the satisfaction of the want is good for you, or the non-satisfaction bad. Then again undeniably there is (speaking generally) a too much of any particular pleasure, and ​that too much is bad. But between enough and too much, as in the pleasures of eating and drinking, there comes a neutral territory. It is probably good for you to have say not less than two glasses of wine after dinner. Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but, as to three or four, they are neither one way nor the other. If asked, is the pleasure of these intermediates bad? we say No. If asked, is it good? I do not think we can say Yes. If asked, is it not a positive addition to the surplus of pleasure? I do not think we can say No. We should put the whole question aside as idle. We should say the pleasure is neither good nor bad, or at least we do not know that it is. So far the ordinary man.
Now whether this margin is scientifically defensible, whether there must not be a point say of number of drops or fractions of drops, which is good, and beyond which acme you fall at once into badness, we shall not discuss. It is not an easy question; and fortunately the answer matters nothing to our argument. But for the ordinary man clearly some pleasures are neither good nor bad, and this because (for him) they do neither harm nor good.
(2) To come now to the question, Is any pleasure a good per se? we are in a position, I think, to answer it in the negative. Ordinarily it does sound absurd to say mere pleasure is not an end, since at first sight it seems desirable. The foregoing, however, should have removed this difficulty. We have seen that the pleasures pronounced desirable are so because they are inseparable from and heighten life; and hence these pleasures are not pleasures per se. And further, if the doctrine of the indifferent margin were indefensible (we believe that it is not so), then no pleasure could be a pleasure per se, and our present question would disappear.
But supposing that there exist pleasures which are only pleasurable and, so to speak, end in themselves, then these may certainly be desired, but I think they are not considered desirable or good. And, if that is so, then, in denying that pleasure in itself is good, we are not in collision with the ordinary consciousness. To illustrate. Having had three glasses of wine, I may say I think so much was desirable. I certainly may have another if I like, and I suppose it will give me a certain amount of pleasure and no pain, or lessening of pleasure, now or afterwards. Is the surplus good? Is it desirable? Clearly, though a pleasure, and though not bad, it may not be good; and such is the case, I think, with all innocent pleasures, as e.g. those of physical exercise, sports and games, sight-seeing, &c. If this be so, however, then common consciousness does not hold pleasure per se to be desirable or good. And as for philosophical arguments, what and where are they?
We have now seen that pleasure is good so far as inseparable ​from life, and so far as it results in the heightening of life. But in itself, if and so far as we separate it by an abstraction or find it apart from its good qualities, it is not good, it is in no sense an end in itself.
Here we might cease, but further elucidations will perhaps not be superfluous.
Life is an end in itself. It is true that life implies pleasure. Pessimism notwithstanding, it implies, speaking generally, a surplus of pleasure; and I am not called upon to deny (though I certainly neither assert nor admit it) that higher life means always a greater surplus.
If so, have we come back to Hedonism? Since pleasure and life are inseparable, can we say that to aim at the realization of life is to aim at pleasure? No, in the sense of making it an object, it is not to aim at pleasure; and this distinction is a vital difference, which we must never slur. Function carries pleasure with it as its psychical accompaniment, but what determines, makes and is good or bad, is in the end function. Function, moreover, is something comparatively definite. It gives something you can aim at, something you can do. Not so the pleasure. Further, so far as function and pleasure are separable objects of choice, we must, if we are moral, choose the former. If they are inseparable, are one whole, why are we to aim at the indefinite side, at the subjective psychical sequent and accompaniment, when we have an objective act which we can see before us and perform, and which is the prius of the feeling? It is the act carries with it the pleasure, not the pleasure the act.
‘Yes, but,’ it will be said, ‘we want more pleasure, more than we get with present function; and we will alter the function to get the pleasure.’ Then you must take one of these three positions. You (a) wholly reject the idea that one function is in itself higher than another; or, while believing in higher and lower functions, you say (b) pleasure is separable, or (c) inseparable from the higher.
On the first supposition (a) you break at once with common morality, which does not believe that lower and higher stand for mere means to less or more pleasure. And (b) on the second you are confessedly immoral; for, while believing in a higher, you propose to sacrifice it to pleasure. ‘Let us have pleasure, even at the cost of function’ is not a moral point of view.
​Thirdly (c) if you maintain more pleasure and higher function to be on the whole inseparable, you may at once be challenged as to the truth of that assertion; and if you are not allowed to assume it, you can not assume that more pleasure is an end.
But allowing you for the present to assume that higher function and more pleasure go together, so that to have one is to have the other, why (I would ask), if these two are one whole, will you persist in isolating one side of that whole; since surely it is the less knowable side? The coincidence of the two is an extremely general truth; it need not be true for this man or generation; and, if so, how is it possible to aim at progress except by aiming at function? The function must (on the whole and in the end) carry the pleasure with it, and it is surely a more definite mark. Is it not preposterous to think of aiming at more pleasure, in the end and on the whole (not in any future that we can see), in order, by making this the end, to get along with it some higher function which we know nothing about? Is it not (e.g.) hopelessly vague, if we want to find out what the divine will is, to attempt to define it by some idea of pleasure in the end and on the whole, and not to ourselves or any one else in any time that we can see? Is it not less vague to study that will by considering the previous evolution of it, and to accept what seems a higher step in that evolution, as an end in itself? Must we not say that this going together of function and pleasure is a mere general faith, which we can not verify by experience in every case, and so can not use to determine our particular course?
Of course one sees quite clearly that, generally speaking, it is a good thing to aim at the increasing of pleasure and diminishing of pain; but it is a good thing because it increases the actuality and possibility of life. To make function the end justifies and demands the increase of pleasure and gives you all you can fairly ask in that way. But to say more pleasure is all the end, and life a mere accompaniment to that, is another matter.
And again, when we are doubtful what is higher in progress, it may be a safe course to increase pleasure and diminish pain, because that heightens the good function we have. But to look on the increase of pleasure as the mark to aim at always and simply, when we aim at progress, is again a very different course.
But, leaving this subject, we must observe that we have no right to assume that higher function and more pleasure do on the whole go together. We have bitter proof that in particular cases and stages of progress this is not the case, and so are forced to separate the two in our minds. We can imagine function without pleasure, since we have experienced ​decrease of pleasure proportionate to heightening of quality of function. But, when the two come thus before the mind separately, we feel we must choose function and not pleasure.
In conclusion, there is one way in which pleasure may be used as a test of function. It shows whether function is impeded in discharge or not. But by it you can not tell higher from lower function; and, if you go by it, you must prefer a lower state of harmony to a higher state of self-contradiction.
For the sake of clearness I have run the risk of wearisome length and repetition. In the foregoing Essay I have sharply, not I hope too sharply, criticized Hedonism. From a somewhat more positive consideration I have reached the same result. And now in a spirit of conciliation I would ask the Utilitarian, whose heart is in the right place, who does not care about pleasure, but who wants something definite, to consider this,—whether to take life as the end, the highest and ever a higher life, be more vague than Hedonism; whether it does not give him all he wants; and whether, beside being more in harmony with morality, it is not equally antagonistic to Asceticism.
If our end is to realize the life or the self which is realized in all life, and to develope this in more distinctively human forms, and if we consider that this life to be realized must be realized in living individuals, we shall be far enough from asceticism. There is here no abstract negation of human nature, no sacrifice of detail and fulness to a barren formula. The universal is realized only in the free self-developement of the individual, and the individual can only truly develope his individuality by specifying in himself the common life of all. As we repudiate the liberty of Individualism (better, Particularism), so we repudiate the tyranny of the (abstract) universal. The member is no member but a parasitical excrescence, if it does not live with the life of the whole; the whole life does not exist except in the life of the members. And here, in the moral sphere, the members are self-conscious. It is then only in the intensity of the self-consciousness of the members that the whole can be intensely realized. Furthermore, these members are spiritualized animals; everything human stands on the basis of animal life; and to make self-realization the end not only justifies but demands attention to the well-being and happiness of man as a spiritualized animal, because the feeling of inner harmony is required for, is the psychical condition of, maintenance and progress of function. So far as this we go and must go, but no further; we ought not to sacrifice what seems to be maintenance or progress of function to prospect of increased ​pleasure. But I do not think that the Utilitarian wishes to teach that doctrine; and whatever he wants to teach he can teach without making pleasure the end. To repeat it once more, if self-realization is the end, then pleasure is a relative end and good, because a condition without which good is impossible; and hence to increase pleasure is good, though we need not add ‘for pleasure’s sake.’ And unhappiness is evil, if it is a psychical state which tends to exclude the good, and may be treated as an evil, which it is our bounden duty to fight against, without our being forced to say ‘it is the evil itself, and there is no evil beyond it.’
If again it is objected that the end is vague and has no content, the following Essays will to a certain extent, I hope, remove the objection. Here we may reply that to take human progress as the end, and to keep our eye on past progress, is not an useless prescription; and if any one wants a moral philosophy to tell him what in particular he is to do, he will find that there neither is nor can be such a thing, and at all events will not find it in Hedonism.
One word on the unconscious or latent Hedonism of society in its progress. That is no argument for making pleasure the end, as the reader who has followed me so far will, I trust, at once see. Taking for granted the asserted fact, that society tends to identify what brings pleasure with what is good, we altogether deny the Hedonistic inference. If society tends to realize life more highly and perfectly, it is obvious that it must also realize the conditions of such life. The fact that life can not exist without pleasure does not prove pleasure to be the end of life, unless we are prepared to say (the illustration is not a good one) that because as a man rises in society he wears better clothes, therefore to be dressed like a gentleman was the conscious or unconscious end of his advancement. Of course it might have been, but do we say that it was? Or, again, a mother may have desired her daughter’s health not for her health’s sake, but for the sake of her looks; but would it not be an unfounded inference to conclude that it must have been so? The argument we have noticed holds against asceticism, but we must entreat the reader to bear in mind that the opposite of a false view may be every whit as false; and that you could argue from the denial of asceticism to the assertion of Hedonism only if you had previously made good your alternative, your ‘either—or’ of the two.
Finally (as we have already gone beyond all bounds), let us make a remark on the phrase ‘Utilitarianism.’ It is a thoroughly bad name, and misleads a great many persons. It does indeed express the fact that, for Hedonism, virtue and action are not the end, but are useful as mere means to something outside them. ​But surely it would be better to call the theory after its end (as we have done), since to not a few persons ‘Utilitarianism’ conveys the notion that the end is the useful, which, besides being strictly speaking sheer nonsense, is also misleading. The associations of the useful are transferred to Hedonism, and if these are in some ways unfavourable (Mill’s Util., p. 9), they seem to me in other and more ways to be favourable. The practical man hears of ‘the useful,’ and thinks he has got something solid, while he really is embracing (as I have shown) the cloud of a wild theoretical fiction, from which he would shrink if he saw it apart from its false lights and colours. And on whichever side the balance of advantage lies, no respectable writer can wish to rest on a basis of misunderstanding. The two words ‘useful’ and ‘happiness’ delude not only the public, but perhaps all Utilitarian writers. While they are the terms employed, the question can not possibly be brought to a clear issue; and let me say for myself that I see no good reason why ‘Utilitarianism’ should stand for Hedonism. If ‘happiness’ means well-being or perfection of life, then I am content to say that, with Plato and Aristotle, I hold happiness to be the end; and, although virtue is not a mere means, yet it can be regarded as a means, and so is ‘useful.’ In this sense we, who reject Hedonism, can call ourselves Utilitarians, and the man who thinks he is pushing some counter view by emphasizing ‘happiness’ and ‘usefulness’ does not touch us with his phrases, but rather perhaps confirms us. But pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and life and virtue for the sake of pleasure, is another doctrine, which we repudiate.
* ↑ We need not distinguish further the pleasure of having something done to us. It will, I think, be covered by our answer, and it is a somewhat complicated state of mind.
* ↑ Nor can you reconcile yourself to common morality by saying, ‘But we will only increase the pleasure.’ For (1) either the increase of pleasure does issue in the heightening of function, and will be good in this sense and not in yours; or else (2), as we have seen, if pleasure neither raises nor lowers function, then common opinion considers it neither desirable nor undesirable.
* ↑ Since Mr. Sidgwick’s book has appeared this has grown more common, and is a step in the right direction.
Footnotes