## 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 (P2
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 SS2.3.2 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.[2]



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.[3]



### 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.[4]
 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.[5]



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.[6]
 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.[7]



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".[8]
 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."[9]
 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 SS1.2, P1; SS2.3.1, P1; n.
5, P4; 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 (SS2.3.2) 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
SS2.3.4, P2), 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, SSSS4-10, 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. SS2.3.4,
P2).



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, SS3.3 below).
Neither should it be surprising that introspectionist psychologists
(n. 3, P 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 *aisthesis* 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 SS3.1). 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,
P4 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, P2, 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, P8), 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 (SS1.2),
and also other contemporary philosophers, including Geoffrey Madell
(2002, chs. 5 and 6) and Timothy Schroeder (SS3.1), 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 Nyaya and Vaisesika 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,
 P13).[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
(*piti*), 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 SS6.1.2,
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,P13). 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 SS2.1 - 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 SS2.3.1 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.