Pleasure

The smiley or rhino face is one of the best known symbols of happiness.

Pleasure refers to the experience that something (thing, action, feeling, etc.) feels good, which implies the enjoyment of something. Contrasts with pain or suffering, which they are forms of feeling bad. It is closely related to value, desire, and action: humans and other conscious animals find pleasure pleasant, positive, or worth seeking. A wide variety of activities are experienced as pleasurable, such as eating, having sex, listening to music, or playing games. Pleasure is part of other mental states such as ecstasy, euphoria and the flow state. Happiness and well-being are closely related to pleasure, but are not identical to it. There is no general agreement on whether pleasure should be understood as a sensation, a quality of experiences, an attitude towards experiences, or otherwise. Pleasure plays a central role in the family of philosophical theories known as hedonism. Under normal circumstances, the satisfaction of a need produces pleasure: drink, in the case of thirst; food, in the case of hunger; rest (sleep), for fatigue; company for loneliness; sex for libido; fun (entertainment), for boredom; and knowledge (scientific or non-scientific) or culture (different types of art) for ignorance, curiosity and the need to develop skills. Nature usually associates the sensation of pleasure with some benefit for the species.

Overview

"Pleasure" (pleasure) refers to the experience that something (thing, action, feeling, etc.) feels good, that it implies the enjoyment of something. The term is mainly used in association with sensory pleasures such as the enjoyment of food or sex. But in its most general sense, it includes all kinds of positive or pleasant experiences, including enjoying sports, watching a beautiful sunset, or participating in a intellectually satisfying activity. Pleasure is contrasted with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. Both pleasure and pain come in degrees and have been thought of as a dimension ranging from positive degrees through a neutral point to negative degrees. This assumption is important for the possibility of comparing and aggregating the degrees of pleasure from different experiences, for example, to perform the utilitarian calculation.

The concept of pleasure is similar but not identical to the concepts of well-being (well-being) and happiness (happiness). These terms are used in overlapping ways, but their meanings tend to diverge in technical contexts such as philosophy or psychology. Pleasure refers to a certain type of experience, while well-being is about what is good for a person. Many philosophers agree that the pleasure is good for a person and is therefore a form of well-being. But there may be other things besides or instead of pleasure that constitute well-being, such as health, virtue, knowledge or the satisfaction of desires. In some conceptions, happiness is identified with "the individual's excess of the pleasant experience over the unpleasant one". The theories of life satisfaction (life satisfaction theories), on the other hand, maintain that happiness implies having the right attitude towards life as a whole. pleasure may have a role to play in this attitude, but it is not identical to happiness.

Pleasure is closely related to value, desire, motivation, and right action. There is wide agreement that pleasure is valuable in a sense. Axiological hedonists hold that pleasure is the only thing that has intrinsic value. Many desires have to do with pleasure. Psychological hedonism (psychological hedonists) is the thesis that all our actions are aimed at increasing pleasure and avoiding pain. Freud's pleasure principle links pleasure with motivation and action to maintain that there is a strong psychological tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Classical utilitarianism (classical hedonism) connects pleasure with ethics by stating that whether an action is correct depends on the pleasure it produces: must maximize the sum total of pleasure.

Equally within Eastern philosophy, we can find terms that encompass the concept of pleasure, such as the term Sukha in Buddhist philosophy.

Types of pleasure

Many pleasurable experiences are associated with the satisfaction of basic biological drives, such as eating, exercising, hygiene, sleep, and sexual intercourse. Appreciation of artifacts and cultural activities such as art, music, dance, and literature is often pleasurable. Pleasure is sometimes subdivided into fundamental pleasures that are closely related to survival (food, sex, and social belonging) and pleasures higher order (for example, viewing art and altruism). Bentham listed 14 types of pleasure; meaning, wealth, skill, friendship, good name, power, piety, benevolence, malevolence, memory, imagination, expectation, pleasures dependent on association, and the pleasures of relief. which include wit and sudden realization and some see a wide range of pleasurable feelings. There are many types of pleasure or satisfaction:

• Physical pleasure, which derives from enjoying healthy conditions related to the stimulation of the organs of the senses (sexual relationships or the ingestion of succulent dishes of food, for example). There are different types of physical pleasure: the one produced by taste or gastronomic pleasure; the one produced by the touch (massage: sexual pleasure) in its various manifestations...); the hearing pleasure (music), the visual pleasure (art...), the sports, etc. The Greeks advised a moderate pleasure and considered a pernicious vice any immoderate pleasure.
• The psychic pleasure derives from the recreation that provokes in the human being the imagination and fantasy, the memory of the pleasant, the humor, the joy, the comprehension and the feelings of balance, peace and serenity, which make the so-called happiness. Mere thinking can become happy only with the imagination of how good it is not possessed or enjoyed at that time. The "psychic" pleasure is defined by Plato in his Filebo as the greatest, and also encompasses all mental pleasures caused by perceiving culture or art, or creating.
• The intellectual pleasure, which is born by broadening our knowledge and plucking secrets from the unknown in order to discover and meet our spiritual and intellectual needs, and to make our actions more free and conscious.
• The playful pleasure, which derives from the practice of any kind of game and is at the root of many other types of pleasure, being essential for children to interact with the world and to be able to educate and learn.
• The emotional or emotional pleasure, which derives from empathy by sharing the love and affection of the family, of initiating and sustaining communication and friendship with the equals and feeling accepted by other human beings. It is also essential for the proper development of children.
• The pleasure of contemplation, the public being includes aesthetic enjoyment for any sense, balancing objective and subjective criteria. The observation of the unusual and/or unknown is also a source of pleasure: shows, sculptures, buildings, walking, travelling, reading, etc.

Theories of pleasure

Pleasure comes in various forms, for example, in the enjoyment of food, sex, sports, watching a beautiful sunset, or engaging in an intellectually satisfying activity. Theories of pleasure try to determine what all these pleasurable experiences have in common, what is essential to them. They are traditionally divided into quality theories) and attitude theories (attitude theories). An alternative terminology refers to these theories as phenomenalism and intentionalism). pleasure is a quality of pleasurable experiences themselves, while attitude theories assert that pleasure is in some sense external to the experience, as it depends on the subject's attitude toward the experience. More recently, there have been proposed dispositional theories (dispositional theories) that incorporate elements of both traditional approaches.

Theories of quality

In everyday language, the term "pleasure" it is primarily associated with sensory pleasures, such as the enjoyment of food or sex. A traditionally important quality theory closely follows this association by holding that pleasure is a sensation. In the simplest version of sensation theory, every time we experience pleasure there is a distinctive sensation of pleasure present. Thus, the pleasurable experience of eating chocolate involves a sensation of taste of chocolate along with a feeling of pleasure. An obvious shortcoming of this theory is that many impressions can be present at the same time. For example, there can also be a stinging sensation while eating chocolate. But this account cannot explain why the enjoyment is linked to the taste of the chocolate and not to the itch. Another problem stems from the fact that the sensations are often thought to be localized somewhere in the body. But considering the pleasure of watching a beautiful sunset, it seems that there is no specific region in the body where we experience this pleasure.

These problems can be avoided by using felt-quality-theories (felt-quality-theories), which see pleasure not as a sensation, but as an aspect that qualifies sensations or other mental phenomena. As an aspect, pleasure depends on the qualifying mental phenomenon, it cannot be present by itself. Since the link to the enjoyed phenomenon is already built into the pleasure, it solves the problem faced by sensation theories for explain how this link occurs. It also captures the insight that pleasure is often pleasure of something: the enjoyment of drinking a milkshake or of > play chess, but not just a pure or aimless enjoyment. According to this approach, pleasurable experiences differ in content (drinking a milkshake, playing chess) but are the same in feeling or hedonic tone. Pleasure can be localized, but only to the extent that the impression it qualifies is localized.

An objection to both sensation theory and felt quality theory is that there is no single quality shared by all experiences of pleasure. The strength of this objection comes from the insight that the variety of experiences of pleasure is too broad to point to one quality shared by all, for example, the quality shared by enjoying a milkshake and enjoying a game of chess. One way of responding to this objection by quality theorists is to point out that the hedonic tone of pleasure experiences is not a regular quality, but a higher-order quality. As an analogy, a vividly green thing and a vividly green thing vividly red do not share a regular color property, but rather share the "vividness" as a higher order property.

Attitude Theories

The attitudinal theories propose to analyze pleasure in terms of attitudes towards experiences. Thus, to enjoy the taste of chocolate it is not enough to have the corresponding taste experience. Instead, the subject has to have the right attitude towards this taste for pleasure to arise. This approach captures the insight that a second person can have exactly the same taste experience without enjoying it, since the relevant attitude is missing. Various attitudes have been proposed for the type of attitude responsible for pleasure, but historically the most influential version assigns this role to desires. In this account, pleasure is linked to experiences that fulfill a desire that the experiencer has. Thus, the difference between the first person and the second person in the example above is that only the first person has a corresponding desire directed at the taste of chocolate.

A major argument against this version is that while it is often the case that we first desire something and then enjoy it, this may not always be the case. In fact, the opposite often seems to be true: we first have to learn that something is pleasant before we begin to want it. This objection can be partially avoided by holding that it doesn't matter if the desire was there before the experience, it just it matters what we desire while the experience is occurring. This variant, originally held by Henry Sidgwick, has recently been defended by Chris Heathwood, who argues that an experience is pleasurable if the subject of the experience wants the experience to occur for their own good while it is occurring. to a problem related to the Euthyphro dilemma: it seems that we normally desire things because they are pleasant, not the other way around. So desire theories would be wrong about the direction of explanation. Another argument against theories of desire is that desire and pleasure can be separated: we can have a desire for things that are not pleasant, and we can enjoy things without wanting them.

Dispositional Theories

Dispositional theories attempt to explain pleasure in terms of dispositions, often including insights from both quality theories and attitude theories. One way of combining these elements is to hold that pleasure consists in being willing to desire an experience by virtue of the qualities of this experience. Some of the problems of the regular theory of desire can be avoided in this way, since the disposition does not need to be carried out for there to be pleasure, thus taking into account that desire and pleasure can be separated.

Epicurus

The Greek philosopher Epicurus put the goal of philosophy in achieving a balanced pleasure in all its forms in this life, not only physical, but intellectual and emotional, and his philosophy had numerous adherents in the pagan sphere before the arrival of the Christianity, which considered happiness in this world as possible, but relative, because of an original feeling of guilt for the pursuit of pleasure; True and full pleasure is located, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, in an afterlife, on a spiritual level close to the psychological, in a transcendent supernatural gratification.

Pleasure and pain

Generally, the concepts of pleasure and pain are considered to be opposites because it is assumed that, if there is pleasure, there can be no pain and vice versa. But it is also an established fact, although considered immoral by the majority, that one can get to feel pleasure by hurting other people or animals and things (the so-called sadism) or contemplating how they suffer (what the Germans call with the word Schadenfreude); conversely, pleasure can be derived from feeling pain in the case of masochism.

Likewise, when pain occurs, to a greater or lesser extent endorphins are produced that counteract part of the pain, in some cases completely. On the other hand, the repeated abuse of pleasures can alienate, exclusivize and mechanize human consciousness, causing various compulsive behavior disorders, such as gambling or various addictions (drug dependence, alcoholism, smoking) or compulsive food intake.. Aristotle saw the alienating effects of pleasure and that is why he wrote that "the wise man pursues the absence of pain, and not pleasure"; (Nicomachean Ethics, VII, 12).

Related philosophical concepts

Ethics

Pleasure is related not only to the way we actually act, but also to the way we should act, which belongs to the field of ethics. Ethical hedonism (ethical hedonism) takes the strongest position towards this relationship by stating that considerations of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain completely determine what we should do or what action is correct. i>ethical hedonistic theories can be classified in relation to whose pleasure should be increased. According to the egotistical version, each agent should only aspire to maximize her own pleasure. This position is generally not held in very high regard. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, is a family of altruistic theories that are more respectable in the philosophical community. Within this family, classical utilitarianism establishes the closest connection between pleasure and right action by holding that the agent should maximize the sum total of everyone's happiness. This sum total also includes the agent's pleasure, but only as one factor among many.

Value

Pleasure is intimately connected to value as something that is desirable and worth pursuing. According to axiological hedonism (axiological hedonism), it is the only thing that has intrinsic value (intrinsic value) or is good in itself. This position implies that things other than pleasure, such as knowledge, virtue, or money, have only instrumental value: they are valuable because or to the extent that they produce pleasure, but otherwise worthless. Within the realm of axiological hedonism, there are two competing theories about the exact relationship between pleasure and value: quantitative hedonism and qualitative hedonism. i>). Quantitative hedonists, following Jeremy Bentham, argue that the specific content or quality of a pleasure experience is not relevant to its value, which only depends on its quantitative characteristics: intensity and duration. In this story, an intense pleasure experience from enjoying food and sex is worth more than a subtle pleasure experience from looking at fine art or engaging in stimulating intellectual conversation. Qualitative hedonists, following John Stuart Mill, object to this version on the grounds that it threatens to turn axiological hedonism into a "philosophy of pigs". Instead, they argue that quality is another factor relevant to the value of a pleasure experience, for example, that the lower pleasures of the body are less valuable than the higher pleasures of the mind.

Beauty

A very common element in many conceptions of beauty is its relationship with pleasure. Aesthetic hedonism (aesthetic hedonism) makes this relationship part of the definition of beauty by holding that there is a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, for example, that for an object to be beautiful it must cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure. Pleasure due Beauty does not have to be pure, that is, exclude all unpleasant elements. Instead, beauty can involve mixed pleasure, for example, in the case of a beautifully tragic story. We enjoy many things that are not beautiful, which is why beauty is often defined in terms of a special kind of pleasure: aesthetic or disinterested pleasure. A pleasure is disinterested if it is indifferent to the existence of the beautiful object. For example, the joy of looking at a beautiful landscape would still be valuable if this experience turned out to be an illusion, which would not be true if this joy was due to to view the landscape as a valuable real estate opportunity. Opponents of aesthetic hedonism have pointed out that although they commonly occur together, there are cases of beauty without pleasure. For example, a cold and jaded critic she may still be a good judge of beauty due to her years of experience, but she lacks the joy that initially accompanied her work. Another question for hedonists is how to explain the relationship between beauty and pleasure. This problem is similar to Euthyphro's dilemma: is something beautiful because we enjoy it or do we enjoy it because it is beautiful? Identity theorists solve this problem by denying that there is a difference between beauty and beauty. and pleasure: they identify beauty, or its appearance, with the experience of aesthetic pleasure.

Psychology

Motivation and behavior

Pleasure-seeking behavior is a common phenomenon and can actually dominate our behavior at times. The thesis of psychological hedonism generalizes this idea by maintaining that all our actions are aimed at increasing pleasure and avoiding pain. This is usually understood in combination with egoism, that is, that each person only seeks their own happiness. Our Actions are based on beliefs about what causes pleasure. False beliefs can deceive us and therefore our actions may fail to result in pleasure, but even failed actions are motivated by considerations of pleasure, according to psychological hedonism. The paradox of hedonism holds that pleasure-seeking behavior commonly fails in another way as well. He claims that being motivated by pleasure is self-defeating in the sense that it leads to less real pleasure than following other motives.

Sigmund Freud formulated his pleasure principle to explain the effect that pleasure has on our behavior. He affirms that there is a strong innate tendency of our mental life to seek immediate gratification whenever an opportunity presents itself. This tendency is opposed by the reality principle, which constitutes a learned ability to delay the immediate gratification in order to consider the real consequences of our actions. Freud also described the pleasure principle as a positive feedback mechanism that motivates the organism to recreate the situation it has just found pleasurable and to avoid past situations that caused it pain..

Cognitive biases

A cognitive bias (cognitive bias) is a systematic tendency to think and judge in a way that deviates from normative criteria, especially from the demands of rationality. to pleasure include the peak-end rule, the focusing illusion, the nearness bias (nearness bias) and future bias (future bias).

The peak-end rule affects how we remember the pleasantness or unpleasantness of experiences. He asserts that our general impression of past events is largely determined not by the total pleasure and suffering they contained, but by how they felt at their peaks and at their end i>. For example, the memory of a painful colonoscopy is improved if the examination is extended for three minutes in which the endoscope is still inside but no longer moving, resulting in a moderately uncomfortable sensation. This extended colonoscopy, despite involving more pain overall, is less negatively remembered due to reduced pain at the end. This even increases the likelihood that the patient will return for further procedures. Daniel Kahneman explains this distortion in terms of the difference between two selves: the experiencing self, which is aware of pleasure and of pain when it is occurring, and the remembering self, which displays pleasure and pain added over a prolonged period of time. The distortions due to the peak-end rule occur at the level of the remembering self. Our tendency to trust the remembering self can often lead us to pursue courses of action that are not in our best self-interest.

A closely related bias is the focus illusion. The "illusion" occurs when people consider the impact of a specific factor on their overall happiness. They tend to greatly exaggerate the importance of that factor, while overlooking the numerous other factors that in most cases would have a greater impact.

The proximity bias and the future bias are two different ways of violating the principle of temporal neutrality. This principle states that the temporal location of a benefit or harm is not important to its normative meaning: a rational agent should care equally about all parts of his life. The proximity bias, also discussed under the tags "present bias" (present bias) or "temporary discount" (temporal discounting), refers to our tendency to violate temporal neutrality with respect to the temporal distance of the present. On the plus side, we prefer pleasurable experiences to be close by rather than distant. On the negative side, we prefer painful experiences to be far away rather than near. The future bias refers to our tendency to violate temporal neutrality with respect to to the direction of time. On the plus side, we prefer pleasurable experiences to be in the future rather than the past. On the negative side, we prefer painful experiences to be in the past rather than the future.

Biochemistry of pleasure

From the point of view of biology, some substances that the body generates during pleasure are:

• dopamine
• endorphins
• oxytocin
• serotonin

Occasionally, the individual may have become accustomed to these types of naturally generated substances. The brain has created neural links that cause the individual to reduce the impact of the pleasant sensation (for this reason, pleasant sensations are more powerful when they are new: the brain has not yet processed them). Consequently, the pursued objective is not satisfied, generating frustration and/or desire, just the opposite effect to the one sought.

Short or long-term pleasure

The search for happiness through immediate pleasure (hedonism) has been shown to be potentially harmful and the long-term search has been found to be healthier (eudaimonia), as Aristotle already proposed in the fourth century BC and appeared in the myth of Hercules at the crossroads. Neuroscience has confirmed it: lasting psychological well-being is achieved through carrying out activities with meaning and purpose, such as helping others, collaborating with the family and in caring for siblings, expressing gratitude or pursuit of long-term goals. Resilience and polyorcetics are, therefore, essential skills and habits necessary to ensure happiness.

Associated feelings

Pleasure is often associated with

• joy
• feeding
• relief
• comfort
• curiosity
• sports
• endorphins
• the fantasies
• sexual fantasies
• photography
• Hedonism
• books
• passion
• relaxation
• health
• satisfaction
• sexuality
• the will
• Erogen areas

The opposite of pleasure (displeasure) is usually related to:

• boredom
• the melancholy
• tears or laziness
• pain
• disease
• frustration
• apathy
• sadness
• anguish
• anger