Pleasure - The Driving Force in all Human Achievement
Every choice we make as humans, whether conscious or not, is made with our own pleasure in mind. When we choose to buy a pack of chocolate, go to church, or even go to work, we do it with the goal of maximizing our own pleasure. The choices we make are those that we feel will give us the greatest pleasure. We spend our entire lives trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain; this is the essence of man.
Aristippus was one of the first philosophers of ancient Greece to state that the focus of life is pleasure. He said that "The highest good is pleasure, the greatest evil is pain." (Gaarder, 132) Epicurus expanded his ideas around 300 BC, saying that the pleasurable results of an action must always be weighed against its possible side effects. He believed that momentary pleasure should be weighed against the possibility of greater, more lasting, or more intense pleasure in the future (Gaarder, 133). For example, rather than smoking cigarettes everyday for a year, you could save your money and health and instead take a trip ...
al (2007), “In other words, individuals were guided by a pain-and pleasure principle by which they calculated the risks and rewards involved in their actions” (p. 15).
With any form of hedonism, one is committed to the concept that pleasure is the chief good. In an extremely generic form of hedonism, it seems as though the quality of sensual pleasure should be given no more weight than the quality of emotional pleasure and vice versa. Additionally, this sort of hedonism would hold that the acquisition of kinetic pleasures would increase overall pleasure to seemingly no end, a concept which Epicurus’ doctrine would reject. Even if we understand death to be a genuine ceasing to exist, we must conjecture that it is bad for a person to die in the sense that it terminates even the possibility to acquire more pleasure. Under this concept of hedonism, we must agree that a person who lives a pleasurable life for ...
Epicurus was admittedly a Hedonist, and this philosophy has had a huge influence on his work. Especially so on his death argument. Hedonism is, “the doctrine that pleasure is the only thing that is good in itself for a person, pain the only thing that is bad in itself for a person.”
Although Epicurus states that pleasure is the pathway to happiness and the good life, he does not believe that all pleasures are good pleasures and that there is a distinct difference between pleasure and indulgence. One point he makes in the ‘Letter to Menoeceus’ is that “there are times when we forgo certain pleasures, particularly when they are followed by too much unpleasantness” (PHIL132 Unit Reader, p3). An example of this is indulging in alcoholic beverages; when one drinks too high a quantity of alcohol they may feel pleasure in the short term, however the day after usually result...
The several effects of distracted driving are deadly. Andrew Lavallee points out that “texting while driving is unsafe. Not only are a driver’s eyes off the road, one or both hands are off the wheel.” “We think it is incompatible with safe driving” (qtd. in Lavallee). “Study upon study showed that talking on a cellphone was far more dangerous than she’d realized – that a driver on a phone had the same reaction speed as someone legally intoxicated, that those talking on a phone behind the wheel are four times as likely to crash” (qtd. in Hanes). Stephanie Hanes also mentions that, “Unlike a conversation with a passenger, the electronic conversation takes a driver into a virtual space away from the road.” Subsequently, this causes severe problems and deadly
I, on the other hand, do not believe that the pleasure principle is everyone's driving force. First of all, people have different goals in life, starting with the most basic goal of survival. Besides that, though, people seek love, praise, wealth, and reproduction. However, different people do not hold these goals in equal esteem because no one is the same. Secondly, the need for happiness is important, but not vital. We can survive if we are not always experiencing pleasure, but for some individuals, sterility is devastating, and for others, the loss of love can lead to suicide.
Marriage is a commitment that seems to be getting harder to keep. The social standards placed on an individual by society and influenced by the media inevitably lead some to consider divorce as a “quick-fix” option. “Have it your way” has become a motto in the United States. It has become a country without any consideration of the psychological effects of marriage and divorce. The overwhelmingly high divorce rate is caused by a lack of moral beliefs and marital expectations.
Another problem is that some pleasures are more alluring than others. Pleasure does not deal with just quantity, quality is also important. The old saying, “You ...
According to recent statistics, there are more divorces now than ever before. At the rate things are going, the divorce rate may soon surpass the marriage rate. There are many reasons for such a high divorce rate, but one of the main ones is that people do not realize what they are getting themselves into when they marry. Couples do not realize that marriage is a job that must be worked at continuously in order for it to go well. Because many couples marry for the wrong reasons, a breakdown in communication results, which leads to a couple's growing apart. This process, all too often, ends in divorce.
On The Pleasure of Hating by William Hazlitt he reaches out to an audience of the Romance Era in Great Britain to argue his belief that emotions are ever changing (save for the emotion of hatred). Whereas the emotion of hate is therapeutic and everlasting for the human mind. According to Hazlitt his hatred is the result of politics, religions, and the aristocracy of Great Britain. Ultimately, what Hazlitt hates most is that he did not have enough hate.
One of the most key examples of understanding human culture through archaeology is the topic of climate and the environment. As seen through history, there is an intricate relationship between the environment and life on earth. Through extensive research, archaeologists have the ability to take note of minor cultural changes that can be attributed to the environment during a particular time period. These changes include, shifts in methods of food collection, changes in the artwor...
Aristotle feels we have a rational capacity and the exercising of this capacity is the perfecting of our natures as human beings. For this reason, pleasure alone cannot establish human happiness, for pleasure is what animals seek and human beings have higher capacities than animals. The goal is to express our desires in ways that are appropriate to our natures as rational animals. Aristotle states that the most important factor in the effort to achieve happiness is to have a good moral character, what he calls complete virtue. In order to achieve the life of complete virtue, we need to make the right choices, and this involves keeping our eye on the future, on the ultimate result we want for our lives as a whole. We will not achieve happiness simply by enjoying the pleasures of the moment. We must live righteous and include behaviors in our life that help us do what is right and avoid what is wrong. It is not enough to think about doing the right thing, or even intend to do the right thing, we have to actually do it. Happiness can occupy the place of the chief good for which humanity should aim. To be an ultimate end, an act must be independent of any outside help in satisfying one’s needs and final, that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else and it must be
However, we can wonder if the pleasures that derive from necessary natural desires are what actually brings us happiness, since having a family, friends, a good job and doing fun things seem to bring the most joy in life. Plato’s ideas on life are even more radical, since he claims that we should completely take difference from our bodily needs. Therefore it seems that we should only do what is necessary for us to stay a life and solely focus on the mind. Although both ways of dealing with (bodily)pleasure are quite radical and almost impossible to achieve, it does questions if current perceptions of ‘living the good life’ actually leads to what we are trying to achieve, which is commonly described as
Arnold, Colleen. "Divorce Rates." Divorce Reform Page. Americans for Divorce Reform, Web. 21 Feb 2010. .
To Aristotle leading a good life, for the most part, means fulfilling one’s purpose in a way that is good by balancing life’s pleasures. In order to determine if an object fulfills its function in a good way, we must first consider the object. If we were to agree that a car should be reliable, then we could also agree that reliable car should be considered a good car. Similarly, animals, for example, possess certain traits like the power of locomotion, and the desire to seek nourishment and reproduce. According to Aristotle, an animal that is a fast runner, or a very successful hunter would be considered a good animal. Following this reasoning, Aristotle believed that in order for a human to be good, he or she must also fulfill their purpose. Yet, as an advanced species, we must go beyond fulfilling these animalistic functions like eating right and reproducing well. In order for a human to live the good life, he or she must first be good at using powers of intellect and reason, which Aristotle believed were unique to only humans and, as a result, constitute our purpose (McManaman). It seems that in addition to being a good human, Aristotle also recognized pleasure must play a role in the good life. Still, he recognized the importance of balance when indulging in acts of pleasure claiming that a life of only pleasure was too animalistic (Richter, 2008). In this way, Aristotle believed the key to a good life was to fulfill one’s function a good way, while balancing life’s pleasures in a way that allowed the...