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Pleasure and Its Contraries

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Abstract

What is the contrary of pleasure? “Pain” is one common answer. This paper argues that pleasure instead has two natural contraries: unpleasure and hedonic indifference. This view is defended by drawing attention to two often-neglected concepts: the formal relation of polar opposition and the psychological state of hedonic indifference. The existence of mixed feelings, it is argued, does not threaten the contrariety of pleasure and unpleasure.

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Broad (1959, p. 230), Sidgwick (1981, p. 127), Von Wright (1963, p. 11), Alston (1967, p. 341), Sprigge (1988, p. 128), Johansson (2001, p. 39). Some philosophers prefer to use “enjoyment” instead of “pleasure” in order to refer to that generic concept (Crisp 2006, pp. 101–2). Some others use “happiness”. For Hartmann (1932, vol. 2 p. 160), happiness is opposed to “suffering” and includes “pleasure, satisfaction, joy, blessedness”.

  2. This is meant to be true only for contradiction and contrariety when they operate upon predicables (or properties). That is, the claim is simply that if two predicates (or properties) are contradictory, then they are contraries. It is neither claimed nor entailed that contradictory propositions are contraries propositions. As argued by Geach (1969), thinking of contrariety as an operation applying to propositions might well be mistaken. In accordance with Geach, I shall not rely here on the controversial notion of contrary propositions; only contrary predicables will be appealed to: being pleasant, being unpleasant and being indolent.

  3. To my knowledge, the only attempt to define pain on the basis of pleasure is to be found in Bouillier (1877, Chap. XII).

  4. Barnes’ original definition reads as follows:

    C3(F,G)=(x)((RF=RG) & (Gx Fx)&((H)(((RH=RF) &(H ≠ F) &(H ≠G)) (H is between F and G)))) (Barnes 1969)

    Where “C3”means polar opposition and “R” means the range of a predicate.

    Incidentally, one objection to it runs as follows: F=black, G=white, H=visually extended. It is true that visual extension and color have the same range (whatever is colored is visually extended and whatever is visually extended is colored). It is not the case however that H is between F and G (in any intuitive sense). So according to Barnes’ definition black and white would not be polar opposites (he himself claims that they are). By requiring that H be contrary to both F and G, my definition above avoids this problem.

  5. Aydede (2000) offers a different (though partly overlapping) account of the pain-pleasure contrast.

  6. See also Stumpf (1928, p. 68, n. 1) and Titchener (1908, p. 338 n. 5).

  7. I am here treating obligatory and forbidden, and necessary and impossible, as well as good and bad, as predicates, but the same remarks hold, mutatis mutandis, for the sentential operators ‘it is obligatory/necessary/forbidden … that …’. I intend to remain neutral on the question of whether alethic modalities, norms, and values are better construed in terms of operators or predicates.

  8. A non-arbitrary convention, governed by the behavior of water.

  9. Earlier, Burke (1767, Part I, sect. II) defends indolences against the view that pleasure is the negation of pain alluded to above. Stout (1902, vol. 2 p. 288) grants that there can be indolences, but only after the impression of pleasantness or unpleasantness becomes faint due to habit. Sidgwick (1981, pp. 124–5) defends the existence of indolences, which he refers to as the “hedonistic zero”, but urges that it does not constitute the “normal condition of our consciousness”. Likewise Marshall (1894, pp. 57–8, 244–5) insists that states of indifference are seldom reached: our mental episodes are usually pleasant or unpleasant, but often to such a small degree that we do not notice it.

  10. See Sidgwick (1981, p. 125) for a version of this argument. One version was put forward by Wundt, see Brentano (1995, p. 149).

  11. Stout clearly distinguishes between the question of whether some mental episodes are neither pleasant nor unpleasant from the question of whether our whole mental being, “our total consciousness”, might be neither pleasant nor unpleasant overall. To this latter question he answers negatively.

  12. A distinction introduced, among others, by qualitative hedonists such as Mill (2002, chap. 2); Edwards (1975, 1979.

  13. The view is also called the “bivariate approach”—by contrast to standard “bipolar” approach—and is at the heart of the influential “Evaluative Space Model” of Cacioppo and Bernston (1994).

  14. A view going back to Epicurus:

    Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, pain or distress or their combination is absent. (Epicurus, Key Doctrines, 3–4, in Long and Sedley 1987, vol. 1, p. 115)

  15. Brentano (1979, chap. 3) even argues that in the case of multiple colors, such as orange, the places where the component colors lie (red/yellow) are distinct but too small to be sensorily differentiated (see Massin and Hämmerli 2014, for an assessment of this view).

  16. To the extent that the subjects consciously access the stimuli at stake in these studies, these stimuli might be equated to intentional objects.

  17. I am grateful to an anynymous referee of this journal for having pointed out this issue.

  18. Findlay’s original objection was targeted at hedonic tones theories of pleasure, but is naturally applicable to INDEPENDENCE.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Cain Todd, Otto Bruun, Nicole Osborne, Fabrice Teroni, Anne Meylan, Julien Deonna, Guillaume Fréchette, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Michael Zimmerman, Kevin Mulligan and to two anonymous referees of this journal for their invaluable comments.

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    Olivier Massin

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Massin, O. Pleasure and Its Contraries. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 15–40 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0179-2

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