Hedonism

Philosophers are fond of wild hypotheticals: psychophysicists confined to black-and-white rooms, trolleys targeting victims with unnerving precision, magic rings that turn those who wear them invisible (and perhaps unjust).

One of the most well-known thought-experiments in philosophy is Robert Nozick’s “experience machine”: a flawlessly convincing virtual reality in which one victim, unaware that they’ve been plugged in, is fed a stream of consciousness that simulates an ideal life. The point is that their life is not in fact ideal: there’s more to living well than one’s subjective mental states. Philosophical hedonism—the view that a life is good in proportion to its net balance of pleasure over pain—is false.

As I wrote in Life is Hard, examining a version of the case in which the victim is “submerged in sustaining fluid, electrodes plugged into her brain”: “You wouldn’t wish it on someone you love: to be imprisoned in a vat, alone forever, duped.” If you would, you’re making a mistake, albeit one so close to bedrock that it’s hard to argue with: where can the critic find common ground on which to stand?

Yet there’s a way in which the experience machine objection is misleading: it conflates two issues we might hope to pull apart. One is about “experientialism”—a broader doctrine than hedonism—on which the quality of one’s subjective experience determines how well one’s life has gone. This is the target of the thought-experiment. The other issue is the hedonistic emphasis on feeling good, an emphasis that persists even for those who agree that living well involves engagement with the real world and other people in it.

Faced with the prospect of life in the experience machine, students at MIT sometimes protest that they would not want to be plugged in because an endless stream of bliss would be monotonous. We need lows, they say, in order to reach true highs. But this way of valuing negative experience is superficial. As befits MIT, it registers an engineering problem: how to design a course of experience so as to maximize net hedonic value over time? If painful feelings of struggle are needed for the joy of victory, we should factor that into the algorithm.

The deeper objection is that activities that feel good may not contribute to living well, even when they are engaged with the world, while activities that feel bad can make life better—quite apart from their power to enable other feel-goods.

Philosophers find it hard to free themselves from the feel-good focus. Take Susan Wolf, who stresses the need for engagement with reality, rejects hedonism and experientialism, and argues that activities that feel good contribute to a meaningful life only when the object of engagement is objectively fitting.

“[Being] able to be actively engaged with things that one loves,” Wolf writes, “affords one a particularly rewarding type of subjective experience—it is, if you will, a high-quality pleasure.”

[What] is distinctively valuable is not the state or ongoing experience of fulfillment considered in itself. Rather, what is valuable is that one’s life be actively (and lovingly) engaged in projects that give rise to this feeling, when the projects in question can be seen to have a certain objective kind of worth. It is not enough, according to this view, that one is occupied with doing things that one loves. The things one loves doing must be good in some independent way.

What’s striking about this passage is that, while Wolf admits the first part of the “deeper objection” above—activities that feel good may not contribute to living well, even when they are engaged with the world, since their objects may be worthless—she doesn’t make room for the second. For Wolf, engagement with the world contributes to a meaningful life only when its object is fitting and it gives rise to a “high-quality pleasure.” In other words, it has to feel good.

This residual hedonism strikes me as damagingly false. It invites us to think that activities that bring us suffering cannot contribute, in themselves, to a life well-lived: that when things feel bad, something has gone wrong. I don’t believe that’s true.

We don’t need science-fiction to see this. On the one hand, there’s the pain of ameliorative engagement—the distress of those who are moved to fight injustice, for example—which can be a central part of living well. On the other hand, the value of activities that feel bad is not confined to amelioration, but extends to creativity in art, not only when it goes poorly, but for some—perhaps for many—when it goes well.

“No artist is pleased,” the choreographer Martha Graham told an interlocutor.

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Graham is not alone. I am reminded of an interview with the novelist Colm Tóibín in the Manchester Review—no longer available online, but notorious enough to be memorialized in The Guardian. Here’s an excerpt I love:

Interviewer: Could you describe the experience of writing in your early years, compared to how it feels to write now? Is there a difference? Did you get a powerful rush of good feeling from writing good passages then, or a rush of pleasure from getting praise then? Do you get less of a rush now from success or praise? Or perhaps it’s the other way round?

Tóibín: Oh there’s no pleasure. Except that I don’t have to work for anyone who bullies me. I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it. I don’t read reviews now.

…

Interviewer:  Which of your books did you most enjoy writing?

Tóibín: No enjoyment. No, none.

Hedonism is doubly false: false, because there’s more to living well than how it feels; and false, because living well, even under the best conditions, may not feel good.