Some believe that happiness is identical to pleasure. They say things like “Happiness is a glass of wine and a sandwich.” What the epicure means is that happiness is identical to the pleasure experienced from such consumption. In philosophy, this view is called hedonism. (There are more sophisticated versions of hedonism which appeal to intellectual pleasures.)
One problem with hedonism is that it has no conceptual resources to account for the idea of a happy life. Pleasure is fugacious. It arrives, stays for a short while, and leaves without delay. You might have a few pleasures per day, but you have many other experiences too. There is more to life than pleasant feelings. And there is no such thing as a human life of unending pleasure, at least not this side of death.
Yet it makes sense to speak of a happy life, a life that is on the whole well-lived and flourishing. Such happiness is not merely a matter of pleasure. One can have a happy life without wine and sandwiches.
In short, whatever the correct theory of happiness is, it must account for the possibility of a happy life. Hedonism does not account for this possibility. Hence, hedonism is false.
Happiness is not pleasure.
There are other problems with hedonism, but I’ll save those for another post.
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Thanks for your comment, Justin. You make some important points about the significance of higher forms of pleasurable experience. There is, however, a hedonistic view of happiness called *prudential hedonism* which holds that happiness is identical to pleasure. This is the view I am challenging. To elaborate, my next post should be a taxonomy of the various forms of hedonism. I'll try to post that next.
Thanks for the post. I always thought hedonism in its best form says aesthetic experience is necessary but maybe not sufficient for happiness. Or better, it’s through aesthetic experience that we are able to pursue happiness. A cold shower, a dip in a frozen pond, a hard run, a skipped meal, silence - all have their own kind of pleasure in the same way a delightful meal or book have their own pleasure. It’s not that these bodily and intellectual experiences are the trappings of a happy life - they are the medium through which we swim towards happiness. The fad? or resurgence? of contemporary research into mindfulness and meditation are deeply sympathetic with a hedonistic philosophy.