Pleasure and pain are emotions that are used in the lives of people daily. Both pleasure and pain evoke emotional and physical responses from them. Pleasure allows human beings to experience happiness, joyfulness, and laughter through their lives. Pain allows them to be exposed to sadness, remorse, and crying. Most people do not realize the philosophical importance that is placed on these emotions. Two philosophers, Jeremy Bentham and Arthur Schopenhauer, are well known for their research regarding pleasure and pain. Jeremy Bentham believed that pleasure and pain were directly related to happiness. Because of this, he developed a scale to show the relevance of pleasure and pain to man’s happiness. Arthur Schopenhauer believed like Bentham …show more content…
Schopenhauer believed that pleasure is just the absence of pain, like Bentham. The world is full of strife and frustration which produces much conflict. Schopenhauer believed that the escape of all this conflict, or pain, was to reject it. However, philosophical art held the key to a temporary release. Since his philosophy is based on sympathy, Schopenhauer expressed the idea in which feeling one’s hurt or sorrow can be an effort in relieving pain (Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition). In order to lose the strife in the world, the people need to minimize their desires so there will be a tranquil frame of mind and arrangement towards the universe (Wicks, Robert). Schopenhauer explains that suffering is caused by the willing, therefore “the more intense the willing the more intense the suffering.” In every want there is a willing, and in every willing there is a suffering. Suffering is just an uncompleted willing or want, including the pain felt in the body (Kerns, Tom). Schopenhauer explains suffering as a continuous cycle, because when a want or desire is fulfilled, a new desire is replaced with old. In Schopenhauer’s eyes, suffering is completely caused by “the frustration and conflict that arises from competition between individual wills” (UK
When having good experiences, most people, if asked, would claim that they feel happy. However, if one decided to ask Martha Nussbaum, author of “Who is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology,” she would most likely respond that she was feeling pleasured. In her article, she draws a restrictive line between pleasure and happiness. She introduces the viewpoints of many intellectuals who have spoken on the definition of happiness, and then offers her own opinions in regards to theirs. Her thoughts generally align with those of Aristotle, Plato, and the ancient Greek thinkers – the very ones she spent much of her higher education studying. Her main ideas, that happiness is too complex to be concretely defined and that pleasure is a feeling that we may experience while doing certain things, are well-explained and supported. She offers the idea that happiness is not an emotion – rather, it is a state of being that we should all hope to attain as a result of self-reflection. Nussbaum continually counters the beliefs proposed by psychologists, like the notion that happiness is a one-note feeling, or the concept that happiness is only influenced by positive emotions. In my essay, I will explain how Martha Nussbaum’s explanation of the complexities of happiness is superior, as well as how the ideas of two psychologists, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Daniel Gilbert, are faulty and disreputable. However, it is important to note that just because Nussbaum is the least wrong
Many theorist believe that happiness is the only important in people's life, and all that should matter to a person is being happy. The standard of assessing a good life is how much or quantity of happiness it contains. This openness of happiness, its generosity of spirit and width of appreciation, gets warped and constricted by the claim pretending to be its greatest friend—that only happiness matters, nothing else. Robert Nozick does not on the side of hedonistic utilitarianism, he gives several examples to show that there are other elements of reality we may strive for, even at the expense of pleasure. In this essay, I will focus on Nozick's opinion of the direction of happiness and the experience
Zadie Smith explains to you that pleasure can be more of a temporary feeling that can only satisfy readers at that moment or for a little bit of time. Reading this short story by Smith makes the readers realize that there is a difference between two words that can also be so similar but so different at the same time. And that joy can sometimes be similar to pleasure but it’s more than a feeling. You enjoy “joy” and you live during
I support this idea of achieving absolute pleasure from the removal of all pain due to a series of corresponding reasons. The first factor addressed in support of this claim is the tendency of human nature to focus on the negative. This observation will lead to the second supporting idea that these distresses which culminate towards the feeling of pain often block out the feeling of the pleasure desired. This secondary notion results in a comparison between the subsequent uplifting experiences from the removal of pain as opposed to the effect of a simple everyday pleasure on the mind. I
In their society, “Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consumption. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers” (Huxley 44). While this seems like an ideal situation, if people are never sad or uncomfortable, then they never can experience true happiness. When people become happy after being sad, they appreciate it more and can understand their happiness. Since bad and good are binary oppositions, it is necessary to have one in order to define the other. I would rather suffer through pain if it meant that my happiness was true and
The usefulness of his calculus, and the way Bentham defined pleasure came into question from one of his students, J.S. Mill who found his approach too general and simplistic. Mill rejected Bentham’s idea that all pleasures are the same and can be compared, he felt that there were different types or ‘levels’ of pleasure, and that some are more desirable or valuable than others. He decided that some pleasures or more desirable and meaningful than others, that there are
In addition, Kupperman evaluates the value of pleasure through the Buddhist Argument as well as Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” argument. Although it may seem that since we want more pleasure in life, that value of pleasure may depend on how much
In addition, both touch on the topic of absolute happiness and its connection to existentialism, both sharing a somewhat grim look on the subject matter. First of all, absolute happiness “implies total and all consuming happiness. You are nothing but happy all the time, and as such have no understanding of other counter feelings.”[1],
In part one of our book, “The Good Life,” we studied five different philosopher’s viewpoints on what is needed in order for a person to have a good, fulfilling life. They all included the concepts of pleasure and happiness to some extent in their theories, but they all approached the ideas in different ways. The two hedonists we studied, Epicurus and John Stuart Mill, place heavy emphasis on the importance of pleasure. They both believe that pleasure is a necessity in the ideal life. Jean Kazez agreed with their viewpoints in her theory and said that happiness was a necessity for a good life. Epicurus and Mill also argue that there is nothing else that we ultimately desire beyond pleasure and that it is an intrinsic good.
In “On The Sufferings of the World,” Arthur Schopenhauer has a pessimistic outlook on life. He believes that suffering is a part of life and that without suffering, the world would be an even more miserable place. As many people may assume, life gets better as you grow older. Schopenhauer however disagrees with this statement and claims that life continually deteriorates. Before reading this piece I strongly believed that I was an optimist. I always like to see the bright side of situations but, Schopenhauer really gave me a different outlook on life, a pessimistic view, and I surprisingly agreed with many of his ideas. Although this is true, at the end of the reading, I disagreed with more ideas than not. Therefore, I do not think that Schopenhauer’s account on life is a good proposal to live by because not everyone is continuously miserable in their life and it is perfectly reasonable to have a positive outlook on life.
We are a pleasure driven society always waiting to be amused. Self indulgence is a very natural aspect of human life. Does pleasure affect our lives? Will it make us happy at the end? Well, Aristotle will let us know what it means to be happy and have a good life in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the process, he reveals his own account of pleasure as well as other philosophers opposing views on the subject. The author highlights the key them by telling us that pleasure is not the chief good. However, it is an end in itself, which makes it good. In addition, pleasure is also not a process because it doesn’t involve any movement from incompleteness to completeness. According to Aristotle, happiness is
Pleasure and disenthrallment from torment, solely, are desirable as ends; all desirable things, a plenitude for the Utilitarian, are advantageous, either for the ecstasy innate in themselves or as the means to the elevation of sybaritism and the evasion of suffering.
Alain de Botton's "The Consolations of Philosophy" addresses essential chapters in the field of philosophy and the last chapter is focused on providing Nietzsche's view on human pain as an important concept in people's lives. The German philosopher believed that society had a flawed understanding of ideas like suffering and failure. From his perspective, individuals failed to understand the complexity of suffering and embrace it in order for them to be able to succeed. Considering Nietzsche's theory, great people only become great as a result of overcoming their problems and refraining from spending most of their time trying to appreciate simple pleasures in life.
Human enduring makes an immediate good interest, specifically, the interest for help, while there is no comparable call to build the joy of a man who is doing admirably at any rate. A further feedback of the Utilitarian equation 'Expand delight' is that it accept a nonstop joy torment scale which enables us to regard degrees of agony as negative degrees of joy. Be that as it may, from the ethical perspective, torment can't be exceeded by joy, and particularly not one man's agony by another man's pleasure. Rather than the best joy for the best number, one should request, all the more unobtrusively, minimal measure of avoidable languishing over
Happiness is the fundamental objective of life. This bold statement is unanimously agreed upon among generations of people on every corner of our planet. However, the real question that has been contested for centuries is the true meaning of happiness? The true meaning of happiness is one of the most highly debated philosophy topics in history. Most famous are the writings of Aristotle and John Stuart Mill who both paint very opposing pictures of happiness. Mill believes happiness is obtained through pleasure and the absence of pain. On the other hand, Aristotle insist happiness is obtained through living a fulfilling, virtuous life. This passage will examine Aristotle 's and Mill 's views on happiness as well as give an opinion one which philosophical theory is most convincing.