Samuel Fleischacker (1999)
"...(a) My pleasure in succeeding, if I succeed, is likely to encourage me both to take on housecleaning again and to pursue that end in the same
or a very similar way. The pleasure here is thus part of what psychologists
call a “feedback mechanism”: the pleasure at the end feeds back into the
habits of my behavior as a means encouraging me to act in a similar way
again; which action, if I once more succeed, results once more in pleasure
as an end; that pleasure then becomes a means once more to further
action of the same kind. As long as I keep getting rewarded by success,
the motivation to behave similarly in future should become greater and
greater, such that the pleasure does not merely maintain the habit but
strengthen it. The frustrating pain I talked about in each of three ways I
might fail will similarly feed back into a motivation not to behave similarly
in the future, and indeed a series of successes can be badly stymied
by one or two striking failures.
(b) The feedback mechanism can equally well be regarded as a cognitive
tool. The pleasures and pains I feel on succeeding and failing in my
tasks teach me something. It is not merely natural to abandon the putting
away of toys if one’s children continually defeat every attempt one makes
in this direction: taking the task as unachievable is a rational response to
such failure. Of course, one could learn something more subtle—clean
up when the children are in bed, perhaps—and the natural reaction does
not always track the most intelligent reaction. The natural reaction to
striking failure may well be to give up on a task altogether; a more intelligent
one is to do the task differently. But pleasures and pains do generally
track something we ought to take note of in our proceedings, some
feature of the world with which we are successfully or unsuccessfully negotiating.
So this particular kind of pleasure and pain is a cognitive one,
something from which we can learn. That is not as true of the “brute”
pleasures that come with the satisfaction of bodily needs: the pleasures of
ingestion, excretion, rest, and copulation. Not that one cannot learn
from the latter as well. Pleasure can indicate that a food is healthy for us,
the pain of nausea often indicates that a food is unhealthy, pain in excretion
can signal illness, ecstasy or boredom in copulation can signal the
appropriateness or inappropriateness of a love partner. But these are blunt
and broad mechanisms, perhaps for good biological reasons, and are notoriously
unreliable indicators in particular cases. They are also, perhaps
again for biological reasons, pleasures and pains that sweep over us
mostly without our conscious control. We cannot easily choose to enjoy a
particular meal or act of copulation by attending to its objectively advantageous
features. Only attention to such objectively advantageous features,
by contrast, can give us pleasure in housecleaning—the task itself
hardly conduces to bodily delight. Hence the pleasure achieved or missed
is more likely to index some real success or failure than a pleasure tripped
off by a biological mechanism. Biological pleasures can be so sweeping, moreover, that they leave little room for thought at all. They overcome
us at the expense of thinking, and this is indeed part of the relief they
bring: satisfying bodily needs, we are relieved from the strain and responsibility
of thought.
Finally, there is a category of pleasures that distract us from thinking
without satisfying any bodily need, that work directly on brain centers for
the activation of positive sensations, or the dulling of negative ones,
without going via the completion of either a task-based or a biologically
necessary process. Such are the pleasures of alcohol, of narcotics, and,
probably, of much TV watching and “light” reading. The mind is directly
stimulated to pleasure, or directly dulled to pain, or distracted from all
thoughts, including the worrying ones about whether one’s tasks are
completed and bodily health in order. Very ill and very unsuccessful people
notoriously devote much of their lives to pleasures like these, a fact
which I take as empirical evidence both that the pleasures in question
require little effort, and that they are satisfying precisely because they
allow one to set aside one’s objective situation. ..."
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