Realized Capacities:

"How strong the motivation is that drives people to dance, skate, or engage in other skilled forms of movement can be judged by how much money they are willing to spend on them. As H. Harlow showed with macaques, performing a learned movement gives these animals so much pleasure that they repeat it over and over again without any further reward. The strength of this appetence increases the more difficult the skilled movement is and the more thoroughly it has been ingrained. Karl Bühler, who was the first to perceive and correctly describe this phenomenon, called it “functional pleasure.” It clearly plays a major role in the emergence—and especially in the refinement—of skilled movements. As we know from ourselves, every improvement of a movement, every smoothing of a remaining roughness—which always means saving effort—produces a considerable gain in pleasure. The perfection of the movement is therefore its own reward; there must be a mechanism that reinforces perfection, as I argued in a book titled Evolution and Modification of Behaviour."

Konrad Lorenz, Comparative Behavioral Research, 1978

-----

Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment:

"Philosopher John Rawls distilled the sense of Aristotle’s discussion into what he labeled the Aristotelian principle, which Rawls stated as follows:

Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.

The intuitive idea here is that human beings take more pleasure in doing something as they become more proficient at it, and of two activities they do equally well, they prefer the one calling on a larger repertoire of more intricate and subtle discriminations. For example, chess is a more complicated and subtle game than checkers, and algebra is more intricate than elementary arithmetic. Thus the principle says that someone who can do both generally prefers playing chess to playing checkers, and that he would rather study algebra than arithmetic.

The things we enjoy the most deeply are the things at which we are most expert.

Human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities, with the enjoyment increasing the more the capacity is realized."

-----

Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment:

"Realized capacities are pleasing not only when they are exercised, but also when they are seen to be exercised. Or to recast the first two-thirds of the Aristotelian principle: Human beings enjoy watching the exercise of the realized capacities of their species, and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized. 

To be in the presence of greatness is exciting, even when we are not capable of appreciating all the nuances of the achievement. The best has a magic about it, whether we are eating a meal cooked by a great chef, watching a great athlete perform under pressure, or witnessing anything done superbly well, far beyond our own reach. 

Now comes the last clause of the Aristotelian principle: “. . . or the greater its complexity.” The depth of gratification we get from watching people perform at the pinnacle increases as the difficulty and importance of what they are doing increases."