Informally, living for pleasure.
Formally, a theory of motivation that says we have only two motives: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.
As a theory of psychology, this is disreputable because circular. We can’t directly observe pain or pleasure, except by inference from what people do. But that is what a theory of motivation sets out to explain. Hedonism just argues in a circle: people do or don’t do stuff because they do or don’t like the results they anticipate.
However, that does not make hedonism false.
Without taking consciousness into the reckoning, it’s a persuasive account of what people are up to, and accords with common sense. What it lacks as a formal theory is a set of primitive pleasures and pains, to which all others can be reduced. Maslow’s hierarchy is an attempt to construct such a set. (Maslow argued that his set is ordered: some pleasures—needs—take priority over others until satisfied.)
It’s not hard to construct a plausible set of pleasures: food, warmth, sex, company. Pain somehow seems easier. Pain and the fear of it seem easily reducible to physical pain: hurt, cold, hunger.
Motivational psychology from the 1930s sought a detailed analysis, a reduction to stimulus and response simple enough to avoid appeal to representation and symbol manipulation.
If we accept that humans are symbol-manipulating animals, (we’re always searching for what distinguishes us) then we might accept a simplified description.
Gestalt psychology is hedonistic: it describes people as moving from contact through withdrawal and back again. Contact is reaching out towards pleasure, withdrawal the retreat from pain. The paradigm example is the amoeba, which moves towards food and away from electrical or chemical disturbance.
As the amoeba follows a pain-pleasure gradient, so do we. Ours is determined in more complex ways.
Fear is the anticipation of pain, and enthusiasm the anticipation of pleasure. We are not the only animals able to learn. Like other animals, we imagine pain to avoid its reality. Addressing fear now avoids suffering damage later. Fear is a substitute for hurt.
Because of our advanced symbol manipulation (that is, our story-telling ability) our hedonism can take complicated forms. We can neglect immediate pleasure to address fears of the consequences.
Like the amoeba, we move on pain-pleasure gradients. We are drawn by the smell of hot coffee and remember not to touch the stovetop. But our pain-pleasure gradients are way more complex than that, as you consider drinking the coffee without fattening cream and sugar you enjoy, and I consider the consequences of putting more caffeine in my body.
The life of man is lived largely in the imagination. (Who said that?)
The immediate pain-pleasure gradients that surround us affect our behaviour far less than the pain-pleasure gradients we imagine.
There is nothing wrong with this. It’s the secret of our success as a species, of the complexity of our behaviour. But it’s really worth noticing. Most of what we do and don’t do is a function of the stories we tell ourselves.
There’s a little bit of fact and observation, and lots and lots of story and interpretation.
Put another way, how we live our lives is determined more by the stories we tell ourselves than by anything else.
The pursuit of pleasure can be reckless in its disregard for possible danger or pain. Most people are more circumscribed most of the time. (And notice that sexual arousal includes reduced sensitivity to pain.)
The avoidance of pain can be ruthless in its disregard for the possibility of pleasure. Catatonia is a rare, extreme example. More common is what we mean when we say that someone is prematurely middle-aged.
Death is the final retreat or escape from pain, and I wonder if it was this that Freud pointed to by positing that we have instincts for both life and death.
Everyone has his own ‘comfort zone’ for risk and reward. These zones vary between people. My sister Joanne, for example, is strongly biased towards pleasure, and tends to find it even in unlikely circumstances. She’s always trying new things in the expectation that she’ll have a good time.
Most people, in my experience, are more intent on avoiding pain than on finding pleasure. It’s like a setting on some hidden dial that somehow gets set early in life, and rarely if ever gets adjusted later. It might even be a part of temperament, an inheritance not acquired from experience.
I suspect that it has a strong correlation with what we think of as Leadership. Leaders expect things to go well and are willing to take risks. Followers fear they won’t and hide behind leaders
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