Pleasure

Schopenhauer was right to insist that pain is real, but he was wrong that pleasure is not.

On the other hand, Epicurus was right that getting pleasure as commonly undertaken generally entails a lot of trouble, not unusually more than it is worth.

Epicurus was thinking of sex when he said that, but one might also consider the use of adult beverages.

Clearly, much in either case depends on moderation and prudence.

Probably, Schopenhauer too was thinking of sex when he said that pleasure is only relief.

The German also held that, pleasure being unreal and pain only too much so, the avoidance or minimization of pain is the only reasonable rule of life.

A rule he never followed, demanding as it does, since he agreed a longer is a more painful life, a quick and painless suicide.

Sometimes, however, he claims only that pleasure occurs only with or as the relief of an always greater pain.

This is still wrong - there are, for instance, pleasant surprises that are not episodes of unexpected relief of pain - but it is not silly.

And sometimes the pleasure that comes with relief is considerably greater than the distress relieved.

Of course I, too, am thinking of sex.

Not very popular since the mid-20th Century, before that it was generally admitted that pain is an evil and at least innocent pleasure a good, and the hedonist view that only pleasure is good in itself and only pain thus evil was a serious competitor, along with the view that happiness is the excess of pleasure over pain.

Like egoism, hedonism has historically been offered, generally by the same people, in an ethical and a psychological version.

And again like egoism, a purely empirical hedonism, neither ethical nor quite the other, is available concerning the way things generally seem to go.

We note that humans commonly seem to give little or no weight to the interests or concerns of others as against their own, except in varying degrees for some few persons most close to them.

Likewise, they seem in practice to attribute little significance to anything but their own pleasure - or at any rate what pleases them - , their own pain, and their own happiness, taking account of those of some few others as they would those of their pets. 

Perhaps very beloved - even excessively beloved - pets, but still pets.

Perhaps not surprisingly, egoism and hedonism are often advanced by the same people.

Henry Sidgwick, contemporary of Nietzsche, professed both hedonism - more Bentham's than Mill's - and egoism.

(And also act utilitarianism, but never mind that.)

Against the pessimists he insisted that, the ordinary background tenor of life being somewhat pleasant, most of the time for most of us life is happier than not.

And the prospects for many of us, at least, and much of the time, do not make immediate suicide the prudent choice.

There is some question whether he took sufficiently into account such common phenomena as chronic though mild arthritis and the myriad episodic and impermanent pains of life.