V. PLEASURE AND PAIN.
It is very strange that, so far as I am aware, no ethicist who bases ethics upon the Happiness Principle has ever investigated the nature of pleasure and pain. It is generally assumed that pleasure is an indication of growth and pain of decay, but it has never been proved, and after a careful consideration of this theory I have come to the conclusion that it is based upon an error. Growth is rarely accompanied with pleasure and decay is mostly painless.
Optimistic philosophers look upon pleasure as positive and pain as negative, while the great pessimist Schopenhauer turns the tables and says pleasure is negative and pain positive.
An impartial consideration of the subject will show that both pleasure and pain are positive. Pain is felt whenever disturbances take place, pleasure is felt whenever wants are satisfied, and unsatisfied wants are perhaps the most prominent among the disturbances that produce pain.[133]
[133] See the chapter "Pleasure and Pain" in The Soul of Man, p. 338.
Professor Höffding says:
"I agree with Dr. Carus that "this world of ours is not a world suited to the taste of a pleasure-seeker," if we understand by pleasure passive sensual enjoyment, an enjoyment which is not united with the rest and nourishment with which not only an immediate pleasurable feeling is connected, but whereby power is also gathered for continued endeavor."
When I say that this world of ours is not a world suited to the taste of the pleasure-seeker, I do not restrict the meaning of pleasure to "passive sensual enjoyment," but to all kinds of pleasure. There are also intellectual and artistic voluptuaries who sacrifice anything, even the performance of duty, to their pleasure, which I grant is far superior to any kind of passive sensual enjoyment. The pursuit of pleasure is not wrong in itself; but it is not ethical either. Ethics in my opinion has nothing to do either with my own pleasures or with the pleasures of anybody else. The object of ethics is the performance of duty; and the main duty of man is the performance of that which he needs must do according to the laws of nature, to let his soul grow and expand, and to develop to ever higher and nobler aims.