[1] Cf. Introduction to Vol. I., §§ 215 and 247.
Confusion covered by calling ‘happiness’ the general object of desire.
6. The term ‘happiness’ is the familiar cover for confusion between the animal imagination of pleasure and the conception of personal well-being. It is so when—having raised the question. What moves desire?—Locke answers, ‘happiness, and that alone.’ What, then, is happiness? ‘Good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain,’ and ‘happiness in its full extent is the utmost pleasure we are capable of.’ [1] This is ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ but Locke is careful to explain that the happiness which ‘moves every particular man’s desire’ is not the full extent of it, but ’so much of it as is considered and taken to make a necessary part of his happiness.’ It is that ‘wherewith he in his present thoughts can satisfy himself.’ Happiness in this sense ‘every one constantly pursues,’ and without possibility of error; for ‘as to present pleasure the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil.’ Every one ‘knows what best pleases him, and that he actually prefers.’ That which is the greater pleasure or the greater pain is really just as it appears (Ibid. §§ 43, 58, 63). Now in these statements, if we look closely, we shall find that four different meanings of happiness are mixed up, which we will take leave to distinguish by letters—(a) happiness as an abstract conception, the sum of possible pleasure; (b) happiness as equivalent to the pleasure which at any time survives most strongly in imagination; (c) happiness as the object of the self-conscious pleasure-seeker; (d) happiness as equivalent to any object at any time most strongly desired, not really a pleasure, but by Locke identified with happiness in sense (b) through the fallacy of supposing that the pleasure which arises on satisfaction of any desire, great in proportion to the strength of the desire, is itself the object which excites desire.
[1] Ibid., sec. 42, and cap. 28, sec. 5.
‘Greatest sum of pleasure’ and ‘Pleasure in general’ unmeaning expressions.
7. Happiness ‘in its full extent,’ as ‘the utmost pleasure we are capable of,’ is an unreal abstraction if ever there was one. It is curious that those who are most forward to deny the reality of universals, in that sense in which they are the condition of all reality, viz., as relations, should yet, having pronounced these to be mere names, be found ascribing reality to a universal, which cannot without contradiction be supposed more than a name. Does this ‘happiness in its full extent’ mean the ‘aggregate of possible enjoyments,’ of which modern utilitarians tell us? Such a phrase simply represents the vain attempt to get a definite by addition of indefinites. It has no more meaning than ‘the greatest possible quantity of time’ would have. Pleasant feelings are not quantities that can be added. Each is over before the next begins, and the man who has been pleased a million times is not really better off—has no more of the supposed chief good in possession—than the man who has only been pleased a thousand times. When we speak of pleasures, then, as forming a possible whole, we cannot mean pleasures as feelings, and what else do we mean? Are we, then, by the ‘happiness’ in question to understand pleasure in general, as might be inferred from Locke’s speaking of it as the ‘object of desire in general’? But it is in its mere particularity that each pleasure has its being. It is a simple idea, and therefore, as Locke and Hume have themselves taught us, momentary, indefinable, in ‘perpetual flux,’ changing every moment upon us. Pleasure in general, therefore, is not pleasure, and it is nothing else. It is not a conceived reality, as a relation, or a thing determined by relations, is, since pleasure as feeling, in distinction from its conditions which are not feelings, for the same reason that it cannot be defined, cannot be conceived. It is a mere name which utilitarian philosophy has mistaken for a thing; but for which—since no one, whatever his theory of the desirable, can actually desire either the abstraction of pleasure in general or the aggregate of possible pleasures—a practical substitute is apt to be found in any lust of the flesh that may for the time be the strongest.
In what sense of happiness is it true that it ‘is really just as it appears?’ In what sense that it is every one’s object?
8. Having begun by making this fiction ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ Locke saves the appearance of consistency by representing the particular pleasure or removal of uneasiness, which he in fact believed to be the object of every desire, as if it were a certain part of the ‘full extent of happiness’ which the individual, having this full extent before him, picked out as being what ‘in his present thoughts would satisfy him.’ Nor does he ever give up the notion of a ‘happiness in general,’ in distinction from the happiness of each man’s actual choice, as a possible motive, which a man who finds himself wretched in consequence of his actions may be told that he ought to have adopted. His real notion, however, of the happiness which is motive to action is a confused result of the three other notions of happiness, distinguished above as (b), (c) and (d). As that about which no one can be mistaken, ‘happiness’ can only be so in sense (b), as the ‘pleasure which survives most strongly in imagination.’ Of this it can be said truly, and of this only, that ‘it really is just as it appears,’ and that ‘a man never chooses amiss’ since he must ‘know what best pleases him.’ But with this, almost in the same breath, Locke confuses ‘happiness’ in senses (c) and (d). So soon as it is said of an object that it is ‘taken by the individual to make a necessary part of his happiness,’ it is implied that it is determined by his conception of self. It is something which, as the result of the action of this conception on his past experience, he has come to present to himself as a constituent of his personal good. Unless he were conscious of himself as a permanent subject, he could have no conception of happiness as a whole from relation to which each present object takes its character as a part. Nor of the objects determined by this relation is it true, as Locke says, that they are always pleasures, or that they ‘are really just as they appear.’ Our readiness to accept his statements to this effect, is at bottom due to a confusion between the pleasure, or removal of uneasiness, incidental to the satisfaction of a desire and the object which excites the desire. If having explained desire, as Locke does, by reference to the good, we then allow ourselves to explain the good by reference to desire, it will indeed be true that no man can be mistaken as to his present good, but only in the sense of the identical proposition that every man most desires what he does most desire; and true also, that every attained good is pleasure, but only in the sense that what satisfies desire does satisfy it. The man of whom it could be truly said, in any other sense than that of the above identical proposition, that his only objects of desire—the only objects which he ‘takes to make a necessary part of his happiness’—were pleasures, would be a man, as we say, of no interests. He would be a man who either lived simply for pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of animal appetite, or one who, having been interested in certain objects in which reason alone enables us to be interested—e.g., persons, pursuits, or works of art—and having found consequent pleasure, afterwards vainly tries to get the pleasure without the interests. To the former type of character, of course, the approximations are numerous enough, though it may be doubted whether such an ideal of sensuality is often fully realised. The latter in its completeness, which would mean a perfect misery that could only issue in suicide, would seem to be an impossibility, though it is constantly being approached in proportion to the unworthiness and fleetingness of the interests by which men allow themselves to be governed, and which, after stimulating an indefinite hunger for good, leave it without an object to satisfy it; in proportion, too, to the modern habit of hugging and poring over the pleasures which our higher interests cause us till these interests are vitiated, and we find ourselves in restless and hopeless pursuit of the pleasure when the interest which might alone produce it is gone.
No real object of human desire can ever be just as it appears.
9. Just as it is untrue, then, of the object of desire, as ‘taken to be part of one’s happiness’ or determined by the conception of self, that it is always a pleasure, so it is untrue that it is always really just as it appears, except in the trifling sense that what is most strongly desired is most strongly desired. Rather it is never really what it appears. It is least of all so to the professed pleasure-seeker. Obviously, to the man who seeks the pleasure incidental to interests which he has lost, there is a contradiction in his quest which for ever prevents what seems to him desirable from satisfying his desire. And even the man who lives for merely animal pleasure, just because he seeks it as part of a happiness, never finds it to be that which he sought. There is no mistake about the pleasure, but he seeks it as that which shall satisfy him, and satisfy him, since he is not an animal, it cannot. Nor are our higher objects of desire ever what they seem. That is too old a topic with poets and moralizers to need enforcing. Each in its turn, we know, promises happiness when it shall have been attained, but when it is attained the happiness has not come. The craving for an object adequate to oneself, which is the source of the desire, is still not quenched; and because it is not, nor can be, even ‘the joy of success’ has its own bitterness.