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.
Can Locke consistently allow the distinction between true happiness
and false? Or responsibility?
10. The case, then, stands thus. Locke, having too much ‘common
sense’ to reduce all objects of desire to the pleasures incidental to
satisfactions of appetite, takes for granted any number of objects
which only reason can constitute (or, in other words, which can only
exist for a self-conscious subject) without any question as to their
origin. It is enough for him that they are not conscious inventions
of the individual, and that they are related to feeling--though
related as determining it. This being so, they are to him no more
the work of thought than are the satisfactions of appetite. The
conception of them is of a kind with the simple remembrance or
imagination of pleasures caused by such satisfactions. The question
how, if only pleasure is the object of desire, they came to be
desired before there had been experience of the pleasures incidental
to their attainment, is virtually shelved by treating these latter
pleasures as if they were themselves the objects originally desired.
So far consistency at least is saved. No object but feeling, present
or remembered, is ostensibly admitted within human experience. But
meanwhile, alongside of this view, comes the account of the strongest
motive as determined by the conception of self--as something which
a man ‘takes to be a necessary part of his happiness,’ and which he
is ‘answerable to himself’ for so taking. The inconsistency of such
language with the view that every desired object must needs be a
pleasure, would have been less noticeable if Locke himself had not
frankly admitted, as the corollary of this view that the desired good
‘is really just as it appears.’ The necessity of this admission has
always been the rock on which consistent Hedonism has broken. Locke
himself has scarcely made it when he becomes aware of its dangerous
consequences, and great part of the chapter on Power is taken up by
awkward attempts to reconcile it with the distinction between true
happiness and false, and with the existence of moral responsibility.
If greatest pleasure is the only possible object, and the production
of such pleasure the only possible criterion of action, and if ‘as
to present pleasure and pain the mind never mistakes that which is
really good or evil,’ with what propriety can any one be told that
he might or that he ought to have chosen otherwise than he has done?
‘He has missed the true good,’ we say, ‘which he might and should
have found’; but ‘good,’ according to Locke, is only pleasure, and
pleasure, as Locke in any other connexion would be eager to tell
us, must mean either some actual present pleasure or a series of
pleasures of which each in turn is present. If every one without
possibility of mistake has on each occasion chosen the greatest
present pleasure, how can the result for him at any time be other
than the true good, _i.e._, the series of greatest pleasures, each in
its turn present, that have been hitherto possible for him?
Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions.
11. A modern utilitarian, if faithful to the principle which excludes
any test of pleasure but pleasure itself, will probably answer that
every one does attain the maximum of pleasure possible for him,
his character and circumstances being what they are; but that with
a change in these his choice would be different. He would still
choose on each occasion the greatest pleasure of which he was then
capable, but this pleasure would be one ‘truer’--in the sense of
being more intense, more durable, and compatible with a greater
quantity of other pleasures--than is that which he actually chooses.
But admitting that this answer justifies us in speaking of any sort
of pleasure as ‘truer’ than that at any time chosen by any one--which
is a very large admission, for of the intensity of any pleasure we
have no test but its being actually preferred, and of durability
and compatibility with other pleasures the tests are so vague that
a healthy and unrepentant voluptuary would always have the best of
it in an attempt to strike the balance between the pleasures he has
actually chosen and any truer sort--it still only throws us back on
a further question. With a better character, it is said, such as
better education and improved circumstances might have produced, the
actually greatest happiness of the individual--_i.e._, the series of
pleasures which, because he has chosen them, we know to have been
the greatest possible for him--might have been greater or ‘truer.’
But the man’s character is the result of his previous preferences;
and if every one has always chosen the greatest pleasure of which
he was at the time capable, and if no other motive is possible,
how could any other than his actual character have been produced?
How could that conception of a happiness truer than the actual, of
something that should be most pleasant, and therefore preferred,
though it is not--a conception which all education implies--have been
a possible motive among mankind? To say that the individual is, to
begin with, destitute of such a conception, but acquires it through
education from others, does not remove the difficulty. How do the
educators come by it? Common sense assumes them to have found out
that more happiness might have been got by another than the merely
natural course of living, and to wish to give others the benefit
of their experience. But such experience implies that each has a
conception of himself as other than the subject of a succession of
pleasures, of which each has been the greatest possible at the time
of its occurrence; and the wish to give another the benefit of the
experience implies that this conception, which is no possible image
of a feeling, can originate action. The assumption of common sense,
then, contradicts the two cardinal principles of the Hedonistic
philosophy; yet, however disguised in the terminology of development
and evolution, it, or some equivalent supposition, is involved in
every theory of the progress of mankind.
According to Locke present pleasures may be compared with future, and
desire suspended till comparison has been made.
12. Such difficulties do not suggest themselves to Locke, because he
is always ready to fall back on the language of common sense without
asking whether it is reconcilable with his theory. Having asserted,
without qualification, that the will in every case is determined
by the strongest desire, that the strongest desire is desire for
the greatest pleasure, and that ‘pleasure is just so great, and
no greater, than it is felt,’ he finds a place for moral freedom
and responsibility in the ‘power a man has to suspend his desires
and stop them from determining his will to any action till he has
examined whether it be really of a nature in itself and consequences
to make him happy or no.’ [1] But how does it happen that there
is any need for such suspense, if as to pleasure and pain ‘a man
never chooses amiss,’ and pleasure is the same with happiness or
the good? To this Locke answers that it is only present pleasure
which is just as it appears, and that in ‘comparing present pleasure
or pain with future we often make wrong judgments of them;’ again,
that not only present pleasure and pain, but ‘things that draw after
them pleasure and pain, are considered as good and evil,’ and that
of these consequences under the influence of present pleasure or
pain we may judge amiss. [2] By these wrong judgments, it will be
observed, Locke does not mean mistakes in discovering the proper
means to a desired end (Aristotle’s ἀγνοία ἡ καθ’ ἕκαστα) [3], which
it is agreed are not a ground for blame or punishment, but wrong
desires--desires for certain pleasures as being the greater, which
are not really the greater. Regarding such desires as involving
comparisons of one good with another, he counts them judgments, and
(the comparison being incorrectly made) _wrong_ judgments. A certain
present pleasure, and a certain future one, are compared, and though
the future would really be the greater, the present is preferred;
or a present pleasure, ‘drawing after it’ a certain amount of pain,
is compared with a less amount of present pain, drawing after it a
greater pleasure, and the present pleasure preferred. In such cases
the man ‘may justly incur punishment’ for the wrong preference,
because having ‘the power to suspend his desire’ for the present
pleasure, he has not done so, but ‘by too hasty choice of his own
making has imposed on himself wrong measures of good and evil.’
‘When he has once chosen it,’ indeed, ‘and thereby it is become part
of his happiness, it raises desire, and that proportionately gives
him uneasiness, which determines his will.’ But the original wrong
choice, having the ‘power of suspending his desires,’ he might have
prevented. In not doing so he ‘vitiated his own palate,’ and must be
‘answerable to himself’ for the consequences. [4]
[1] II. 21, Sec. 51 and 56.
[2] Ibid., Sec. 61, 63, 67.
[3] [Greek ἀγνοία ἡ καθ’ ἕκαστα (agnoia he kath’ hekasta) =
unawareness of the particular circumstances. Tr.]
[4] Ibid., Sec. 56.
What is meant by ‘present’ and ‘future’ pleasure? By the supposed
comparison Locke ought only to have meant the competition of
pleasures equally present in imagination ...
13. Responsibility for evil, then (with its conditions, blame,
punishment, and remorse) supposes that a man has gone wrong in
the comparison of present with future pleasure or pain, having
had the chance of going right. Upon this we must remark that as
moving desire--and it is the determination of desire that is here
in question--NO pleasure can be present in the sense of actual
enjoyment, or (in Hume’s language) as ‘impression,’ but only in
memory or imagination, as ‘idea.’ Otherwise desire would not be
desire. It would not be that uneasiness which, according to Locke,
implies the absence of good, and alone moves action. On the other
hand, to imagination EVERY pleasure must be present that is to act as
motive at all. In whatever sense, then, pleasure, as pleasure, _i.e._
as undetermined by conceptions, can properly be said to move desire,
every pleasure is equally present and equally future. [1] For man, if
he only felt and retained his feelings in memory, or recalled them in
imagination, the only difference among the imagined pleasures which
solicit his desires, other than difference of intensity, would lie in
the imagined pains with which each may have become associated. One
pleasure might be imagined in association with a greater amount of
the pain of waiting than another. In that sense, and only in that,
could one be distinguished from the other as a future pleasure from
a present one. According as the greater imagined intensity of the
future pleasure did or did not outweigh the imagined pain of waiting
for it, the scale of desire would turn one way or the other. Or
with one pleasure, imagined as more intense than another, might be
associated an expectation of a greater amount of pain to be ‘drawn
after it.’ Here, again, the question would be whether the greater
imagined intensity of pleasure would have the more effect in exciting
desire, or the greater amount of imagined sequent pain in quenching
it--a question only to be settled by the action which results. In
whatever sense it is true of the ‘present pleasure or pain,’ that
it is really just as it appears, it is equally true of the future.
Whenever the determination of desire is in question, the statement
that present pleasure is just as it appears must mean that the
pleasure _present in imagination_ is so, and in this sense all motive
pleasures are equally so present. Undoubtedly the pleasure associated
with the pain of prolonged expectancy might turn out greater, and
that associated with sequent pain less, than was imagined; but so
might a pleasure not thus associated. Of every pleasure alike it is
as true, that while it is imagined it is just as it is imagined, as
that while felt it is just as it is felt; and if man only felt and
imagined, there would be no more reason why he should hold himself
accountable for his imaginations than for his feelings. Whatever
pleasure was most attractive in imagination would determine desire,
and, through it, action, which would be the only measure of the
amount of the attraction. It would not indeed follow because an
action was determined by the pleasure most attractive in imagination,
that the ensuing pleasure in actual enjoyment would be greater than
might have been attained by a different action--though it would be
very hard to show the contrary--but it would follow that the man
attained the greatest pleasure of which his nature was capable. There
would be no reason why he should blame himself, or be blamed by
others, for the result.
[1] It is noticeable that when Locke takes to distinguishing the
pleasures that move desire into present and future, he speaks as if
the future pleasure alone were an absent good, in contradiction to
his previous view that every object of desire is an absent good. (Cf.
sec. 65 with sec. 57 of cap. 21.)
... and this could give no ground for responsibility. In order to do
so, it must be understood as implying determination by conception of
self.