Pleasure is merely the sign that one or other of these has attained its object, and that we have lived to purpose. The doctrine that it is pleasure, or, more correctly, the idea of pleasure, which normally stimulates to action is, as Wallace says,* on a par with the converse doctrine that it is present uneasiness of desire which determines to voluntary action; and this, as we have seen, is incompatible with Aristotle's view that there are activities which are preceded by no feeling of want or pain. (b) In view of the above theory of pleasure we can further understand how pleasures differ from one another in worth. According to our theory, activities are not valuable because they produce pleasure, but pleasure is valuable according to the kind of activity which it accompanies. If the question is put where we are to look for the standard of activity, and therefore of pleasure, we are referred to the good man (c. v. § 10). His pleasures are the only ones that are pleasant in the true and proper sense of the word. Taken by themselves these words might seem to be a mere evasion, and to carry us no further than the Utilitarian appeal to the authority of the man who has had experience of both kinds.† Taken, however, in connexion with all that has already been said of the good man as the individual embodiment of the system of life to which man's true nature points, it will be seen to be more than this. The true standard is not the individual who chances for the moment to * Lectures and Essays, p. 347. † See p. 193 foll. above. embody this order, but the order itself as it reveals itself to reason through him. Let us recall what we have already implied with respect to the activities of such a man. In analyzing human activity we have already had occasion to note that just because it is human activity it is not the activity of a mere individual. It has reference at every point to the larger whole in which the true life of the individual man is to be sought. Every act, therefore, however narrow its apparent scope, really points beyond its immediate object to the wider life as to the context which gives it meaning.* We might even say that it is only in virtue of its relation to this wider life that it is a human act at all. Foolish and wicked actions are those whose form as issuing from a human will is contradicted by the narrowness and selfishness of their actual scope. Such actions are untrue in the sense that they fail to express what as human actions they purport to express, viz. the universal order which, though belied in their execution, is implied in their form as actions of the human will. Wise and good action, on the other hand, is the action in which what is actually willed, viz. the conduct required by the permanent structure of society, is in harmony with the form of will as essentially social. Representing the true as opposed to the apparent will, such actions may be said to be themselves true and real. * For an admirable statement of this truth in modern philosophy, see Dr. Bosanquet's essay on "The Reality of the General Will" in Aspects of the Social Problem. We have only to translate what has just been said into terms of feeling to understand what Aristotle means by true and false pleasures. Just as no man, however selfish he may be, can really live to himself, so no man can be pleased to himself. "If we set aside for the moment abnormal cases, we may say that all pleasures have a social element, and that they cease to be real pleasures except in so far as they are correlated to the consciousness of other men. The pleasures of ambition, power, love, severally, are complete only when they are responded to by the feelings of others." Our pleasures, like our actions, reflect our social nature, and the standard of pleasure, as the standard of action, is that they should reflect it in its completeness. It is true that they, like our actions, begin in the narrow circle of the individual soul; they are our pleasures, signs, as we have seen, that some circumstance is momentarily in harmony with our organs or faculties. But they, like our actions, have an outlook on an experience wider than our own. They imply relations to a larger life. Wisdom consists in permitting our momentary impulses to seek what is pleasant, to be moulded and deepened by the larger experience of which they are a part. Error and delusion begin when we turn a deaf ear to the message they bring of this larger life, and hear only what they tell us of the moment, so mistaking a feeling which has truth and reality only in a context, for a thing desirable in itself. How this larger experience can be made a reality to the individual * Wallace's Lectures and Essays, p. 359. soul and act from the outset as a corrective to the natural tendency to mistake the momentary pleasure for the whole of happiness, is the problem of moral education. Aristotle's contribution to its solution in these sections on Pleasure is to warn us against Quixotic hostility to all forms of it on the one hand, and indiscriminate approval of it as necessarily and in its own nature good, on the other. |