UNPLEASANT DIFFICULTIES

What can be so common and so well known to us as pleasure? Do we not seek it throughout the day? Does it not frequently guide or even sway our actions? Many people apparently even live for pleasures of a certain sort.

And yet it seems almost impossible to say what pleasure is. Is it a sensation, like seeing a patch of blue sky? Or is it a feeling, like joy and delight? If it is feeling, can it be enduring, like a “mood,” or is pleasure something passing, more like an emotion? But perhaps pleasure is not a “thing” that we are related to at all, but rather our being related to something in a certain way, so that to be pleased simply is to “take pleasure” in something that is not itself a pleasure. Yet is it not also pleasant to take pleasure in something? (How could it not be?) But then, if it is pleasant to be pleased, a pleasure could serve as an object of pleasure.

Moreover, what is the relationship between pleasure and attraction? Might we be repelled by a pleasure, qua pleasure, or is that suggestion nonsense? But if we are necessarily attracted to a pleasure, must we not in some sense inevitably take it to be good? It would be, if a good is a goal. Or at least this much seems true: the fact that something is pleasant seems to be some kind of sign that it is good.