PLEASURE
Pleasure is a feeling that we often refer to in explaining and justifying action. To understand pleasure philosophically is to understand how feeling, explanation, and justification are systematically interlinked. Philosophical accounts of pleasure typically fail to meet this condition of adequacy. Accounts typically over-emphasize either the felt-aspect of pleasure, or its explanatory-jusitifcatory role. The result is a distorted picture of pleasure. The ambiguity of the word "pleasure" contributes to this distortion. Many associate the word with the bodily sensations involved in sensory pleasure, but the connotation of the word is considerably broader; in many uses, we can speak equally well of either pleasure or enjoyment. One may enjoy--or get pleasure from--a variety of experiences and activities, and the enjoyment need not involve any experience of bodily sensations at all, such as the enjoyment of playing chess.
We will begin by focusing on the explanatory-justificatory side of pleasure. One way to accomodate pleasure's explanatory-justificatory role is to see pleasure as invovling desire since we often refer to our desires to explain and justify our actions. Such a conception of pleasure seems clearly correct. When, for example, you eat bitter-sweet chocolate and enjoy the bitter-sweet taste, and the explanation of your pleasure would seem, at least in part, to be that you are getting something you want.
The obvious objection is that there are things we desire that we do not enjoy getting. When you are sitting in the dentist chair, you are satisfying your desire have dental work done, but you are not enjoying it. The difference between the dentist case and the chocolate case is that you desire dental work only as a means to an end while you desire the taste the bitter-sweet taste for its own sake. So why not simply say that pleasure consists in satisfying a desire for something for its own sake? This is a common suggestion. It is also an incorrect one, and seeing why reveals the true complexity of the explanatory-justificatory side of the concept of pleasure.
Consider this example. Suppose you have never been deep-sea fishing and that you desire to go for its own sake. But imagine that you find the entire experience of deep-sea fishing distasteful. You get seasick; you are disgusted by the crowded, noisy deck from which you must fish; you are repelled by the necessity of barehandedly catching the small, live fish used for bait, and are even more repelled by having to impale the living bait by the gills on your hook. You desire to fish survives the initial shock of these experiences, and so you continue to fish even though, as you admit to yourself, you are not enjoying it. You continue to fish because you hope you will get pleasure. Your desire to fish is waning. It persists, but it persists despite your experiences.
You do not get pleasure from deep-sea fishing because two crucial elements are missing. The first is that your activity of deep-sea fishing does not reinforce and sustain the desire to fish. Compare the chocolate example: when you eat the chocolate the experience of the taste makes you want that experience. Reflection on the chocolate example also reveals the second missing element. When you taste the chocolate, that experience causes you to believe that you are tasting bitter-sweet chocolate. So: the experience causes you to want it, and causes you believe that you are getting what you want. In the deep-sea example, the activity of deep-sea fishing does not make you want it, and there is a clear sense in which you certainly do not believe that you are getting what you want. You believe that you are seasick; that the crowded, noisy deck is disgusting; that catching live bait repellant. You did not want these experiences. You formed your desire to go deep-sea fishing because you conceived of the activity as thrilling and exciting, and you do not believe that you are experiencing deep-sea fishing so conceived.
In general pleasure or enjoyment consists in a certain harmony between causation and satisfaction. An enjoyed experience or activity causes (or causally sustains) a desire that it also satisfies. The desire is the desire that the experience or activity be of a certain sort. The experience or activity ensures the satisfaction of this desire by causing one to believe that that the experience or activity is of the desired sort. (More precisely, the experience or activity ensures that it will seem to one that one's desire is satisfied; the desire is really satisfied only if it is true that, as one believes, the experience or activity is of the relevant sort.)
Our account of pleasure as a harmony between causation and satisfaction illuminates the explantory-justificatory role of pleasure since we often explain and justify our actions by appeal to beliefs and desires. But what about pleasure as a feeling? In explaining pleasure as a complex of desire and belief linked by causation. we seem to have left out the feeling. To leave out the feeling is not only to ignore the sensory side of pleasure, it is also to fail to adequately account for its explantory-motivational side. After all, the feeling is what we are aiming for when we pursue pleasure; it is the prospect of the feeling that we appeal to explain and justify our actions.
The answer to this objection is that it presupposes far too sharp a distinction between the sensory, on the one hand, and the cognitive and affective, on the other. Imagine tasing the bitter-sweet chocolate. When the taste makes you want the experience, the sensory and the affective are mixed together in the state "experiencing/desiring the taste." The experience and the desire arise together in a "single" state of "experiencing/desiring," a state with both sensory and affective aspects. The same is true for belief: when you taste the bitter-sweet chocolate, the experience of the bitter-sweet taste and the belief that the taste is bitter-sweet are mixed together in the state of "experiencing/believing" that the taste is bitter-sweet. Indeed, the most accurate picture of pleasure here represents the pleasure as a state in which experience, belief, and desire are all intermixed together.
It is this mixed state that we seek when we seek pleasure.