A happy man is walking through the snow. It is horribly cold in the arctic desert. The ice is burning in his face leaving a biting and delightful pain. He is enjoying every moment. He is not a masochist; he is on his way.
A man is sitting in his nicely furnished house, half asleep in his comfy chair. The automatic heating system makes the temperature just right, his stomach is full and he has no complaints; only one – he is not happy.
One feels the pain and is pleased. The other is without pain, but suffers. Where is the fallacy?
The words are to blame, meaning one thing and then another. Our habit is the culprit, telling us what to do before we have thought about it.
If pain only means the physical sensation of a sting or a burn or an ache, then it doesn’t always make us suffer. But if pain is simply suffering, then our hero in the snow cannot be happy. Maybe that is how the comfortable man is reasoning. Pain can only mean suffering, he thinks, adjusting his cushion. Or maybe he doesn’t think at all as life has taught him to choose the path of least resistance.
Avoid pain and seek pleasure, that’s the real motto of that arctic adventurer and no one is working harder than him on his mission. He is struggling to reach that goal and succeeding every moment. He knows how to feel strongly and intensely and feeling is the essence of pleasure. As for pain, he shuns it and dreads it, fighting through the wilderness to escape the mental agony of being paralyzed in a comfy chair.
Pleasure is happiness, pain is misery, but we need to know where to get the real thing. Nothing is given for free and “the unexamined life is not worth living”, a wise man said.
A lonely creature in the snow is persistently searching for his life and finding it through painful pleasure.
Art does not have to be beautiful. No one believes that nowadays when art galleries are crowded with the most repugnant images. Yet art is essentially an aesthetic enterprise. It strives to say something in an attractive language.
Art must have a message, but that message must be conveyed in a special way. All other means of communication are only concerned with transferring objects or ideas from the sender to the recipient as efficiently as possible, but art cares about how it is done. The mode of communication should itself be interesting.
For visual art “interesting” means that the spectators would want to look at it because they are attracted to it and in a sense, whatever is visually attractive may also be said to be beautiful.
True, we are also attracted to what is disgusting and that’s partly the reason why those modern galleries get visitors. We want to be shocked and emotionally stirred up and in a curious psychological double movement we are drawn toward those objects at the same time as we are repulsed by them. We glance at it through our fingers, wanting to look while fighting the urge.
But this phenomenon is by no means restricted to art. We are all somehow attracted to cruelty no matter how much we hate it. (People are ardent readers of news stories about murders and accidents for example.) But using this piece of human psychology in an attempt to make art does not automatically make it art.
Suppose you have a picture of a war scene that is absolutely horrifying and disgusting to look at. There is a message: “War is terrible”, and there is a visual language to express it. But that is not enough to make the picture a work of art. Any war photo that is sufficiently disgusting would then be art. There must be something more that would make us want to look at it for another reason than our perverted attraction to cruelty. There must be something in the composition of the picture that makes it effective so that we can look at it and understand in a deeper way. And that thing, proportionality or contrast or whatever it is, inasmuch as it delights the eye, is a form of beauty.
Then it may be the case that a good piece of art, even if it is ugly, is beautiful.
You are not allowed to break the laws of the state, but you may betray a friend. The state doesn’t care, and it shouldn’t, but right and wrong doesn’t begin and end with the state – far from it.
Crime is a betrayal in a certain sense. Society protects you and in return it expects you to obey its laws. But your mutual relationship isn’t strong. After all, who is the state for you? An anonymous mass; whatever you do you will not hurt its feelings. Who are you for the state? An insignificant particle.
And moreover, how did you get into a relationship with this Leviathan? You were probably born in its land. You had no choice and you never promised anything.
Concerning people around you it is different. They are human beings. You have looked into their eyes and you know that they are conscious individuals like yourself. Trust me, you said, I will not hurt you. And they believed you.
No crime is worse that the breach of trust. You may rob a bank or snatch a handbag from a person in the street; that is bad. But when the victim of your action is not just anyone but someone that is tied to you by the bonds of personal promise and trust, then your act is more than a crime.
All unethical behavior may in a sense be considered a betrayal of duty, but a duty is not absolute until it has been connected to a real fellow human being. The anonymous state or the abstract mankind can only give general directions about which actions we are obliged to perform. Often we can fulfill our duty by complete passivity, and that is not much of a feat. But when you have made a promise to someone, the duty is real and defined. If you break that promise, it is not a crime for the state is not involved, but it may be worse.
Happiness is a pleasure; pleasure is not happiness. Happiness is a totality; pleasure is a single instance.
You enjoy a good meal; it’s a pleasure, but it’s not happiness. It may add a little to an otherwise miserable condition, but not so much. You have a good friend; it’s a pleasure to be with that person and he may really contribute to your happiness. The first is a single instance; the second is a condition that lasts.
A pleasure is a part of a good feeling, but happiness is a good feeling as an overall condition.
Therefore some pleasures that give a strong instant feeling may not add much to happiness, but even prolonged physical comfort can only partly contribute for the human mind needs more.
Mental pleasures surely are important. Playing games or reading books, each example of enjoyable activities, may be ingredients in a happy life, but they alone are not happiness. Still, happiness is pleasure.
Happiness is feeling good, and feeling good is pleasure.
Happiness is what we want; we want it because it pleases us and what pleases is a pleasure
Could we not just take happy pills or drugs, sit still, feel good and be happy. No, that is not what we want, we know something would be lacking, so it would not really please us.
True, we sometimes feel happy without there being any particular pleasurable activity at hand. It is then a general feeling of pleasure, but for it to be genuine it must contain a conscious satisfaction with the environment and one’s own position in it. Happiness can therefore not be an illusion or a drug inflicted hallucination. It needs to have a connection with reality or else it would only be a single instance of pleasure and an insufficient one.
Still, happiness is a pleasure since it is a good feeling. For each person happiness is whatever gives an overall genuine good feeling.
How many grains of sand make a heap? When does a hill become a mountain? What is the difference between a shoe and a boot? Who cares?
The words only have to be precise enough to fulfill one purpose: to communicate. We know when something is definitely a shoe and definitely a boot and for footwear that is somewhere in the middle, we are happy to accept any of the two designations. It doesn’t impede our communication, so it is fine.
The art of defining words is to indicate the area that the users of the language generally understand the words to cover. If the boundaries around a word are vague, that vagueness itself may be an element of the meaning of the word and no attempt should be made to come up with an artificial exactness.
When philosophers ask for precise definitions, they want no more than that. The question is: What do we really mean when we say x? What does the word really designate? The exact definition of ”heap” is not the number of grains.
Another kind of exactness is wished for. Sometimes our communication is confused when the extension of a word is enlarged while the original definition is still kept unexpressed in our mind. This is a typical propaganda trick. Take for example the word “war” in “the war on terror”. This is clearly an extended meaning of the original, but we are somehow still led to believe that nothing has changed. The leaders insist that it is to be understood literally and the purpose is to evoke the kind of feeling that the word normally gives and use it in a new situation. Then reality is distorted and a precise definition is much needed.
To define is to call forth our actual understanding of a word in order to avoid a false belief about reality.
A Bear - Poles Apart 