Pleasure in Aristotle and Spinoza

Slides 3 (title)-4 (content)

To begin with, we should discuss what pleasure actually is for both philosophers.
Aristotle defines pleasure (hedone in Greek) as that which “completes [an] activity” as a
supervenient end. Pleasure is then what follows from or accompanies the actualization of a
characteristic activity. More specifically, the activity and its subsequent pleasure follow from the
orexis (fundamental longing, appetite or striving) of a given characteristic. For example: (1)
When a courageous person is able to successfully act courageously, (2) When a licentiousness
person successfully enjoys the pleasures they strive for, and (3) When one is free to contemplate
Nature without desire (epithumia) and pain (lupe).
An important distinction to make here, however, is about pleasure in the subjective sense
and objective sense. Aristotle never explicitly provides this distinction, but certainly he refers to
pleasure in these contexts. Subjective pleasure is the actual experience of pleasant feeling, which
is what the above definition is referring to, i.e. the pleasant feeling from successfully acting.
Pleasure understood objectively is the things or objects that cause one pleasure, in other words
what is involved in actualizing one’s activities and supervening pleasures.
Slide 5
Pleasures, subjectively and objectively, unsurprisingly can vary in a number of ways with
the activities they supervene on. Firstly, they can differ in terms of the type of soul in question.
Living things with only a nutritive soul, i.e. a soul concerned with growth, reproduction and
decay (such as plants), do not have appetites and consequently cannot experience pleasure and
pain. Organisms that also possess a sensitive faculty of soul (such as animals), qua sensation,
possess bodily appetites and consequently experience bodily pleasure and pain. Finally, certain
animals like humans can experience mental pleasure, because they possess in addition to the
nutritive and sensitive faculties a thinking faculty of soul with rational appetites. The type of soul
an organism possesses is thus greatly indicative of the kinds of pleasures it enjoys. Focusing on
the human soul, the organism whose pleasures most concerned Aristotle, we can see further
variance in terms of the appetites that follow from its faculties. Appetite or orexis is expressed in
the human soul in three basic ways: desire (epithumia), which follows from the nonrational part
of the soul and pertains to pain and bodily need, passion (thumos), which follows from the part
of the soul partially aligned with reason and that pertains to emotions (pathe) – which involve
pleasure or pain directed at something – and rational will/wish (boulesis), which follows from
the rational part of the soul and pertains to intellectual appetites.
Slide 6
The third point of variance is the given state of an individual, viz. whether they are in a
state of restoration or stable health. Restorative pleasures are pleasures that follow from one’s
transition to a healthier state. They are pleasurable qualifiedly and incidentally, because they are
only pleasant insofar as they serve to restore one to a healthy, unimpaired state; once healthy,
one cannot or need not take pleasure in them. These pleasures consequently pertain to the body,
which is in constant need of replenishment, and are particularly subject to being enjoyed
excessively or disproportionately. Stable pleasures on the other hand are pleasures naturally and
unqualifiedly, since they are involved in the activities of one who is in a state of homeostasis or
stable health with no impairment of pain or sickness, and thus are pleasures proper to one’s
nature and its actualization. In bodily terms, these pleasures are the unhindered use of one’s
sensory faculties and physical activities. Mentally, one enjoys pleasure from contemplation and
other instances of intellectual activity.
Fourthly, pleasures can vary in ethical terms, with some being appropriate – virtuous and
kalon (fine or noble) – and others inappropriate, phaulos or base. We’ll discuss this more in the
second part of this presentation “Pleasure Ethically.”
Lastly, and most obviously, pleasures subtly vary individually and situationally, with the
content of any of the above consequently differing based on these fundamental factors.
Slide 7
Let’s move on to Spinoza’s conception of pleasure now, what he refers to in Latin as
“Laetitia.” For Spinoza pleasure is an affect (affectus) or emotion, meaning it represents a
modification in one’s state, namely a coexistent change in the mind and body’s respective states
of activity. Pleasure in turn serves as a foundation for more complex affects or emotions like
love, self-contentment and cheerfulness. The formal definition Spinoza gives of pleasure is that
which indicates a “transition from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection.”
Pleasure is therefore an increase in one’s state of power or capacity for activity. More
fundamentally, it marks the strengthening of one’s conatus, the essential striving to persist and
increase one’s power or potential for activity. Pleasure qua increase in activity is ultimately then
an increase in one’s state of self-empowerment.
Slide 8
For Spinoza as well, pleasure greatly varies. The two main forms of it are active pleasure,
pleasant feeling insofar as one is the cause of it themselves, and passive pleasure (passion),
pleasant feeling insofar as external things are the cause. The two types of pleasure are kinetic and
static pleasure. Kinetic pleasure is the most common and is what pertains to the formal definition
given by Spinoza, i.e. an affect that marks one’s transition to a more empowered state of activity.
In the primary sense, this is the experience of pleasure with the idea or perception of that
pleasure. In compound terms, when pleasure becomes emotion as we typically understand it,
there is the experience of pleasure and the perception of something as the cause of this feeling.
Based on the content of that perception, the pleasure will be classified as a compound emotion
like love (the simple perception of being affected pleasantly by something), self-contentment
(when pondering one’s empowerment is the cause of their pleasure) or cheerfulness (one’s body
as a whole is perceived to be benefited). Kinetic pleasure can be passive, in the case of love,
active, in the case of self-contentment, or potentially either in the case of cheerfulness. These
pleasures are transitory though, because they are temporary and can be counteracted by pain and
misfortune. Stable pleasure conversely is continual and inherently active, in that it represents
one’s essential empowerment or state of activity itself. One’s degree of enjoyment of activity can
vary and is subject to time, but one’s enjoyment of being active in itself is perpetual (while alive)
because one’s conatus is an active appetite for self-expression. Self-contentment is a perfect
example of this. It can be kinetic in the sense that one causes an increase in their state of
empowerment from a lesser state through self-reflection, and stable in the sense that one can
never not perceive themselves and thus the essential activity of their striving to live and express
themselves. One can more-or-less fail to cause this kind of pleasure, i.e. one can be more or less
self-reflective or aware of their agency, but one is never devoid of self-contentment because one
will always have a perception of their own empowerment in some way; while alive, it’s
impossible for one to be completely devoid of activity or empowerment since these things are
one’s very essence.
Another example is the intellectual love of God, which is the pleasure one experiences
from perceiving God, Nature, life or existence in some way. In fact, one's contemplation of self
is the contemplation of God or Nature, because the individual is an expression of Nature's power,
meaning that the pleasure of self-contentment and the intellectual love of God are the same
(Vp32-34c, 37). Consequently, just as self-contentment cannot be entirely taken from us, nor can
the love of God, because just as we will always perceive ourselves to some degree, so too will
we perceive God, Nature, life or existence to some degree, whether this perception is largely
isolated to ourselves as modes of Nature or accompanied by the understanding of others things
and their interconnections with us."
More generally, pleasures are also simply variable in terms of the essences and
experiences of individual minds/bodies, and the nature of particular appetites (e.g.
proportionate/excessive, adequately aligned with reason/inadequately aligned with reason).
Slide 10
Now, to compare Aristotle and Spinoza reveals quite a bit that they share in common.
Pleasure for both is central to life and its activities, since it represents a necessary component of
human striving or appetite, as a consequent of the actualization of one’s nature. Broadly-
speaking there is a shared sense of stable pleasures as activities following from an unhindered
nature (i.e. free of pain), with intellectual activity being a prime example for both. Pleasures are
agreed to be variable individually/situationally, in proportion/excess, in relation to reason
appetitively and in terms of a distinction between pleasures as restorative (pertaining to lack and
deficiency) and stable (pertaining solely to one’s active nature, understanding being a prime
example). Both see pleasure as a necessary component in emotions, with the intentionality (i.e.
perceptual directedness) of the pleasure influencing the nature of the emotion. Finally, both
philosophers fail to formally distinguish pleasure as subjective feeling from pleasure as object,
despite discussing pleasure in both contexts, making the subjective/objective distinction valuable
in making their respective views more coherent.
Slide 11
There are, however, just as many differences in how they understand the nature of
pleasure. For Aristotle, all pleasure is activity; even restorative pleasure is only pleasant insofar
as one performs a replenishing activity, such as feeding oneself or taking medication for an
ailment or illness; Spinoza conversely, qua kinetic pleasure, grants the existence of pleasures that
are processes because they represent a change in one’s state, with the pleasant feeling coming not
from an activity but the change in state itself, albeit to a state of greater activity. Another major
difference is that Aristotle views bodily and mental pleasure as distinct, because the nonrational
and rational parts of the soul are distinct. Epithumia is bodily desire; while it may involve
perception, because it is realized in the nonrational part of the soul, there is no deliberation
involved in this appetite and its satisfaction, and thus there can be no mental pleasure, only
sensory satisfaction. And while intellectual pleasure, such as the enjoyment of contemplation, is
reliant on a healthy body, the pleasant feeling is realized not by sensation but the mind, which is
something higher and superior. Bodily and mental pleasures, while interconnected, are then
nevertheless enjoyed distinctly. For Spinoza such a distinction makes no sense, because mind
and body are coextensive, ontologically identical expressions of one’s conatus or essential self-
activity. The essence of the mind is the idea of a particular body, and all its subsequent ideas are
derived from this fundamental perception of a particular body and its states. What this means is
that mental pleasure is identical with bodily pleasure and that pleasure from understanding is
synonymous with enjoying pleasurable sensations, particularly in a healthy manner.
Slide 12
Lastly, Aristotle grants the capacity for appetite and pleasure/pain only to organisms with
more than a nutritive faculty of soul, i.e. things with sensation, whereas Spinoza grants the
capacity for appetite and the experience of pleasure/pain to all finite things, to some degree. The
essence of Nature, for him, is both thinking and extended or material, and his naturalism
demands that everything in turn be understood equally in mental and bodily terms. What this
means is that, for every body there is a corresponding idea/perception of that body, so no thing
can be exclusively material or mental, because as I said previously mind and body are identical
and are thus two different ways of understanding the same subject. Consequently, Spinoza can be
classified as a panpsychist in the sense that he asserts all things possess a mental component.
Moreover, because he denies any essential difference between living and non-living things, since
both categories of being are physical and mental, all things can be said to be animate, active or
ensouled to some degree. In what way all things are animate is the conatus, which fundamentally
in this context can be understood as an internal self-preservative force, this force being the
appetite or striving of any given thing to remain in existence as it is, i.e. just as a human strives
to remain human so too do things like rocks and tables strive to remain rocks and tables,
respectively; only in being interfered with by external forces can a thing be benefited or harmed.
Because pleasure/pain represent the empowerment of a thing, they represent its capacity to be
what it is, pleasure being the enhancement of this power or capacity and pain its weakening.
Because Spinoza’s definition of pleasure precedes a sensory faculty, he can grant a capacity for
pleasure to all things; the difference being a matter of degree, a rock experiencing the
actualization of its nature in a less robust way than a human being with complex sensory
faculties.
Slides 13 (title)-14 (content)
 Now, onto the ethical role of pleasure. Again, we’ll start with Aristotle, whose
Nicomachean Ethics and subsequent ethical discussion of pleasure center on Eudaimonia, i.e.
happiness, flourishing or living well. According to Aristotle, Eudaimonia is constituted by a full
life of virtuous activity. Pleasure is a necessary component in this complete life of virtue,
because Aristotle asserts that living well and more specifically being virtuous should feel
pleasant; if one failed to experience pleasure in these things, one’s life would be lacking and
ultimately it would be contradictory to classify one as happy or virtuous to begin with. However,
he also clarifies that pleasure cannot be happiness itself. It is insufficient to constitute
Eudaimonia for the simple fact that I can experience pleasure, but not be virtuous or Eudaimon.
One can easily live a slavish life devoted to bodily pleasures that may satisfy one in the moment,
without ultimately allowing one to realize their full potential.
Consequently, pleasures can be inappropriate and appropriate. Inappropriate pleasures
follow from vice (kakia), which is a characteristic of choosing and acting towards extremes, in
this case excessive and base (phaulos) pleasures (viz. licentiousness). Such pleasures pertain to a
part of one’s being to the detriment of the whole. What this means is that base and excessive
pleasures inevitably lead to pain, which is the frustration of one’s activities and overall
flourishing. Appropriate pleasures conversely follow virtue, a characteristic of choosing and
acting towards what is noble/fine (kalon), viz. the mean between extremes. This disposition
involves reason directing one’s appetites and subsequent pleasures towards what is proper to
one’s nature. The highest virtue and objective pleasure is contemplation, since it represents one’s
rational nature and the aspect of the human soul closest to the divine. Virtue therefore involves
pleasure proper to one’s nature and its health or flourishing, whereas vice involves pleasures that
stunt one’s nature and subsequent self-actualization.
Slide 15
There is another state, however, between virtue and vice, referred to as akrasia or
incontinence, which is knowing what pleasures are proper and improper to one’s nature, but
choosing to enjoy base, excessive pleasures anyway. This is different than licentiousness,
because the licentious person (albeit mistakenly) views all pleasurable activity and objects as
good, whereas the incontinent person knows what pleasures they shouldn’t enjoy. This
characteristic involves deliberating on what desires and pleasures are base or inappropriate, but
being led by passion to embrace these pleasures nonetheless, which is made possible by the
nonrational-rational division of the soul. The cause of incontinence is a conflict between
universal and particular knowledge, where one fails to possess or make use of a certain universal
or particular idea, or one fails to properly link universal and particular ideas together coherently.
Slide 16
Bodily longing plays a major role in this epistemic disparity. Particular knowledge is
sensory, and thus pertains to desire and passion; these desires and passions influence which
universal ideas one affirms or makes use of in their actions in a given moment, meaning that base
bodily longing can influence one to ignore universal knowledge of healthy pleasures for the sake
of universal knowledge more attuned with that longing…leading one to cultivate base pleasures
despite knowing that they are base. Aristotle’s solution to this problem is the habituation of self-
restraint (i.e. being able to ignore those desires and make use of one’s knowledge fruitfully) or
virtue (to be in a state where one cannot experience pleasure improper to one’s nature at all).
Slide 17
Moving outside the self now, an important criterion in having virtuous characteristics is
taking pleasure in certain external things. In order to be virtuous or achieve personal excellence
one needs a proper upbringing, status, societal resources and of course friends. The absence or
loss of pleasure for or from any of these things can significantly hinder living well, subsequently
causing vice and/or incontinence.
What makes pleasures so important is that, because they supervene on one’s activities,
they also influence those and other activities. Pleasure from an activity can enhances one’s
commitment to it and the duration of its performance. More significantly, pleasure can interfere
with other activities, virtuous or base, by motivating one to forsake other activities for this
pleasurable activity. Pleasures are then a powerful motivational force in habituation, because
what one takes pleasure in can determine their characteristics, longings and subsequent activities.
Overall then, pleasure is both good and bad for Aristotle. Pleasure is good in terms of
virtuous characteristic activities, which represent the successful actualization of one’s nature, but
certain pleasures can be inherently bad when they are derived from base characteristics.
Character is therefore an extremely important factor in the moral evaluation of pleasures for
Aristotle.
Slide 18
Spinoza too focuses on happiness or what he calls beatitudo (blessedness), which for him
is flourishing, self-empowerment or self-contentment. A blessed life is a life of virtue, which
here means being in agreement with one’s nature, i.e. acting within one’s true self-interest.
Kinetic pleasure is the transition to greater virtuousness qua a greater capacity for activity or
power to follow one’s conatus. Among these pleasures, only active emotions, i.e. self-caused
pleasures, are truly virtuous. Passions can contribute to virtue insofar as they are pleasurable or
promote future pleasure indirectly, but ultimately because they represent external forces they
cannot truly represent one’s nature and power. Stable pleasures, on the other hand, are virtue
itself because they represent the enjoyment of the activity of one’s nature. Since these virtues are
self-contentment and the intellectual love of God, it’s not surprising then that Spinoza proclaims
understanding to be the highest objective pleasure, virtue and happiness. Understanding involves
representing the world accurately, particularly the relations of things to the individual, and
subsequently engaging with the world fruitfully. Moreover, since for Spinoza one is a mode or
expression of God’s power in a particular context, one’s understanding is a particular
instantiation of God’s infinite intellect, and thus the activity of one’s mind is divine. This is why
self-contentment and the love of God are coextensive, because one’s understanding of self is
God’s understanding of Itself in a particular way.
 Virtue and happiness are not all-or-nothing concepts for Spinoza, however. It is never the
case that one is virtuous or they are not, because it is never the case that one is entirely due active
to our finitude or entirely passive due to the essential self-activity of the conatus. Virtue and
happiness are then matters of degree; insofar as one actively enjoys pleasures one is
proportionately virtuous and happy. As well, despite the fact that virtue is about agency, i.e.
being the cause of one’s actions and feelings, Spinoza does not reject the value of external
things. All individuals are finite and thus necessarily subject to and reliant on other things,
meaning one can never escape passions nor the need for them. One’s body/mind necessarily
needs nourishment, the body to preserve homeostasis and the mind to increase its content, so
various pleasures like food, art, entertainment and friends are not only necessary but good
because they promote flourishing and diverse self-expression.
Slide 19
Beyond the bondage to passions one will experience when they are not significantly the
agent of their actions (what we might call “vice”), one can also fall victim to incontinence, which
here too means knowing what pleasures one should enjoy, but failing to act in accordance with
this knowledge. Spinoza rejects, however, the role of intention in incontinence, i.e. that one can
know the best action (in this case what objective pleasures are healthy to enjoy) in a given
situation, but intend or will an action contrary to this knowledge (viz. to enjoy objective
pleasures known to be unhealthy). Spinoza rejects free will in the sense that there is a distinct
faculty of mind capable of indeterminately affirming or denying certain ideas of action over
others. On the contrary, the mind is simply composed of ideas, all of which determine each other
and one’s subsequent actions. Since mind is an expression of one’s conatus, essential striving, all
ideas represent desires.
Slide 20
The cause of incontinence is then a conflict of desires, or more specifically passive
desires (i.e. desires imposed by external things), where one idea/desire supplants another. Since
these desires are ideas, they involve evaluative judgments; the problem is that passions involve
inadequate or partial knowledge, because one knows the object in question only through its
effect, not its nature or full relation to the individual. This is further exacerbated by the fact that
this knowledge is temporal and existentially modal, meaning that the more immediate in time
and necessary something appears to be the more potent is its effect. This is how one can know
the right objective pleasures, but act contrary to this knowledge, because the desires imposed on
one create an impression of immediacy that trumps one’s moral knowledge insofar as it is
temporal as well.
Slide 21
Since incontinence is a problem of competing temporal desires and accompanying
judgments the natural solution is desire and judgment that is non-temporal, i.e. eternal. Insofar as
one understands the underlying principles behind things and their effects on them, they have
stable, perpetual knowledge, because these causal and psychological principles are fixed and
irrespective of time. Consequently, the more concretely this eternal knowledge of principles is
applied to the everyday experiences of life, the more such knowledge can subvert the incongruity
between desires by organizing these temporal ideas around a stable foundation of causal
knowledge.
Slide 22
This rational organization of desires and objective pleasures is important, because overall
Spinoza deems pleasure inherently good, because to experience pleasure is to be empowered in
some way. No pleasure, subjectively or objectively, is bad in itself; rather, pleasures become
harmful when they move beyond their zone of benefit, i.e. the degree to which they are indeed
pleasurable and thus conducive to one’s nature. Excess consequently is when a part of one’s total
state of being is overstimulated to the detriment of the whole, i.e. when that objective pleasure
ceases to be solely pleasurable and leads to pain partially or entirely. The goodness of pleasure is
therefore when it corresponds to one’s rational and bodily nature, meaning one understands the
true value of objects of pleasure and accordingly enjoys those pleasures only insofar as they are
beneficial (i.e. insofar as they are truly pleasurable and thus devoid of pain). When properly
enjoyed one possesses significant virtue of mind qua understanding the nature of objective
pleasures and body qua cultivating these pleasures fruitfully.
Slide 23
Now, in terms of pleasure ethically, again we see a significant degree of agreement
between Aristotle and Spinoza, with both viewing pleasure as necessary and important in
achieving a good life, due to pleasure being an indicator of the actualization of one’s nature.
Moreover, they agree that pleasure is influential in determining activities and pleasures that are
virtuous and good insofar as they are moderate (and thus proper to one’s nature) and base and
bad insofar as they are excessive and subsequently painful (and thus misaligned with one’s well-
being). As well, it is stated that one can suffer incontinence, which inappropriate pleasurable
activity that is misaligned with one’s moral knowledge, and subsequently resolved through
rational self-determination. This is the solution to incontinence because both argue the centrality
and supremacy of reason in enjoying pleasures virtuously, on the grounds that we are rational by
nature and that understanding is divine. However, Aristotle and Spinoza concede that external
pleasures are necessary in maintaining the bodily and mental health one needs in order to self-
sufficiently engage in pleasurable activities and thus live well. Ultimately then, they agree that
pleasure is unqualifiedly good qua flourishing and bad qualifiedly insofar as it leads to pain (the
weakening of one’s natural activity).
The role of pleasure in happiness is not identical between them, though. For Aristotle a
necessary element of Eudaimonia is a complete life of pleasurable virtuous activity, because
realistically major misfortunes (viz. the loss of important externals or health) can prevent one’s
overall life from being classified as happy; flourishing is therefore an all-or-nothing concept.
Spinoza conversely treats happiness mathematically, in terms of one’s ratio of flourishing to
passivity. Insofar as one enjoys pleasures, particularly active pleasures, they are virtuous and
thus happy and insofar as they experience pain and are reliant on passions their virtue and
happiness are stunted. The role of reason is also subtly different. Aristotle treats reason as the
rightful authority over the nonrational part of the soul, meaning bodily appetite and pleasure are
only virtuous when subject to reason; furthermore, the pleasures from rational activity are
superior to bodily pleasures, reason being humanity’s closest approximation to divinity. Spinoza
rejects this hierarchical, authoritarian view of reason on the grounds that he posits no ontological
distinction between mind and body, since both are equally modal expressions of God. What this
means is that mental and bodily pleasure are coextensive and consequently body is not subject to
reason, but synonymous with it. Moreover, qua modes, not only is reason literally an expression
of divinity (and not merely an approximation), but so too is body. The third point of departure
between these philosophers is what the loss of externals means ethically. Aristotle of course
argues that losing externals can ruin happiness, whereas Spinoza disagrees. As a necessitarian,
meaning he believes all phenomena are necessarily determined to be as they are, Spinoza argues
much of our suffering comes from a false sense of contingency. If one comes to understand why
they lost those externals and why things could not have turned out differently, the pain from this
loss can be lessened if not entirely removed. Understanding therefore allows one to properly
understand their agency (i.e. what they can and cannot control in their lives) and how best to
respond to losses of any severity (i.e. to combat the pain of loss with new constructive
pleasures), thus safeguarding their happiness in some way. The final, and most central
difference, is that Aristotle grants that there are particular pleasures that are inherently bad
insofar as they follow from base characteristics and appetites despite the fact that pleasure in
general is inherently good qua activity, whereas Spinoza argues all pleasures insofar as they are
pleasures are inherently good, with the badness of objective pleasures being ignorance of their
true nature and proper utility to the individual.
In conclusion, both philosophers tell us a number of valuable things about pleasure.
Firstly, that it represents the actualization of one’s nature or natural state of being, pleasure being
good when it is rational and moderate (and thus harmonious with one’s empowerment) and bad
when it is irrational, excessive and conducive to pain (and thus contrary to one’s self-
actualization). Secondly, pleasure can be understood in both a restorative and stable context, the
latter being more valuable, but pleasure overall being a necessary component of flourishing.
Thirdly, both give insight into incontinence as an incongruity between different forms of
knowledge, that is subsequently resolved by rational self-determination. And finally, all the
above points illustrate the complex individual and situational forms pleasure can take.
Significant differences between them are that Aristotle argues . . . and Spinoza on the
other hand asserts . . .
Pragmatically, however, there is sufficient agreement between them that I would argue
Aristotelians and Spinozists can cohabitate and even contribute to each other’s well-being,
because ultimately their differences are grounded in metaphysical and epistemological
foundations and than ethical ones (at least in terms of pleasure). The advantages of both ethical
views of pleasure are significant. Aristotle is helpful via his emphasis on habituating behaviour
conducive to living well (viz. being disposed to take pleasure in virtuous, healthy things). The
value of Spinoza’s position is its emphasis on psychological determination via the rejection of
free will and metaphysical necessitarianism, both of which are well-equipped in resolving
conflicts of pleasure and pain through causal and self-knowledge.