HEDONISM. - From Greek ἠδονή, pleasure, enjoyment, it is, in the generic sense, every doctrine that makes pleasure, however understood, the norm and ultimate end of human activity, making the very value of the moral good consist in II. H. is an ethical derivative of epistemological empiricism: once the possibility is denied to human knowledge of attaining, beyond the facts of experience, values of an absolute spiritual order (God, soul, good, etc.), there logically follows the impossibility, or at least the inappropriateness, of placing these supposed values at the foundation and as the norm of moral life and happiness; and it is easy to substitute for them the immediate and concrete criterion of the satisfaction, pleasure, and enjoyment that individual actions are capable of procuring for the individual. H., in this proper sense, is distinct from other eudemonism (v.) utilitarianism (v.).
H. appears systematically in Western philosophy with Aristippus (435-360), the founder of the Cyrenaic school.
Giving concrete form to the concept of the good, which had remained somewhat indeterminate in Socrates, Aristippus oriented it toward individual enjoyment, still understood in a fairly broad sense, as the satisfaction of every desire and inclination of the soul: all pleasures are good, whatever their source and object; the sole criterion of preference is their greater degree of refinement and intensity, which, according to Aristippus, is characteristic of the pleasures of the senses, in the immediate concreteness of the present moment. The virtue of the wise man is nothing other than the art of enjoying, that is, of procuring the greatest possible enjoyment, mastering pleasure while still following it as the sole and supreme norm of action (cf. Diog. Laert., II, 86 ff.); pleasure is desirable and good in itself: ἡ ἠδονὴ δι' αὐτὴν αἱρέτη καὶ ἀγαθῶν (ibid., 88). Aristippus’s principles, developed in various directions by his school, reappear later in Epicureanism. Epicurus (v.) too, the equation good = pleasure, evil = pain holds: the pursuit of enjoyment and the avoidance of pain therefore constitute the supreme end of life and the norm of happiness: ἠδονὴν ὀργὴν καὶ τέλος λέγουεν εἶναι τοῦ μοναχοῦς τῶν (Diogenes Laertius, X, 128). But Epicurus considers pleasures of a spiritual order intrinsically better; in any case, in pursuing them one must proceed with discernment, preferring those which, also in relation to their near and distant consequences, are capable of procuring for us the greatest sum of enjoyment (cf. Epist. to Menoeceus, §§ 128-30). A pain, too, should be sought when it is the means to a greater pleasure. Epicurus’s ethical system thus appears as an anticipation of Bentham’s moral arithmetic (v.).
The hedonistic tendency, taken up by certain trends of the Renaissance (Valle), lives on, albeit in different forms, in the empiricist-materialist systems of modern philosophy. Its principal representatives are Gassendi, Helvétius, Diderot, Holbach, Feuerbach, and, with a utilitarian turn, Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, and Spencer. In these latter currents, criteria for qualitative differentiation among the various classes of pleasures are sometimes introduced (Stuart Mill), in disagreement with the system’s general principles (Utilitarism, chap. 2: 3rd ed., London 1867, pp. 11 ff.). It should be noted that H. lies at the basis of the Marxist social system and, as a practical method of life, is widely disseminated in contemporary society, also as a consequence of modern philosophical culture, which is largely oriented toward metaphysical skepticism and the denial of the transcendent.
Hedonistic ethics, essentially negative, is fundamentally at fault for failing to recognize the higher values of human life, which represent the irreplaceable foundation of an objective morality. The total reduction of the ethical good to pleasure conflicts with the most immanent demands of the human spirit, for which the law and norm, prior to utility and immediate enjoyment, is above all duty, the expression of the absolute ethical order within which its action, precisely because it is personal and spiritual, must be inserted. Pleasure and utility, understood in their broadest sense, and which Christian ethics does not intend to repudiate, certainly represent a concomitant and consequent element of moral action, but do not constitute its essence, unless morality as such is to be denied. In fact, H., through its substantial denial of the values of honesty, obligation, law, and virtue, makes every objectively valid norm of good and evil impossible, thus amounting to a denial of morality itself. Morality is reduced to a pure calculation of egoism in which everything is judged and accepted according to immediate self-interest, and even the noblest actions imposed by duty, or suggested by a will toward goodness and perfection, lose, as such, all their meaning and value (v. CIRENAICI; ETICA; MONISMO).