Hedonism

HEDONISM. - From the Greek ἡδονή, pleasure, enjoyment, it is, in a generic sense, every doctrine that posits pleasure, however understood, as the norm and ultimate end of human activity, making the very value of the moral good consist in it. Hedonism is a derivative in the ethical field of epistemological empiricism: once the possibility is denied to human knowledge of reaching, beyond the facts of experience, values of an absolute spiritual order (God, soul, good, etc.), there follows logically the impossibility, or at least the inopportuneness, of positing these supposed values as the foundation and norm of the moral life and of happiness; and it is easy to substitute for them the immediate and concrete criterion of the satisfaction, pleasure, enjoyment that individual actions are capable of procuring for the individual. This is hedonism in the proper sense, distinct from other similar ethical systems such as eudemonism (v.) and utilitarianism (v.).

Hedonism appears systematically in Western philosophy with Aristippus (435-360), the founder of the Cyrenaic school. Making concrete the concept of the good that had remained somewhat indeterminate in Socrates, Aristippus polarized it toward individual enjoyment, still understood in a fairly broad sense, as the satisfaction of every desire and tension of the soul: all pleasures are good, whatever their source and object; the criterion of preference is only their greater degree of refinement and intensity, such as belongs, according to Aristippus, to the pleasures of the senses, in the immediate concreteness of the present moment. The virtue of the wise man is nothing but the art of enjoying, that is, of procuring for himself the greatest possible enjoyment, mastering pleasure and yet 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 αἱρετή καὶ ἀγαθόν (ibid., 88). The principles of Aristippus, developed in various directions by his school, reappear later in Epicureanism. For Epicurus too (v.), the equation good = pleasure, evil = pain holds: therefore the supreme end of life and the norm of happiness consists in the pursuit of enjoyment and the flight from pain: ἡδονὴν ἀρχὴν καὶ τέλος λέγομεν εἶναι τοῦ μακαρίως ζῆν (Diogenes Laertius, X, 128). But Epicurus judges the pleasures of a spiritual order to be in themselves the best among pleasures; in any case, in the pursuit of 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). Even a pain is to be sought when it is a means to a greater pleasure. The ethical system of Epicurus thus appears as an anticipation of Bentham's moral arithmetic (v.).

The hedonistic tendency, taken up again by certain currents of the Renaissance (Valla), lives on, albeit in different forms, in the empiricist-materialist systems of modern philosophy. Principal representatives: Gassendi, Helvétius, Diderot, Holbach, Feuerbach, and, with a utilitarian bent, Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Spencer. In these latter currents there are sometimes introduced (Stuart Mill), in disagreement with the general principles of the system, criteria of qualitative discrimination among the various classes of pleasures (Utilitarianism, ch. 2: 3rd ed., London 1867, pp. 11 ff.). It should be noted that hedonism is at the basis of the Marxist social system, and, as a practical method of life, is widely diffused in contemporary society, also in dependence on modern philosophical culture, largely oriented toward metaphysical skepticism and the negation of the transcendent.

Hedonistic ethics, essentially negative, has the fundamental fault of failing to recognize the highest values of human life, which represent the irreplaceable basis of an objective morality. The total reduction of the ethical good to pleasure is in contrast with the most immanent demands of the human spirit, for which law and norm, prior to immediate utility and enjoyment, is first of 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 most comprehensive sense, and which Christian ethics does not intend to disown, do indeed represent a concomitant and consequent element of moral action, but they do not constitute its essence, unless one is to deny morality as such. In fact hedonism, with its substantial negation of the values of honesty, obligation, law, virtue, makes impossible every objectively valid norm of good and evil, thus resolving itself into a negation of morality itself. This 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 for good and perfection, lose, as such, all their meaning and value (v. CYRENAICS; ETHICS; EUDEMONISM).

Ugo Viglino