EDONISM. – From the Greek ἠθωνή, pleasure, enjoyment, it is, in a generic sense, any doctrine that places pleasure, however understood, as the norm and ultimate end of human activity, making it consist in the very value of moral good. Edonism is a derivative in the ethical field of epistemological empiricism: if, in fact, human knowledge is denied the possibility of attaining, beyond empirical facts, absolute spiritual values of a higher order (God, soul, good, etc.), it logically follows that it is impossible, or at least inadvisable, to place these supporting values as the foundation and norm of moral life and happiness; and it is easy to substitute for them the immediate and concrete criterion of satisfaction, pleasure, enjoyment that individual actions are able to procure for the individual. This edonism, in the proper sense, is distinct from other related ethical systems such as eudemonism (q.v.) and utilitarianism (q.v.).
Edonism appears systematically in Western philosophy with Aristippus (435-360), the founder of the Cyrenaic school. By concretizing the concept of good left indeterminate in Socrates, Aristippus directed it toward individual enjoyment, understood still 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 may be; the criterion of preference is only their greater degree of refinement and intensity, which, according to Aristippus, is proper 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 the greatest possible enjoyment, mastering pleasure while following it as the sole and supreme norm of action (cf. Diog. Laert., II, 86 ff.); pleasure is desirable and good in itself: ἡ ἡθωνὴ δέ ἀνθρωπή καὶ ἀνθρωπή (ibid., 88). The principles of Aristippus, developed in various ways by his school, reappear later in Epicureanism. For Epicurus as well (q.v.), the equation good = pleasure, evil = pain holds: in the search, therefore, for enjoyment and in fleeing pain consists the supreme end of life = the norm of happiness: ἡθωνὴ ἀρχήν καὶ τάξις λέγουμε εὖν τοὺς μακαρίους ζητῶν (Diogenes Laertius, X, 128). But Epicurus, among pleasures, esteemed simple those of a spiritual order; however, in the search for them one must proceed with discernment, preferring those that, even in relation to their immediate and distant consequences, are capable of procuring us a greater 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. Epicurus’s ethical system thus appears as an anticipation of Bentham’s moral arithmetic (q.v.).
The edonistic trend, taken up by some tendencies of the Renaissance (q.v.), revives, albeit in different forms, in the empirico-materialistic systems of modern philosophy. Principal representatives: Gassendi, Helvétius, Diderot, Holbach, Feuerbach, and, with a utilitarian turn, Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Spencer. In these latter currents, criteria of qualitative discrimination among the various classes of pleasures are sometimes introduced (Utilitarianism, ch. 2: 3rd ed., London 1867, pp. 1 ff.), in discourse with the general principles of the system. It should be noted that edonism is at the basis of the Marxist social system, and, as a practical method of life, widely diffused in contemporary society, also in dependence on modern philosophical culture largely oriented toward metaphysical skepticism and the negation of the transcendent.
Edonistic ethics, essentially negative, has the fundamental defect of failing to recognize the highest values of human life that represent the irreplaceable basis of an objective morality. The total reduction of ethical good to pleasure is in contrast with the most pressing demands of the human spirit, to which law and norm, prior to immediate utility and enjoyment, is admired 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, are not what Christian ethics intends to deny; they represent, rather, a concomitant and consequent element of moral action, but do not constitute its essence, except in denying morality as such. In fact, edonism, with its substantial negation of the values of honesty, obligation, law, virtue, makes every objectively valid norm of good and evil impossible, 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 advantage, and even the noblest actions imposed by duty, or suggested by a will toward good and perfection, lose, as such, all their meaning and value (q.V. CIRENAICS; ETHICS; EUDEMONISM).