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A practitioner’s guide to hedonism (2007)

• kcorbitt 10y ago
  I understand how hedonism could seem appealing. But when I consider my own life experiences, I find that the happiest people I know are all motivated by some "higher calling," although the callings in question vary widely, and may seem distasteful or simply trivial to a third party. By contrast, I don't know that I've ever met someone who pursued pleasure for pleasure's sake and felt truly satisfied with their life. Others may have different experiences, so take from that what you will.
  • true_religion 10y ago
    Would you characterize people with a higher calling as content or actually visibly happy each and every day?
    • jasikpark 10y ago
      I would call them alive. They might not be happy everyday. There is always time to be sad, and to be angry, and to just stare into the void and realize how screwed up life is sometimes, but I would say that if you have a higher calling, it's much easier to be happy in a less hedonistic way. Actually: yeah, I just basically described contentedness. Though there is definitely a difference between contentedness and complacency.
    • raducu 10y ago
      Nobody is happy each and every day, that's impossible given human nature. There are however people who are satisfied and content with their life almost every day.
  • empath75 10y ago
    If people are following the 'higher calling' because that makes them happy, then that is hedonism.
    • badosu 10y ago
      Well, that makes almost everything humans do hedonic, doesn't it. Happiness in this case probably comprises of a state of mind different of perceptual pleasure.
      • pasquinelli 10y ago
        Epicurus advocated learning as the best form of pleasure because you can't do it to excess very easily like you can with things like eating, drinking, etc. The various helenistic schools of philosophy were all searching for what constituted virtue. They were quite explicitly after what was good about life and how to organize life around that. The fact you can understand every every human motivation in hedonistic terms is no coincidence; it's the justification for the philosophy, the reason there was a school of hedonism.
      • chibolo 10y ago
        "Hedonic" and Hedonism should be defined differently. The semi-last paragraph gives a good point to what Hedonism is. "That is why the real Epicurus – in contrast to the crude sybarite invented by his detractors – denounced the rapidly rotting fruits of dissipation and excess. The constant pursuit of intense pleasures will in fact backfire, according to Epicurus, because it leads to the psychological hell of enslavement to unsatisfiable appetites. The would-be hedonist must take care to ensure that the pain of overreaching desire does not ruin his peace of mind and thereby defeat his original aim of securing a balance of pleasure over pain."
    • RodericDay 10y ago
      No, not really. Hedonism refers to pursuing pleasures such as money, sex, food, luxury. Unless you want to play fast and loose with terms, an achievement such as becoming a veterinarian or winning a tennis championship or breaking a videogame speedrun record doesn't qualify. Some words are tricky to fully define outside any ambiguity. Love and Game are good examples.
    • coldtea 10y ago
      Not really. The same circular reasoning can be used to make altruism selfish, etc. It makes far more sense to define those things by their external manifestations rather than by some final (and worse, sometimes even subconscious) motive.
  • ziikutv 10y ago
    Agreed. For me, I noticed that I am always seeking for an answer. A magical key that will unlock everything lol. I do not mean from a religious POV. I just mean things like..if I do X, Y will happen which will lead to Z, so on and so forth. Related to this: Instead of Hendonism, I am getting into Stoicism; of course adapting it to 'modern day'.
    • ci5er 10y ago
      Either I have mis-read stoicism, or you have, or I misunderstand you, or a combination of the above.
      • ziikutv 10y ago
        Edited paragraph. Those were two separate topics.
        • ci5er 10y ago
          Well, then, post-edit, good on you, mate. Still sounds like you might be getting a bit mystical with both the old and the new. You might want to play around with extreme spiritual skepticism to get your grounding before launching off with any sort of practice with any expectations. But, you know, hey! YMMV.
    • che_shirecat 10y ago
      there's no seeking for an answer in stoicism. the answer is already there, both within and in nature, revealed day by day through living a virtuous life. unrelated - you're using semicolons incorrectly.
      • ziikutv 10y ago
        Two unrelated paragraphs :).
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    • 10y ago
  • peterwwillis 10y ago
    Most of us probably relate to the experiences of the people we are around the most. I've never met anyone who has told me they felt truly satisfied with their life, and I know I will never be. I thought that was one of life's virtues... What good is a cup running over if you never drink from it? And if you drink, is it still full? My point is, I need a glass of wine...
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >But when I consider my own life experiences, I find that the happiest people I know are all motivated by some "higher calling," although the callings in question vary widely, That's true. Hedonism is a treadmill (no pun intended) like most other traps. Heroin users are also hedonists...
    • voidz 10y ago
      Until they run out of heroin..
    • Neliquat 10y ago
      Maybe the 1st few times... after that you are avoiding pain, rather than chasing pleasure. It is a small, but important distinction.
      • zer0tonin 10y ago
        That's the whole treadmill concept.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        When you're chasing pleasure the first times, you're avoiding pain too. Not many totally happy with their lives people get into heroin...
  • freeflight 10y ago
    While I agree that growth can happen trough struggle (which does not equate suffering!), I have a very hard time believing that most living things are actively looking for suffering or pain. What living things do you know that go actively out of their way to experience pain and suffering? Such a behavior would be highly disadvantageous to any species and would run counter to the most basic instincts of all things living. We have pain receptors for a reason, that reason ain't that we just gotta learn to "enjoy the pain". As such I would argue that all living things live their lives on a rather hedonistic basis. Equally, it could be argued that if "having a calling" makes you "suffer less", because you've found a purpose for your life while a lack of purpose can lead to suffering, then having a calling might just as well be considered a hedonistic lifestyle choice. The notion that pain and suffering are something that needs to happen to "pull trough" is trough and trough a human invention among the same lines as proper "working virtues".
    • pjc50 10y ago
      "Through" and "trough" are different words.
      • sjcsjc 10y ago
        Since the misspelling was repeated, this could actually be a helpful comment.
      • jbrown 10y ago
        I've heard an accent that has trouble pronouncing the English "th" sound, instead approximating it with more of a "t" sound that misses the tongue thrust. Maybe that is what's happening here?
      • freeflight 10y ago
        Sorry about that, I'm not a native speaker so I sometimes confuse words that sound similar. Grammarly is usually pretty good about pointing stuff like that out, sadly it failed me this time.
    • literallycancer 10y ago
  • lmm 10y ago
    I think it's possible to make mistakes in both directions. Certainly in my own life I used to be far too concerned about trying to do something for the ages; adopting the Epicurian attitude has made me a lot happier. (I still spend time helping others, because that's a satisfying thing to do in itself, but I've stopped trying to change the world).
  • Retric 10y ago
    Hedonism like anything else can be done poorly. The first and most important step is to optimize for what you actually enjoy and not just use the greedy algorithm of what feels good this second. The goal is to align effort with actual reward and not maximize meaningless numbers like total income. Do you enjoy taking a lazy morning with 30 minutes of quiet reflection each day? Great, but don't assume that means you would be happy maximizing that and living in a monistic life. The cost benefit on drugs is really complex for example, but so is having a committed relationship, or any other major life choice. That does not mean you should ignore the actual complexity of life, rather you should actually consider the cost benefits of where you live, what you do etc etc.
  • jbrown 10y ago
    You make a very good point. I think my observations are pretty similar to yours. My solution is to expand from the hedonistic goal of maximizing one's own pleasure, to the larger goal of maximizing the total amount of happiness in the world.
• mcguire 10y ago
  Epicurus' 4-part cure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapharmakos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapharmakos
• deleted 10y ago
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• vivekd 10y ago
  Am I missing something about the title - because I've never seen Epicurus associated with hedonism until I read this article. In fact, I don't think anything about his philosophy or lifestyle can be associated with the term hedonism as it is commonly used. He was a vegetarian, never married and never had any children. I don't see any evidence of him being a sex maniac or advocating free sex or anything like that. He simply believed that the good life is the absence of suffering and that ethics means minimizing suffering for both oneself and society at large. There is nothing hedonistic about that. I think there might be a little bit of clickbate going on in the title. The article itself doesn't really elaborate on why Epicurus was criticized by medieval christian philosophers or where their differences were. In fact I think it does more to misrepresent Epicurus than it does to actually edify about him. I think this is just a really bad article.
  • freeflight 10y ago
    >He was a vegetarian, never married and never had any children. I don't see any evidence of him being a sex maniac or advocating free sex or anything like that. What definition of hedonism are you using that necessarily involves marriage, eating meat or being a sex maniac? The very basic definition of hedonism is this: >He simply believed that the good life is the absence of suffering Nothing more and nothing less because "suffering" and "good" can actually be quite subjective. A masochist might enjoy being degraded and hurt, it's his/her part of the definition of "good", while non-masochists would probably put many SM practices into the category of "I wouldn't want to suffer trough that". If not eating meat makes you suffer less, on account of empathy for the animals that didn't need to be slaughtered for your nutritious needs, then that fits pretty perfectly into decreasing the suffering around you and for yourself.
    • vivekd 10y ago
      >What definition of hedonism are you using that necessarily involves marriage, eating meat or being a sex maniac? the google definition: the pursuit of pleasure; sensual self-indulgence. The sex maniac part was from the article.
• EvanMiller 10y ago
  This Economist article's a bit chatty and superficial (surprise), but in an age of mass anxiety and digital distraction, I think the goal of the Epicureans is as important as ever: How does one go about producing a calm mind? It's not a simple task, and I think correctly has to analyze the mind in relation to everything else. The atomic hypothesis of the Epicureans seems like a side quest into physics, but the fruit of the journey is that everything's just combinations of atoms and the mind must be made of atoms too, so let's think of it as a physical system with inputs and outputs, and forget about any grander god-narratives. With this perspective comes some very practical advice; Lucretius for instance has an extended passage on how to deal with a "crush". I'll paraphrase but he points out that your crush exists purely as an image in your head, and you really have no idea what the person behind the image is like, and if you finally get together the sex will probably be very awkward, so it's better to direct your mind and amorous intentions elsewhere. I believe the phrase he used was to find smaller pleasures that carry no penalty -- because seeking the larger rewards almost always leads to misery. Lucretius is a good read and the Latham translation has some felicitous turns of phrase. It's fun imagining arguing with the ancient philosophers about their physical theories, which they support (as best they can) with the available evidence about what wind, liquids, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, smells, tastes, sights, etc. are made of. It's a shame philosophy got distracted with "higher things" for so long (i.e. 2,000 years) because here we are realizing again that everything is made of atoms, and it sure would be nice to have more advice on living life in the face of this fact.
• z3t4 10y ago
  > "Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website." And it's just a bunch of text and an image ... When a web page tells me to activate JavaScript I expect some cool webgGL or canvas demo or the like.