Among the Greeks rationalism and hedonism alike are eudæmonistic.
Hedonism appears as the sequel to naturalism; or, more rarely, as part of a theistic system whose morality is divine legislation enforced by an appeal to motives of pleasure and pain.
This third general ethical tendency has thus been of the greatest importance in emphasizing the consciousness of duty, and has brought both hedonism and rationalism to a recognition of its fundamental importance.
But neither the hedonism of Aristotle, nor his defense of poetry on moral grounds through his theory of katharsis, is usual in Greek criticism.
Strabo in a famous passage records an exceptional hedonism in Greek thought and goes on to expound the conventional belief.
But it is utterly unjust to extend the natural feeling against excessive and egoistic hedonism to theoretical materialism and to monism.
But as every legitimate enjoyment can become wrong by excess, and every virtue be turned into vice, so a narrow hedonism is to be condemned, especially when it allies itself with egoism.
Utilitarianism consists of a still more unfriendly and unwholesome mixture of two elements, both of them bad, and unable to stand together, Hedonism and Altruism.
Hedonism is the doctrine that the main object and end of life is pleasure: which is the position laid down in so many words by Mill (1.
If Hedonism were sound doctrine, the Pleasant and the Good would be identical, and the most pleasant pleasure would ever be the best pleasure.
This, as we believe, could be shown true of the popularly current ideal of self-realization as well as of hedonism in its various forms and the older systems of conscience or the moral sense.
That the assumption mentioned is the essential basis of the twin theories of associationism in psychology and hedonism in ethics is shown by DR.
We shall not repeat here our prior criticisms of hedonism and utilitarianism in order to point out the falsity of this division of moral action into unrelated inner (or private) and outer (or social) factors.
The fundamental fallacy of psychological hedonism has been well stated by Green to be supposing that a desire can be aroused or created by the anticipation of its own satisfaction--i.
Hedonism means that pleasure is the end of human action, because the end of desire.
Strict hedonism would tend to reduce all virtue to prudence--the calculation of subtler and remoter consequences and the control of present behavior by its outcome.
That phase of utilitarianism which holds that the object of desire is pleasure, is termed hedonism, or sometimes psychological hedonism to distinguish it from ethical hedonism, the theory that pleasure is the standard for judging acts.
As a theory of moral knowledge, Hedonism is thus almost always allied with empiricism, understanding by empiricism the theory that particular past experiences furnish the method of all ideas and beliefs.
Developing from this is a new point of practical importance to the hedonism of the Cyrenaics.
Thus, in the end, Aristippus, the founder of the purest hedonism in the history of thought, comes very near not only to the Cynics, but to the more cultured hedonism of Epicurus and modern thinkers.
It is of the utmost importance that this development of Cyrenaic hedonism should be fully realized.
It would be quite possible to accept his criticisms of naturalism and hedonism while rejecting many of the metaphysical inferences which he draws.
It was clear that if philosophic hedonism was to be established on a broad and firm basis, it must in its notion of good combine what the plain man naturally sought with what philosophy could plausibly offer.
This characteristic, however, is the key to the chief differences between Epicureanism and the more naivehedonism of Aristippus.
Similarly the conception of the self as a moral unity arises naturally out of the impossibility of finding the summum bonum in a succession of transient states of consciousness such as hedonism for example postulates.
But this view cannot be maintained, save by uniting it with a philosophichedonism that is complete and not partial, that is to say, with a hedonism which does not admit any other form of value.
The value of the term Eudaemonism as an antithesis toHedonism is thus very questionable.
Pleasure is strictly nothing more than the state of being pleased, and hedonism the theory that man's chief good consists in acting in such a way as to bring about a continuous succession of such states.
In its most independent form Hedonism can hardly be said to exist now as a reasoned theory.
But in Paul's case, as in that of our Lord, the charge of hedonism is meaningless.
And in very much the same way materialism and idealism, not to mention hedonism and rigorism, or naturalism and supernaturalism, [p.
Hence the New Hedonism teaches that "to prepare ourselves for the duties of paternity and maternity, by making ourselves as vigorous and healthful as we can be is a duty we owe to all our children unborn and to one another.
We have here the central idea of the New Hedonism advocated by Mr. Grant Allen, whose views necessitate the active agency of man as well as of woman.
Hedonism and egoism are in the end convertible terms.
Under hedonism the economic interest is not conceived in terms of action.
Since hedonism came to rule economic science, the science has been in the main a theory of distribution,--distribution of ownership and of income.
The theory of value which hedonism gives is, therefore, a theory of cost in terms of discomfort.
It is as such a mechanical intermediate term that the stricter hedonism construes human nature.
But this economic situation was also the chief ground for the vogue of hedonism in economics; so that hedonistic economics may be taken as an interpretation of human nature in terms of the market-place.
It appears from what has just been said of Mr. Clark's "natural" distribution and of his dealing with the problems of modern industry that the logic of hedonism is of no avail for the theory of business affairs.
His hedonism is but the uncritically accepted metaphysics comprised in the common sense of his time, and his substantial coincidence with Bentham goes to show how well diffused the hedonist preconception was at the time.
Again, in the matter of the psychological postulates of the science, he accepts a hedonism as simple, unaffected, and uncritical as that of Jevons or of James Mill.
While hedonism seeks the causal determinant of conduct in the (probable) outcome of action, the later conception seeks this determinant in the complex of propensities that constitutes man a functioning agent, that is to say, a personality.
A refutation of hedonismmust consist in showing that pleasures really differ in kind, and cannot, therefore, be compared in intensity.
Could he succeed in so doing, hedonismwould be proved.
Between the hedonism of the ancients and that of modern philosophers there lies a great gulf.
This extreme or "pure" hedonism regarded as a definite philosophic theory practically died with the Cyrenaics, though the same spirit has frequently found expression in ancient and modern, especially poetical, literature.
This pessimistic attitude is far removed from the positive hedonism of Aristippus.
Practically speaking ancient hedonism advocated the happiness of the individual: the modern hedonism of Hume, Bentham and Mill is based on a wider conception of life.
The confusion already alluded to between "pure" and "rational" hedonism is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the misconceptions which have arisen as to the doctrine of the Epicureans.
The earliest and the most extreme type of hedonism is that of the Cyrenaic School as stated by Aristippus, who argued that the only good for man is the sentient pleasure of the moment.
Moreover, hedonism has, especially by its critics, been very much misrepresented owing mainly to two simple misconceptions.
For if the dictates of universalistic hedonism are to be fulfilled, it must be under the guidance of individual judgments, or of corporate judgments, or of both.
Hence, if the method of egoistic hedonism is unsatisfactory, far more unsatisfactory for the same and kindred reasons, is the method of universalistic hedonism, or utilitarianism.
Later on, when the bloom began to pass from poetry and art, and the vigor of national life declined, this attitude of simple manliness diverged into hedonism and asceticism.
Against the hedonism which lay so near at hand to pagans in the license of the flesh, the Greeks set up an ideal of glory attainable alone by toil.
Without hedonismthey took their frugal share of the delightful things furnished by the boon earth in prodigal abundance.
The useless exertions of a section of moral philosophers to eliminate not only Hedonism but also Eudaemonism from moral action are a veritable labour of Sisyphus.
If we agree to this definition we can take Eudaemonism into consideration as an aim of moral action, but Hedonism we shall have to discard from the start.
Hedonism makes no secret of its nature and its tendency.
This seems to be in itself a sufficient objection to founding a deductive method of Hedonism on Mr. Spencer's general conclusion.
Here our investigation seems, after all, to leave Empirical Hedonism as the only method ordinarily applicable for the ultimate decision of such problems--at least until the science of Sociology shall have been really constructed.
I am willing to hope that this refuge from the difficulties of Empirical Hedonism may some time or other be open to us: but I cannot perceive that it is at present available.
We find it expressly admitted by leading representatives both of Intuitionism and of that Universalistic Hedonism to which I propose to restrict the name of Utilitarianism.
Moreover, the common estimate of different sources of happiness seems to involve all the confusion of ideas and points of view, which in defining the empirical method of Hedonism we have taken some pains to eliminate.
A dubious guidance to an ignoble end appears to be all that the calculus of Egoistic Hedonism has to offer.
But both of these writers stand on a somewhat different platform from the strict psychological hedonism which Mill never relinquished.
It has been shown, indeed, that the realisation of egoistic hedonism is not merely unattainable from the point of view of psychological hedonism, but that it would involve conditions inconsistent with the nature of desire.
The relative and transient nature of pleasure has been urged as an objection against any form of hedonism by many philosophers since the time of Plato.
A uniform theory such as psychological hedonism] Psychological hedonism possesses the merit of offering a simple and uniform theory of mental action.
This is the question brought into prominence in recent discussions, and of most importance for the present inquiry; and upon an affirmative answer to it Evolutionist Hedonism is plainly dependent.
And the practical tendency finds its counterpart in speculative opinion, so that, whereas Epicurus placed happiness in freedom from wants, modern hedonism usually considers a man the happier the more wants he has and is able to supply.
It is in this interpretation of its law that psychological hedonism seems to be most capable of defence, and in this sense it has been more than once stated and defended.
If psychological hedonism is our starting-point--and we give to the theory the interpretation that has the greatest verisimilitude--it is the greatest present pleasure that rules.
Mill seems to be the only recent writer who, in making this transition, adheres strictly to the psychological hedonism distinctive of his school.
Psychological hedonism has not, however, been confronted by the English moralists with an opposed theory of equal simplicity, nor can the controversy be said to have led to a thorough analysis of action.
Utilitarianism only becomes a practicable end for individual conduct when psychological hedonism has been given up.
