Enjoyment 12, first eight pages
Enjoyment
What is it to enjoy something? The question arises for us because we
will, in the next chapter, claim that to believe that something is beautiful is
to believe, on the basis of a special kind of enjoyment, that others will also
enjoy the item in that way. We premise our explanation and defense of that
claim on the account of enjoyment we give in this chapter. An account of
enjoyment is, however, of general interest. Enjoyment is, after all, a nexus
at which important concepts meet, including reasons for action, happiness,
and goodness. An adequate account of enjoyment should exhibit systematic
relations between two aspects of enjoyment: enjoyment as a feeling, and
enjoyment as an explanation and justification of action. The feeling varies
greatly; compare: the watery relief of satisfying an urgent thirst; sexual
gratification; a sudden whiff of perfume; learning that one has received a
fervently hoped for grant; the thoughts, associations, and feelings aroused
by reading the following lines from the end of Faust, spoken by the angels
who intervene to snatch Faust from Mephistopheles: “Wer immer strebend
sich bemüht,/Den können wir erlösen.” The variety of feeling does not,
however, prevent enjoyment from playing a standard explanatoryjustificatory role. When asked, “Why do you play so much chess?” one
provides both an explanation and a justification if one answers, “Because I
enjoy it.”
We offer an account of enjoyment that exhibits systematic connections
between enjoyment as a feeling and its explanatory-justificatory role. We do
so by completing the following biconditional:
x enjoys Φ if and only if ... ,
where Φ is an experience or an activity of x. The restriction of values of ‘Φ’
to experiences and activities may sight seem questionable. After all, you can
enjoy a meal or a painting. But, of course, you can enjoy the meal only if
you eat it; and the painting, only if you look at it; and, in general, where y is
something other than an experience or activity, one enjoys y if and only if
one enjoys Φ, where Φ is a suitable experience or activity involving y. The
restriction on values of ‘Φ’ involves no irrecoverable loss of generality. More
importantly, if one examines explanations of the form “because he or she
enjoys it”, one finds that what is enjoyed is always either explicitly or
implicitly understood to be an experience or an activity, and it is this primacy
in explanation that motivates restricting values of ‘Φ’ to experiences and
activities; for, as the explanations we advance show, we treat as derivative
the enjoyment of things other than experiences and activities.
The central idea behind our account is that enjoyment consists in a
harmony between three elements: the relevant activity or experience; the
features which this activity or experience causes you to believe it has; and a
desire to for the activity or experience so conceived. The harmony consists in
this: the activity or experience causes a desire which it simultaneously causes
one to believe is satisfied. The belief and desire form the nexus at which the
felt aspect of enjoyment and its explanatory/justificatory role meet. The
belief/desire pair is typically a reason to act so as to have the experience or
engage in the activity, and the key to characterizing the way it feels to enjoy
something is to note that the relevant desire is a felt desire and the relevant
belief an occurrent belief.
A final preliminary point: When we describe our enjoyments, we
sometimes refer to types of experiences or activities; one may, for example,
say “I enjoy sailing” and mean thereby that one generally enjoys a sailing.
We may also refer to individual, non-repeatable instances of experiences and
activities; one may, for example, say, “I am really enjoying sailing today,”
meaning thereby that one is enjoying an individual, non-repeatable instance
of the activity. We understand Φ, in “x enjoys Φ,” Φ to range over an
individual, non-repeatable instances of experiences and activities.
No sharp line.
I. Enjoyment and Desire
We will argue shortly that one enjoys Φ only if one desires Φ. As a
preliminary, we note that we understand ‘desire’ in the broadest possible
sense to include such diverse sources of motivation as values, ideals, needs,
commitments, personal loyalties, and patterns of emotional reaction.
Further, the desire to Φ need not exist prior to one’s enjoying Φ. Suppose,
for example, that you find yourself cornered by a talking stranger with whom
you have no initial desire to converse; however, you eventually find yourself
enjoying conversing. Our claim is that as long as you enjoy conversing, you
desire to do so. This will seem to be a mistake to those who think that one
can only properly be said to desire that which one lacks; however, that is not
our conception of desire. We conceive of a desire as a state that not only
causes one to seek what one lacks, but to persist once one finds it.1
In support of the claim that desiring to Φ is necessary condition of
enjoying Φ, imagine you are listening to an indifferently performed piano
piece. The pianist is your friend; he will ask you if you enjoyed the
performance, and you know that that you will say you did. In hopes of
avoiding an unconvincing lie, you are trying to enjoy it; unfortunately, the
indifferent performance leaves you indifferent—neither desiring to listen, nor
desiring not to listen. The complete absence of any desire to listen to the
This will seem counterintuitive to those who see desire as related to a "perceived
lack," but it should cause no problems to those who think of desires as states that
move us to action. See, for example, Brian O'Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2, p. 295f.: "A brief word on desire. When
action occurs, it is in the final analysis this phenomenon that underlies all of the
workings of the act generative mental machinery." Thus desire is what explains my
acting so as to maintain ongoing experiences and activities whose occurrence I
want, even when I know such experiences are occurring (compare quotes from
Hobbes below). O'Shaughnessy characterizes desire as a "striving towards an act of
fulfillment" (2, p. 296). In this, he agrees with Aristotle; the root meaning of
Aristotle's most general word for desire-'orexis'-is "a reaching out after." Plato is
one source of the "perceived lack" view (see the Symposium, for example). This
view is indefensible as a general characterization of desire. The problem is revealed
by Hobbes. In the Leviathan, Hobbes characterizes desire as an "endeavour . . .
toward something which causes it," but he restricts the use of 'desire' to cases in
which the object of desire is absent. However, he then notes: "that which men
desire, they are also said to LOVE: and to HATE those things for which they have
aversion. So that desire and love are the same thing; save that by desire, we
always signify the absence of the object; by love most commonly the presence of
the same. So also by aversion we signify the absence; and by hate, the presence of
the object" (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes,
ed. Sir William Molesworth [London: John Bohn, 1939]). Surely, Hobbes is right. If
desire requires the absence of the object, we need a word for that attitude that is
just like desire except that its object is present-the attitude that explains why one
would resist removal of the object. Remove the object and this attitude is 'desire'.
But then why not just say that 'love' and 'desire' are just the same state-whether
the object is present or absent? Or at least say that 'love' and 'desire' are instances
of some single generic desire-state? As Hobbes says, "love and desire are the same
thing."
1
music certainly seems sufficient to show you not are enjoying listening to it.
The following considerations provide reinforce this conclusion. Imagine
Smith was attending a party which he left after only staying a short while; he
complains that he wanted nothing the party had to offer. He mitigates these
complaints, however, by confessing that the party was not completely
wretched, and that he actually enjoyed it a little. If this confession is
consistent with Smith's claim that he wanted nothing the party had to offer,
then Smith enjoys the party without any relevant desire. But why should
one grant that the confession and the claim are consistent? Suppose we ask
Smith what it was that he enjoyed about the party. Smith might refuse to
answer this question, for he might insist that he just enjoyed attending the
party without enjoying any particular aspect of the party. For the moment,
however, let's suppose he answers us by saying that he enjoyed dancing, but
he denies he wanted to dance, and he does not merely mean that he did not
desire to dance prior to dancing, he means that, throughout the time he was
purportedly enjoying dancing, he did not desire to dance. As in the
indifferently-performed-music example, the complete lack of a desire to
dance is sufficient to establish that Smith did not enjoy dancing. The same
considerations would apply if Smith said that what he enjoyed was not
dancing but talking with friends, or listening to music, or watching the
people, or whatever. In fact, it is difficult to see how Smith can provide any
convincing answer to the question of what it was about the party that he
enjoyed. But, as we already noted, Smith may reject the question and insist
that, while he, neither desired nor enjoyed any particular thing the party had
to offer, he nonetheless enjoyed attending the party. Suppose that this is
what Smith does, and suppose that he also insists that, even though he
enjoyed attending the party, he did not want to be there at all. Is this
sufficient to cast doubt on the claim that desiring to Φ is a necessary
condition of enjoying Φ? Surely not. Smith at no time desires to attend the
party, and does not have any desire for anything the party has to offerdancing, music, conversations with friends, or anything else. This is a crystal
clear example of not enjoying a party.
We conclude that one enjoys having an experience or engage in an
activity Φ only if one desires to have or do Φ. This formulation does not,
however, provide a sufficiently perspicuous specification of the required
desire. To begin with, Φ is an individual experience or activity about which
one has a desire. We will express this by saying that one desires, of Φ, that
it occur. Thus, if you are enjoying the experience of tasting bittersweet
chocolate, we will describe you as desiring, of that experience, that it occur.
This is simply an instance of the following standard Quinean convention.
Where ‘[’ and ‘]’ are the left and right Quinean corner quotes, a singular term
[t] may be substituted salva veritate for a term [t'] in the context [ ...
desires, of t, that . . .] given the true identity [t = t’]. We need one further
refinement in our description of desires. To this end, imagine you are
enjoying the experience of tasting bittersweet chocolate. The
bittersweetness creates and pervades a gustatory field that captures your
attention, and it is this bittersweetness that is the aspect of the experience
that you desire. We will express this by saying that you desire, of the
experience of tasting the chocolate, under the feature bittersweet, that it
occur. The “of, under” device is cumbersome and largely unnecessary if one
is simply describing particular instances of enjoyment (one can just say, for
example, “It is the bittersweetness of the taste that Jones enjoys and
desires”), but it is essential if we are to have a perspicuous way of talking in
general about enjoyment and desire.
Our general claim is that when one enjoys having or doing Φ, there is
an array A of one or more features such that one desires, of Φ, under A, that
it occur. Take experiences first. The essential point is that to experience
something is to experience as being some way. To experience the taste of
chocolate is to experience it as bittersweet, or sweet, or as chocolaty, or
whatever. One’s experiences always present themselves as experiences of a
certain sort. There are no “raw feels,” no experiences that we have without
apprehending them as experiences of a certain sort. Thus, to desire to have
an experience is to desire to have an experience of a certain sort. In our
terminology, it is to desire, of the experience, under some array A of
features, that it should occur. A similar point holds for activities. Suppose
you are enjoying singing along to a rendition of the choral finale of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. You hear the music and the singers, and, in a
swirl of emotions, memories, and associations, you feel and hear yourself
sing “Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.”
In short, you are aware of the
activity has having a variety of features, and it is the realization of these
features (or some subset of them) that you desire. Again, we express this
by saying that you desire, of your activity of singing along, under the
relevant array of features, that it should occur.
To summarize, when one enjoys having or doing Φ, there is an array
of features A such that one desires, of Φ, under A, that it should occur. We
take it to be clear that when asked, “What did you enjoy about it?”, one
answers by specifying (some of) the features in A. In such a case, we will
say x enjoys Φ under A. The “under A” simply provides an explicit
representation of what is implicit in our day in day out description of people
as enjoying experiences and activities: namely, that there is some desire
array of features that are the enjoyers would identify in response to the
question, “What do you enjoy about it?” We will therefore define enjoyment
by completing “x enjoys Φ under A if and only if ...”