Maverick Philosopher

The End of Moderation

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Pleasures of the Flesh, Mind, Spirit

Those who pursue the pleasures of the flesh alone do not know any better: they do not know the pleasures of the mind. Those who pursue the sensuous and intellectual pleasures alone know no better: they do not know the pleasures of the spirit resting in contemplative silence. All seek pleasure; your measure, however, is the type of pleasure you seek.

Katastematic and Kinetic Pleasures

David Kaston, emphasis added:

. . . happiness (eudaimonia), according to Epicurus, is not simply a neutral or privative condition but rather a form of pleasure in its own right — what Epicurus called catastematic or (following Cicero’s Latin translation) “static” as opposed to “kinetic” pleasure. Although the precise nature of this distinction is debated, kinetic pleasures seem to be of the non-necessary kind (see below), such as those resulting from agreeable odors or sounds, rather than deriving from replenishment, as in the case of hunger or thirst. The philosophical school known as the Cyrenaics advocated increasing desires and seeking ever new ways of gratifying them.

Epicurus objected that such pleasures are necessarily accompanied by distress, for they depend upon a lack that is painful (Plato had demonstrated the problematic nature of this kind of pleasure; see Gorgias 496C–497A, Philebus 31E–32D, 46A–50C). In addition, augmenting desires tends to intensify rather than reduce the mental agitation (a distressful state of mind) that Epicurean philosophy sought to eliminate. Catastematic pleasure, on the contrary, is (or is taken in) a state rather than a process: it is the pleasure that accompanies well-being as such. The Cyrenaics and others, such as Cicero, maintained, in turn, that this condition is not pleasurable but rather neutral — neither pleasurable nor painful.

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part Two (2021 Version)

Part One is here.

Some pains, though bad in themselves, are instrumentally good. You go for broke on your mountain bike. At the top of a long upgrade your calves are burning from the lactic acid build-up. But it's a 'good' pain. It is instrumentally good despite its intrinsic badness. You are satisfied with having 'flattened' that hill one more time. The net result of the workout is hedonically positive. But surely not all pains are classifiable as instrumentally good. Think of someone who suffers from severe chronic joint pain so bad that he can barely walk let alone pedal a bike. In alleviation thereof he daily ingests a cocktail of drugs with nasty side effects that make it impossible for him to think straight or accomplish anything. Surely the person's condition is evil. (But don't get hung up on the word 'evil' and don't assume that every evil is the responsibility of a finite agent. The evil of pain is a natural or physical, not a moral, evil.) Is this not a counterexample to the thesis that every evil is a privation or absence of good?　

Now pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' I developed this suggestion in Part One and found reason to reject it.

B. Or one might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. One might point to the fact that pains are often very useful warning signals that indicate that something is going wrong in the body or that some damage is being done to the body: the pains in my knees inform me that I am running too long and hard and am in danger of an overuse injury. On this suggestion, then, pains are real but not evil. Consequently, pains are not counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni.

But this response is not very convincing. There are several considerations.

1. If pains are warning signals, then they are instrumentally good. But what is instrumentally good may also be intrinsically evil. The searing pain in a burnt hand, though instrumentally good, is intrinsically evil. Its positive 'entity' (entitas in scholastic jargon) is not well accommodated on the classical doctrine that evils are privationes boni. Again, the pain is not the mere absence of the good of pleasure, but something positively bad. After all, the hand is not numb or as if anaesthetized; there is a positive sensation 'in' it, and this positive sensation is bad. So even if every pain served to warn us of bodily damage, that would not detract from the positive badness of the pain sensation. One cannot discount the intrinsic positive badness by pointing to the fact that the pain is instrumentally good.

2. If pains are warning signals, it seems that many of them could perform this function without being so excruciating. The intensity of many pains seems out of all proportion to the good that they do in warning us of bodily damage. This excruciating intensity is part of the evil of pain. 

In The Human Predicament, David  Benatar adduces the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77) There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) 

3. It is a fact that the pain in my hand that warns me to remove it from the hot stove typically does not subside when the hand is removed. It continues to hurt. But what good purpose does this serve given that the warning has been heeded and the hand removed from the hot stove? The argument that pain is good, not evil, because it warns us about bodily damage fails to account for the pain that persists after the warning has been heeded. The pain in my burnt hand continues, of course, because the hand has been damaged; but then that pain is intrinsically and positively evil and the evil cannot be discounted in the way the pain at the time of the contact of hand with stove can be discounted.

4. There is no necessity that a warning system be painful. A robotic arm could have a sensor that causes the arm to retract from a furnace when the furnace temperature becomes damagingly high. The robot would feel nothing. We might have had that sort of painless warning system.

My interim conclusion may be set forth as follows:

Pains are natural evils

The evil of pain is not a mere absence of good

Ergo

Not all evils are privationes boni.

REFERENCES: Jorge J. E. Gracia, "Evil and the Transcendentality of Goodness: Suarez's Solution to the Problem of Positive Evils" in Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness (Cornell UP, 1991), pp. 151-176. David Benatar, The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017)

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part One (2021 Version)

For Vito Caiati.  This 2021 version of a November 2010 post corrects unclarities, infelicities of expression, and outright errors in the initial entry . And the font is more legible for ancient eyes.

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When theists are confronted by atheists with the various arguments from evil, the former should not reject the premise that objective evil exists.  That would eliminate the problem, but eliminativism here as elsewhere in philosophy is a shabby evasion. (Example: How does brain activity give rise to consciousness? No problem! Consciousness is an illusion!) Evil exists and it is not merely subjective. But the same is true of holes. See Holes and Their Mode of Being.  Holes are not nothing, and that is objectively the case despite their being absences.  You could say that holes have no positive entitative status and are only as privations.  (Curiously, as argued in the linked entry, they are empirically detectable absences which is another reason to hold that they are not nothing.)

So, to accommodate the objective reality of evil we should consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present --namely, the diseases and wounds -- go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, -- the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils -- that is, privations of the good which we call health -- are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem -- dating back beyond David Hume to Epicurus -- of reconciling the existence of God (as traditionally defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first  note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.  In fact, I will lay it down as a condition of adequacy for any theory of evil that evil not be hypostatized.  If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then evil is not a substance.  That way lies Manicheanism.  There are no two co-equal 'principles' eternally at war, Good and Evil.  

The Problem of Pain

But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils as opposed to moral evils that come into the world via a misuse of free will.  Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The  what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. (This hyphenated locution from Thomas Nagel.) It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positively evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.  And so we cannot dismiss evil as privatio boni.

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, clinical depression, etc.

Two Possible Responses

Felt pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that felt pains are evil but that the painfulness of a felt pain is a matter of projection.  One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. I am not talking about the physical damage to the knee, if any, or about anything physical. By the experiential substratum I mean the felt datum precisely and only as felt, as lived though, as experienced.  I am talking about the physical pain as a phenomenal datum. The painfulness of this felt pain is something else again. On the objection now being considered, the painfulness of the felt pain is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The experiential substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." "Master desire and aversion!" Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness.  One reduces the painfulness but without eliminating the felt pain. You still feel the sensation, but you have withheld the aversive overlay. If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent.   This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain.   Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. And a good Stoic one as well.  But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

I conclude that plenty of felt pains are not only objectively real but also objectively evil: their evilness is not a subjective addition.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil since they are outweighed by greater goods. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for Part II. Brevity is the soul of blog.

C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil

In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed.  This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects.  "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."

So far, so good. It is equally true, however,  that two people being tortured to death  is worse than one person  being tortured to death.  Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.

I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists.  Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe."  And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.) 

My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.

Suffering Pleasure

We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be patient rather than agent, to be acted upon, to be in the thrall of another, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self.  Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:

. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.

It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities.

The mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won't advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.

On the Suffering of Non-Human Animals

Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal suffers. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.

The Platonist and the Hedonist

I am a Platonist (broadly speaking), but here I give the floor to the hedonist. The true philosopher aims to examine every side of every issue. He is, qua philosopher, no ideologue and no dogmatist. 

Platonist: You pursue paltry pleasures that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy. 

Hedonist: You  pursue objects lofty and lasting, but with no assurance that they exist. I have all the assurance I need, that of the senses.  The sensuous pleasures I attain I can repeat, and in that repetition I have the sign and seal of their reality. The real is repeatable.

You claim to have been vouchsafed intimations of the  Absolute and glimpses behind the veil, but can you repeat those experiences? Do others have them? If few have had them, and those few only a few times in their lives, does that not support the view that those experiences, real as experiences, yet lack reality-reference? No experience proves anything. One man's revelation is another's random neuronal swerve or brain fart.

I grant you that the pleasure of orgasm, the keenest of the fleshly pleasures, is fleeting and that no instance of such pleasure is equipped to put an end to sexual desire. No orgasm is finally satisfactory. One is left hankering for a repeat performance.  One literally itches for more. And what is true of orgasm is true of the less commanding allurements of the flesh.  I will also grant you that no series of repetitions, no matter how  protracted, can render us satisfied in full.  I am even inclined to grant you that one is seduced into an infinite process, a sort of Hegelian bad infinity, that could be called addiction.

Why waste your life on illusions like a monk in a monastery when you could live life to the full, a life that is as real as it gets? Why do you suppose impermanence is an index of unreality and lack of value?

F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain

This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.

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I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.   I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.

How do I know that Bradley is right?  By doing a little phenomenology.  Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation.  At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree.  Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself -- pick your favorite phraseology.  The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not.  No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.'  At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.'  And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments?  Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.

ADDENDA (11 December 2020)

1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore  every mental state is object-directed.  I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:

Let's think about Searle's example of an itch, one 'in' the scalp, say. Not every mental item is a conscious item, but this itch I feel right now is a conscious mental item. Attending to this datum, a distinction suggests itself: there is the qualitative character of the itch, its sensory quale or raw feel, and there is its unpleasantness. Since I am attending to the itch, it is the intentional object of a series of acts of phenomenological reflection. At the same time of course, I am 'living' the itch, not just reflecting on it and analyzing it. The itch is an experience, an Erlebnis in something like Husserl's sense; it is something man erlebt, one lives through.

Now the question is whether the itch itself is directed to an object or 'takes an accusative.' Please don't confuse this question with the question whether the itch can itself be made the intentional object of acts of reflection. Of course it can, and I just did. But that is not to say that the itch has an intentional object. Attending carefully to the itch as it presents itself to me, I discern no object to which it points. Surely Searle is right: itches and the like are not about anything in the way a desire to drink a cold beer is about drinking a cold beer, or the seeing of a bobcat is about a bobcat and not a tire iron or nothing at all.

2) I suggest above that some questions in philosophy can be answered phenomenologically, just by carefully attending to what is qiven, the itch sensation in our example, under bracketing of all questions about causes and effects. One compares the felt itch, precisely as felt, with a clearly object-directed conscious mental state such as desiring to be itch-free.  The act of desiring is obviously a desiring of something, namely, being itch-free.  The act (intentional experience) refers beyond itself to something not contained within it. One cannot just desire; necessarily, to desire is to desire something that is no part of the act of desiring. Having done the comparison, one just 'sees' the difference: it is not intrinsic to sensory qualia that they refer to anything beyond themselves in such a way as to present an object to a subject; but this is intrinsic to intentional states.  As Bradley puts it, sensory qualia,  "have no reference to anything else . . . ."  They have "no meaning whatsoever." That is, they do not mean, signify, intend, or refer.  Qualia have content alright, but not intentional or representative content. (Cf. Husserl's distinction between descriptive and intentional content, Log. Inv. II, 576 ff.)

3) Was I able to make my point above with phenomenology alone thereby avoiding dialectic or argument entirely?  No, I argued in a way that can be explicitly set forth as follows:

a) Some sensory qualia  are not object-directed.
b) All sensory qualia are mental states.
Therefore
c) Some mental states are not object-directed.

I had to reason to my conclusion, but I did so from a premise -- (a) -- the evidence for which is phenomenological.  To be precise, (a) itself is a conclusion of an inference from 'This itch sensation is not object-directed.'  Phenomenology needs dialectic and vice versa.

4) In the comment thread to the linked entry above, Harry Binswanger, the noted Objectivist (follower of Ayn Rand ), gives essentially the following argument against that thesis that some mental states are non-intentional:

d) An itch is a bodily sensation.
e) The intentional objects of bodily sensations are states of one's body.
Therefore
f) An itch is an intentional mental state.

But in what sense is an itch a bodily sensation? Only in the sense that its cause is physical. In itself, the itch is not bodily or physical but mental.  It is a mental state with a physical cause. But one ought not confuse cause with intentional object, a mistake that Husserl exposes at Log. Inv. II, 572. Binswanger's argument commits this very mistake. Whatever the cause in the scalp or elsewhere of the itchy sensation, that cause is not presented by the sensory state.  The state has a cause but no intentional object.

This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.

..........................................

I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.   I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.

How do I know that Bradley is right?  By doing a little phenomenology.  Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation.  At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree.  Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself -- pick your favorite phraseology.  The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not.  No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.'  At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.'  And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments?  Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.

ADDENDA (11 December 2020)

1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore  every mental state is object-directed.  I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:

Let's think about Searle's example of an itch, one 'in' the scalp, say. Not every mental item is a conscious item, but this itch I feel right now is a conscious mental item. Attending to this datum, a distinction suggests itself: there is the qualitative character of the itch, its sensory quale or raw feel, and there is its unpleasantness. Since I am attending to the itch, it is the intentional object of a series of acts of phenomenological reflection. At the same time of course, I am 'living' the itch, not just reflecting on it and analyzing it. The itch is an experience, an Erlebnis in something like Husserl's sense; it is something man erlebt, one lives through.

Now the question is whether the itch itself is directed to an object or 'takes an accusative.' Please don't confuse this question with the question whether the itch can itself be made the intentional object of acts of reflection. Of course it can, and I just did. But that is not to say that the itch has an intentional object. Attending carefully to the itch as it presents itself to me, I discern no object to which it points. Surely Searle is right: itches and the like are not about anything in the way a desire to drink a cold beer is about drinking a cold beer, or the seeing of a bobcat is about a bobcat and not a tire iron or nothing at all.

2) I suggest above that some questions in philosophy can be answered phenomenologically, just by carefully attending to what is qiven, the itch sensation in our example, under bracketing of all questions about causes and effects. One compares the felt itch, precisely as felt, with a clearly object-directed conscious mental state such as desiring to be itch-free.  The act of desiring is obviously a desiring of something, namely, being itch-free.  The act (intentional experience) refers beyond itself to something not contained within it. One cannot just desire; necessarily, to desire is to desire something that is no part of the act of desiring. Having done the comparison, one just 'sees' the difference: it is not intrinsic to sensory qualia that they refer to anything beyond themselves in such a way as to present an object to a subject; but this is intrinsic to intentional states.  As Bradley puts it, sensory qualia,  "have no reference to anything else . . . ."  They have "no meaning whatsoever." That is, they do not mean, signify, intend, or refer.  Qualia have content alright, but not intentional or representative content. (Cf. Husserl's distinction between descriptive and intentional content, Log. Inv. II, 576 ff.)

3) Was I able to make my point above with phenomenology alone thereby avoiding dialectic or argument entirely?  No, I argued in a way that can be explicitly set forth as follows:

a) Some sensory qualia  are not object-directed.
b) All sensory qualia are mental states.
Therefore
c) Some mental states are not object-directed.

I had to reason to my conclusion, but I did so from a premise -- (a) -- the evidence for which is phenomenological.  To be precise, (a) itself is a conclusion of an inference from 'This itch sensation is not object-directed.'  Phenomenology needs dialectic and vice versa.

4) In the comment thread to the linked entry above, Harry Binswanger, the noted Objectivist (follower of Ayn Rand ), gives essentially the following argument against that thesis that some mental states are non-intentional:

d) An itch is a bodily sensation.
e) The intentional objects of bodily sensations are states of one's body.
Therefore
f) An itch is an intentional mental state.

But in what sense is an itch a bodily sensation? Only in the sense that its cause is physical. In itself, the itch is not bodily or physical but mental.  It is a mental state with a physical cause. But one ought not confuse cause with intentional object, a mistake that Husserl exposes at Log. Inv. II, 572. Binswanger's argument commits this very mistake. Whatever the cause in the scalp or elsewhere of the itchy sensation, that cause is not presented by the sensory state.  The state has a cause but no intentional object.

The End of Moderation

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29:

Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue.

A penetrating observation.  What is the end or goal of moderation? Haecker is rejecting the notion that the purpose of moderation, conceived as a virtue, is to maximize the intensity and duration of pleasure. Of course, moderation can be used for that end -- but then it ceases to be a virtue. For example, if I am immoderate in my use of alcohol and drugs, I will destroy my body, and with it my capacity for pleasure. So I must limit my pleasure to my capacity for pleasure. And the same holds for immoderation in eating and sexual indulgence. The sex monkey can kill you if you let him run loose. And even if one's immoderation does not lead to an early death, it can eventuate in a jadedness at odds with enjoyment. So moderation can be recommended merely on hedonistic grounds. The true hedonist must of necessity be a man of moderation. If so, then the ill-starred John Belushi, who took the 'speedball' (heroin + cocaine) express to Kingdom Come, did not even succeed at being a very good hedonist.

But if enjoyment is the end of moderation, then moderation as a virtue is at an end. Haecker, however, does not tell us what the end of moderation as a virtue is. He would presumably not disagree with the claim that the goal of moderation as a virtue is a freedom from pleasure and pain that allows one to pursue higher goods. He who is enslaved to his lusts is simply not free to pursue a truer and higher life.

Pain and Time: An Aporetic Triad

Here are three extremely plausible propositions that cannot all be true:

1) A wholly past (felt) pain is not nothing: it is real.

2) For (felt) pains, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived.

3) Wholly past (felt) pains are not perceived.

Ad (1): To say that an item is wholly past is to say that it does not overlap the present. A felt or phenomenal pain is a pain exactly as it is experienced  from the first-person point of view of the one who endures it, with all and only the properties it appears to have from the point of view of the one who endures it.  It is not to be confused with the physical cause of the pain if there is one. Now yesterday's excruciating migraine headache, which is wholly past, is not nothing: it happened. It is now an object of veridical memory. Since the memory is veridical, its intentional object cannot be unreal.  The pain  is also a subject of presently true past-tensed statements such as 'The pain was awful.' Given that veritas sequitur esse, that no true statement is about what is wholly unreal or nonexistent, yesterday's migraine pain cannot be unreal or nonexistent. The remembered wholly past pain is actual not merely possible; factual not fictional; real not imaginary.  Of course, it is not temporally present. But it is real nonetheless.  It is or exists. It is included in the ontological inventory.  To deny this is to deny the reality of the past. 

Ad (2): The being or existence of a felt pain is just its being-perceived.  A felt pain cannot exist apart from its being experienced. Again, it is not to be confused with an external, objective, physical cause of the pain sensation, if there is one.  Esse est percipi is not true of the physical cause of the felt pain.  But surely it is true of the pain precisely as it is endured from the first-person perspective of the one who endures it.

Ad (3): Yesterday's particular pains are over, and thank goodness: they are not being perceived or felt or experienced by anyone.  

Each of these propositions is extremely plausible if not self-evident. Each is, or is very close to being, a Moorean fact, a datum, a given, something not reasonably denied. I myself am inclined to say that each of the limbs of the triad is true. But of course they cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction.  Any two limbs of the triad entail the negation of the remaining limb. For example, The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).  What we have here, then, is a paradigmatic philosophical problem: apparent data in logical conflict.

To avoid a logical contradiction, we must reject or revise one or more of the propositions in a principled way, i.e., by endorsing a theory that excludes the proposition.  Here are four solution strategies:

A. Deny (1) by Adopting Presentism. This is the view that all and only what exists now, exists.  This is not the tautology that all and only what exists now exists now, or exists in the present-tensed sense of 'exists.' It is a substantive (non-tautological) and highly controversial metaphysical thesis that restricts the ontological inventory to temporally present items.  To avoid tautology, we can formulate it like this: all and only the temporally present exists simpliciter.  (What exactly 'simpliciter' means here is of course part of the problem. Tenseless existence is presumably the best candidate for existence simpliciter.) Presentism entails that wholly past and wholly future items do not exist, are not real. So yesterday's pain does not exist simpliciter, and (1) is false. Problem solved.  The past pain, being wholly past, is nothing at all. It is not just that it is now nothing at all -- which is a mere tautology given the standard meanings of  'past,' 'present,' and 'now' -- but that it is nothing at all, period!

But of course the problem is solved only if presentism makes sense and is true.  And that is a big 'if.'

B. Deny (1) by Rejecting Veritas Sequitur Esse. 'JFK was assassinated' is past-tensed but presently true.  It is true now that he was assassinated. But there are no truths about what does not exist. So I reason: since 'JFK was assassinated' is true, and is about JFK, he must (tenselessly) exist: wholly past items exist (are real, have being) despite being temporally non-present. You might resist my conclusion by making a Meinongian move: there are truths about beingless items and one can refer to such items.  Even though JFK has ceased to exist, he is still in some sense available to serve as an object of reference and a subject of true statements.

C. Deny (2) by Adopting  Materialism about the Mental. A token-token identity theorist will say that a particular pain episode is just a brain state. Now such a state, being wholly objective, can exist without being felt by anyone, in which case (2) is false. The eliminative materialist proposes a more radical solution: there are no mental states at all. Therefore, there are no felt pains and (2) is false.  

D. Deny (3) by Adopting 'Eternalism.'  This is a position in the philosophy of time entailed by the B-theory of time. The B-theorist denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege.  All times and their occupants are both temporally and existentially equal. Every time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter.  This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness.  There just is no irreducible monadic mind-independent property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it.  To exist is to exist tenselessly.  The B-theory excludes presentism according to which there is a genuine, irreducible, property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property.  Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent.  If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist, not just now (which is trivial) but at all.  The B-theory leads to what is known in the trade as 'eternalism' according to which the catalog of what exists is not exhausted by present items, but includes past and future ones as well.  See here for more.

If eternalism is true, then (3) above is false. The third limb of our antilogism states that past felt pains are not perceived. But if not perceived, then they do not exist. But on eternalism they do exist, tenselessly, whence it follows that yesterday's headache is tenselessly being perceived, whatever that might mean.

In a thorough discussion, I would then proceed to argue that each of these four attempts at a solution requires theories that are as problematic as the original problems.  Once that case is made, a case will have been made that the above problem is an aporia in a strict sense, a problem that is fully intelligible and genuine, but insoluble by us.

Addendum (11/18)

Jonathan Barber writes, 

I think you could distinguish between (a) the quale of pain (the raw sense data) and (b) the experience of pain – the mental effect produced by the raw sense data. Past qualia are not real - they simply do not exist. Past experiences are real. So in proposition 1 of your aporetic triad you are using 'pain' in sense (b), whereas in propositions 2 and 3 you are using 'pain' in sense (a).

Response.  Barber's criticism, in terms I find more congenial, would go like this. There is a difference between a pain experience and its content, where the latter is the sensory quale. Past qualia are not real. Past experiences are real.  'Felt pain' in (1) refers to the experience whereas in 'felt pain' in (2) and (3) refer to the quale. I would say in response that while one can distinguish in thought between experience and quale, neither can exist in reality without the other.  So if the past pain experience exists, then so does its qualitative content.

Suffering Without Evil?

The following entry has been languishing in the cloud for going on ten years.  I think I'll post it now, warts and all.

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I argued earlier that there can be instances of evil that do not involve suffering. Now I consider the converse question: Can there be instances of suffering that are not instances of evil? As I read the following passage from a 1978 article by William Rowe, Rowe is claiming that every instance of intense animal or human suffering is an instance of evil. It seems to me, however, that there are instances of intense human suffering that are not evil. In The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism Rowe writes:

(show)

In developing the argument for atheism based on the existence of evil, it will be useful to focus on some particular evil that our world contains in considerable abundance. Intense human and animal suffering, for example, occurs daily and in great plenitude in our world. Such intense suffering is a clear case of evil. Of course, if the intense suffering leads to some greater good, a good we could not have obtained without undergoing the suffering in question, we  might conclude that the suffering is justified, but it remains an evil nevertheless. For we must not confuse the intense suffering in and of itself with the good things to which it sometimes leads or of which it may be a necessary part. Intense human or animal suffering is in itself bad, an evil, even though it may sometimes be justified by virtue of being a part of, or leading to, some good which is unobtainable without it. What is evil in itself may sometimes be good as a means because it leads to something that is good in itself. In such a case, while remaining an evil in itself, the intense human or animal suffering is, nevertheless, an evil which someone might be morally justified in permitting.

Suppose that to be restored to health a child must undergo an extremely painful medical treatment. So the parents of the child allow the treatment to be administered. We will agree that the infliction of the suffering upon the child is morally justified by the fact that the treatment is necessary to prevent a greater evil which we may assume to be the child's death. Now what Rowe is saying above is that in a case like this, the suffering is (morally) justified but evil nevertheless.

I find this difficult to understand. It sounds like a contradiction. For if the infliction of the suffering is morally justified, then the infliction is morally permissible. But if the suffering is morally evil, then its infliction is also morally evil, which is to say that its infliction is morally impermissible. But surely it is a contradiction to affirm of any action A that A is both morally permissible and morally impermissible.

If the suffering is morally justified in that it leads to a good unobtainable without it, then the suffering, though certainly unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc., is not under the conditions specified evil. In the situation we are imagining, it is not only morally permissible but also morally obligatory for the parents to allow the painful treatment to be administered. This implies that the treatment ought to be administered. Therefore, if you say that the child's suffering remains evil despite its leading to a greater good, then you are committed to saying that the infliction of evil upon the child is morally obligatory, something that ought to be done. But this smacks of absurdity since it is hard to understand how any infliction of evil could be morally obligatory. Since in our example the infliction of suffering is morally permissible, I conclude that (intense) suffering is not in every case evil.

What Rowe is saying is that (intense) suffering is intrinsically evil, and that its evilness remains the same whether or not the suffering is instrumentally good. What I am suggesting contra Rowe is that whether or not suffering is evil depends on whether or not it is instrumentally good. For me, suffering that is instrumentally good is not evil. I concede of course that such suffering remains unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc. But I do not understand how suffering in itself, or intrinsically, can be said to be evil.

Perhaps the problem is that there are two senses of 'evil' in play, one non-normative the other normative, and that Rowe is appealing to the former sense. Accordingly, the non-normatively evil is that which elicits aversion. In this sense, mental and physical suffering is evil in that beings like us are prone to shun it. The normatively evil, on the other hand, is that which ought not exist. So perhaps my puzzle can be resolved by saying:

1. Every instance of suffering is evil in the non-normative sense that, as a matter of empirical fact, beings like us are prone to shun it. (Being prone to shun X does not entail the shunning of X.)

2. Some instances of suffering are not evil in the normative sense that it is false that they ought not exist.

3. If an instance of suffering conduces to a good that outweighs it, and the good is unobtainable by any other means, then the instance of suffering ought to exist. Thus the child's suffering in our example ought to exist. Admittedly, this sounds paradoxical. But note that this 'ought' is not categorical but hypothetical or conditional: the child's suffering ought to exist given that, on condition that, the treatment that causes it is the only way to avoid the child's death, which would be an evil worse than the child's suffering from the treatment.

4. (3) is not paradoxical or incoherent.

5. The moral goodness of God is called into question not by the existence of evils in the non-normative sense, but by the existence of evils in the normative sense. Thus the mere existence of suffering, which is non-normatively evil, does not by itself cause a problem for the divine moral goodness. For it may well be that all instances of suffering are morally justifiable in the light of a greater good. This does not make these sufferings any less repugnant; but this repugnance is not a moral repugnance but the non-normative property of thwarting desire.

Real Enough to Debase, but Not Real Enough to Satisfy

St. Augustine at Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me."

A paradox of pleasure.  Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their pursuers.

At the apogee of this mad trajectory, the pleasure pursued issues in death as in the case of David Carradine's death by auto-erotic asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room.  Is there any more extreme case of the insane abuse of the body as a pleasure factory?

Physical Pain: Some Distinctions and Theses

The topic of evil brought us to the topic of pain. Herewith, some distinctions and theses for your examination. With regard to physical pain, at least, we ought to distinguish among:

a) The physical substratum of the pain. The cause of the pain. In the case of lower back pain, for example, a pinched nerve. But not just the salient cause, e.g. the pinched nerve, but the totality of causal conditions in the body that 'underpin' the experience of pain. All that makes up the physical substratum of a physical pain.

b) The pain-as-felt, the felt pain. This is the pain one experiences or lives through. Pain as Er-lebnis. The phenomenal pain to which the subject of pain alone has access. (Access to the physical substratum is public; access to the felt pain is private.)  With respect to felt pain, esse est  percipi, to be is to be perceived. So for a felt pain, appearance and reality coincide. Its being as a mental datum is exhausted by its appearing.  This is not the case with the physical substratum of the pain.

The felt pain factors into two aspects:

c) The sensory quale of the felt pain, its raw feel to use an old expression of Herbert Feigl. This is the qualitative content, the Nagelian what-it-is-like of the felt  pain. Each pain feels like something to the one who has it, though he would be hard pressed to put this feeling into words.

d) The painfulness of the felt pain. The felt pain has a quality, but this quality is not the same as its painfulness. Thus I factor the felt pain into the sensory quale (raw feel) and the painfulness of it.   Suppose I am outside in the cold and I feel a stinging sensation in my  bare hands. It seems that the painfulness of this sensation depends, at least in part, on my attitude toward it, my aversion. Or consider any olfactory sensation you take to be unpleasant, the smell of cooking broccoli, say. One can learn to overcome such aversions, which is not to say that one overcomes the sensation itself. Or perhaps you are in a public restroom. You focus on the stench and remind yourself that it is only a sensation and one that betokens nothing harmful to the body. As a result of this reflection, the unpleasantness diminishes while the sensation itself remains constant. A reasonable inference from phenomena such as these is that the sensory quale of a pain and its painfulness are distinct, and not just conceptually, but in reality. In some cases it is the attitude of aversion that makes a sensory quale into a pain sensation, but I don't claim that this is true for all cases.

Two Theses

T1. Felt pain is mental, a conscious phenomenon. This is true of both physical and psychological pain. Physical pain, toothache, headache, backache and the like are called 'physical' because of their physical substrata -- see (a) above -- even though in themselves they are mental. Felt pain cannot be identified with any physical process. Correlated, but not identified.

T2. Felt physical pain is a conscious state with no intentional object. Pains are non-intentional experiences. They are not of or about anything in the way that believing and desiring are
object-directed. But here I need an argument since  some maintain that pains exhibit intentionality or object-directedness.

Suppose we compare a visual perceiving of my foot, and a feeling of pain 'in' my foot. The perceiving of my foot is an intentional experience: the act of perceiving 'takes an accusative,' is directed to an object. The perceiving presents the foot as having such and such properties. But what does the pain present? It doesn't present damage to the foot, although there presumably is damage to the foot, a torn Achilles tendon, perhaps. The torn tendon is the cause of the pain sensation, but it is not the intentional object of the pain sensation.   The torn tendon is hidden from the pain experience in the way the foot is not hidden from the visual experience. So what is the intentional object of the pain sensation? I say there is none. There is a pain sensation and its cause, but no intentional object. The cause is not presented to me by the pain sensation.

The relation of intentional experience to intentional object is nothing like the relation of pain to its cause. If X is caused by Y, then both X and Y must exist. But if X is an awareness-of Y, if X is   intentionally related to Y, then Y need not exist.

For more on non-intentional experiences, see the Intentionality category.

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part Two)

Part One is here.

Some pains, though bad in themselves, are instrumentally good. You go for broke on your mountain bike. At the top of a long upgrade your calves are burning from the lactic acid build-up. But it's a 'good' pain. It is instrumentally good despite its intrinsic badness. You are satisfied with having 'flattened' that hill one more time. The net result of the workout is hedonically positive. But surely not all pains are classifiable as instrumentally good. Think of someone who suffers from severe chronic joint pain so bad that he can barely walk let alone pedal a bike. In alleviation thereof he daily ingests a cocktail of drugs with nasty side effects that make it impossible for him to think straight or accomplish anything. Surely the person's condition is evil. (But don't get hung up on the word 'evil' and don't assume that every evil is the responsibility of a finite agent. The evil of pain is a natural or physical, not a moral, evil.) Is this not a counterexample to the thesis that every evil is a privation or absence of good?　

Now pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' I developed this suggestion in Part One  and found reason to reject it.

B. Or one might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. One might point to the fact that pains are often very useful warning signals that indicate that something is going wrong in the body or that some damage is being done to the body: the pains in my knees inform me that I am running too long and hard and am in danger of an overuse injury. On this suggestion, then, pains are real but not evil. Consequently, pains are not counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni.

But this response is not very convincing. There are several considerations.

1. If pains are warning signals, then they are instrumentally good. But what is instrumentally good may also be intrinsically evil. The searing pain in a burnt hand, though instrumentally good, is intrinsically evil. Its positive 'entity' (entitas in scholastic jargon) is apparently not well accommodated on the classical doctrine that evils are privationes boni. Again, the pain is not the mere absence of the good of pleasure, but something positively bad. After all, the hand is not numb or as if aenesthetized; there is a positive sensation 'in' it, and this positive sensation is bad. So even if every pain served to warn us of bodily damage, that would not detract from the positive badness of the pain sensation. One cannot discount the intrinsic positive badness by pointing to the fact that the pain is instrumentally good.

2. If pains are warning signals, it seems that many of them could perform this function without being so excruciating. The intensity of many pains seems out of all proportion to the good that they do in warning us of bodily damage. This excruciatingness is part of the evil of pain.

3. It is a fact that the pain in my hand that warns me to remove it from the hot stove typically does not subside when the hand is removed. It continues to hurt. But what good purpose does this serve given that the warning has been heeded and the hand removed from the hot stove? The argument that pain is good, not evil, because it warns us about bodily damage fails to account for the pain that persists after the warning has been heeded. The pain in my burnt hand continues, of course, because the hand has been damaged; but then that pain is intrinsically and positively evil and the evil cannot be discounted in the way the pain at the time of the contact of hand with stove can be discounted.

4. There is no necessity that a warning system be painful. A robotic arm could have a sensor that causes the arm to retract from a furnace when the furnace temperature becomes damagingly high. The robot would feel nothing. We might have had that sort of painless warning system.

My interim conclusion may be set forth as follows:

Pains are natural evils

The evil of pain is not a mere absence of good

Ergo

Not all evils are privationes boni.

REFERENCE: Jorge J. E. Gracia, "Evil and the Transcendentality of Goodness: Suarez's Solution to the Problem of Positive Evils" in Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness (Cornell UP, 1991), pp. 151-176.

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part One)

A reader recalled my posts on evil as privatio boni from the old blog and wants me to upload them to the new, which I will gladly do.  So far I managed to scare up two.  Here is the first.

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The goddess of blogging sent me Peter Lupu whose comments are a welcome stimulant. Peter displays the virtues of a good commenter and indeed co-worker: he is 'up to speed,' 'in there' with the terminology, and he knows how to oppose without becoming churlish. He tells me that theists, confronted with the logical argument from evil should not reject the premise that objective evil exists. I agree. But a good philosopher examines every aspect of a problem, no matter how bizarre it appears at first, and every premise and every inferential joint of every argument pertaining to the problem. So we need to consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

 For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present --namely, the diseases and wounds -- go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, -- the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils -- that is, privations of the good which we call health -- are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem -- dating back beyond Hume to Epicurus -- of reconciling the existence of God (as standardly defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first  note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.

The Problem of Pain

But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positive evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, etc.

Two Possible Responses. Pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. But the painfulness of this substratum is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness.  If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent.   This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain.   Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for another time.

The Perils of Pleasure

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. (Emphasis added.)

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

Nietzsche on Bentham, Mill, & Co.

"If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." (Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," #12.)

The art of the aphorism at its best.

In all fairness to the English I should point out that it was an Englishman who provided what is perhaps the best refutation of hedonism we have, namely, F. H. Bradley in his "Pleasure For Pleasure's Sake"  in Ethical Studies.

On the Suffering of Animals

Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.

Suffering Pleasure

We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be acted upon, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self. Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:

. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unseasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.

It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities. Tha mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won't advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.