GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

404
ETHICS
theory of pleasure renders intelligible, for example, that
bitter lesson of experience which teaches that you cannot
repeat a pleasure. You have gone, let us say, to a concert
to hear a Mozart quartet and have heard it with passionate
enjoyment. Ravished by the memory of intense pleasure
which the beauty of Mozart's music engendered, you go
to hear the quartet a second timft, and, the second time,
it is surprisingly unsatisfying. You come away disappointed,
almost disillusioned. What is the reason for your disappointment?
It is, the by-product theory of pleasure would
suggest, that on the second occasion, you were aiming
directly at pleasure. The motives which prompted your
two visits to the concert were, in fact, different motives.
On the first occasion you wanted to hear the music for its
own sake; on the second, to re-experience the pleasure which
the music on the first occasion.
you obtained from hearing
The motive for your action, in fact, on the second occasion,
was not the desire to hear music, but the desire to experience
pleasure.
THE MORALISTS ON THE DIRECT PURSUIT OF
PLEASURE. There is, perhaps, no truth which men
more habitually neglect than the truth that pleasure may
not be pursued directly, and no neglect for which moralists
have more persistently rebuked them. Most of the poets 1
admonitions on the subject of the vanity of human wishes
are probably derivable from their intuitive perception of
the mistake of direct pleasure seeking. The following speech
by Mrs. Quarks in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point
may be taken as a typical statement of the truth which
the poets have discerned, conveyed with a moralist's
habitual irritation at the folly of his contemporaries.
"'I fed so enormously much happier since I've been
here, with you,' she announced hardly more than a week
after her arrival.
'"It's because you're not trying to be happy or wondering
why you should have been made unhappy, because