Practical Hedonism

Part 1:  http://hedonix.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/equivocation/
Part 2:  http://hedonix.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/practical-hedonism/

Practical Hedonism
by Lloyd H. Whitling

Hedonism promotes healthy living

WHAT IS IMPRACTICAL ABOUT HEDONISM? Hedonism, in its basic form (that considers actions and choices only in a pleasure/pain scenario), must be semantically updated if it is to become meaningful to modern thought. The Greek philosopher known as the father of ethical hedonism, Epicurus (342-270 B.C.), expressed ethical hedonism as natural inclination to minimize pain and maximize pleasure in a way that was very advanced thinking for his time. By sticking with his original, outmoded terminology in their own presentations, modern writers discredit much that science has discovered about the biological, emotional and ethical nature of the human being and animated life forms in general. By limiting hedonism to being only about human beings, such authors discredit its universally natural application as something that has evolved into its current form among us. We apply it without much thought, and condemn it without a full, current conception of everything pertinent to it.

‘PLEASURE’ AND ‘PAIN’ ARE INACCURATE. To begin with, the terms ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ have induced too much distractive and counterproductive discussion due to their overly broad, yet self-limiting nature, and to the absence of any real definitions applied to them from the beginning. Modern language would assert ‘reward’ and ‘aversion’ in their stead, and then apply current knowledge to be gleaned about such subjects as ethology, homeostasis, sociology. The results can be as well applied to groups as to individuals, to cities, states and countries as easily as to any single entity. Such can be done without twisting semantical threads into patterns woven for self-support without any real-world application, as too often has been the case so far.

AS CURRENTLY UNDERSTOOD AND PRESENTED, HEDONISM SUFFERS CERTAIN WEAKNESSES. A real concern for those vying against hedonistic principles is about the abandonment of altruism as a pure and selfless process. If the only reason to  reject the philosophy of hedonism is because the current form of this philosophy makes genuinely selfless behavior impossible (as stated in
<http://www.ldsphilosopher.com/2008/08/11/the-pleasure-principle/>), that is actually not a valid reason at all. It is simply not a reason, and certainly not a defense that supports altruism as anything real nor makes a case for it as an ideal. We can understand that the introduction of altruism into topics about hedonism serve only as a decoy to keep a reader or listener from actually assessing either subject on its own merits. As an ethical process, altruism can be redefined according to whatever can eventually be found to be true about it. That can be shown to be a natural part of a hedonic process, once understood in modern terms, that is as natural to animated sentient beings as to anything else.

Hedonism teaches us to avoid unhealthy living

HEDONISM’S NATURAL OBJECTIVE: As was shown in an earlier script, the objective of hedonic behavior is to gain and maintain homeostasis, the physiological balance required for healthy physical and mental existence. Stress results from off-balanced conditions. Stress represents a real problem that has permeated modern living, so that a majority of us suffer from it with little relief. We do not enjoy homeostasis in our lives, more because of inhumane systems of irrational belief than for any other reason. Such beliefs are those which induce behavior that counters our own best interests, and go far beyond the religious persuasions that generally get accused at this point in any discussion. Homeostasis represents an advanced understanding of such ancient terms as ‘ataraxia’ and ‘eudaemonia’, and infers much about such ancient concepts as ’spirituality’, ‘bliss’, ‘ecstasy’ and ‘joy’, which are but temporary manifestations of it.

WHY ‘PAIN’ IS A WRONG LABEL: To our updated view of hedonism, then, whatever would induce bliss, joy, ecstasy, homeostasis, would be promoted by the sense of good that would become reinforced by them, the modern understanding of pleasure in a philosophical sense. Whatever would negate such a sense, then, would be the aversive reinforcement that Epicurus equated with pain (a word that arises from the same roots as penalty). Pain, however, can often be shown to contribute not only to homeostasis, but also to such states as bliss and ecstasy; as, for an example, the orgasm of coitus, a form of pain, but much sought after by any animal capable to experience it; or, the sneeze, also from pain, which restores a semblance of balance to the nostrils by clearing them.

The successful achievement of emotional balance opens us up to homeostasis however we go about it. The sense of unbalance drives altruistic impulses as much as it drives any attempts to alleviate stress. Awareness of impoverishment in the midst of affluence will drive any sensitive person to “give back” in ways hoped to counter the imbalance and make it go as much as possible away. That in no way demarks the altrusitic act as self-centered nor other-centered, but does show it to be an entirely natural response to an undesirable condition. The old, and obsolete, way to present both hedonism and altruism required acceptance or denial of selfishness as an end toward which action would be directed. It failed inasmuch as the selfishness of others, set up to benefit from “selfless” acts, never got acknowledged. In our practical view, the role of self becomes simply unimportant. That renders any such acts as automatically ’selfless.’

IS HEDONISM, THEN, TRULY ‘SELFISHNESS’ AS DESCRIBED? In a different scenario often offered to counter hedonism’s apparent selfish motives, the example of a man who risks his life by jumping into a river to save a child from drowning gets offered as an unquestionably selfless act (sometimes it is a dog that dies trying to save a human). Look at the scene as one in which balance is threatened by the fact of the drowning person’s plight: The river’s forces are far superior to the threatened person’s ability to overcome them. The man (or the dog) does not take time to contemplate his own weaknesses, but takes for granted that he will somehow overcome the odds. The only alternative is an irrational claim that the man (or the dog) purposefully added his own demise to that one already impending, and so selflessly gave up his own life so the other would not die alone.

So, a modern version of hedonism would not depict a simple, black/white two-dimensional pleasure/pain scenario from which human beings have developed their ethical apporaches to socialized existence. A modern, practical hedonism requires more than that in order to be complete and cogent. Reward, penalty and balance play equal roles on life’s stage, with stability, tranquility and health as rewards, and disease, injury and stress as punishments. That a pleasure/pain schema could be developed from that, and defended accordingly, ought to not surprise us. That the pain half of it should be forgotten for the sake of commerce or religion ought to be even less surprising.

IS THE MOST COMMON CRITICISM JUSTIFIABLE? A criticism could be leveled against our practical picture by stating how such a statement might seem judgmental, that claiming those who suffer diseases must somehow deserve them, the same as others somehow deserve their status and wealth. How foolish must we be, that we would expect conditions of heritage, such as existed before a person’s birth, were somehow earned before his or her existence had begun? No, whatever our circumstances or station, hedonism serves only to acknowledge that, whatever our circumstances, our actions have consequences. Reward and penalty serve as our mentors so that we can learn an ethical process of living, establish a set of values (rewards) and gain a sense of justice by gaining awareness of how others are affected much the same as ourselves by the same natural rules and their inherent rewards and penalties.

THE MORAL RESULT: Morality begins when humanity learns to turn that sense of justice into an established set of rules according to which we should act as a social animal. Ethics begins when humanity seeks to refine its rules into a precise system of formal laws with which to accord in our business relationships, the goals being fairness of trade and a balanced society that serves our needs and rewards our accomplishments while it serves as an umbrella under which we operate the processes of our shared existence. Morality, then–our sense of good and bad–arrives as a product of nature’s built-in mentoring devices, and not as a result of threatening impositions.

Copyright ©2008 by Lloyd H. Whitling.

 

Semantic Equivocation

Part 1: http://hedonix.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/equivocation/

Part 2: hedonix.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/practical-hedonism

by Lloyd H. Whitling

Most aspects of human endeavor become populated by those who reside at the extremes of misunderstanding and misinterpretation that originate within the camps of the sticklers and their opponents, the mitigators.

In semantics, stickler extremists demand only one definition for all words, and that those definitions should be granted by whatever philosophical, political or religious creed they most favor. Extremist mitigators, on the other hand, favor loose interpretation for the working room it provides (wiggle room, if you’d prefer), often to enable the meshing of disparate ideas into a cogent form.

EXAMPLE: Does the phrase “kill the light” mean to stand in front of it to cast a shadow?– to shoot it dead so it will never light again?– or something in between?

SO, WHAT IS IT YOU ARE CALLING ‘HEDONISM?’ Hedonism originated in ancient Greece as a natural philosophy wherein pleasure versus pain serve to guide our moral senses. That is what we should refer to now, and not the psychological, commercial or religious depictions that serve up pleasure as a goal in itself. Much has developed in various fields of science that serve to enhance the value of hedonic philosophy for anyone who would bother to make all the connections. My effort is to try to spare others the basic work so that hedonic philosophy can advance into a modern form of wisdom minus all the artifices and blather. Hedonism, once understood as a whole program, does not need all of that. It can stand on its own.

You will find that hedonism, as a natural philosophy, suffers from sticklerism. People who talk and write about hedonism’s happiness/pain scenario seem too often to be sticklers, especially when writing against it, and write their cricism according to their one-sided definition of hedonism while avoiding its original philosophical intent. I have read far too many essays about the many conditions that cannot qualify as ‘painful’ or ‘pleasurable’, however bad or good they make one feel. They seem to want to deny that the threat of Hell evokes pain-responses, or that the promise of Heaven elicits those of pleasure, which are hedonic interests.

Others seem willing to grant that all kinds of physical pain can be sensed as such, but that mental responses are irrelevant, with the same to be said about pleasure. Such stickler claims emanate from the same origins, often with anti-sexuality as their basis, so that physical pain (such as from sexually transmitted diseases) and sexual pleasure (described as booze, carousing, orgasm) become all that hedonism is about, and so Heaven and Hell stay unrelated to that.

Their sly ploy works wonders for their image among their semi-literate, gullible followers, and offers a hook that entices devils’ advocates to develop it for their own ends. As a result, the Internet fills up with misinformed BLOG pages about hedonism that cater to the commercial and religious views (even to the point of trying to develop a pleasure meter), only sparsely populated with pages from those whose studies allowed them to infer a picture far different from that commonly presented.

All of that gets mitigated by the “anything goes” crowd, usually in support of commerce. Pain gets forgotten by both sides in a distractive pursuit of pleasure that takes everybody off the main path and makes a side alley into the whole ball game. Pain and pleasure are not the goals of hedonism, but represent what is seen to be nature’s way of guiding us into evolutionarily beneficial behavior.

SO, WHAT ABOUT PAIN AND PLEASURE? It is correct to identify pain as a noun or verb referencing any condition or effect that signifies inconvenience, injury, distress or disease, whether mental or physical (the way you will find it in your dictionary). Let us oppose that with happiness and pleasure as synonyms (the same as our USA founding fathers and the ancient Greeks they favored in many remarks, and with which our handy thesaurus agrees without forcing it), and let that represent conditions opposing pain: soundness, tranquility and health. I insist that a study of ethology, and hedonism from its very roots, will bear that out. I must also insist that a study of religious and commercial documents about hedonism will bear out that with which this essay was begun.

Using your favorite search engine to ferret out documents about such subjects as homeostasis, ataraxia or eudaemonia will enlighten the diligent student with still more information in support of all the foregoing. Then, look to ethology to find your bearings and your natural reasoning.

There have been furtherances of such a natural understanding that have risen from recent developments in the fields of medicine (especially biological), psychology and sociology. All of it, taken together, can be assembled into a full-fledged philosophy of the kind the world needs that, widely adopted and practiced, subjected to refinements that could result from scientific study, would ascertain for all of us exactly what America’s founding fathers had visualized when they expressed our right for the pursuit of happiness. They had not seen Utopia, they had seen how to live, a natural way to understand how to live, and how to apply that barring interference from power-seeking groups with dominance agendas.

Feel assured that hedonism is a medically sound, practical philosophy when practiced to its fullest, with all its components kept intact. It today’s terms, hedonism is about an ongoing quest for balance that is natural for life-forms capable of autonomous movement. It can be shown how evolution favors such a quest, and that self-destructive life would soon die out at its own hands (1as have societies that favored cannibalism, especially of their own young, which should concern us about the immense willingness of advanced modern societies to send their own youngsters off to feed their war machines).

Neohedonism updates an ancient philosophy. Please look at my web page about something I am still learning. It rounds out hedonism’s “happiness” message, and makes it practical and practiceable:

<http://www.atheistlloyd.com/Hedonism/modern.html>

We can attain balance and still endure stress due to instability, as the web page demonstrates. The happiest, healthiest individuals, whether puppies or people, are those who are the most stably balanced, and those affected by their contagious attitudes. That applies to the physical and the mental aspects as they affect each of us.

The Xians have their godly triangle (Father/Son/Ghost) and we hedonic secular folks now have our own in Balance/ Stability/ Happiness. The difference is, ours is real, tangible, and obvious because it is demonstrable and verifiable, especially as opposed to the normal daily suffering of injury, distress and disease.

Things that other people do and say, words they use, should not bother us. That is one of the results of my having adopted those described as ‘religious’ for my own use, and so I think about my own meanings when I hear them or see them. You can do the same, and gain the same benefit.

EXAMPLE: My brother asked me whether he could say “God be with you” to me without my getting upset. I told him, “Of course.” When some one says ‘God’ I think ‘love’ (as in [1 John 4:8]< 8. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.> I do use that as a standard for assessing Xians and their messages. If the Xians actually practiced their religion in that manner, I would still be one of them. They don’t. I am not. When they don’t, then I get bothered, and seldom fail to tell them why according to their own written creed.

EXAMPLE 2: the word ’soul’ that the Xians use to label some aspect of a human that will live on after the person dies, does not mean a kind of ’spirit’ to me. I regard all of existence as being constituted of events in processes. The chaos of existence can be (at any instant) broken down to its smallest components, which will always be events in every aspect of existence.

In other words, nothing exists except as a result of events. Combined events contribute to processes, and those processes are what we see as ‘objective reality.’ All the processes are members of parent/child relationships, in which child processes conjoin to form larger ‘parent’ processes (as in a family tree): Atoms form materials form objects which are, themselves, part of still larger processes. (Atom plus atom plus atom plus atom = molecule; molecule plus molecule plus molecule = compound; compound plus compound plus compound = thing, and so 2forth in a hierarchy of processes.)

In such a scenario, we are the result of a conglomerate of processes, and we are living out the events in which we are but components. Every event branches into new events as the chaos of events interacts within itself. As events, we eventually die out, but the events we initiated, or to which we contributed, continue on in a cascading fashion, like tumbling dominoes. That is one thing I refer to as ’soul.’

There are others: for instance, the way black folks use soul (as in “She has real soul”) I find very acceptable as a reference to a person’s happily balanced image and the way it affects others. That joyous effect is invisible, intangible, but still very noticeable and desirable. Once you are onto this, you will find that an absence of it is just as noticeable (but undesirable), which will give you an image of my meaning for ‘zombie.’

That kind of way to understand existence seems essential to a full grasp of philosophical hedonism. All the events in which we perform result in processes that affect others. Our attitude while dealing with others throughout all the events in our lives puts the spin on how the processes will play out, long after our involvement has ended.

The attitude required to deny that steers us on a different course than would an attitude that would heighten a tendency to try to understand it. Each of us has that to be concerned with, and that to leave as out legacy, however large or small. That is our soul, not an object destined for a heaven or a Hell, but a condition we will leave behind us after our bodies have been buried or burned.]

WHY SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT MORALITY IF THERE’S NO GOD NAMED GOD? While the balancing act depicted on the web page makes a point, most people would declare it impertinent to their own lives. By viewing pleasure as an aspect of sin-tainted endeavors, most people position themselves as though standing off-center at the brink of a cliff.

Our stress-filled lives indicate the truth of that. Avoidance of a hedonic awareness, whether intentional or the result of simple ignorance (by somebody else’s intention) does not position us to maintain an awareness about any long-term effects that will result from our actions and choices. We get taught to think in the short-term, and it catches up to us in the long run.

Thinking in the short-term, too, makes us less aware of consequences afflicting others, and of others’ past actions that later afflict ourselves. Whether or not we ought to be worried about others’ perceptions about us, we should be concerned with whatever influences that interplay within the processes that involve them and us, and the nature of any feedback from which we may benefit or suffer.

Morality in natural terms refers to the consequences of our actions as other human beings are affected by them—and as they affect ourselves, since we do ourselves harm at cost to others. We benefit in many ways as a result of having developed a reputation for maintaining high standards, and we suffer when we allow ourselves to fall into ill repute.

To take a stand that there being no god, or no god named God, to express an opinion wherein it gets said that no reason exists for moral behavior, that it is meaningless, tells more about the person issuing that expression than it ever will about anyone else. There either is a god or none, and if none exists, then it changes nothing about meaning nor morality to pretend otherwise. If morality depends upon a nonexistent god, there is no morality in it, for its reason and meaning is held by what is never there. It matters not what one pretends, for a fact remains a fact, and facts are what require demonstration to establish them.

If no god can be shown, if no god can speak to all for itself, if all the prayers ever issued have the same effect as all the curses, there is no god. Since there is no god, but only self-chosen spokespeople whose processes of living have harmed their reputations, there is no god named God, no god named Allah, no god named Buddha, no god of any name beyond what was whittled from wood or carved from rock.

We are then left with what we will do for and to ourselves and our communities. Our reasons and meanings then arise from what gets agreed upon as just and right, and that best when verifiable from nature. Then, the scope of its process becomes the size of the universe, refined understanding reaches to beyond all borders, and war becomes a stigmata of ancient history and the many contesting schemas of politics and misinformed ideals reinforced by systems of belief.

With gods, mankind’s ears have remained deaf and our eyes blinded. Without a god, we get to hear misery’s cries and know we must respond ourselves if suffering will ever end. Death may bring oblivion, but we are foolish to think we’ll care. Life gets offered to us once, and it must be we who give or take away its meaning, and we who foolishly choose to suffer stress when blissful balance, harmony and tranquility demand us to step away from the precipice we fear.

IN CONCLUSION, the human being may be the most foolish product of evolution. The greater portion of our population, across the face of the globe, works hard for the downfall of their own best interests. Masses starve in Edens, nations steal from each other, we slaughter each other wholesale, all in the name of short-range gains for a few and the long-range loss of the majority.

If made modern by incorporating recent information acquired by many important fields of science, hedonism provides a path into a calmer future that would enable human advancement that we already rocket toward in the desperate fashion of today. Our survival as a species most likely depends on our successful adoption of new paradigms wherein we take a longer, stronger view of the way our current events will prevail upon the processes of the future. It is for the wise among us to recognize how different philosophies and systems of thought interfere with or promote our current well-being while steering us into the foggy realm the future represents to us. Hedonism, understood according to modern knowledge, may well be the better choice compared with our current ships’ captains. We would be a credit to our species were we to adopt it as our own, and deserve our own extinction were we to not even consider it, or where we would fend it off.

Hedonism suffers at the hands of sticklers and mitigators with agendas to promote. If no god exists, it makes no difference what we pretend, no god exists and morality based on fantasy cannot be enforced by others nor upheld for long by oneself. Hedonism expresses nature’s path to moral values.

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NOTES:______________

1: Lest this be taken as an unpatriotic political remark, let me point out the way our militaries have developed, which enables a few casualties on the high-tech side to result in massive casualties among the enemy and those who harbor them. One mad suicide bomber might kill or injure tens of victims, which his comrades will regard to be a high ration. One aircraft pilot, or one ship lobbing smart bombs into a terrorist stronghold, can eradicate thousands of terrorists and those who give them a place to hide. By so stating, I do not justify war, but support that military cannibalism is most prominent where advanced technologies remain unavailable.

2: It may seem backward logic to describe a parent process as a product of its children, but then, think: Is not every parent a parent only because of the children?