What is the Highest Form of Pleasure?

Ren

Ren

Seeker at heart
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"The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral." Aristippus (453-356 BC)

"Dancing, the theatre, society, card-playing, games of chance, horses, women, drinking, traveling, and so on... are not enough to ward off boredom where intellectual pleasures are rendered impossible by lack of intellectual needs. Thus a peculiar characteristic of the philistine is a dull, dry seriousness akin to that of animals." Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Separated by two millennia, the hedonist Aristippus, a pupil of Socrates, and post-Kantian Arthur Schopenhauer are having a debate about the highest form of pleasure. For the former, pleasure of the highest form is in the moment, spontaneous, and physical. For the latter, it is intellectual: spontaneous pleasures end up in boredom, and worse, they make us dependent on them, and expose us to the pain of lack until they are met. Intellectual pleasures protect us from that lack... but they seem to be less intense.

Who do you agree with? Let's argue.

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versus........ *dramatic drumroll*

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Ren said:
“Directly after copulation, the devil's laughter is heard.” Schopenhauer
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I think that Schopenhauer makes a good point. Firstly, becoming a parent is a lot of responsibility. After that, how does one justify the imposition of existence?
 
Pin said:
Firstly, becoming a parent is a lot of responsibility. After that, how does one justify the imposition of existence?
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I could totally picture Jordan Peterson saying that during a lecture while wildly flailing his arms and making dramatic facial expressions.
 
I think this whole thread is mental masturbation

JK...hahaha.
I think the highest form of pleasure is the feeling of love...it has it’s many offshoots, but love is central.
 
This might be a pseudo-problem founded on the presumption that very different kinds of delights can firstly be easily categorised under the labels "physical" and "intellectual", and secondly made commensurate both within the category (dancing versus singing) and against each other (physical versus intellectual). Yes, we call all kinds of nice feelings pleasures, but the concept is very vague and we have no universal scale. I guess we could use some materialist reduction like defining pleasure by dopamine level, but that would be very crude and hence not pleasurable enough to consider seriously.

So, if you want to find an answer, you must first define what you mean by pleasure. That's why Aristippus and Schopenhauer can come to such different conclusions: they are using different examples and different scales to define the concept itself, after which it is very easy to say that the examples you yourself provided demonstrate the highest forms of pleasure. Seems kind of circular, doesn't it? Or in any case, the conclusion is already present in the premise (which is the concept of pleasure you choose).

I think the real question might be: can there be a concept of pleasure that contains all these examples, intellectual and physical ones, in a way that makes them universally comparable to each other? I think the answer is no, because the way we judge the meaning, the duration, and the intensity of pleasure is highly subjective.
 
Ren said:
Lmao, Aristippus in particular, his profile is pure sleaze
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I was googling random things for a joke here, and I found the best defense of everything ever.
Just gonna play my Hegel card when shit gets weird.
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