Enjoyment

What is it to enjoy something? An adequate answer is an essential for

our account of beauty. We contend that to judge something is beautiful is to

believe, on the basis of a special kind of enjoyment, that others will also

enjoy the item in that way. Our explanation and defense of that claim rests

on the account of enjoyment we give in this chapter. An account of

enjoyment is, however, of general interest. Enjoyment is a nexus at which

important concepts meet, including, in addition to beauty, the concepts of

feeling and reasons for action, and one goal of our account of enjoyment is to

exhibit systematic relations between enjoyment as a feeling, and enjoyment

as source of reasons for action. The feeling varies greatly; compare: the

watery relief of satisfying an urgent thirst; sexual gratification; a sudden whiff

of perfume; learning that one has received a fervently hoped for grant; the

thoughts, associations, and feelings aroused by reading the following lines

from the end of Faust, spoken by the angels who intervene to snatch Faust

from Mephistopheles: “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,/Den können wir

erlösen.” The variety of feeling does not, however, prevent enjoyment from

playing a standard explanatory-justificatory role. When asked, “Why do you

play so much chess?” one provides both an explanation and a justification by

offering, as one’s reason, “Because I enjoy it.”

We offer an account of enjoyment by completing the following

biconditional:

x enjoys Φ if and only if ... ,

where Φ is an experience or an activity of x. The restriction of values of ‘Φ’

to experiences and activities may sight seem questionable. After all, you can

enjoy a meal or a painting. But, of course, you can enjoy the meal only if you

eat it; and the painting, only if you look at it; and, in general, where y is

something other than an experience or activity, one enjoys y if and only if

one enjoys Φ, where Φ is a suitable experience or activity involving y. The

restriction on values of ‘Φ’ involves no irrecoverable loss of generality. More

importantly, if one examines explanations of the form “because he or she

enjoys it”, one finds that what is enjoyed is always either explicitly or

implicitly understood to be an experience or an activity, and it is this primacy

in explanation that motivates restricting values of ‘Φ’ to experiences and

activities; for, as the explanations we advance show, we treat as derivative

the enjoyment of things other than experiences and activities.

The central idea behind our account is that enjoyment consists in a

harmony between three elements: the relevant activity or experience; the

features which this activity or experience causes you to believe it has; and a

desire to for the activity or experience so conceived. The harmony consists in

this: the activity or experience causes a desire which it simultaneously causes

one to believe is satisfied. The belief and desire form the nexus at which the felt

aspect of enjoyment and its explanatory/justificatory role meet. The

belief/desire pair is typically a reason to act so as to have the experience or

engage in the activity, and the key to characterizing the way it feels to enjoy

something is to note that the relevant desire is a felt desire and the relevant

belief an occurrent belief.

Two final preliminary points: The first is that, when we describe our

enjoyments, we sometimes refer to types of experiences or activities; one

may, for example, say “I enjoy sailing” and mean thereby that one generally

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enjoys a sailing. We may also refer to individual, non-repeatable instances of

experiences and activities; one may, for example, say, “I am really enjoying

sailing today,” meaning thereby that one is enjoying an individual, non-

repeatable instance of the activity. We understand Φ, in “x enjoys Φ,” Φ to

range over an individual, non-repeatable instances of experiences and

activities. The second point is that we do not mean, by our talk of

“experiences” and “activities,” to indicate that there is a sharp distinction

between the two. We merely have in mind the rough and ready distinction

enshrined in ordinary talk and thought between activities as, in part, readily

publicly observable events, and experiences as, to some extent at least,

presented to the one experiencing them in a way they are not presented to

others. The “to some extent” qualification is necessary because we will

routinely refer to publicly observable objects when describing experiences—

for example, “an experience of watching one’s daughter perform in a play.”

The reverse of this qualification is necessary in the case of activities.

Activities are only in part readily publicly observable because they are—as we

are using the term—intentional actions (swinging the golf club), or more or

less organized sequences of such activities (deep-sea fishing, or growing

roses, the latter being a sequence of temporally discontinuous sequences).

Intentions are typically accessible to the agent in a way they are not

accessible to others. Finally, we by no means deny that “activities,” like

deep-sea fishing for example, involve “experiences,” like feeling the fish

strike the line. Talk of experiences and activities is just a convenient way to

describe the range of items that is our primary concern.

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I. Enjoyment and Desire

We will argue shortly that one enjoys Φ only if one desires Φ. As a

preliminary, we note that we understand ‘desire’ in the broadest possible

sense to include such diverse sources of motivation as values, ideals, needs,

commitments, personal loyalties, and patterns of emotional reaction.

Further, the desire to Φ need not exist prior to one’s enjoying Φ. Suppose, for

example, that you find yourself cornered by a talking stranger with whom you

have no initial desire to converse; however, you eventually find yourself

enjoying conversing. Our claim is that as long as you enjoy conversing, you

desire to do so. This will seem to be a mistake to those who think that one

can only properly be said to desire that which one lacks; however, that is not

our conception of desire. We conceive of a desire as a state that not only

causes one to seek what one lacks, but to persist once one finds it.1 1 This will seem counterintuitive to those who see desire as related to a "perceived lack," but it should cause no problems to those who think of desires as states that move us to action. See, for example, Brian O'Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2, p. 295f.: "A brief word on desire. When action occurs, it is in the final analysis this phenomenon that underlies all of the workings of the act generative mental machinery." Thus desire is what explains my acting so as to maintain ongoing experiences and activities whose occurrence I want, even when I know such experiences are occurring (compare quotes from Hobbes below). O'Shaughnessy characterizes desire as a "striving towards an act of fulfillment" (2, p. 296). In this, he agrees with Aristotle; the root meaning of Aristotle's most general word for desire-'orexis'-is "a reaching out after." Plato is one source of the "perceived lack" view (see the Symposium, for example). This view is indefensible as a general characterization of desire. The problem is revealed by Hobbes. In the Leviathan, Hobbes characterizes desire as an "endeavour . . . toward something which causes it," but he restricts the use of 'desire' to cases in which the object of desire is absent. However, he then notes: "that which men desire, they are also said to LOVE: and to HATE those things for which they have aversion. So that desire and love are the same thing; save that by desire, we always signify the absence of the object; by love most commonly the presence of the same. So also by aversion we signify the absence; and by hate, the presence of the object" (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth [London: John Bohn, 1939]). Surely, Hobbes is right. If desire requires the absence of the object, we need a word for that attitude that is just like desire except that its object is present-the attitude that explains why one would resist removal of the object. Remove the object and this attitude is 'desire'. But then why not just say that 'love' and 'desire' are just the same state-whether the object is present or absent? Or at least say that 'love' and 'desire' are instances of some single generic desire-

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In support of the claim that desiring to Φ is necessary condition of

enjoying Φ, imagine you are listening to an indifferently performed piano

piece. The pianist is your friend; he will ask you if you enjoyed the

performance, and you know that that you will say you did. In hopes of

avoiding an unconvincing lie, you are trying to enjoy it; unfortunately, the

indifferent performance leaves you indifferent—neither desiring to listen, nor

desiring not to listen. The complete absence of any desire to listen to the

music certainly seems sufficient to show you not are enjoying listening to it.

The following considerations provide reinforce this conclusion. Imagine Smith

was attending a party which he left after only staying a short while; he

complains that he wanted nothing the party had to offer. He mitigates these

complaints, however, by confessing that the party was not completely

wretched, and that he actually enjoyed it a little. If this confession is

consistent with Smith's claim that he wanted nothing the party had to offer,

then Smith enjoys the party without any relevant desire. But why should one

grant that the confession and the claim are consistent? Suppose we ask

Smith what it was that he enjoyed about the party. Smith might refuse to

answer this question, for he might insist that he just enjoyed attending the

party without enjoying any particular aspect of the party. For the moment,

however, let's suppose he answers us by saying that he enjoyed dancing, but

he denies he wanted to dance, and he does not merely mean that he did not

desire to dance prior to dancing, he means that, throughout the time he was

purportedly enjoying dancing, he did not desire to dance. As in the

indifferently-performed-music example, the complete lack of a desire to

state? As Hobbes says, "love and desire are the same thing."

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dance is sufficient to establish that Smith did not enjoy dancing. The same

considerations would apply if Smith said that what he enjoyed was not

dancing but talking with friends, or listening to music, or watching the people,

or whatever. In fact, it is difficult to see how Smith can provide any

convincing answer to the question of what it was about the party that he

enjoyed. But, as we already noted, Smith may reject the question and insist

that, while he, neither desired nor enjoyed any particular thing the party had

to offer, he nonetheless enjoyed attending the party. Suppose that this is

what Smith does, and suppose that he also insists that, even though he

enjoyed attending the party, he did not want to be there at all. Is this

sufficient to cast doubt on the claim that desiring to Φ is a necessary

condition of enjoying Φ? Surely not. Smith at no time desires to attend the

party, and does not have any desire for anything the party has to offer-

dancing, music, conversations with friends, or anything else. This is a crystal

clear example of not enjoying a party.

We conclude that one enjoys having an experience or engage in an

activity Φ only if one desires to have or do Φ. This formulation does not,

however, provide a sufficiently perspicuous specification of the required

desire. To begin with, Φ is an individual experience or activity about which

one has a desire. We will express this by saying that one desires, of Φ, that it

should occur. Thus, if you are enjoying the experience of tasting bittersweet

chocolate, we will describe you as desiring, of that experience, that it occur.

This is simply an instance of the following standard Quinean convention.

Where ‘[’ and ‘]’ are the left and right Quinean corner quotes, a singular term

[t] may be substituted salva veritate for a term [t'] in the context [ ... desires,

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of t, that . . .] given the true identity [t = t’]. We need one further refinement

in our description of desires. To this end, imagine you are enjoying the

experience of tasting bittersweet chocolate. The bitter sweetness creates

and pervades a gustatory field that captures your attention, and it is this

bitter sweetness that is the aspect of the experience that you desire. We will

express this by saying that you desire, of the experience of tasting the

chocolate, under the feature bittersweet, that it occur. The “of, under”

device is cumbersome and largely unnecessary if one is simply describing

particular instances of enjoyment (one can just say, for example, “It is the

bitter sweetness of the taste that Jones enjoys and desires”), but it is

essential if we are to have a perspicuous way of talking in general about

enjoyment and desire. We adopt the same conventions for belief for the

same reasons. When one of believes that a particular ongoing experience or

activity realizes a certain array of features, we will say that one believes, of

the activity, under that array, that it is occurring.

Our general claim is that when one enjoys having or doing Φ, there is

an array A of one or more features such that one desires, of Φ, under A, that

it occur. Take experiences first. The essential point is that to experience

something is to experience as being some way. To experience the taste of

chocolate is to experience it as bittersweet, or sweet, or as chocolaty, or

whatever. One’s experiences always present themselves as experiences of a

certain sort. There are no “raw feels,” no experiences that we have without

apprehending them as experiences of a certain sort. Thus, to desire to have

an experience is to desire to have an experience of a certain sort. In our

terminology, it is to desire, of the experience, under some array A of features,

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that it should occur. A similar point holds for activities. Suppose you are

enjoying singing along to a rendition of the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony. You hear the music and the singers, and, in a swirl of emotions,

memories, and associations, you feel and hear yourself sing, “Freudig, wie

ein Held zum Siegen.” In short, you are aware of the activity has having a

variety of features, and it is the realization of these features (or some subset

of them) that you desire. Again, we express this by saying that you desire, of

your activity of singing along, under the relevant array of features, that it

should occur.

To summarize, when one enjoys having or doing Φ, there is an array of

features A such that one desires, of Φ, under A, that it should occur. We take

it to be clear that when asked, “What did you enjoy about it?”, one answers

by specifying (some of) the features in A. In such cases, we will say x enjoys

Φ under A (more precisely, in a subset of such cases—our view being that

desiring Φ under A is a necessary but not sufficient condition of enjoying Φ

under A). The “under A” simply provides an explicit representation of what is

implicit in our day in day out description of people as enjoying experiences

and activities: namely, that there is some desire array of features that are

the enjoyers would identify in response to the question, “What do you enjoy

about it?” We will therefore define enjoyment by completing “x enjoys Φ

under A if and only if ...”

It is a necessary condition of enjoying Φ under A, that one desire, of Φ,

under A, that it should occur; it is, however, clearly not a sufficient condition.

Suppose you desire to undergo dental treatment. In our canonical form: you

desire, of your current experience, under the feature needed dental

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treatment, that it should occur. Dental treatment is for you an ordeal of

discomfort and anxiety. You desire to undergo your current experience only

as a means to the end of adequate dental health, and you most certainly do

not enjoy the experience. The obvious response is to distinguish between

desiring something for its own sake and desiring something only as a means

to an end. To desire that p for its own sake is to desire p and not to desire it

merely as a contingently related means to an end; and, second, that to desire

that p merely as a means to an end is for there to be an end E such that one

would not desire p if one did not desire E and believe that p was a

contingently related means to E. The “contingently related” qualification

allows the following case to count as desiring something for its own sake.

Victoria desires in general the experience of looking at impressionist

paintings for its own sake; she is looking at Mary Cassatt’s Lydia Leaning on

Her Arms, which she correctly believes is an impressionist painting. She

desires, of her looking at the painting, under looking at Lydia Leaning on Her

Arms, that it should occur for its own sake; however, she would not have that

desire if she did not believe that the painting was an impressionist painting.

One question remains: how should one understand attributions of desire for

its own sake in our canonical form? What does it mean to say that one

desires, of Φ, under A, that it should occur for its own sake? What is the “it”?

Our answer: Φ’s realization of A. What one wants after all is that Φ should

realize A.

II. A Preliminary Definition of Enjoyment

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Simplicity argues for the following account: one enjoys Φ under A if

and only if one Φ’s, and one desires, of Φ, under A, that it should occur for its

own sake. We note in passing that the desire is that Φ, not that it should

continue. One will not always desire to continue to Φ. I may enjoy writing

the last word of an essay even though I (by no means!) desire that the writing

down of the word should continue; I just desire that it occur. The essential

point is that the proposed conditions are not sufficient, as the following

example shows.

Suppose that you have never been deep-sea fishing, but have long

harbored a desire to do so for its own sake, and are now in fact engaged in

that very activity. Given your general desire to go deep-sea fishing for its

own sake, and your belief that you are now doing so, you desire, of that

activity, under deep-sea fishing, that it occur for its own sake. You are not,

however, enjoying the activity under the feature deep-sea fishing. You find

the activity distasteful. You get seasick; you are disgusted by the crowded,

noisy deck from which you must fish; you are repelled by the necessity of

barehandedly catching the small, live fish used for bait, and you are even

more repelled by the fact that, once you have succeeded in grabbing the

bait, you have to impale the struggling fish by the gills on your hook. But your

desire to fish survives this initial shock, and you continue to fish even though

you admit to yourself that you are not enjoying it. You only continue to fish

in the hope that you will enjoy it. In the present, however, your desire to fish

is waning. It persists, but it persists despite your reactions, and it is only the

hope that things will change that keeps it alive.

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Any number of examples can be constructed along these lines, and we

take them to show that it is not sufficient to count as enjoying Φ, under A that

one Φ’s and desires, of Φ, under A, that it occur for its own sake. Further

reflection on the deep-sea fishing example points the way to a sufficient

condition. The example is a convincing case of lack of enjoyment in large

part because your desire persists, in spite of, not because of, your activity.

Transform this feature into its opposite transforms the example into one of

enjoyment. Thus: suppose a large fish suddenly strikes your line, and all of

your attention is immediately focused on the fight to land it. Your seasick

feeling, your impinging awareness of the crowded deck, and your qualms

about catching the live bait are instantly eclipsed by the excitement of the

fight; moreover, after you have landed the fish, you find that you are no

longer seasick. The deck no longer seems inhospitably crowded but full of

cooperative people who are congratulating you on your catch. Even catching

and hooking the live bait now seems just one of those necessities which

disquiet only the uninitiated. You find now that you want to fish not in spite

of, but because of your experiences. You are—as you now realize—enjoying

it.

We interpret the “not in spite of, but because of” causally. This appeal

to causation is to be understood in the context of everyday causal

explanations. The identification of causes in such explanations is highly

pragmatic. For

example, when eight-year-old Sally asks her mother why the mill wheel turns,

her mother replies that the wheel turns because the water strikes it. When

Sally, now an undergraduate, is working on a similar homework problem for

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513

her Physics course, her answer includes a calculation of the friction in the

mill’s system. With causation so understood, we suggest that after the large

fish strikes your line, but not before, there is an array of features A meeting

these conditions: your activity of deep-sea fishing causes you to believe, of

that activity, under A, that it is occurring; and, to desire, of that activity,

under A, that it should occur. Thus, the activity not only causes you to desire

it for its own sake, it also ensures the—at least apparent—satisfaction of that

desire by causing you believe that you are getting exactly what you want.

We take enjoyment to consist in this causal harmony between an

experience or an activity, and the belief/desire pair it causes. That is, subject

to additions to deal with enjoyment as a feeling:

x enjoys Φ under A if and only if

(1) x Φ’s;

(2) x's Φing causes x

(a) to believe, of Φ, under A, that it occurs, and

(b) to desire, of Φ, under A, that it occur for its own sake.

Note that (b) reads “occur” not “continue to occur.” To see why, consider

enjoying writing the last word of an essay. Writing the last word is

necessarily an activity that occurs in a relatively short time span; if it takes a

year for one to “write the last word,” then whatever it may be that on is

doing, it is not, in any normal understanding of the phrase, writing the last

word. Thus, when one enjoys writing the last word, one does not—per

impossible—desire that one’s writing the word should continue beyond the

relevant time span; one simply desires that it happen. Compare enjoying a

sudden whiff of perfume in a case in which the brief experience is enjoyable

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but in which any prolonged experience of the overpowering odor would be

distinctly distasteful. Unlike your activity of writing the last word, you

experience of smelling the perfume could endure for quite some time; it is

not necessarily confined to a short temporal interval. However, since one

wishes to avoid, any further experience of what one realizes would quickly

become a cloying odor, one desires that the experience occur, not that it

continue. Such cases aside, when one enjoys Φ under A, one desires, of Φ

under A, not only that it should occur, but that it should continue to do so for

some appropriate length of time. Where continuation is not possible, one will

desire, of some possible future Φ, under a relevantly similar A’, that it should

occur.

Two counterexamples indicate the need to amend the definition to

reflect the fact that enjoyment is something one feels.

Jim has just returned from a long business trip, and, during the long

flight home, he found himself looking forward to a having dinner with his wife

at one of their favorite restaurants, and he is doing so now, but the reality of

the dinner is at best a pale reflection of his expectations. They are

nonetheless doing and saying exactly as he imagined in exactly the setting

he envisioned, and, for the appropriate array A of features, he believes, of

their dinning activity, under A, that it is occurring; moreover, he desires, of

the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake. The problem is

that he does not feel as he expected. He had expected to eagerly embrace a

mind-filling desire; instead, all he feels is a weak wisp of longing that has no

power to keep his mind from wandering. He is filled with disappointment, not

desire, and, as disappointment robs the weak desire of what strength it had,

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he realizes (so the example contends) that he is not enjoying dinning with his

wife. To turn this example into an apparent counterexample, one merely

needs to add that the activity of dinning with his wife causes the belief and

the desire, and it certainly appears to do so. After all, the belief and desire

are about the activity; they are a “belief, of the activity, that” and a “desire,

of the activity, that.” Surely, part of the reason the belief and desire count as

being about the activity is that there is a causal chain leading from the

activity to the formation of the belief and desire (this is not to say that there

is such a causal requirement in every case of a belief or desire about

something).

In the next section, we will respond to this example by distinguishing

two cases—one in which Jim does not enjoy dinning with his wife, and one in

which he does; in the latter, the activity of dinning with his wife causes a

certain feeling; in the former, it does not. We will also offer a very similar

response to the following, seemingly quite different, counterexample.

Suppose you visit the concentration camp at Ausschwitz to honor and

preserve in memory those who died there. Let A be the array of features

of your activity of visiting the camp by virtue of which the visit realizes

the end of honoring and preserving the memory of the dead. As you visit

the camp, you believe, of your activity, under A, that it is occurring, and

you desire, of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake;

moreover, the activity also causally sustains your desire. As you work

you way through the camp, your awareness of your activity’s progressive

realization of the features in A reinforces your conviction that honoring

those who died and preserving their memory is the right thing to do and,

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in reinforcing that conviction, it reinforces (causally sustains) your desire,

of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake. Thus, you

fulfill the definition, but surely—so the counterexample goes—you do not

enjoy visiting the concentration camp. How could viewing its horrors be

something you enjoy?

III. Feeling Enjoyment

What does it feel like to enjoy something? Given the diversity of

feelings associated with enjoyment, we take it for granted that there is no

one feeling F such that one enjoys something only if one feels F. The variety

of feelings associated with enjoyment nonetheless involve have a felt desire

to Φ at precisely the same time that one occurrently believes that one is

Φing. To motivate the suggestion, consider enjoying quench a demanding

thirst with a drink of water.

Imagine yourself before you drink. You not only desire, of your future

experience Φ of drinking the water, under quenching your thirst, that it

should occur, you feel the desire as an insistent craving to drink. When you

drink, you continue to desire, of your now presently occurring experience Φ,

under quenching your thirst, that it should occur; however, the sensations

attendant on drinking the water transform the feeling of insistent craving into

a felt embracing of the watery relief, an embracing for its own sake, not just

as a means of alleviating the urge to drink. The transformation of your desire

occurs the instant you become aware of the complex of sensations

comprising the experience of the watery relief. The sensations are present to

your consciousness in—more or less—the way that your awareness that you

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are now reading these words is present to your consciousness. Thus, in this

sense, you occurrently believe, of Φ, under quenching your thirst, that it is

occurring. If you were not aware in this way of the complex of sensations

comprising the experience of the watery relief, you would not have the

embracing-of-the-watery-relief feeling of desiring, of Φ, under quenching your

thirst, that it should occur for its own sake. If, for example, some

physiological anomaly ensured that the drinking the water did nothing to

quench your thirst, you would continue to have the insistent craving, not the

embracing of relief. We suggest that the common element running through

the wide variety of feelings of enjoyment is the felt desire to Φ arising against

the background of the occurrent belief that Φ is occurring. The belief ensures

a feeling of a satisfied desire.

Subject to some qualifications about what we meant by a felt desire

and an occurrent belief, we offer the following definition:

x enjoys Φ under the array of features A if and only if

(1) x Φ’s;

(2) x's Φing causes x

(a) to occurrently believe, of Φ, under A, that it occurs;

(b) to have the felt desire, of Φ, under A, that it occur for its own sake.

To further illustrate and motivate this definition, we explain in more detail

what we mean by a felt desire and an occurrent belief.

A. Felt Desire

We introduced the notion of a felt desire through the quenching your

thirst example. In that example, the feeling manifests itself to consciousness

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in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore or overlook. In this

subsection, we briefly review a variety of felt desires that, the felt desire in

the thirst example, transparently manifest themselves to consciousness. In

subsection C, we turn to desires, that although felt (in some sense), do not

transparently manifest themselves to consciousness; these are felt desires

one may nonetheless sincerely deny having.

Our focus here, however, is on desires that do transparently manifest

themselves to consciousness, and the first point to note is that such desires

may vary greatly in how they feel. The felt embracing of the watery relief, for

example, feels quite different than one’s felt desire for the well-prepared

Kung Pao chicken one is eating, and neither feels at all like the felt desire for

the experience of understanding, insight, and affirmation one may have when

reading “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,/Den können wir erlösen.”

Essentially the same point holds for activities. In the case of activities,

the feeling of enjoyment consists in experiences attendant on the activity (e.

g., casting the line, reeling in a fish in the case of deep-sea fishing), the felt

desire for the activity, and the occurrent belief that the activity is taking

place. The notions of felt desire and occurrent belief call for some further

clarification in the context of activities. We focus first on felt desire and then

turn to occurrent belief. Suppose you are enjoying racing your sailboat off

the coast of California from Ventura to Redondo Beach; you started at 11 am

and expect to finish around 2:00 am the next day, so your racing activity is a

temporally extended event of about 15 hours duration. You enjoy this

activity; that is, the 15 hours can be divide into intervals, t1, . . ., tn, such that,

for a sufficient number of intervals t i, there is an array of features A such that

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during ti you enjoy engaging in the activity under that array. A “sufficient

number” is enough for you to count as enjoying the whole 15 hour activity,

where what counts as enough may vary from person to person and context to

context. The relevant array A always includes the feature racing a sailboat

from Ventura to Redondo Beach plus an evolving variety of other features

such as: getting (having gotten) a good start; deciding (having decided)

whether the route near the island shore will be faster than going further out

to sea, running (having run) downwind surfing waves at 12 knots, and

perhaps even being (having been) becalmed in the middle of Santa Monica

Bay at mid-night sitting with absolutely no motion in order not to shake what

little wind there is out of the sails. The desires will vary in the way they feel.

The thrill hitting 14 knots while surfing the spinnaker-driven boat down the

front of eight foot waves feels different than the desire, based on one’s

assessment of wind patterns and the positions of competitors, to head further

out to sea in search of stronger winds.

Felt desires, for both experiences and activities, may also vary in

intensity. Imagine that, as you converse with a friend, you are enjoying

walking along the seashore, or the pear and white pepper taste of a

particularly fine Grüner Veltliner. You have the felt desire to walk in one

case, and the felt desire to taste in the other. As you become absorbed in

the conversation, the desire in each cases recedes into the background to

linger at the periphery of consciousness. You still have the felt desire in each

case, just not in the consciousness gripping way you feel the intense craving

to drink, or the piercing-illumination way you feel your desire for the

reverberations of reading, “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,/Den können

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wir erlösen.” Variations in the feeling and intensity of desires accounts in

part for the variation in the feelings of enjoyment; “in part” because

variations in occurrent beliefs.

B. Occurrent Beliefs

We explained occurrent beliefs as believes that are present to

consciousness in—more or less—the way your belief that you are now reading

these words is present to consciousness. As in our examples of felt desires,

the belief manifests itself to consciousness in a way that is difficult, if not

impossible, to ignore or overlook. In this subsection, we briefly review a

variety of occurrent beliefs that share this feature. In the next section, we

consider beliefs, that one is aware of (in some sense) even though they do

not transparently manifest themselves to consciousness.

Occurrent beliefs vary greatly in the way they are present to

consciousness. Your belief that you are experiencing the taste of the Kung

Pao Chicken is before your mind as a consciousness-gripping complex of

sensations; your belief that you are experiencing a certain understanding,

insight, and affirmation in reading the lines from Faust is before your mind

with an assent-compelling clarity. Like felt desires, those beliefs that are

before one's mind in the way that your belief that you are now reading this

sentence is before your mind to beliefs that linger on the periphery of self-

consciousness. Suppose, for example, that early in the day you receive some

good news—that you do not need the operation that your doctor first thought

you would. For the rest of the day, the belief that the operation is un-

necessary lingers on the periphery of self-consciousness. Although it is not

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always before your mind in the way that the belief about reading the

sentence is, you nonetheless have it "in mind" all day. It contrasts in this

way with your belief, for example, that your grandmother was not married to

Mussolini. You are never, during the entire day, aware even in the slightest

degree of that belief.

C. Desires and Beliefs Not Transparently Manifest To Consciousness

We begin with desires. People can have feelings of desire which are

not present to consciousness, at least not in the way our earlier examples

are. A client in psychoanalysis might, for example, very well say, “All those

years, I burned with the desire for revenge and never realized it.” This is the

ascription of a feeling of desire; to burn with the desire for revenge is not just

to desire revenge but to feel intensely. Similar remarks hold for belief.

Consider the psychoanalytic client who says, “I never admitted it, but I not

only believed that my brother was my parents’ favorite, I knew I believed it,

and the fact that I knew I believed it yet did nothing about it subjected me to

a double disappointment: the disappointment that he was their favorite, and

the disappointment in myself as I watched myself believing in my second-rate

status but doing nothing about it.” This is the ascription, not just of a belief,

but of an awareness of the belief, although not an awareness transparently

present to consciousness in the way your belief that you are now reading

these words is.

The choice of psychoanalytic examples may suggest that such cases

are odd or unusual; we choose them for the opposite reason—to reject the

suggestion that there is anything odd about such cases. On contrary, such

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cases are commonplace. Consider Henry James’ description in The Golden

Bowl of Maggie Verver’s realization that her husband is having an affair with

her best friend:

It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till now—such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter, and even, verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short—though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

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James describes “recognitions and perceptions already active” prior to their

fruit manifesting itself to Maggie Verver’s consciousness in the ways

illustrated by our “quenching thirst” and “reading these words” examples.

The “recognitions and perceptions” are nonetheless feelings (e. g., “silver

bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly”) and the apprehension of beliefs (e. g.,

“she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of

lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near”). The

description is the sophisticated description of a novelist genius, but what

James describes is commonplace. As Iris Murdoch says, commenting on this

passage,

Do we understand? Yes, of course, we follow, in context, these descriptions of states of consciousness with no difficulty. We are able to think of the imagery both as something which the character, like the author, is continually coining as she goes along, and as something ‘deeper’ or ‘beyond’, which the imagery evokes or points to. This may be seen as two levels of a region wherein we can discern many levels. Figurative language, metaphor, is everywhere in out thinking, apprehended by the thinker as ultimate or pointing beyond. How we proceed here can be a matter of our deepest thoughts. We recognize this dialectic, these levels, and these differences of style and image, in our own thinking as we understand a writer and as we are at other times led to reflect upon what the stuff and quality of our consciousness is.2

We will expand our understanding of “felt desire” and “occurrent belief” to

include feelings of desire and the apprehension of beliefs even when the

feelings and apprehensions are not manifest to consciousness in ways

illustrated by our earlier examples.

Those who disagree need not follow us down this path; they may

simply remain with the original understanding of “felt desire” and “occurrent

belief.” We do, however, think that the testimony of art and life makes it

2 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 171 (The Penguin Press, 1992).

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plain that the broader understand is correct. To quote Murdoch again, “the

layman lives at peace with ‘consciousness’, with all its obscure implications

of ‘ownership’ and ‘presence’. It is what is most his own, he is responsible for

it, even though it may seem to include so much that is not momentary or

personal or private or clearly visible.”3

One advantage of the broader understanding is that it allows us to

recognize and describe what we will label “unacknowledged enjoyments.” An

example: Hannibal, a law professor, is teaching a class in what he regards as

the traditional “Socratic” style; in fact, he is intentionally humiliating the

students by ridiculing their attempts to answer questions that even the best

of them have no hope of understanding. He fulfills the conditions for enjoying

the activity of questioning and ridiculing the students under the feature,

humiliating the students: the activity causes him to occurrently believe, of

the activity, under the feature, humiliating the students, that it occurs, and to

have the felt desire, of that activity, under that feature, that it should occur

for its own sake. Hannibal nonetheless sincerely—but self-deceptively—

insists to himself and others that he does not believe he is humiliating the

students, and that he does not desire to do so. He acknowledges that it may

appear that he intends to humiliate them, but he insists that he intends no

such thing; he insists that what he intends to do, and what he believes his

doing, is to train them to think like lawyers. Unacknowledged enjoyments are

an important path to self-understanding; coming to acknowledge what one

does in fact enjoy can reveal a great deal about oneself.

3 P. 173.

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Although there is a great deal more one could say, let this suffice for a

discussion of felt desire and occurrent belief. We now return to the two

counterexamples raised earlier—Jim’s dinning with his wife and the visit to

the concentration camp.

D. Causation

We distinguish two cases—one in which Jim does not enjoy dinning

with his wife, and one in which he does; in the latter, the activity of dinning

with his wife causes a certain feeling; in the former, it does not. The first step

is to redescribe the example with explicit reference to felt desire and

occurrent belief. During the flight home from a long business trip, Jim eagerly

contemplates having dinner with his wife at one of their favorite restaurants,

and as they dine, for the appropriate array A of features, he occurrently

believes, of their dinning activity, under A, that it is occurring; moreover, he

has the felt desire, of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own

sake. But the desire, while felt, is not the mind-filling desire that he

expected, and that he imagined would rivet his attention on his wife; it is

instead a mild longing that has no power to keep his mind from wandering.

This is the point at which the example divides into two.

The no-enjoyment version. Under the impact of Jim’s disappointment

begins the mild feeling of desire begins to dissipate; the waning feeling

persists, but, as in the deep-sea fishing example, it persists in spite of, not

because of, Jim’s dinning activity. The activity does not causally sustain the

felt desire; on the contrary, it causes the disappearance of the desire. This

claim is consistent with granting that the desire qualifies as a “desire of the

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activity” because there is a causal chain leading from the activity to the

formation of the belief and desire. The requirement is that the activity

causally sustain the felt desire. We take this to be a clear case of not

enjoying dinning.

The enjoyment version. In this version, Jim’s dinning activity does

causally sustain the felt desire. It just does not create the mind-filling

intensity that he had imagined on the flight home. In this case, Jim does

enjoy dinning with his wife. In defense of this claim, we note the following

equivocation on “enjoy.” Sometimes when one says, “I enjoy it,” one may

suggest or imply that the enjoyment is “pure”—unmixed with any significant

degree of pain, distaste, aversion, or disappointment. Suppose, for example,

that I enjoy gossiping about my colleagues. I also hate myself when I do it,

but this does not keep me from yielding to temptation as three of us meet in

the hall. I enjoy imparting and learning the latest, but this enjoyment

competes with a growing and distinctly unpleasant sense of shame and guilt;

indeed, the enjoyment feeds this sense of shame, for I hate myself all the

more for enjoying gossiping. Overall my experience is one of conflict—

enjoyment mixed with aversion. If you asked me, “Did you enjoy gossiping?”,

it would be misleading to answer with an unqualified, “Yes.” That would make

you think that the enjoyment was untainted by any significant admixture of

aversion. This does not mean that it is false that I enjoyed gossiping. On the

contrary, I did; indeed, it was the enjoyment that fuelled the aversion. It just

means my answer must take the form, “Yes, but ...”. Similarly, Jim’s

enjoyment is mixed with considerable disappointment, and it would be

misleadingly incomplete simply to describe Jim as enjoying dinning. This

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point should not, however, make one overlook the fact that Jim does indeed

enjoy dinning.

Now we turn to the concentration camp example. You visit

Ausschwitz, and where A is the array of features of your activity by virtue

of which it realizes the end of honoring and preserving the memory of the

dead, you occurrently believe, of your activity, under A, that it is

occurring, and you have the felt desire, of the activity, under A, that it

should occur for its own sake. The activity causes the belief and desire.

The activity causally sustains your desire. As you work you way

through the camp, your awareness of your activity’s progressive

realization of the features in A reinforces your conviction that honoring

those who died and preserving their memory is the right thing to do and,

in reinforcing that conviction, it reinforces (causally sustains) your felt

desire, of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake.

In this case, your activity causally sustains a felt attraction to that

activity as an instance of honoring the dead and preserving their memory. In

such a case, we contend that you do enjoy honoring and preserving the

memory of those who died. The feeling of desire need not, of course, feel

anything like the relieved embracing of the watery relief when you quench

your thirst, nor anything like the burst of affirmation when you sing, “Freudig,

wie an Held zum Siegen.” It may be a solemn, even somber, feeling to honor

and memoralize for its own sake. Indeed, you might well think that to fail to

respond to the sights with such a desire, and hence to fail to enjoy honoring

and memoralizing, would be to fail to respond appropriately.

We now turn to the relation between enjoyment and reasons for action.

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