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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
What is pleasure? Don't we all know? How could so many of us pursue it so eagerly otherwise? Or how could we so readily and confidently say whether this, that and the other are pleasures? Having one's back rubbed, dancing, listening to a Bach flute sonata and eating a cheese soufflé are pleasures, while having a cold, smelling rotten eggs and reading Hegel are not. We may not be able to define pleasure, but if we can readily say what is a pleasure and what is not, must we not know what it is, just as we know what a chair is if we can correctly identify chairs, distinguishing them from stools, benches and couches?
1 Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 102.Google Scholar
2 In this paper I am very much indebted to Gilbert Ryle, chiefly on the subject of what pleasure is not. My positive views arequite at variance with his, however. I have never felt I understood his thesis that pleasure is a form of attention—a view that in any case is an answer to a question I claimed it is a mistake to ask. As I noted, my “expressionist” theory about the use of this and kindred words resembles a view he expressed about depression. I presume it is not because depression is not a form of pleasure, that he did not adopt a similar way of treating the latter.