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Higher and Lower Pleasures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Benjamin Gibbs
Benjamin Gibbs
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 61 , Issue 235 , January 1986 , pp. 31 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1986

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References

1 Collected Works, Vol. X (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 211. All quotations from Utilitarianism refer to this edition.

2 ‘Bentham’, Works, Vol. X, 113.

3 Mill's debt to Plato has been pointed out by Grote, Shorey, Pappe and others, including (repeatedly) Mill himself. It is noteworthy that several of the German Romantics who impressed Mill were inspired by Plato and Platonism, e.g. Schleiermacher, to whose Platonic scholarship Mill refers appreciatively in his Notes on the dialogues. Mill's writings on Greek philosophy have been re-published (1978) as Volume XI of the Toronto edition of the Collected Works.

4 Utilitarianism was first published in 1861 as a series of articles in Fraser's Magazine.

5 Pleasures and Pains: a Theory of Qualitative Hedonism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 70.

6 Francis, Hutcheson, Collected Works (Hildesheim: O1ms, 1969), Vol. V, 117.Google Scholar

7 On Liberty, Works, Vol. XVIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 235.

8 Plato divides the soul into three faculties, each with its own kind of pleasure (580d). Mill is content with a duality.

9 Platonism Ancient and Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), 231.

10 Plato's Republic (London: Macmillan, 1964), 265.

11 See further West, Henry R., ‘Mill's Qualitative Hedonism’, Philosophy 51 (1976), 97–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 ‘Notes on the Protagoras’, Works, Vol. XI, 40.

13 Autobiography, Works, Vol. I (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 25.

14 Works, Vol. XI, 61.

15 Works, Vol. XI, 419–120.

16 421

17 Works, Vol. XI, 505.

18 See 1099a13-20, 1113a3Off., 1170a15–16, 1176a15fi., 1176b23–27. Cf. also E.E. 1235b35ff.

19 1099b33ff., cf. 1178b24-28.

20 See ‘Grote's Aristotle’, Works, Vol. XI, 505.

21 On the similarities between Plato's ideal of the autonomous individual and Mill's, see Gibbs, B., ‘Autonomy and Authority in Education’, Journal of the Philosophy of Education 13 (1979), especially 122–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Cf. Mill's editorial footnotes to James, Mill'sAnalysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, 1878), 242, 246–247, 252–255. My interpretation of these passages differs somewhat from that of Susan L. Feagin, whose interesting discussion in Philosophy 58 (1983) seems to me to be marred by conflating Mill's categorial division of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures and differing degrees of excellence within those categories. Thus she says (247) that Mill ‘thought much of the music of Mozart the source of lower pleasure’, and (249) that the kind of pleasure Mozart's music gives ‘is not generally aesthetic because not derived from the use of the higher faculties’. Feagin refers to Mill's assertion that Mozart's music excels in ‘physical’ aspects such as harmony and melody, while Beethoven's excels in ‘expression’. But Mill does not say Mozart's music is devoid of ‘expression’, only that Beethoven's excels it in this respect while being excelled by it in ‘physical’ respects. Perhaps Mill did, like other nineteenth-century Romantics, believe Beethoven's music to be more sublime and generally finer than Mozart's. But this comparative judgment would imply only that, in the class of ‘higher’ pleasures, some are higher than others. It would not consign Mozart's music to the category of swinish or sub-human pleasures. Had that been Mill's opinion, he would never have been tormented, as he says he was, by the thought that ‘there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts … to strike out … entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty’ {Autobiography, Works, Vol. I, 149).Google Scholar

23 238. Cf. also A System of Logic, VI, ii, 4; Works, Vol. VIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 842–843.

24 The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Harrison, W. (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), 152.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., end of Ch. 5, 163.

26 Mill says in the Autobiography (Works, Vol. I, 151) that ‘the love of rural objects and natural scenery’ was one of the strongest of his own ‘pleasurable susceptibilities’; but the passage which immediately follows this admission in the original draft—a romantic description of a summer evening's walk beside the Thames—he later suppressed.

27 Qualis=of what kind.

28 Aristotle says ‘good’ is predicated in all the categories of being: Nic. Eth. 1096a19–29.

29 He calls them ‘dimensions’.

30 ‘Bentham’, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. I, Edwards, Paul (ed.) (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 283.Google Scholar

31 Works, Bowring, J. (ed.), Vol. II (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843), 253.Google Scholar

32 Diary entry for 23 March 1854; The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Elliott, H. S. R. (ed.), Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 381.Google Scholar

33 ‘Fallacies in and about Mill's Utilitarianism’, Philosophy 30 (1955), 354.

34 211; my emphasis.

35 Works, Vol. X, 92.

36 Plato's definition of justice in the individual (as the condition in which each element of the soul does and has what is proper to it, and does not interfere with the others) entails that physical pleasures have a legitimate place in the constitution of the good life.

37 Cf. Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1175a3–9.

38 In my book Freedom and Liberation (London: Harvester, 1976) I argued that On Liberty expounds a Romantic form of libertarianism inconsistent with Mill's utilitarian principles. I still believe this; but on one important point I think I misinterpreted Mill. Referring to his assertion that the individual's ‘own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode’ (Vol. XVIII, 270), I commented: ‘Presumably the mode that is “best in itself” is the one that corresponds with the principle of utility, and the mode that is best simpliciter is the one that corresponds with the individual's desires’ (Freedom and Liberation, 87). I have come to see that by ‘best in itself’ Mill means something like ‘best in kind’, and he is making a point which is quite compatible with his utilitarianism: that happiness is better promoted by allowing the individual to choose his own mode of existence than by forcing him into one which, though more excellent in itself, is unsuitable and impracticable for him.

39 J. S. Mill (London: Routledge, 1974), 111.