Utilitarianism and Epicureanism

It all started when . . . 

When Bentham said that the highest good is pleasure, and the way to create an ethics, morality, and social structure is to promote pleasurable things that will keep people warm, fed, clothed and happy, thus preventing wars and death.  There is no concept of developing the self, or striving for higher things, because the world is only physical.  John Stuart Mill takes evolves this further:  he admits to a realm of imagination, which is the reason that religion and poetry are useful.  This is not the ideal outlet, however.  In Utility of Religion, Mill claims that the best route to happiness is to be able to accept and be content with the fact that all we have is this physical existence, and, since pleasure is the highest good, we should take care to fill each moment with pleasure so that we will have nothing to regret or wish for at the end of life.  A moment filled with pleasure, he says, is never wasted, and a life filled with pleasurable moments is the highest good we could possibly desire.

Where does this leave poesy, then?

Pater's Aesthetics

and how he's influenced the rest of the world.  Structure:  The Renaissance, Appreciations, Marius.  Wordsworth is key because he is the most immediate launching point.  The Romantics are also the splitting point:  Byron  & Shelley opposing the founders, Wordsworth & Coleridge, and Keats teetering somewhere between, trying to reconcile the points.  Pater's misreading of Wordsworth is one of his foundational claims:  here it is that he asserts contemplation is sterile (Appreciations).  Slowly, slowly building the foundations for this work--the culmination of my fling with academia, unless an MA in philosophy begins to woo me.

*

Let it be hereby known, that in this blog, the term "poetry" or "poesy" is used with the understanding of including all forms of fine arts, including the visual, musical, and prosodic.

Rationale of Reward

The basic premise of Jeremy Bentham's treatise is that mankind needs to be rewarded, or have some sort of incentive, to accomplish anything, and that, as just punishment is commensurate with the offense, a reward ought to be commensurate with the virtue done.  (There is also a Rationale of Punishment, but that is not pertinent here).  What is virtue, though?  "Virtue is sometimes considered as an act, sometimes as a disposition: when it is exhibited by a positive act, it confers a service; when it is considered as a disposition, it is a chance of services.  Apart from this notion of service, it is impossible to tell wherein virtue consists.  To form clear ideas concerning it, it must altogether be referred to the notion of utility:  utility is its object, as well as its motive . . . it is fostered by, and perhaps depends upon, esteem; but this is a secret which it seeks to hide from itself" (125-6).  He establishes one first premise:  all of every person's actions are limited to the object of utility.  In this lies embedded the presumption that forms his famous attack on poetry*:  namely, that all our actions, desires, motives, and interests are limited to concrete, human, material ends.  Our intellects are purely in the interest of tangible goods, and the reward should be immediately satisfying.  In these terms, he presents his argument on poetry:  it is too difficult and too dangerous to be truly useful.

Perhaps one of Bentham's best known ideas is that of poetry being equal, perhaps even lesser, than the game of push-pin, for the simple reason that push-pin, requiring little intellect and no discipline, affords a more immediately available form of pleasure to a greater number of people than poetry.  The outrageous ideas in this are multitudinous.  First, he supposes that all pleasures are equal; then, that there is no merit or obligation to develop the so-called higher faculties because the pleasure of poetry is incommensurate with the pains it requires to appreciate it.  For, if all our actions lead only to material aims, then man is not truly an intellectual being; that is, he is not a contemplative being.  And herein lies the greatest outrage of all, for to deny the contemplative nature of man is to deny not only his nature, but the nature of the Creator, as well.

There is more on this.  John Stewart Mill introduces the idea of refinement of pleasure, but with the exception of a few deliberately ignored thinkers, the utilitarian premises of art have been accepted whole-scale even now, and we are content, even eager, to promote the idea that art is, by and large, useless.