The examined life philosophical meditations pdf

THE EXAMINED LIFE

in that case the pain itself will not count as pleasurable. Someone enjoys an activity to the extent he engages in the activity because of its own intrinsic properties~ not simply because of what it leads to or produces later. Its intrinsicpmperties are not limited to felt qualities, though; this leaves open the possibility that something is enjoyed yet not pleasurable. An example might be tennis played very forcefully; lunging for shots, scraping knees and elbows on the ground, you enjoy playing, but it is not exactly-'-not precisely-pleasurable.

From this definition of pleasure, it does not follow that there actually are any experiences that are wanted because of their own felt qualities; nor does it follow that we want there to be pleasurable experiences, ones we desire because of their felt qualities. What does follow from ( my use of) the term is this: If experiences are pleasurable to us, then we do want them ( to some extent). The term pleasurable just indicates that something is wanted because of its felt qualities. How much we want it, though, whether enough to sacrifice other things we hold good, and whether other things also are wanted, and wanted even more than pleasure, is left open. A person who wants to write a poem needn't want (primarily) the felt qualities of writing, or the felt qualities of being known to have written the poem. He may want, primarily, to write such a poem-for example, because he thinks it is valuable, or the activity of doing so is, with no special focus upon any felt qualities.

We care about things in addition to how our lives feel to us from the inside. This is shown by the following thought experiment. Imagine a machine that .could give you any experience ( or sequence of experiences) you might desire.* When connected to this experi- ence machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel "from the inside." You can program your experiences for tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest ofyour life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams "from the

* I.first presentedanddiscussedthis experience-machine example inAnarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 42-45.

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Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. Touchstone, 1989.
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Happiness

inside." Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? If not, why not? (Other people also have the same option of using these machines which, let us suppose, are provided by friendly and trust- worthy beings from another galaxy, so you need not refuse connect- ing in order to help others.) The question is not whether to try the machine temporarily,· but whether to enter it for the rest of your life, Upon entering, you will not remember having done this; so no pleasures will get ruined by realizing they are machine-produced. Uncertainty too might be programmed by using the machine's op- tional random device (upon which various preselected alternatives can depend).

The question of whether to plug in to this experience machine is a question of value. (It differs from two related questions: . an epistemological one-Can you know you are not already·plugged in?-and a metaphysical one-Don't the machine experiences them- selves constitute a real world?) The question is not whether plugging in is preferable to extremely dire alternatives-lives of torture, for instance-but whether plugging in would constitute the very best life, or tie for being best, because all that matters about a life is how it feels from the inside.

Notice that this is a thought experiment, designed to isolate one question: Do only our internal feelings matter to us? It would miss the point, then, to focus upon whether such a machine is techno- logically feasible. Also, the machine example must be looked at on its own; to answer the question by filtering it through a fixed view that internal experiences are the only things that can matter (so of course it would be all right to plug into the machine) would lose the op- portunity to test that view independently. One way to determine if a view is inadequate is to check its consequences in particular cases, sometimes extreme ones, but if someone always decided what the result should be in any case by applying the given view itself, this would preclude discovering it did not correctly fit the case. Readers who hold they would plug in to the machine should notice whether their first impulse was not to do so, followed later by the thought that since only experiences could matter, the machine would be all right after all.

Few of us really think that only a person's experiences matter. We would not wish for our children a life of greatsatisfactions ·that

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all depended upon de~eptions they would never detect: although they take pride in artistic accomplishments, the critics. and their friends too are just pretending to admire their work yet snk:ker behind their backs; the apparently faithful mate carries on secret love affairs; their apparently loving children really detest them; and so on. Few of us upon hearing this description would exclaim, "What a wonderful life! It feels so happy and pleasurable from the inside," That person is living in a dream world, taking pleasure in things that aren't so. What he wants, though, is not merely to take pleasure in them; he wants them to be so. He values their being that way, ·and he takes pleasure in them because he thinks they are that way. He doesn't take pleasure merely in thinking they are.

We care about more than just how things feel to us from the inside; there is more to life than feeling happy. We care about what is actually the case. We want certain situations we value, prize, and think important to actually hold and be so. We want our beliefs, or certain of them, to be true and accurate; we want our emotions, or certain important ones, to be based upon facts that hold and t;o be fitting. We want to be importantly connected to reality, not to live in a delusion. We desire this not simply in order to more reliably acquire pleasures or other experiences, as Freud's reality principle dictates. Nor do we merely want the added pleasurable feeling of being connected to reality. Such an inner feeling, an illusory one, also can be provided by the experience machine.

Whatwe want and value is an actual connection with reality. Call this the second reality principle ( the first was Freud's): To focus on external reality, with your beliefs, evaluations, and emotions, is valuable in itself, not just as a means to more pleasure or happiness. And it is this connecting thatis valuable, not simply having within ourselves true beliefs. Favoring truth introduces, in a subterranean fashion, the value of the connecting anyway-why else would true beliefs be (intrinsically) more valuable within us than false ones? And if we want to connect to reality by knowing it, and not simply to have tnie beliefs, then if knowledge involves tracking the facts-a view I have developed elsewhere-this involves a direct and explicit external connection. We do not, of cour$e, simply want contact with reality; we want contact of certain kinds: exploring reality and responding, altering it and creating new actu,ality ourselves. Notice that I am not

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saying simply that since we desire connection to actuality the expe- rience machine is defective because it does not give us whatever we desire-though the example is useful to show we do desire some things . in addition .to experiences-for that would make "getting whatever you desire" the primary standat;d. Rather, I am saying that the connection to actuality is important whether or not we desire it-that is why we desire it-and the experience machine is inadequate because it doesn't give us that.*

No doubt, too, we want a connection to actuality that we also , share with other people. One of the distressing things about the experience machine, as describedj is that you are alone in your particular illusion. (Is it more distressing that the others do not share your "world" or that you are cut off from the one they do share?) However, we can imagine that the experience machine provides the very same illusion to everyone ( or to everyone you care about), giving

, each person a coordinate piece of it. When all are floating in the same tank, the experience machine may not be as objectionable, but it is objectioµable µevertheless. Sharing coordinate perspectives mightbe one criterion of actuality, yet it does. not guarantee that; and it is both that we want, the actuality and the sharing.

* One psychologist, George Ainslie, offers an ingenious alternative explanation of our concern for contact with reality, one that sees this as a means, not as intrin- sically valuable. According to Ainslie, to avoid satiation ( and hence a diminution· of pleasure) by imagining satisfactions, we need a clear line to limit pleasures to those less easily available, and reality provides that line; pleasures in reality are fewer and farther between (George Ainslie, "Beyond Microeconomics,".in Jon Elster, ed., The Multiple Self[Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986], pp. 133-175, especially pp. 149-157). Note that the phenomenon of satiation itself presumably has an evolutionary explanation. Organisms that don't get satiated in an activity ( as in the experiments where apparatus enables rats to stimulate the pleasure centers in their brains) will stick to it to the exclusion of all else, and hern;:e die of starvation or at any rate not go on to have or raise offspring. But in a reality framework too organisms wiU have to show some self-control, and not simply pursue easy pleasures even when they have not yet been satiated, so a reality principle would not completely fulfill the purpose Ainslie describes, and presumably other quite clear lines also could serve the purpose as well. One line might depend upon a division of the day according to biological rhythms-is sleep the time for easy pleasures and dreams the vehici<;? Other lines might depend upon whether you were alone or accompanied, recently fed or not, close to a full moon, or whatever; these too could be used to restrict when the easy gain of pleasure was acceptable. Reality is not a unique means to this, noris our concern with reality simply a means.

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Notice that we have not said one should never plug in to such a machine, even temporarily. It might teach you things, or transform you in a way beneficial for your actual life later. It a.liio might give pleasures that would be quite acceptable in limited doses. This is all quite different from spending the rest of your life on the machine; the · internal contents of that life would be. unconnected to actuality. It seems too that once on the machine a person would not make any choices, and certainly would not choose anythingfreery. One portion of what we want to be actual is our actually ( and freely) choosing, not merely the appearance of that.

My reflections about happiness thus far have been about the limits of its tole in life. What is its proper role,_ though, and what exactly is happiness; why has its role so often been exaggerated? A number of distinct emotions travel under the label of happiness~ alorig with one thing that is more properly called a mood rather than an emotion. I want to consider three types of happiness emotion here: first,. being happy that something or other is the case ( or that many things are); second, feeling that your life is good now; and third, being satisfied with your life as a whole. Each of these three related happiness emotions will exhibit the general threefold structure that emotions have (described in the previ,ous meditation): a belief, a positive evaluation, and a feeling based upon these. Where these three related emotions differ is in the object of the belief and eval- uation, and perhaps also in the felt character of the associated feeling.*

The first type of happiness, being happy that some particular thing is the case, is reasonably familiar and dear, a straightforward instance of what has been said about emotion earlier. The second type-feeling that your life is good now-is more intricate. Recall those particular moments when you thought and felt, blissfully, that there was nothing else you wanted, your life was good then. Perhaps this occurred while walking alone in nature, or being with someone you loved. What marks these times is their completeness. There· is something you have that you want, and no other wants come crowd- ing in; there is nothing else that you think of wanting right then. I

* There is a need for an accurate phenomenology of the specific character of these · feelings.

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