ON THE DISTENSIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF PLEASURE

Everybody knows the extraordinary beginning of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.’Footnote ⁷ Just as nobody can fail to notice that pain is mentioned before pleasure, nobody could deny either that nature is being invoked to sustain men's submission to the principle which, at the same time, generalizes the fact that men seek pleasure and avoid pain as much as possible, and uses that fact as the basis of morality. However, some forty years later, when Bentham published The Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, under the assumed name of Philip Beauchamp, the symmetrical naturalness of pleasure and pain seems to have been abandoned. After echoing Hume's idea that ‘pain is a far stronger, more pungent, and more distinct sensation than pleasure’,Footnote ⁸ Bentham added that it is ‘more various in its shapes, more definite and impressive upon memory, and lays hold of the imagination with greater mastery and permanence’. Pain impresses itself more upon our mind than pleasure, even when we seek simply to conceive or imagine them, that is, to form purely mental representations of them. Seemingly in blatant contradiction to the text he published in 1789, and ascribing naturalness only to pain now, Bentham wrote:

This text is not only striking in its explicit negation of the naturalness of pleasures, which puts it at odds with An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Contrary to pain, considered literally, what is at stake is less pleasure than what is called pleasure, which is quite different. Bentham insisted on the secondary status of pleasure with respect to pain; but the phrase carries significant ambiguity. It refers to two rather different things. The first is that, from an individual as well as from a phylogenetic point of view, pain comes first. The constitution of pleasure is subsequent to an initial pain,Footnote ¹⁰ from which it tries to tear itself, the result of all this effort being a final failure. Pain is more archaic than pleasure, which is formed out of it by the effort to overcome it and progressively move it aside. This is never completely achieved without either remainder or reliance on illusion. There is a second meaning to the primary status of pain over pleasure: pain is always more real than pleasure, and it presses with more energy and lasts much longer than pleasure, which is more imaginary, volatile and fragile. Pain is the essence or the very matter of sensation. It is the background to all the sensations, including pleasures. The equivocal meaning of the word pathological mirrors that ambiguity quite well.Footnote ¹¹

The issue of naturalness, and its connections in this passage with the theme of primary and secondary or derivative statuses, requires further explanation. There is nothing fortuitous in the fact that the issue of the inequality of pain and pleasure with regard to naturalness emerges in a book on natural religion, for pain is more natural than pleasure in that man is always subject to it. He does not want it, and, when he thinks that he does want it, it is thanks to the mysteries of asceticism in which he loses the threads of his pleasure. Pain is a formidable sovereign, to which one subjects oneself to as to a foreign master whom one has not chosen and of whom one never knows whether he will manage to knock one down. Pleasure, however, refers to what man can do with himself, in all his precariousness, and in a sort of insipid state that he recognizes as his. Just as pleasure gives the impression of knowing itself, pain, which appears as the anteroom to death, is terrifying because it is unknown. It is beyond all art and all artifice, which are rather – except in the case of the cruel refinements of torturers or perverts – resorted to in the effort to defeat it. Religious criticism could afford to omit neither the disparity between pleasure and pain, nor the exploitation of the terror, which seems to have natural origins:

However, what cannot but surprise Bentham's reader is the fact that though they are torn apart along the axes of naturalness versus artifice, of primary versus secondary status, and of reality versus imaginative and fictitious character, the concepts of pain or suffering and of pleasure are taken together when they are about to be given a role in calculation. This led Bentham into contradictions, at least verbal ones. In his marginal summaries compiled for A Table of the Springs of Action, which was published in 1817,Footnote ¹³ Bentham bluntly declared that ‘pleasures and pains are, doubtless real entities’, in which the other fictitious entities are rooted.Footnote ¹⁴ This assertion was certainly no careless error, as is demonstrated by its frequent, almost verbatim, repetition in the work.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition, Bentham's analytical approach, which led him to want to reduce all psychological and moral entities to functions of pleasures and pains,Footnote ¹⁶ made him deal with pleasure and pain as a correspondent and symmetrical pair, which are, in the same capacity, ‘the roots, the main pillars or foundations of all the rest [i.e. the other psychological entities], the matter of which all the rest are composed – or the receptacles of that matter’.Footnote ¹⁷ This he supported with the following reason, which, on this occasion, and even though his later reflection on religion would shatter this unity, he applied to pleasure as much as to pains: ‘Of pleasures and pains, the existence is matter of universal and constant experience. Without any of the rest [i.e. the other psychological entities], these are susceptible of, – and as often as they come unlooked for, do actually come into, existence’, but ‘without these, no one of all those others ever had, or ever could have had, existence’.Footnote ¹⁸ On this occasion, no sign of any precedence of pains over pleasures appears. Admittedly, what is at stake is not metaphysics anymore, nor ontology, but calculation, which could not allow any disparity or heterogeneity without a significant weakening of its claim to determinacy.

There thus appears to be an obvious tension between the treatments of pleasure and pain in Table of the Springs of Action and in Influence of Natural Religion. Of the primary status of pain over pleasure, which is central to the latter, there is simply no sign in the former. Instead, in Table of the Springs of Action, originality is linked to occurrence in the direct company of perception, whereas derivation or secondary status is linked to occurrence in the company of memory and imagination. Admittedly, one can understand that pleasure requires more memory and imagination to exist than pain, but it should be noted that in this discussion pleasure and pain are dealt with in the same manner, and that Bentham discusses not only derived pleasures but derived pains.Footnote ¹⁹ What does appear in Table of the Springs of Action is a recognition, possibly derived from Bentham's reading of Hume and his reflections on natural religion, that pain is usually more acute than pleasure, which compels the legislator to play more attention to pain than to pleasure.Footnote ²⁰

THAT THE PREVIOUS DISTENSIONS NONETHELESS CAN AND MUST BE REDUCED

It would be a mistake to ignore the ambiguities and apparent tensions identified above, or simply to view them as unresolved inconsistencies, or as the consequence of developments of the author's thought on essential points of his doctrine.Footnote ²¹ Instead, the argument of this article is that far from being the product of errors or changes of mind, they can be perfectly understood, and to some extent resolved, when placed in the context of the study of pleasures within the framework of Bentham's logic in general, and of his theory of fictions in particular.

First, though pains are deemed more ‘natural’ than pleasures, nature never influences men except through the double mastery of pain and pleasure. Even this mastery, even the causal relationship between pains and pleasures on the one hand, and actions on the other, is rather a limiting relationship, which reduces choice, than one in which the situation is such a determining factor that no room is left to actors. Agents are subjected to situations through pleasure or pain, which means that, even in the case of pain, and even when it is severe, they are given more or fewer possibilities that are never completely stifled by necessity.

Moreover, just as a law is characterized in terms of ‘a volition conceived or adopted by the sovereign in a state’Footnote ²² – which is a sort of identifying – it is also noticeable that the religious ascetic ‘has in his breast, for its efficient cause, the desire of ingratiating himself with the almighty being’. This ‘ingratiating’ is a move to adopt, to incorporate the assumed or pretended will of the Almighty Being. Fear – that is the (dyslogistic) alternative name of ‘the desire of ingratiating himself with, of the desire or recommending himself to the favour of the Almighty Being’Footnote ²³ – gives way to an activity, more phantasmic and illusory than that of the industrious and civilizing pleasure. Fear is more archaic, more primitive, than hope.

Second, the concepts of primary and secondary statuses must be understood in a relative rather than an absolute sense. When pain is said to come before pleasure, it must be understood in the way that Pascal asks us to consider the relation between nature and habit, that is, as always ready for, and capable of, some reversal. This means that what is considered to be natural may not necessarily be so, and that it is quite easy to consider that something may in certain circumstances have a primary status, even if, in other circumstances, it is only an unnoticed secondary formation. The problem for any analysis is to determine whether it is sufficiently sophisticated to accommodate such reversals.

This is one of the points of which Bentham was well aware, as demonstrated by his critique of the ideological use of the words nature and natural, which made it possible for the most conservative and reactionary ideas to find a comfortable refuge.Footnote ²⁴ ‘Whenever you are bid to see her doing man's work, be sure it is not Nature that is doing it, but the author, or somebody or other whom he patronizes, and whom he has dressed up for the purpose in the goddess's robes.’Footnote ²⁵ In this light, it seems plausible to assert that the previous axes which we have abstracted – nature versus artifice, primary versus secondary status, real versus fictitious – and the apparently clear-cut distinctions that appeared in the different works that we have consulted, and which correspond to different aims in Bentham's work, must be considered carefully.Footnote ²⁶ How could one forget, after all, that in a utilitarian system, which puts human action at the foundation of everything, the traditional relation between ontology and deontology is reversed? Action does not start in a being that is already there: rather it forms for itself the being it needs.

Finally, one further point must be taken into consideration. It is not possible to see why pleasure (or pain for that matter) would be any less fictitious an entity than any other psychological entity, since it is as diverse as any other, and since the entity of pleasure is no less abstract and, as such, non-existent, than any other. Goldworth subtly pointed out that, though the word ‘pleasure’ is not categorized with such words as ‘interest’, ‘desire’ and ‘want’, which are fictitious terms, yet, ‘like these, the word “pleasure” is incapable of being defined per genus et differentiam’,Footnote ²⁷ and so is closely akin to a fictitious term, incapable of definition and only explained by paraphrasis.Footnote ²⁸ Pleasure never exists except as a point, not experienced and quite uninhabitable, common to all sorts of perceptions, memories, imaginations and projects it accompanies, although in reality it is not pleasure that accompanies, but other perceptions and other entities that are ‘interesting’Footnote ²⁹ and, as such, pleasurable or unpleasant, and thus allow pleasure to be elaborated. For such an in abstracto construction of pleasure and displeasure is necessarily at the root of all the springs of action, and there is an order that cannot be reversed. ‘Pleasures and pains exist without the springs; not vice versa.’Footnote ³⁰ What needs to be understood is how that abstraction, which transforms adjective realities into substantive realities, will require a sort of mathematics – exemplified in the calculus of degrees of certainty – which is capable of distinguishing between the chance to be right in making a guess, and the probability of an event happening.Footnote ³¹ In order to understand that, however, the specific relation between psychological entities (and particularly affective ones) and language must first be studied.

ON AFFECTIVITY AND LANGUAGE, AND THEIR RELATION AS PROLEGOMENON TO MATHEMATIZATION

Hume tried to reduce all the passions he analysed to a structure of a linguistic nature, but in so doing he always underlined two points from which Bentham radically distanced himself. The first is that passion is essentially felt and that, therefore, structures and associations do not exhaust the particular tune and flavour that passions have. The second is that language is woven by affective and imaginative elements, but not conversely: the affects are not the product of language. Hume gave as a proof of this assertion the fact that languages give a structure to that to which they refer, more or less in the same way, and that they may be translated from the one into the others.Footnote ³² Bentham rejected Hume's view on these two points and drew crucial inferences from that rejection.

First, for Bentham, what is experienced in passions, their ‘tune’, is not their essence. The structural and associative element has become the core, and what is experienced has no more substance than that signified in words. What we call passion is made up of a signifying structure. Second, since that signifying structure is rather narrowly conceived as linguistic, when Bentham filled Table of the Springs of Action, mainly with English terms, he did not forget to mention that they would have been quite different in other languages, and that the translation of his table into other languages would be desirable precisely in order to show that the identity of affects and of their system, far from being autonomous and independent of languages, is radically linked to them in their contingent and diverse nature.Footnote ³³

Though he emphasized the different vernacular languages at the foundation of the affective processes, Bentham did not leave them as they were, but kept transforming them, so that, for instance, pathology became pathematics.Footnote ³⁴ The central goal of some such transformations, in particular the reduction of all psychic actions – be they perceptive or affective ones – to functions of pleasures and pains, is to make calculations possible.

Just as it is quite clear that Hume's linguistic system did not try to conceal or to erode the experienced singularity of passions, and only established a few points of likeness and a few tendencies in their evolutions and associations, it is equally clear that Bentham's intention was, through the reduction to pleasure and pain, to allow for the homogeneous and commensurate dimensions necessary as the basis of calculations. Bentham's pathematics is a technique of reduction of the potentially incommensurate dimensions of sensitive or affective data to computable elements. His speculation on that point is that by reducing all the passions and other perceptions to pleasure and pain, commensurate dimensions will be found more easily.

This move, however, is in no way obvious, and it seems vulnerable to the criticisms of which Bergson was later the harbinger. First, the entire calculus of pleasures, which seems founded on the fact that certain pleasures are felt more strongly or more vividly than others – and that certain pains are felt more strongly and more vividly than others – is built upon a confusion between pleasures or pains as they are felt, and the causes or excitations which make them possible. It may be correct that we can add such exciting causes together or subtract them from each other; but it is false – and perhaps absurd – to assert that pleasures and pains themselves can be involved in such calculations. ‘For there is nothing in common between magnitudes that may be superimposed such as vibration-amplitudes, for instance, and sensations that take up no room.’Footnote ³⁵ Second, we must not confuse the affective sensations (what Hume called the impressions of reflection) with the representative sensations, which are obviously composed of distinguishable elements that may easily enter in calculus. In relation to pleasure and pain, the criticism is that nothing is representable. Third, the idea of a calculus of pleasures and pains – which is much spoken about without ever being carried out − rests on the confused idea that the designation by language of pleasures and pains (and of all their combinations) somehow allows us to reason about symbols as if they were the feelings themselves. ‘Associationism’ – Bergson could have said the same of utilitarianism − ‘makes the mistake of constantly replacing the concrete phenomenon which takes place in the mind by the artificial reconstruction philosophy gives for it – through the language that makes it possible – and thus confusing the explanation of the fact with the fact itself’.Footnote ³⁶ Language, through its spatial schematism, supplies a middle term between what is properly sensation (to which language can, at best, give some approximate denotation) and the causes of that sensation (which can be analysed, and potentially submitted to calculation). Thus, a given pleasure may be commensurable with some other pleasure that might be either past or future, and the pleasure that one person experiences at any given moment may be commensurable with the pleasure that another person experiences. Of course it is the same for displeasures and pains. But,

Although no contemporary critic expressed these criticisms in such a developed form, Bentham's philosophy of pleasure and pain did not leave them entirely unanswered. On the first point, his project had never really been that of reducing pleasures and pains to commensurate dimensions, since he recognized that such a project would be absurd. Indeed, Bentham never asserted its possibility. He too distinguished between different types of pleasures. The problem was to translate them into some common metric that would make it possible to assess what should be done socially, that is to say, legally, politically and economically speaking, when one tried to be useful. In Codification Proposal, he stated his ambition as follows:

Further, nobody will say either that the distant memory of a pleasure is the equivalent of a pleasure that is immediately experienced, or that the expectation of a pleasure differs from the pleasure I am currently giving myself only in being a pleasure of a different sort. It is possible to make room for quantities, but with what sort of mathematics? On the second point, given that he valued the Humean distinction between the impression of sensation and impressions of reflection, how plausible is it that Bentham could have neglected that distinction, particularly in the context of a theory of fictions? But it is Bentham's response to the third point that is the strongest, and most complete. It is impossible, in Bergson's view, for language to do better than to speak of the passions. Writing in part in response to Berkeley, Bentham explains that language determines, or sets limits to, the meaning of the passions just as it does in relation to all the other impressions, so that the distinction Bergson would advance as an objection, that is the distinction between the explanation of a fact and the fact itself, has no grounds. The difficulty lies merely in choosing the appropriate mode of calculus.

Bentham was probably conscious that nobody in his time knew enough of the mathematics that would make possible the calculations required to write the best laws and to establish the best policies. Infinitesimal calculation therefore acted for him as an expectation fantasy, for lack of a better one. Leibniz added the ‘small perceptions’ as if the calculations had been made or were, at least, doable. However, even though the best pathematological tools had not yet been developed, Bentham nonetheless felt an acute and persistent desire to create them, that is, to establish the commensurate dimensions necessary to social constructions, even if that entailed forcing a square peg (in the shape of a reality actually incapable of accurate representation) into a round hole (in the shape of a practically useful cognitive pattern). In effect, he did not deem reality as simply given, as simply the place where actions should be set, but rather saw reality as a construction, as that which can be built with the best means. This is how Bentham's project is mathematical, or at least related to mathematics. Deontology thus determines ontology: when the deontological goal influences the ontology, the consequence is good, but not vice versa. Only mathematics can give the idea of, and a method safely to negotiate, the abyss which has opened between a pleasure felt now and a past or future pleasure, or between another's pleasure and my pleasure, or between a pleasure and a pain, and so on. Ontology without mathematics – all the more so if against mathematics − is the source of all the difficulties. The discussion of Maupertuis is interesting from this point of view. Bentham noted that although Maupertuis might have been unfortunate in his definitions of pleasure and pain, he ‘was a mathematician and if he erred, it was with method and precision’. Bentham adopted his dynamic definitions – which could permit a mathematical treatment − of pleasure (‘every sensation [in French: perception] that a man had rather feel than not feel’)Footnote ³⁹ and of pain (‘every sensation [perception] during which a man would wish to sleep or to pass on to any other, every such sensation’).

More generally speaking, it would be a misinterpretation to think that Bentham expected mathematics to provide an instrument that could be directly applied to pleasures and pains. It is true that he sometimes sounded as if that were his position, but it does not capture the core of his doctrine. Just as Kant knew that the law of gravity is the rule of the succession of the available representations of a process thus reconstructed, or even constructed, Bentham knew perfectly well that every law of nature must be taken metaphorically,Footnote ⁴⁰ and that the rules that are supposed to measure the quantities of pleasures and pains and their movements do not actually refer to these things in themselves, but to our intention to act upon them, which is quite different. It would be absolutely wrong to understand the calculations undertaken with reference to the sums of money and their movements, which represent pains and pleasures, as giving an approximate idea of what happens for the pains and pleasures themselves. Bentham insisted on the impossibility of moving from the one to the other, and denounced such a simplistic identification. This was never his aim, however, for it is by no means certain that pains and, furthermore, pleasures exist otherwise than phantasmatically. Just as those laws called laws of nature are in reality laws of the physicist's practice, the alleged laws of the psyche and affectivity are the laws of the politician's practice, be they a legislator or the government, be they active in politics, or in a position of ethics – officer or law specialist, deontologist or nomographist. Furthermore, Bentham was too familiar with the notion of probability – particularly with what are called nowadays subjective probabilities or Bayesian probabilities − to ignore the fact that the mathematical laws of probabilities may apply rather to the subject that guesses, and to his reasons to believe, than to the objects themselves (in this case: to sensations as they are felt).Footnote ⁴¹ Here the link between the theory of fictions and calculation is revealed.

The assertions that sensations of pleasure are not homogeneous, and that they are in fact no more homogeneous in Bentham than in Hume, may appear to undermine the central claims of Bentham's philosophy. However, it is the thesis of this article that Bentham ascribes a dual status both to pains and, more explicitly, to pleasures. Indeed, the logic or method of fictions is precisely intended to treat objects that have this dual status. For Bentham, pleasures or pains may be taken alternatively as real entities or fictitious entities, and this reading helps to explain both the ambitions and the methods of his mathematical calculus. The next section will adduce some evidence in support of this thesis, and argue that the treatment of the concepts of pleasure and pain in the theory of fictions is far from being merely abstract and idle speculation, but rather facilitates the execution of important and quite concrete functions in the domains of religion and law.

THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLEASURE AND PAIN AND THE THEORY OF FICTIONS

Real and fictitious entities do not have any meaning in themselves, but only in a discourse, and their discursive meaning depends on the role they play in that discourse. Entities deemed real in any given discourse may be considered but fictitious in another; and even in a single discourse the denominations ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ are reversible up to a certain point. Fictions cannot be understood without recognizing a tension between the fiction and what is deemed to be real. This tension is both revealed and, to some extent, resolved, by investigating the reversals and inversions, for instance the changing of verbs and adjectives into nouns, and vice versa. Fully to appreciate the scope of the theory of fictions, it must be added that the function of language (even though the language in question is a vernacular language, as in Bentham's work)Footnote ⁴² is not only to reflect and communicate ideas, but also to produce them.

This is how the ambiguities and tensions in the appreciation of pleasures noted at the beginning of this article should be understood. They do not refer to the variations in definition, for it is doubtful that there is any definition of pleasure, but only to some paraphrases of it. It is perfectly clear that the desire to calculate, or even to quantify, pleasures and pains requires that they be transformed into substantives and dealt with uniformly. It is also quite clear that the desire to attack religion requires that pleasure should keep its reflexive character in relation to perceptions, and its status as an interesting perception, which makes it closer to an adjective. In the latter case, reflection is refinement and civilization, and in any case has a secondary status. But such a secondary status can also apply to pains and displeasures, so that religion may be presented as a culture of suffering, and as a general will to denigrate pleasures. This appearance it could have taken if pleasure had been considered as an element of balance. What is at stake in Influence of Natural Religion is the exhibiting of a culture of death and suffering that is not commensurate with what calculation offers as an alternative within nations, provided they become sufficiently refined and civilized. Religion seems, then, in the reckless, fragile and conquering advance of pleasures that set free deep-seated needs, to be that which undoes this advance, that which retains the memory of the basis from which the emancipation from pain started. Religious pathology then appears to be the other side of our actions.

The point here is not to investigate the extent to which this brilliant theory is or is not consistent with other utilitarian premises, by asking, for instance, what becomes of the tendency to seek pleasure if there is some necessity of religion, some natural necessity of it, as Hume called it. Similarly, how should one consider the general character of religion, as a culture of displeasure, if pleasure is maintained to be a general quest and tendency? Instead, what is important here is to show how, without any inconsistency, the theory of fictions accommodates and facilitates the dual language that has been noticed about pleasure.

Even though, again like Hume, Bentham ended his life of reflection on religion without daring to publish more than a fragment of it, and that under a pseudonym, and therefore without having to defend it, it seems that that dual meaning of pleasure may also be read in the legal domain, where, through the opposition between substantive and adjective laws, pleasures and pains may be seen as pathemes, or even as pathemathemes, which enable the conservation of what is adjectival in perceptions, or, in other words, of what is ‘interesting’ in perceptions. In multiple texts, and particularly when he introduces the concept of procedure or of procedural law, Bentham opposes the laws that seem to describe the things themselves and their relations, to the laws that define or determine the technical means to implement the first category of laws.Footnote ⁴³ Bentham emphasizes that it seems logical that the law which deals with real relations should first be settled, in order for the law of procedure to be really meaningful. He refers to mathematics to substantiate that opinion and legitimate it.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nonetheless, he asks the reader to admit that this order of priority does not always apply, and that sometimes procedural law is the fundamental law that gives the other its meaning. In this move, it becomes apparent how the apagogic relation between the two modalities of the law expresses the apagogic relation between the two conceptions of pleasure. Admittedly, when pleasure is considered as an element of a construction, it seems to be considered as more real than when it is considered as the reflection of a perception. But one should then reflect upon what Berkeley had already noted (and which Bentham echoed): that discourse produces and realizes a radical inversion in relation to our feelings of existence, for it acts as if we really dealt with substances that are being qualified by adjectives, although historically adjectives of quality come first, and it is from them that we create the corresponding nouns.Footnote ⁴⁵ If one pays attention to what occurs in the case of laws, one will see roughly the same thing happening. Adjective law may seem to be leaving things in a potential state, but, on deeper investigation, it can be interpreted as the more real law, since substantive law is nothing other than its apparent transformation into a substantive.Footnote ⁴⁶

Even though this passage contains its own ambiguities, and reflection on it triggers further ambiguities, it seems clear that the double definition of pleasure in Bentham's work – where it seems to be as unavoidable as it is in Hume’sFootnote ⁴⁷ – is far from being some oversight, some flaw in his work, but on the contrary plays a crucial part in the very architecture of Bentham's legal system, which nobody will categorize as a secondary aspect of his work. It is because language always sounds as if the objects to which it refers are real entities, even when those objects have no substantial reality, that it can articulate both substantive law and adjective law with equal facility. There is no law that is in touch with the substantive on the one side, without bordering on the adjective on the other. In other words, there is no law that is not ‘material’ on one side, without being ‘procedural’ on the other, just as there is no pleasure – and no displeasure or pain – that is not directly sensible on the one side, and more ideal on the other.