Enjoyment

Enjoyment is a nexus at which important concepts meet, among them

the concepts of feeling and reasons for action. We offer an account of

enjoyment that combines and explains both the felt and reason-for-action

aspects of enjoyment. The feeling of enjoyment varies greatly. Compare the

watery relief of satisfying an urgent thirst; sexual gratification; a sudden whiff

of perfume; learning that one has received a fervently hoped for grant; the

thoughts, associations, and feelings aroused by reading the following lines

from the end of Faust, spoken by the angels when they snatch Faust from

Mephistopheles: “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,/Den können wir erlösen.”

The variety of feeling does not, however, prevent enjoyment from playing a

standard explanatory-justificatory role. When asked, “Why do you play so

much chess?” one provides both an explanation and a justification by

offering, as one’s reason, “Because I enjoy it.” We offer our account by

completing the following biconditional:

x enjoys φ if and only if ... ,

where φ is an experience or an activity of x.

The central idea is that enjoyment consists in a harmony between three

elements: the relevant activity or experience; the features which this activity or

experience causes you to believe it has; and a desire to for the activity or

experience so conceived. The harmony consists in this: the activity or

experience causes a desire which it simultaneously causes one to believe is

satisfied. The belief and desire comprise the point at which the felt aspect of

enjoyment and its explanatory/justificatory role meet. The belief/desire pair is

typically a reason to act in way that ensure the existence or continuance of the

experience or activity, and the key to characterizing the way it feels to enjoy

something is to note that the relevant desire is a felt desire and the relevant

belief an occurrent belief.

Experience and Activity

The restriction of values of ‘φ’ to experiences and activities may at first

sight seem questionable. After all, you can enjoy a meal, a painting, and

deep sea fishing. But, of course, you can enjoy the meal only if you eat it;

the painting, only if you look at it; and, deep sea fishing only if you engage in

appropriate activities. In general, where y is something other than an

experience or activity, you enjoy y if and only if you enjoy φ, where φ is a

suitable experience or activity involving y. But which way, if any, does the

direction of explanation run? Do we explain our enjoying the meal by noting

that we enjoy the taste, or do we explain the latter with reference to the

former? Or, are they just distinct enjoyments neither one of which need

explain the other? As we discuss in more detail later, when you examine

explanations of the form “because he or she enjoys it”, you find that we treat

as derivative the enjoyment of things other than experiences and activities.

What is enjoyed is ultimately understood (explicitly or implicitly) to be an

experience or an activity. It is this primacy in explanation that motivates our

restricting values of ‘φ’ to experiences and activities.

To avoid misunderstanding, it is worth recalling that traditional

empiricism uses ‘experience’ for a “passive receptivity” involved in

perception. We mean nothing of the sort; indeed, we not endorse any

particular philosophical account of the notions of experience and activity.

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Our talk of experiences and activities is just a convenient way to describe the

range of items that is our primary concern. We merely have in mind the

rough and ready distinction enshrined in ordinary talk and thought. Central

examples of activities are publicly observable “doings” subject to intentional

guidance and control. Central examples of experiences are “undergoings”

presented to the one undergoing them in a way they are not presented to

others. There is no sharp distinction here. We routinely refer to publicly

observable objects when describing experiences—for example, “an

experience of watching one’s daughter perform in a play.” Activities on the

other hand have publicly unobservable aspects. An activity, as we are using

the term, is an intentional action (swinging the golf club), or a sequences of

such actions (deep-sea fishing, or growing roses, the latter being a sequence

of temporally discontinuous sequences). Intentions are accessible to the

agent in a way they are not accessible to others; further, activities, like deep-

sea fishing for example, involve experiences, like feeling the fish strike the

line, and one may describe the “experience” of imagining Warsaw in the

snow as an “activity” even though one’s imaginative project is not publicly

observable.

A final point: We understand ‘φ’ to range over individual, non-

repeatable instances of experiences and activities; thus, the definition is

concerned with, for example, enjoying this particular experience eating of the

meal or this particular activity deep sea fishing. This approach runs head on

into questions about what one enjoys. Thus: Imagine Zoe describing the

difficulties she encountered in running a marathon—the pain in her side, the

pain in her legs, the soreness of her feet; she nonetheless says she enjoyed

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running the race. Exactly what experiences and activities did Zoe enjoy?

There are answers of course, but giving a general account of how to arrive at

the answers raises questions of how to individuate enjoyed experiences and

activities. We will defer such questions; they are better raised in the context

of a more fully developed account of enjoyment.

Enjoyment and Desire

We contend that one enjoys φ only if one desires φ. We understand

‘desire’ in the broadest possible sense to include such diverse sources of

motivation as values, ideals, needs, commitments, personal loyalties, and

patterns of emotional reaction. Further, the desire to φ need not exist prior

to one’s enjoying φ. Imagine, for example, you are cornered by a talkative

stranger with whom you have no initial desire to converse; however, you

eventually enjoy conversing. Our claim is that as long as you enjoy

conversing, you desire to do so. This will seem to be a mistake to those who

think that one can only properly be said to desire that which one lacks;

however, that is not our conception. We conceive of a desire as a state that

not only causes one to seek what one lacks, but to persist once one finds it.1 1 This will seem counterintuitive to those who see desire as related to a "perceived lack," but it should cause no problems to those who think of desires as states that move us to action. See, for example, Brian O'Shaughnessy, The Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2, p. 295f.: "A brief word on desire. When action occurs, it is in the final analysis this phenomenon that underlies all of the workings of the act generative mental machinery." Thus desire is what explains my acting so as to maintain ongoing experiences and activities whose occurrence I want, even when I know such experiences are occurring (compare quotes from Hobbes below). O'Shaughnessy characterizes desire as a "striving towards an act of fulfillment" (2, p. 296). In this, he agrees with Aristotle; the root meaning of Aristotle's most general word for desire-'orexis'-is "a reaching out after." Plato is one source of the "perceived lack" view (see the Symposium, for example). This view is indefensible as a general characterization of desire. The problem is revealed by Hobbes. In the Leviathan, Hobbes characterizes desire as an "endeavour . . . toward something which causes it," but he restricts the use of 'desire' to cases in which the object of desire is absent. However, he then notes: "that which men desire, they are also said

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To see that desiring to φ is necessary condition of enjoying φ, imagine

you are listening to an indifferently performed piano piece. The pianist is

your friend, and he will ask you if you enjoyed the performance. You know

that that you will say you did, and, in hopes of avoiding an unconvincing lie,

you are trying to enjoy it. Unfortunately, the indifferent performance leaves

you indifferent—neither desiring to listen, nor desiring not to listen. The

complete absence of any desire to listen to the music certainly seems

sufficient to show you not are enjoying listening to it. The following

considerations provide reinforce this conclusion. Imagine Smith was

attending a party which he left after only staying a short while; he complains

that he wanted nothing the party had to offer. He mitigates these complaints,

however, by confessing that the party was not completely wretched, and that

he actually enjoyed it a little. If this confession is consistent with Smith's

claim that he wanted nothing the party had to offer, then Smith enjoys the

party without any relevant desire. But why should one grant that the

confession and the claim are consistent? Suppose we ask Smith what it was

that he enjoyed about the party. Smith might refuse to answer this question,

for he might insist that he just enjoyed attending the party without enjoying

any particular aspect of the party. For the moment, however, let's suppose he

to LOVE: and to HATE those things for which they have aversion. So that desire and love are the same thing; save that by desire, we always signify the absence of the object; by love most commonly the presence of the same. So also by aversion we signify the absence; and by hate, the presence of the object" (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth [London: John Bohn, 1939]). Surely, Hobbes is right. If desire requires the absence of the object, we need a word for that attitude that is just like desire except that its object is present-the attitude that explains why one would resist removal of the object. Remove the object and this attitude is 'desire'. But then why not just say that 'love' and 'desire' are just the same state-whether the object is present or absent? Or at least say that 'love' and 'desire' are instances of some single generic desire-state? As Hobbes says, "love and desire are the same thing."

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answers us by saying that he enjoyed dancing, but he denies he wanted to

dance, and he does not merely mean that he did not desire to dance prior to

dancing, he means that, throughout the time he was purportedly enjoying

dancing, he did not desire to dance. As in the indifferently-performed-music

example, the complete lack of a desire to dance is sufficient to establish that

Smith did not enjoy dancing. The same considerations would apply if Smith

said that what he enjoyed was not dancing but talking with friends, or

listening to music, or watching the people, or whatever. In fact, it is difficult

to see how Smith can provide any convincing answer to the question of what

it was about the party that he enjoyed. But, as we already noted, Smith may

reject the question and insist that, while he, neither desired nor enjoyed any

particular thing the party had to offer, he nonetheless enjoyed attending the

party. Suppose that this is what Smith does, and suppose that he also insists

that, even though he enjoyed attending the party, he did not want to be

there at all. Is this sufficient to cast doubt on the claim that desiring to φ is a

necessary condition of enjoying φ? Surely not. Smith at no time desires to

attend the party, and does not have any desire for anything the party has to

offer-dancing, music, conversations with friends, or anything else. This is a

crystal clear example of not enjoying a party.

We conclude that one enjoys having an experience or engage in an

activity φ only if one desires to have or do φ. This formulation does not,

however, provide a sufficiently perspicuous specification of the required

desire.

Desiring under A

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To begin with, φ is an individual experience or activity about which one

has a desire. We will express this by saying that one desires, of φ, that it

should occur. Thus, if you are enjoying tasting bittersweet chocolate, we will

describe you as desiring, of that experience, that it occur. This is simply an

instance of the following the standard Quinean convention of corner quotes.

Where ‘[’ and ‘]’ are the left and right corner quotes, a singular term [t] may

be substituted salva veritate for a term [t'] in the context [ ... desires, of t,

that . . .] given the true identity [t = t’]. We need one further refinement in

our description of desires. To this end, imagine you are enjoying the

experience of tasting bittersweet chocolate. The bitter sweetness creates

and pervades a gustatory field that captures your attention, and it is this

bitter sweetness that is the aspect of the experience that you desire. We will

express this by saying that you desire, of the experience of tasting the

chocolate, under the feature bittersweet, that it occur. The “of, under”

device is cumbersome and unnecessary if one is simply describing particular

instances of enjoyment (one can just say, for example, “It is the bitter

sweetness of the taste that Jones enjoys and desires”). The device is

essential, however, if we are to have a perspicuous way of talking in general

about enjoyment and desire. We adopt the same conventions for belief for

the same reason. When one of believes that a particular ongoing experience

or activity realizes a certain array of features, we will say that one believes,

of the activity, under that array, that it is occurring.

Our general claim is that when one enjoys having or doing φ, there is

an array A of one or more features such that one desires, of φ, under A, that

it occur. Take experiences first. The essential point is that to experience

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something is to experience as being some way. To experience the taste of

chocolate is to experience it as bittersweet, or sweet, or as chocolaty, or

whatever. One’s experiences always present themselves as experiences of a

certain sort. There are no “raw feels,” no experiences that we have without

apprehending them as experiences of a certain sort. Thus, to desire to have

an experience is to desire to have an experience of a certain sort. In our

terminology, it is to desire, of the experience, under some array A of features,

that it should occur. A similar point holds for activities. Suppose you are

enjoying singing along to a rendition of the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony. You hear the music and the singers, and, in a swirl of emotions,

memories, and associations, you feel and hear yourself sing, “Freudig, wie

ein Held zum Siegen.” In short, you are aware of the activity has having a

variety of features, and it is the realization of these features (or some subset

of them) that you desire. Again, we express this by saying that you desire, of

your singing activity, under the relevant array of features, that it should

occur.

Enjoying Under A

To summarize, when one enjoys having or doing φ, there is an array of

features A such that one desires, of φ, under A, that it should occur. We take

it to be clear that when asked, “What did you enjoy about it?”, one answers

by specifying (some of) the features in A. In such cases, we will say x enjoys

φ under A (more precisely, in a subset of such cases—our view being that

desiring φ under A is a necessary but not sufficient condition of enjoying φ

under A). The “under A” simply provides an explicit representation of what is

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implicit in our day in day out description of people as enjoying experiences

and activities: namely, that there is some desire array of features that are

the enjoyers would identify in response to the question, “What do you enjoy

about it?” We will therefore define enjoyment by completing “x enjoys φ

under A if and only if ...”

Conceiving of enjoying as enjoying under A provides a satisfying way

to describe the earlier marathon example. Zoe enjoys running the marathon

under an array of features A that includes, for example, achieving an

important goal, competing against other runners at her level, and beating her

personal best, but does not include having a pain in her side, pain in her legs,

and sore feet.

Desiring Under A Is Not Sufficient

It is a necessary condition of enjoying φ under A, that one desire, of φ,

under A, that it should occur; it is, however, clearly not a sufficient condition.

Suppose you desire to undergo dental treatment. In our canonical form: you

desire, of your current experience, under the feature needed dental

treatment, that it should occur. However, dental treatment is for you an

ordeal of discomfort and anxiety. You desire to undergo your current

experience only as a means to the end of adequate dental health, and you

most certainly do not enjoy the experience. The obvious response is to

distinguish between desiring something for its own sake and desiring

something only as a means to an end. To desire that p for its own sake is to

desire p and not to desire it merely as a contingently related means to an

end; and, second, that to desire that p merely as a means to an end is for

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there to be an end E such that one would not desire p if one did not desire E

and believe that p was a contingently related means to E. The “contingently

related” qualification allows the following case to count as desiring something

for its own sake. Victoria desires in general the experience of looking at

impressionist paintings for its own sake; she is looking at Mary

Cassatt’s Lydia Leaning on Her Arms, which she correctly believes is an

impressionist painting. She desires, of her looking at the painting, under

looking at Lydia Leaning on Her Arms, that it should occur for its own sake;

however, she would not have that desire if she did not believe that the

painting was an impressionist painting. One question remains: how should

one understand attributions of desire for its own sake in our canonical form?

What does it mean to say that one desires, of φ, under A, that it should occur

for its own sake? What is the “it”? Our answer: φ’s realization of A. What

one wants for its own sake is that φ should realize A.

A Preliminary Definition

Simplicity argues for the following account: one enjoys φ under A if and

only if one φ’s, and one desires, of φ, under A, that it should occur for its own

sake. The condition is not sufficient, however, as the following example

shows.

The “In Spite Of, Not Because Of” Examples

You have never been deep-sea fishing, but have long harbored a desire

to do so for its own sake, and are now in fact engaged in that very activity.

That long harbored desire and your belief that you are now indeed deep sea

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fishing explain your desire, of your activity, under deep-sea fishing, that it

occur for its own sake. You are not, however, enjoying the activity under the

feature deep-sea fishing. You find the activity distasteful. You get seasick;

you are disgusted by the crowded, noisy deck from which you must fish; you

are repelled by the necessity of barehandedly catching the small, live fish

used for bait, and you are even more repelled by the fact that, once you have

succeeded in grabbing the bait, you have to impale the struggling fish by the

gills on your hook. But your desire to fish survives this initial shock, and you

continue to fish even though you admit to yourself that you are not enjoying

it. You only continue to fish in the hope that you will enjoy it. In the present,

however, your desire to fish is waning. It persists, but it persists despite your

reactions, and it is only the hope that things will change that keeps it alive.

You can construct any number of examples along these lines. You just

need (1) a preexisting desire to have an experience or engage in an activity

of a certain type for its own sake; (2) the belief, of a particular instance of the

experience or activity, under an array of features A, that it is now occurring;

and (3) the resulting desire, of the experience or activity, under A, that it

should occur for its own sake. One does not enjoy the particular instance, but

one’s desire in (3) persists for a while “in spite of, not because of” the

particular realization of what one desire in a general way. We take these

examples to show that it is not sufficient to count as enjoying φ, under A that

one φ’s and desires, of φ, under A, that it occur for its own sake.

Toward a Sufficient Condition

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Further reflection on the deep-sea fishing example points the way to a

sufficient condition. The example is a convincing case of lack of enjoyment in

large part because your desire persists, in spite of, not because of, your

activity. Transform this feature into its opposite transforms the example into

one of enjoyment. Thus: suppose a large fish suddenly strikes your line, and

all of your attention is immediately focused on the fight to land it. Your

seasick feeling, your impinging awareness of the crowded deck, and your

qualms about catching the live bait are instantly eclipsed by the excitement

of the fight; moreover, after you have landed the fish, you find that you are

no longer seasick. The deck no longer seems inhospitably crowded but full of

cooperative people who are congratulating you on your catch. Even catching

and hooking the live bait now seems just one of those necessities which

disquiet only the uninitiated. You find now that you want to fish not in spite

of, but because of your experiences. You are—as you now realize—enjoying

it.

We interpret the “not in spite of, but because of” causally. This appeal

to causation is to be understood in the context of everyday causal

explanations. The identification of causes in such explanations is highly

pragmatic. For example, when eight-year-old Sally asks her mother why the

mill wheel turns, her mother replies that the wheel turns because the water

strikes it. When Sally, now an undergraduate, is working on a similar

homework problem

for her Physics course, her answer includes a calculation of the friction in the

mill’s system. With causation so understood, we suggest that after the large

fish strikes your line, but not before, there is an array of features A meeting

513

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these conditions: your activity of deep-sea fishing causes you to believe, of

that activity, under A, that it is occurring; and, to desire, of that activity,

under A, that it should occur. Thus, the activity not only causes you to desire

it for its own sake, it also ensures the—at least apparent—satisfaction of that

desire by causing you believe that you are getting exactly what you want. To

give more content to our talk of causation, we describe the typical causal

pattern we have in mind.

For convenience and concreteness, we continue with the deep sea

fishing example. Similar remarks hold for examples involving experiences.

We begin with the observation that deep sea fishing is an activity that

evolves over time. Think of the activity as composed of a sequence of

activities φ1, . . ., φn paired with an evolving sequence of arrays of features,

A1, . . ., An. You satisfy the definition of enjoyment for each φi, Ai pair. Each

φi causes you to perceive or otherwise be aware2 that it has certain features.

The features may or may not include or coincide with the features in A i. In

the “coincide or include” cases, perceiving or otherwise being aware of φ i as

having those features is to believe, of φi under Ai, that it is occurring;

otherwise, there will be some causal path from the perception/awareness to

the belief. We place no restriction on what these causal paths may be. All

that matters is that you form the belief, or, where it already exists, have it

reinforced. The causal route from the perception/awareness to the desire

may also exhibit a variety of (possibly concurrent sources): your values,

commitments, predilections, attitudes (established or momentary), and so

on. Again, we impose no restrictions; it just matters that the desire forms or

2 For those who object to talk of perceiving sensations and the like.

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is reinforced. There is no need to describe another pattern for activities that

have no temporal duration since they are none. Even the briefest activity

takes some time and exhibits some complex of features in that time.

The Causal Harmony

We take enjoyment to consist in a causal harmony between an

experience or an activity, and the belief/desire pair it causes. Thus,

x enjoys φ under A if and only if

(1) x φ’s;

(2) x's φing causes x

(a) to believe, of φ, under A, that it occurs, and

(b) to desire, of φ, under A, that it occur for its own sake.

Note that (b) reads “occur” not “continue to occur.” To see why, consider

enjoying writing the last word of an essay. Writing the last word is

necessarily an activity that occurs in a relatively short time span; if it takes a

year for one to “write the last word,” then whatever one is doing, it is not, in

any normal understanding of the phrase, writing the last word. Thus, when

one enjoys writing the last word, one does not—per impossible—desire that

one’s writing the word should continue beyond the relevant time span; one

simply desires that it happen. Similarly, consider enjoying a sudden whiff of

perfume. The brief experience is enjoyable but in which any prolonged

experience of the overpowering odor would be distinctly distasteful. Unlike

your activity of writing the last word, you experience of smelling the perfume

could endure for quite some time; it is not necessarily confined to a short

temporal interval. However, since one wishes to avoid any further

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experience of what one realizes would quickly become a cloying odor, one

desires that the experience occur, not that it continue. Such cases aside,

when one enjoys φ under A, one desires, of φ under A, not only that it should

occur, but that it should continue to do so for some appropriate length of

time. When you enjoy the experience of the bitter-sweet chocolate taste, you

typically desire that the experience continue for some period of time. In

addition, as the taste fades, you may also desire, of a possible future taste

experience, under a relevantly similar array of features A’, that it should

occur (and typically that it should continue).

The Need for Feeling

Enjoyment is something we feel. The current definition fails to

adequately characterize this aspect of enjoyment, as the following example

shows. Hannibal, a law professor, is teaching a class in what he regards as

the traditional “Socratic” style; in fact, he intentionally humiliates the

students by ridiculing their attempts to answer questions that even the best

of them have no hope of understanding. His desire to humiliate the students

is the result of an unfortunate childhood in which he was ridiculed by

domineering parents; now when he is in the quasi-parental role of a teacher,

he finds himself desiring to humiliate and acts as his own parents did by

ridiculing those over whom he has a certain degree of authority. He desires

to humiliate the students for its own sake. To desire to do so for its own sake

is just to desire it and not to desire it merely as a means to some other end,

and Hannibal does not desire to humiliate to achieve merely in order to

achieve some other end. He just finds himself desiring to it. There are, of

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course, variations of the example in which he desires to humiliate merely as

a means to an end; he may desire to do so merely as a means to the end of

proving to his (internalized conception of) his parent’s that he is worthy of

their respect. In all cases, however, there will be some relevant something

he desires for its own sake, and we will assume that, in this case, it is the

desire to humiliate. His questioning activity causes the desire; the more he

humiliates the students, the more that makes him want to. The activity also

causes him to believe that he is succeeding in humiliating them; he monitors

the students’ reactions, and that complex perceptions causes the belief.

Hannibal thus fulfills the definition: his questioning activity causes him

to believe, of that activity, under an array A including the feature humiliating

the students, that it is occurring, and to desire, of the activity, under A, that it

should occur. But he does not enjoy the activity. The activity is filled with

anxiety and feelings of inferiority that his humiliating the students actually

exacerbates. He believes at any moment the students may get the upper

hand and reveal him as inadequate. He hates his questioning activity and

dreads going to class, but once there he is in the grip of his self-torturing,

self-perpetuating desire to humiliate. His feeling is not one of enjoyment, but

of its opposite.

Feeling Enjoyment

What does it feel like to enjoy something? Two seemingly

incompatible claims are clearly true. There is no one feeling F such that one

enjoys something only if one feels F. Enjoyments exhibit a wide diversity of

feelings. However, those feelings, however diverse, must share enough in

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common (even if it is only a “family resemblance”) that they all qualify as

feelings of enjoyment. Our solution is that (with a qualification we suppress

for now) the feeling of enjoyment consists in all cases of having the felt

desire to φ for its own sake at precisely the same time that one occurrently

believes that one is φing. The variation in feelings comes from variations in

the way the desire feels, and in the way the belief is occurrent. To motivate

this suggestion, consider enjoying quench a demanding thirst with a drink of

water. Imagine yourself before you drink. You desire, of your future

experience φ of drinking the water, under quenching your thirst, that it

should occur for its own sake; moreover, you feel the desire as an insistent,

attention riveting craving to drink. When you drink, you continue to desire, of

your now presently occurring experience φ, under quenching your thirst, that

it should occur; however, the sensations attendant on drinking the water

transform the feeling of insistent craving into a felt embracing of the watery

relief, an embracing for its own sake, not just as a means of alleviating the

urge to drink. The transformation occurs the instant you become aware of

the complex of sensations comprising the experience of the watery relief.

The sensations are present to your consciousness in—more or less—the way

that your awareness that you are now reading these words is present to your

consciousness. In this way, you occurrently believe, of φ, under quenching

your thirst, that it is occurring.

Subject to further qualifications, we offer the following revised

definition to capture the fact that to enjoy is to feel:

x enjoys φ under the array of features A if and only if

(1) x φ’s;

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(2) x's φing causes x

(a) to occurrently believe, of φ, under A, that it occurs;

(b) to have the felt desire, of φ, under A, that it occur for its own sake.

To further illustrate and motivate this definition, we explain in more detail

what we mean by a felt desire and an occurrent belief. The explanations lead

ultimately to the “further qualifications” noted above.

Varieties of Felt Desire

Desires vary greatly in how they feel. Variations in the feeling and

intensity of desires account in part for the variation in the feelings of

enjoyment (“in part” because variations in occurrent beliefs also play a role).

The felt embracing of the watery relief, for example, feels quite different than

the felt desire for the well-prepared Kung Pao chicken you are eating, and

neither feels at all like the desire for the experience of understanding, insight,

and affirmation you may have when reading the rescuing angels words, “Wer

immer strebend sich bemüht,/Den können wir erlösen.”

The same point holds for activities. Suppose you are enjoying racing

your sailboat off the coast of California from Ventura to Redondo Beach; you

started at 11 am and expect to finish around 2 am the next day; your racing

activity is a temporally extended event of about 15 hours duration. You enjoy

this activity; that is, the 15 hours can be divide into intervals, t1, . . ., tn, such

that, for a sufficient number of intervals t i, there is an array of features A i

such that during ti you enjoy engaging in the activity under that array. A

“sufficient number” is enough for you to count as enjoying the whole 15 hour

activity, where what counts as enough may vary from person to person and

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context to context. Each array A i always includes the feature racing a

sailboat from Ventura to Redondo Beach plus an evolving variety of other

features such as: getting (having gotten) a good start; deciding (having

decided) whether the route near the island shore will be faster than going

further out to sea, running (having run) downwind surfing waves at 12 knots,

and perhaps even being (having been) becalmed in the middle of Santa

Monica Bay at mid-night sitting with absolutely no motion in order not to

shake what little wind there is out of the sails. The desires vary in the way

they feel. The thrill of hitting 14 knots while surfing the spinnaker-driven

boat down the front of eight foot waves feels different than the desire to head

further out to sea in search of stronger winds.

Felt desires also vary in intensity. Imagine that, as you converse with

a friend, you are enjoying the pear and white pepper taste of a particularly

fine Grüner Veltliner. You have the felt desire to taste. As you become

absorbed in the conversation, the desire in recedes into the background and

lingers at the periphery of consciousness. You still have the felt desire, but in

the center of consciousness way you first felt it when you were concentrating

on the taste of the wine.

Varieties of Occurrent Belief

Occurrent beliefs vary greatly in the way they are present to

consciousness, and the variation accounts in part for the variations in the

feeling of enjoyment. Imagine your belief that you are experiencing the taste

of the Kung Pao Chicken is before your mind as a consciousness-gripping

complex of sensations. Compare the belief that you are experiencing

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understanding, insight, and affirmation as you read the lines from Faust. The

belief is before your mind with an assent-compelling clarity, an experience

that differs in feeling from the consciousness-gripping sensations that

comprise the Kung Pao Chicken belief. Like felt desires, occurrent beliefs also

vary in intensity. Suppose, for example, that early in the day you receive

some good news—that you do not need the operation that your doctor first

thought you would. For the rest of the day, the belief that the operation is

unnecessary lingers on the periphery of self-consciousness. Although it is not

always before your mind in the way that your belief that you are now reading

this sentence is currently before your mind, you nonetheless have it "in mind"

all day. It contrasts in this way with your belief, for example, that your

grandmother was not married to Mussolini. You are never, during the entire

day, aware even in the slightest degree of that belief.

The examples which follow further illustrate and motivate the account.

Illustrations

During the long flight home from a business trip, Jim found himself

looking forward to a having dinner with his wife at one of their favorite

restaurants. They are now having dinner, doing and saying exactly as he

imagined in exactly the setting he envisioned. For an appropriate array A of

features, the activity causes him to occurrently believe, of that activity, under

A, that it is occurring; and, he has the felt desire, of the activity, under A, that

it should occur for its own sake. But the desire, while felt, is not the mind-

filling desire that he expected and that he imagined would rivet his attention

on his wife; it is a mild longing with no attention-riveting power. At this point,

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the example divides into two. In the first, Jim does not enjoy dinning; in the

second, he does.

The no-enjoyment version: As his disappoint grows, his desire

weakens even more and begins to dissipate; it persists for a while, but, as in

the deep-sea fishing example, it persists in spite of, not because of, Jim’s

dinning activity. The activity does not causally sustain the felt desire; on the

contrary, it causes it to disappear. We take this to be, like the deep sea

fishing case, a clear case of not enjoying an activity. The problem is not lack

of the appropriate feeling; it is lack of the required causal power.

Some may balk at the conclusion. After all, Jim does for a while have

the occurent belief and the felt desire, albeit a weakly felt one; so he has the

feeling characteristic of enjoyment. Why isn’t that enough for enjoyment?

Because enjoyment is not just a feeling. Our concept of enjoying an

experience or an activity is the concept of an experience or activity that

makes us feel by making us have the relevant occurrent belief and felt

desire. It is concept of a causal harmony between the experience or activity,

the occurrent belief, and the felt desire. As the dinning example indeed

illustrates, it is the harmony, not just the feeling, that we seek. We aim at

experiences and activities that have the power to make us desire them.

The enjoyment version. The only difference between this version and

the first is that Jim’s desire to dine does not wane under the impact of his

disappointment. The activity causally sustains the felt desire. It just does not

create the mind-filling intensity that he had imagined on the flight home. In

this case, Jim does enjoy dinning with his wife. He just also feels

disappointed. In defense of this claim, we note the following equivocation on

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“enjoy.” Sometimes when you say, “I enjoy it,” you may suggest or imply

that the enjoyment is “pure”—unmixed with any significant degree of pain,

distaste, aversion, or disappointment. Suppose, for example, that I enjoy

gossiping about my colleagues. I also hate myself when I do it, but this does

not keep me from yielding to temptation as three of us meet in the hall. I

enjoy imparting and learning the latest, but this enjoyment competes with a

growing and distinctly unpleasant sense of shame and guilt; indeed, the

enjoyment feeds this sense of shame, for I hate myself all the more for

enjoying gossiping. Overall my experience is one of conflict—enjoyment

mixed with aversion. If you asked me, “Did you enjoy gossiping?”, it would

be misleading to answer with an unqualified, “Yes.” That would make you

think that the enjoyment was untainted by any significant admixture of

aversion. This does not mean that it is false that I enjoyed gossiping. On the

contrary, I did; indeed, it was the enjoyment that fuelled the aversion. It just

means my answer must take the form, “Yes, but ...”. Similarly, Jim’s

enjoyment is mixed with disappointment, and it would be misleadingly

incomplete simply to describe Jim as enjoying dinning. This point should not,

however, make one overlook the fact that Jim does indeed enjoy dinning. The

point is worth one more example.

Suppose you visit the concentration camp at Auschwitz to honor and

preserve in memory those who died there. Let A be the array of features of

your activity of visiting the camp by virtue of which the visit realizes the end

of honoring and preserving memory. As you visit the camp, you occurrently

believe, of your activity, under A, that it is occurring, and you have the felt

desire, of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake;

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moreover, the activity also causally sustains the belief and the desire. As you

work your way through the camp, your awareness of your activity’s

progressive realization of the features in A reinforces your conviction that

honoring those who died and preserving their memory is the right thing to do

and, in reinforcing that conviction, it reinforces (causally sustains) your

desire, of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake.

We see no reason to deny that you enjoy honoring the dead and

preserving their memory. Note that the feeling of desire need not, of course,

feel anything like the relieved embracing of the watery relief when you

quench your thirst, nor anything like the burst of affirmation when you sing,

“Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.” It may be a solemn, even somber,

feeling to honor and memoralize for its own sake. Indeed, you might well

think that to fail to respond to the sights with such a desire, and hence to fail

to enjoy honoring and memoralizing would be to fail to respond appropriately.

In addition, your enjoyment may be mixed with any number of other

reactions—horror, disgust, and revulsion, for example. But this mixture does

not mean you fail to enjoy; it just makes it misleading to describe yourself as

doing so without further qualification.

Beyond Felt Desire and Occurrent Belief

We have explained felt desire and occurrent belief in terms of manifest

presence to consciousness. We introduced felt desire with the thirst example

in which we described the desire as an attention riveting craving to drink, and

we introduced occurrent belief as a belief that is present to consciousness in

the way your belief that you are now reading this sentence is present to your

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consciousness. We will take these as stipulative definitions. For us, a felt

desire is a desire manifest to conscious in the indicated way; likewise, for

occurrent belief. So understood, defining enjoyment in terms of felt desire

and occurrent belief yields too narrow a definition. The feeling of enjoyment

can involve desires and beliefs which are not manifestly present to

consciousness in the way illustrated by our examples.

A variation of the earlier Hannibal example makes the point. As

before, imagine Hannibal teaching his class in what he regards as the

traditional “Socratic” style but in fact intentionally humiliating the students

by ridiculing their attempts to answer questions that even the best of them

have no hope of understanding. The change in this variation is that he fulfills

the definition of enjoyment—minus the occurrent belief and felt desire. That

is, he still fulfills these conditions: his questioning activity causes him to

believe, of that activity, under an array A including the feature humiliating

the students, that it is occurring, and to desire, of the activity, under A, that it

should occur. We take three points to be clear.

First: The “of the activity, under the feature humiliating the students”

belief/desire pair explains Hannibal’s systematic humiliation of the students.

The desire leads him to aim at humiliation, and the belief forms as he

monitors the students’ reactions to determine whether he is achieving his

goal. Second: We offer more elaborate accounts of Hannibal’s behavior by

explaining why he acts on the desire to humiliate. The explanations address

the fact that he need not act on the desire. Hannibal might, for example, be

in conflict; he might also desire not to humiliate the students. Of course,

Hannibal need not be in conflict. He may just have other desires that

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compete with the desire to humiliate. He may desire to tell jokes, be

perceived as kindly and helpful, or to convey the material with as little

emotional involvement as possible, and so on. There are myriad

explanations that we offer of why one desire dominates in such cases. In the

conflict case described, we might, for example, note that, when he enters the

classroom, he is possessed by an obsessive need to demonstrate over and

over again that he is smarter than others. But this is just one explanatory

pattern among many.

Third: In at least some variations of the Hannibal example, one

explanation we might offer of why he acts on the desire to humiliate is that

enjoys humiliating the students. Consider: “Why doesn’t he ever act on his

desire to tell jokes?” “He used to do so, but he never enjoyed it. He enjoys

humiliating the students.” Two points bear emphasis. The first is that we are

not claiming that Hannibal enjoys humiliating the students in all versions of

the example. In all variations, his questioning of the students causes him to

believe, of the activity, under the feature, humiliating the students, that it

occurs, and to have the desire, of the activity, under that feature, that it

should occur for its own sake. But that is not enough for him to enjoy it. He

must feel appropriately, and he can have the belief and desire without any

relevant feeling. The second point is that our readiness to offer the “because

he enjoys it” explanation in some cases shows that in some case he feels

appropriately.

Our current definition is inconsistent with this fact. We extend our

notions of felt desire and occurrent belief and then argue that the expanded

notions can figure in the feeling of enjoyment.

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Manifest versus Conscious

Consider desire first. A client in psychoanalysis might very well say,

“All those years, I burned with the desire for revenge and never realized it.”

This is the ascription of a desire that is felt; to burn with the desire for

revenge is not just to desire revenge, it is also to feel the desire. The desire

is felt even though it is not manifestly present to consciousness in the way

the felt desire to quench one’s thirst is. Similar remarks hold for belief.

Consider the psychoanalytic client who says, “I never admitted it, but I not

only believed that my brother was my parents’ favorite, I knew I believed it,

and the fact that I knew I believed it yet did nothing about it subjected me to

a double disappointment: the disappointment that he was their favorite, and

the disappointment in myself as I watched myself believing in my second-rate

status but doing nothing about it.” This is the ascription, not just of a belief,

but of an awareness of the belief, although not an awareness transparently

present to consciousness in the way your belief that you are now reading

these words is.

Some may balk at the psychoanalytic examples. Some will contend

that they are not genuine examples at all, and others insist that they lie far

afield from routine applications of the concepts of felt desire and occurrent

belief, and, at best, illustrate a strained, extended application of those

concepts. We began with the psychoanalytic examples to reject these

reactions. Such examples are commonplace and involve routine applications

of the concepts of belief and desire. Consider Henry James’ description in

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The Golden Bowl of Maggie Verver’s realization that her husband is having an

affair with her best friend:

It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till now—such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter, and even, verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short—though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

James describes “recognitions and perceptions already active” prior to their

being manifestly present to Maggie Verver’s consciousness in the ways

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illustrated by our “quenching thirst” and “reading these words” examples.

The “recognitions and perceptions” are nonetheless feelings (e. g., “silver

bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly”) and the apprehension of beliefs (e. g.,

“she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of

lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near”). The

description is the sophisticated description of a writer of genius, but what

James describes is commonplace.

As Iris Murdoch says, commenting on the passage,

Do we understand? Yes, of course, we follow, in context, these descriptions of states of consciousness with no difficulty. We are able to think of the imagery both as something which the character, like the author, is continually coining as she goes along, and as something ‘deeper’ or ‘beyond’, which the imagery evokes or points to. This may be seen as two levels of a region wherein we can discern many levels. Figurative language, metaphor, is everywhere in our thinking, apprehended by the thinker as ultimate or pointing beyond. How we proceed here can be a matter of our deepest thoughts. We recognize this dialectic, these levels, and these differences of style and image, in our own thinking as we understand a writer and as we are at other times led to reflect upon what the stuff and quality of our consciousness is.3

Virtually every page of The Golden Bowl describes beliefs and desires of

which the characters are conscious although they are not conscious of them

in the manifestly present to consciousness way illustrated by our thirst and

reading examples. We take it to be clear that James describes with skill and

thoroughness an aspect of our conscious lives with which we are all

intimately familiar. As Iris Murdoch astutely observes, “the layman lives at

peace with ‘consciousness’, with all its obscure implications of ‘ownership’

and ‘presence’. It is what is most his own, he is responsible for it, even

3 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 171 (The Penguin Press, 1992).

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though it may seem to include so much that is not momentary or personal or

private or clearly visible.”4

We will use “conscious belief” and “conscious desire” for those beliefs

and desires of which we are conscious, but which may, but need not, be

manifestly present to consciousness. One may well complain that this notion

of consciousness is hardly clear. We agree. But this does not mean that we

do not use and understand the notion in ordinary life, nor does it mean we

should forsake its use in philosophy. It just means that we face a further

explanatory task.5

The Salient Pattern

There are four possible belief/desire patterns in enjoyment: occurrent

belief/felt desire; occurrent belief/conscious desire; conscious belief/felt

desire; and, conscious belief/conscious desire. We could rewrite the

definition of enjoyment to explicitly cover all these cases by replacing

‘occurrent’ and ‘felt’ with ‘occurrent or conscious’ and ‘felt or conscious’; we

will, however, continue to use the occurrent belief/felt desire version of the

definition of enjoyment. Our reason is that, as our discussion in the next two

chapters shows, the salient pattern that lies at the center of our descriptive

and explanatory uses of the concept of enjoyment is occurrent belief/felt

desire. The varieties of enjoyment we define in those chapters are sub-

varieties of that pattern.

4 P. 173.5 We all share the conviction that a fully adequate explanation is to be found only in some future psychophysiology, although one of us (Richard Warner) is an anti-physicalist and makes markedly different predictions about the content of that future theory than they remaining two authors.

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