61. Why pleasure can’t make you happy
61. WHY PLEASURE CAN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY
Everybody wants pleasure, just as everybody wants to avoid pain, and not just as a means to any further end. Pleasure is sought as an end in itself. So why isn’t pleasure or delight the same as happiness?
Because bodily delights are more generally known, the name of pleasure has been appropriated to them, although other delights excel them; and yet happiness does not consist in them. . . (I-II,2,6).
“Other delights excel them.” Everyone who has experienced both bodily pleasures and spiritual pleasures agrees. The pleasures of the soul are deeper, better, profounder, more variously and lastingly and truly delightful than the pleasures of the body. That is why love is not only more moral than lust but also more joyful. That is why sex with strangers or prostitutes is not joyful, just pleasurable. If you don’t agree, that only proves that you have never really tried both kinds of pleasure. Try it, you’ll like it!
The questioner might continue: If I’m not just my body, I understand why physical pleasures alone can’t make all of me happy, can’t make the innermost “me” happy. But “pleasure” means more than just physical pleasures. Isn’t pleasure the same as happiness if we mean spiritual pleasures? What’s the difference between pleasure and happiness if we always seek both as ends, never as means?
It would seem that man’s happiness consists in pleasure, for since happiness is the last end, it is not desired for something else, for other things for it. But this answers to pleasure more than to anything else. . . .
(However, pleasure or) delight is desirable for something else, i.e., for the good which is the object of that delight and . . . gives it its form (I-II,2,6).
St. Thomas does not mean here that we seek pleasure as a means to this “something else”, this true good, but that we are pleased because of this “something else”. Something must cause us to be pleased with it, and that something is our true good. “Happinesss” does not mean merely “subjective contentment”. It means “our true good”. We should not confine “happiness” to a feeling, nor “good” to “morally obedient”. If we do that, we narrow and misunderstand both, and put them in opposition. In reality, happiness and our true good are identical. Our true good is the rose, and happiness is the smell it gives off. Or happiness is the rose and pleasure the smell. We smell the rose, not the smell.
St. Thomas makes this point in two ways. (The two are not alternatives but two dimensions of the very same point.) Pleasure is a “proper accident” of happiness, not its essence; and it is an effect of happiness, not its cause:
. . . every delight is a proper accident (natural property) resulting from (caused by) happiness or from some part of happiness, since the reason that a man is delighted is that he has some fitting good, either in reality or in hope or at least in memory. Now a fitting good, if indeed it be the perfect good, is precisely man’s happiness; and if it is imperfect, it is a share of happiness . . . at least apparent. Therefore it is evident that . . . delight, which results from the perfect good, (is not) the very essence of happiness, but something resulting from it as its proper accident . . . (I-II,2,6).
St. Thomas’ point is very simple, and you don’t need to be a saint to see it. We are pleased, i.e., we experience pleasure, only when something causes it. Something that is really there, something objectively real, causes in us the subjective feeling of being pleased. We are pleased at this, not just “pleased”. So it is the “this” that is our true good and the cause of our subjective happiness. We have not yet found out what that “this” is merely by saying that we are pleased, or experience pleasure, whenever we are truly happy and blessed. What blesses us? What causes our pleasure?