Enjoyment

What is it to enjoy something? The question arises because we will, in the next chapter, claim that to believe that something is beautiful is to believe, on the basis of a special kind of enjoyment, that others will also enjoy the item in that way. We premise our explanation and defense of that claim on the account of enjoyment we give in this chapter. An account of enjoyment is, however, of general interest. Enjoyment is, after all, a nexus at which important concepts meet, including reasons for action, happiness, and goodness. An adequate account of enjoyment should exhibit systematic relations between two aspects of enjoyment: enjoyment as a feeling, and enjoyment as an explanation and justification of action. The feeling 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 who intervene to 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 if one answers, “Because I enjoy it.”

We offer an account of enjoyment that exhibits systematic connections between enjoyment as a feeling and its explanatory-justificatory role. We do so by completing the following biconditional: x enjoys Φ if and only if ... , where Φ is an experience or an activity of x. The restriction of values of ‘Φ’ to experiences and activities may sight seem questionable. After all, you can enjoy a meal or a painting. But, of course, you can enjoy the meal only if you eat it; and the painting, only if you look at it; and, in general, where y is something other than an experience or activity, one enjoys y if and only if one enjoys Φ, where Φ is a suitable experience or activity involving y. The restriction on values of ‘Φ’ involves no irrecoverable loss of generality. More importantly, if one examines explanations of the form “because he or she enjoys it”, one finds that what is enjoyed is always either explicitly or implicitly understood to be an experience or an activity, and it is this primacy in explanation that motivates restricting values of ‘Φ’ to experiences and activities; for, as the explanations we advance show, we treat as derivative the enjoyment of things other than experiences and activities.

The central idea behind our account 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 form the nexus at which the felt aspect of enjoyment and its explanatory/justificatory role meet. The belief/desire pair is typically a reason to act so as to have the experience or engage in the 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.

Two final preliminary points: The first is that, when we describe our enjoyments, we sometimes refer to types of experiences or activities; one may, for example, say “I enjoy sailing” and mean thereby that one generally enjoys a sailing. We may also refer to individual, non-repeatable instances of experiences and activities; one may, for example, say, “I am really enjoying sailing today,” meaning thereby that one is enjoying an individual, non-repeatable instance of the activity. We understand Φ, in “x enjoys Φ,” Φ to range over an individual, non-repeatable instances of experiences and activities. The second point is that we do not mean, by our talk of

“experiences” and “activities,” to indicate that there is a sharp distinction between the two. We merely have in mind the rough and ready distinction enshrined in ordinary talk and thought between activities as, in part, readily publicly observable events, and experiences as (typically at least) presented to the one experiencing them in a way they are not presented to others.

Activities are only in part readily publicly observable because they are—as we are using the term—intentional actions (swinging the golf club), or more or less organized sequences of such activities (deep-sea fishing, or growing roses, the latter being a sequence of temporally discontinuous sequences).

Intentions, like experiences (in the intended sense), are at least typically accessible to the agent in a way they are not accessible to others. Finally, we by no means deny that “activities,” like deep-sea fishing for example, typically involve “experiences,” like feeling the fish strike the line. Talk of experiences and activities is just a convenient way to describe the range of items that is our primary concern.

I. Enjoyment and Desire

We will argue shortly that one enjoys Φ only if one desires Φ. As a preliminary, we note that 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. Suppose, for example, that you find yourself cornered by a talking stranger with whom you have no initial desire to converse; however, you eventually find yourself enjoying 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 of desire. 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 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 In support of the claim 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; he will ask you if you enjoyed the performance, and you know that that you will say you did. 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,

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." however, let's suppose he 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. 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 occur. Thus, if you are enjoying the experience of tasting bittersweet chocolate, we will describe you as desiring, of that experience, that it occur.

This is simply an instance of the following standard Quinean convention.

Where ‘[’ and ‘]’ are the left and right Quinean 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 largely 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”), but it is essential 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 reasons. 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 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 activity of singing along, under the relevant array of features, that it should occur.

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 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 ...”

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. 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 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 after all is that Φ should realize A.

II. A Definition of Enjoyment

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. We note in passing that the desire is that Φ, not that it should continue. One will not always desire to continue to Φ. I may enjoy writing the last word of an essay even though I (by no means!) desire that the writing down of the word should continue; I just desire that it occur. The essential point is that the proposed conditions are not sufficient, as the following example shows.

Suppose that 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. Given your general desire to go deep-sea fishing for its own sake, and your belief that you are now doing so, you desire, of that 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.

Any number of examples can be constructed along these lines, and we take them 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.

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

513 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 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. We take enjoyment to consist in this causal harmony between an experience or an activity, and the belief/desire pair it causes.

That is, subject to additions to deal with enjoyment as a feeling:

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. The following apparent counterexample to the sufficiency of these conditions indicates the need to amend the definition to reflect the fact that enjoyment is something one feels.

Jim has just returned from a long business trip, and, during the long flight home, he found himself looking forward to a having dinner with his wife at one of their favorite restaurants, and he is doing so now, but the reality of the dinner is at best a pale reflection of his expectations. They are nonetheless doing and saying exactly as he imagined in exactly the setting he envisioned, and, for the appropriate array A of features, he believes, of their dining activity, under A, that it is occurring; moreover, he desires, of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake. The problem is that he does not feel as he expected. He had expected to eagerly embrace a mind-filling desire; instead, all he feels is a weak wisp of longing that has no power to keep his mind from wandering. He is filled with disappointment, not desire, and, as disappointment robs the weak desire of what strength it had, he realizes (so the example contends) that he is not enjoying dinning with his wife. To turn this example into an apparent counterexample, one merely needs to add that the activity of dining with his wife causes the belief and the desire, and it certainly appears to do so. After all, the belief and desire are about the activity; they are a “belief, of the activity, that” and a

“desire, of the activity, that.” Surely, part of the reason the belief and desire count as being about the activity is that there is a causal chain leading from the activity to the formation of the belief and desire (this is not to say that there is such a causal requirement in every case of a belief or desire about something).

In the next section, we will respond to this example by distinguishing two cases—one in which Jim does not enjoy dinning with his wife, and one in which he does; in the latter, the activity of dinning with his wife causes a certain feeling; in the former, it does not.

III. Feeling Enjoyment

What does it feel like to enjoy something? Despite the diversity of feelings associated with enjoyment, it is possible to give any informative answer: namely, the felt aspect of enjoyment consists in having the felt desire to Φ at precisely the same time that one occurrently believes that one is Φing. Thus, we offer the following definition:

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

(1) x Φ’s;

(2) x's Φing under A 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 motivate this definition, we focus initially on the enjoyment of experiences and then turn to activities.

Consider enjoying quench a demanding thirst with a drink of water.

The felt desire begins as an insistent craving to drink; the sensations attendant on drinking the water transform the craving into a felt embracing— a “Yes!” not in words but in feeling—of the watery relief, an embracing for its own sake, not just as a means of alleviating the urge to drink. The occurrent belief is your being aware of the complex of sensations comprising the experience of the watery relief in the same “currently present to consciousness” way in which you are aware that you are now reading these words. We suggest that the feeling of enjoyment consists of this complex: the experience (the sensation of watery relief, for example), the felt desire for that experience for its own sake, and the occurrent belief that the experience is occurring.

The first step in making this plausible is to note that the way the way the desire feels varies from case to case. We defined the feeling ostensively: the desire feels relevantly like the “Yes!”-in-feeling to the watery relief.

“Relevantly alike” need not of course be exactly alike. The felt desire for the well-prepared Kung Pao chicken one is eating does not feel at all like the felt desire for the experience of understanding, insight, and affirmation one may have when reading “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,/Den können wir erlösen.” To see what the feelings have in common, consider a case in which it is absent. Suppose one is broken-hearted over rejection by one’s lover; one no longer enjoys what one used to. When one eats the well-prepared

Kung Pao chicken, the taste is the same, and one wants the experience (that is why one is chewing the chicken instead of spitting it out or not eating it at all). But you are not filled with a feeling of desire the way you were before your heart was broken. Similarly, when one reads the lines from Faust, one desires the experience of understanding, insight, and affirmation, but one is not filled with desire in one’s pre-heart broken way. In each case, the experiences lack a numinosity that was, before one’s heart was broken, conferred by “Yes!”-in-feeling, the felt embrace of the experience. By a felt desire we mean such a numinosity-conferring embrace. The numinosity of the experience is the feeling of desire. A similar point bears emphasis about occurrent belief. We defined them as beliefs before the mind a way relevant like the way in which your belief that you are now reading these words is before your mind. Again, “relevantly like” allows for considerable variation.

Your belief that you are experiencing the taste of the Kung Pao Chicken is before your mind via a consciousness-gripping complex of taste sensations; your belief that you are experiencing a certain understanding, insight, and affirmation in reading the lines from Faust is before your mind with an assent-compelling clarity. The feeling of enjoyment consists in the experience, with its felt-desire-conferred numinosity, and its apprehension in the relevant before-the-mind way.

Essentially the same points about the feeling of enjoyment hold for activities as well. In the case of activities, the feeling of enjoyment consists in experiences attendant on the activity (e. g., casting the line, reeling in a fish in the case of deep-sea fishing), the felt desire for the activity, and the occurrent belief that the activity is taking place. The notions of felt desire and occurrent belief call for some further clarification in the context of activities. We focus first on felt desire and then turn to occurrent belief.

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

2:00 am the next day, so your racing activity is a temporally extended event of about 15 hours duration. You enjoy this activity; that it, for any time interval t (of reasonable length) during which the activity occurs, there is an array of features A such that you enjoy engaging it this activity under that array. The array 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 felt desire is a felt embracing, of the racing, under the temporally relevant array A, that it occur for its own sake. The feeling may be intense as it might be with the thrill hitting 12 knots downwind while surfing the spinnaker-driven boat down the wave fronts, or it may be muted

—present but lingering in the background—as one concentrates wind patterns and the positions of competitors in trying whether to hug the Island shore or head further out to sea. The feeling may even be present, albeit in a muted way, when one is motionless in the becalmed boat, although it would hardly be a surprise if there were no felt embrace of sitting motionless at midnight in a mostly motionless boat, nor even any desire to do so.

However, if there is no felt desire (or no desire at all), the feature is not included in the array A: one enjoys having or doing Φ under A only if, for every feature in A, one has, at the relevant time, the felt desire of Φ, under f, that it occur for its own sake. Like felt desires that range from intense to muted, occurrent beliefs also form a continuum—from those beliefs that are before one's mind in the way that your belief that you are now reading this sentence is before your mind to beliefs that linger on the periphery of self-consciousness. For an example of the latter, For example, 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 the belief about reading the sentence is, 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 occurrent belief in the sailing example evolves over the span of the activity in parallel with the evolution of the felt desire: for any time interval t (of reasonable length) during which the activity occurs, there is an array of features A such that one desires, of the activity, under A, that it occur for its own sake; and, one occurrently believes, of the activity, under

A, that it is occurring. The feeling of enjoyment during a time interval consists during that interval of the felt embracing for its own sake of the activities’ realization of the features in A, a realization that one is present-to- consciousness-convinced is occurring in that interval.

To illustrate the account, we consider two apparent counterexamples.

The first highlights an important question concerning the concepts of an occurrent belief and a felt desire. The second counterexample is the “Jim’s dinning with his wife” example from the previous section.

The first counterexample. Hannibal, a law professor, is teaching a class in what he regards as the traditional “Socratic” style; in fact, he is intentionally humiliating the students by ridiculing their attempts to answer questions that even the best of them have no hope of understanding. He almost fulfills the conditions for enjoying the activity of questioning and ridiculing the students under the feature, humiliating the students: the activity causes him to believe, of the activity, under the feature, humiliating the students, that it occurs, and to desire, of that activity, under that feature, that it should occur for its own sake. The belief is, however, not occurrent; and the desire, not felt. Indeed, Hannibal sincerely—but self- deceptively—insists to himself and others that he does not believe he is humiliating the students, and that he does not desire to do so. He acknowledges that it may appear that he intends to humiliate them, but he insists that he intends no such thing; he insists that what he intends to do, and what he believes his doing, is to train them to think like lawyers. Why should the mere fact that the belief is not occurrent and the desire not felt be sufficient ground to deny that Hannibal enjoys humiliating his students?

Since he satisfies the rest of the conditions, so he will, for the most part, at least act and think as if he enjoyed it. Why not just drop the “as if” and say that he enjoys humiliating his students, enjoys his questioning and ridiculing under the feature humiliating his students? There is a quick and correct reply to this version of the counterexample: namely, enjoyment is felt. Thus, if, in a non-derivative, full-fledged sense, Hannibal enjoys humiliating his students, the enjoyment must take some appropriate felt form; indeed, if he is to enjoy his questioning and ridiculing activity under the feature humiliating the students, he must have the felt desire, of the relevant activity, under humiliating the students, that it should occur for its own sake. Indeed, he must have this desire along with the occurrent belief, the activity, under humiliating the students, that it is occurring. The counterexample contends that Hannibal does not have any such felt desire nor any such occurrent belief, so the example is not an example of enjoying his questioning and ridiculing activity under the feature humiliating the students, it is at best an example of something like that.

The counterexample has a more interesting and more challenging

“psychoanalytic version.” Some may be skeptical of the claims which follow; there is no need to argue about this; they simply think the definition faces one less counterexample than we do. The psychoanalytic version appeals to the fact that people may realize that they have had feelings during a certain time period but were unaware of them during that period. A client in psychoanalysis might, for example, very well say, “All these years, I burned with the desire for revenge and never realized it.” This is the ascription of a felt desire; to burn with desire for revenge is not just to desire revenge but to feel intensely. Similar remarks hold for occurrent belief. Consider the psychoanalytic client who says, “All these years, 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 there favorite, and the disappointment in myself as I watched myself believing in my second-rate status yet doing nothing. But I explicitly and sincerely denied all of this.”

This is the ascription, not just of a belief, but of an awareness of the belief, although not an awareness that rises to the level of your explicit awareness of your belief that you are now reading these words. The counterexample consists of three claims: (1) Hannibal satisfies the proposed definition; (2) he is not explicitly aware of his occurrent belief or felt desire; (3) our explanation of occurrent belief and felt desire requires explicit awareness.

Our response is that (3) is false. Taking felt desire first, we defined a felt desire as a desire that feels relevantly like the “Yes!”-in-feeling to the watery relief. The “Yes!”-in-feeling to the watery relief is most certainly one of which one is explicitly aware, but the definition does not require such awareness. It just requires something relevantly like that, and the counterexample is in fact committed to recognizing desires of which we are not explicitly aware but which nonetheless feel relevantly like the desire in the watery relief example. Similar remarks hold for occurrent belief. We defined occurrent beliefs as beliefs before the mind a way relevantly like the way in which your belief that you are now reading these words is before your mind. Again, the counterexample is committed to recognizing beliefs of which one is not explicitly aware but which are nonetheless “before the mind” in a way that is clearly different but still relevantly like the “reading these words” belief.

The second counterexample. The second example is the “Jim dinning with his wife” example from the previous section. We redescribe the example for convenience, and to illustrate that including references to occurrent belief and felt desire actually seems at first sight to strengthen the example. During the flight home from a long business trip, Jim eagerly contemplated having dinner with his wife at one of their favorite restaurants, and as they dine, for the appropriate array A of features, he occurrently believes, of their dining activity, under A, that it is occurring; moreover, 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 instead a mild longing that has no power to keep his mind from wandering.

As his rising disappointment draining the weak desire of what strength it had.

At this point, the initial version of the example claimed that Jim did not enjoy dining with his wife even though that activity causes the relevant belief and desire. Our response to this claim is to distinguish two cases—one in which

Jim does not enjoy dinning with his wife, and one in which he does. The difference between the cases is the cause of the desire. We begin with the no enjoyment case.

In that case, Jim forms the desire on the flight back to dine with his wife in one of the favorite restaurants for its own sake; as they dine, he believes, of that activity, under the relevant array A, that it is occurring, and, since he thereby identifies it as an instance of the general type of dinning activity he desires for its own sake, the forms the desire, of the activity, under A, that it should occur for its own sake. His belief qualifies as a “belief of the activity” in part because of the activities causal role in the formation of that belief, so, by way of the belief, the activity also plays a causal role in his forming the relevant “desire of.” But that is the only causal role it plays in the formation of the desire; otherwise, the activity causes the desire to wane. As in the deep-sea fishing example, the desire persists in spite of, not because of, the activity, and we take this to be a clear case of not enjoying dining. In the second case, the activity causes the “Yes!-in-feeling” of a felt desire to the activity; Jim does respond to the activity with a felt embrace of it as something he desires for its own sake; he just does not respond with the mind-filling intensity that he had imagined on the flight home. In this case, Jim does enjoy dinning with his wife. It is important in evaluating his claim to avoid an equivocation on “enjoy.” Sometimes when one says, “I enjoy it,” one 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 considerable 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 dining.

Although there is considerably more one could say, let this suffice for discussion of enjoyment as a feeling. We now turn to the explanatory/justificatory role of enjoyment, and in particular to the relation between enjoyment and reasons for action. The prospect of enjoyment is, of course, often (if not always) a reason to act in ways intended to bring about that enjoyment, but we will focus on a different sort of relation between enjoyment and reasons for action: namely, the fact that the belief/desire pair in an instance of enjoyment is often (but we argue not always) a reason to act in ways intended continue the enjoyment.