TY - JOUR

T1 - Pleasure as self-discovery

AU - Clark, Samuel

N1 - This is a pre-print of an article published in Ratio, 25 (3), 2012. (c) Wiley & Sons.

PY - 2012/9

Y1 - 2012/9

N2 - This paper uses readings of two classic autobiographies, Edmund Gosse’s Father & Son and John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, to develop a distinctive answer to an old and central question in value theory: What role is played by pleasure in the most successful human life? A first section defends my method. The main body of the paper than defines and rejects voluntarist, stoic, and developmental hedonist lessons to be taken from central crises in my two subjects’ autobiographies, and argues for a fourth, diagnostic lesson: Gosse and Mill perceive their individual good through the medium of pleasure. Finally, I offer some speculative moral psychology of human development, as involving the waking, perception, management, and flowering of generic and individual capacities, which I suggest underlies Gosse and Mill’s experiences. The acceptance of one’s own unchosen nature, discovered by self-perceptive pleasure in the operation of one’s nascent capacities, is the beginning of a flourishing adulthood in which that nature is fully developed and expressed.

AB - This paper uses readings of two classic autobiographies, Edmund Gosse’s Father & Son and John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, to develop a distinctive answer to an old and central question in value theory: What role is played by pleasure in the most successful human life? A first section defends my method. The main body of the paper than defines and rejects voluntarist, stoic, and developmental hedonist lessons to be taken from central crises in my two subjects’ autobiographies, and argues for a fourth, diagnostic lesson: Gosse and Mill perceive their individual good through the medium of pleasure. Finally, I offer some speculative moral psychology of human development, as involving the waking, perception, management, and flowering of generic and individual capacities, which I suggest underlies Gosse and Mill’s experiences. The acceptance of one’s own unchosen nature, discovered by self-perceptive pleasure in the operation of one’s nascent capacities, is the beginning of a flourishing adulthood in which that nature is fully developed and expressed.

KW - pleasure

KW - John Stuart Mill

KW - Edmund Gosse

KW - value theory

KW - the self

U2 - 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2012.00541.x

DO - 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2012.00541.x

M3 - Journal article

VL - 25

SP - 260

EP - 276

JO - Ratio

JF - Ratio

SN - 0034-0006

IS - 3

ER -