Every pleasure is a felt state, and feeling happens in the body

The argument

Proponents of this account argue that whatever else is true of pleasure, it is something a person feels, and that feeling is not an abstract relation but a condition of the organism. Ask where a pleasure is and the honest answers are bodily ones: an ease in the chest, a loosening of the shoulders, a warmth, a quickening. Proponents argue that this is not incidental colouring but the pleasure itself, and that accounts which make pleasure a relation between a person and a satisfied want have quietly left out the only part that is actually experienced. The mechanism proponents point to is that the sensual register is what distinguishes pleasure from mere approval. A person can judge that something is good, that it is what they wanted, and that they are fortunate to have it, and feel nothing. That state has a name, and the name is not pleasure. What converts the judgement into pleasure is the arrival of the felt component. Where it is absent, as in the achievement that lands flat, the person is left holding the judgement alone and reports precisely that the pleasure did not come. Proponents add that the so-called higher pleasures do not count against this but illustrate it. The pleasure of a difficult problem solved or a piece of music followed closely is not purely intellectual; it is accompanied by a definite bodily state which people recognise and can describe. On this account intellectual and bodily pleasure are not two kinds but one capacity engaged by different occasions, which is why the vocabulary for them overlaps so heavily and why both can be exhausted, dulled or sharpened by the condition of the body.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the account confuses pleasure with its usual accompaniments. Bodily changes attend many mental states, including fear and anger, and nobody concludes that those states are sensations; the warmth that accompanies a pleasure may be its effect rather than its substance. They add that the felt component is often faint or absent in pleasures people insist are real, such as quiet satisfaction at another's good fortune, so an account requiring a bodily signature must either deny these are pleasures or admit the signature is not essential. Others object that reducing the pleasure of a solved problem to a bodily state leaves out what the pleasure was about, since what pleased the person was the solution and not the sensation.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics dispute the universality. People report being pleased at news received in a settled frame of mind with no bodily change they can identify, and describing such cases in bodily terms may be a convention of language rather than a finding about the experience. [Rejecting P2] The contrast with approval is said to be drawn too sharply. Approval shades into pleasure by degrees rather than switching on when a sensation arrives, which suggests the felt component varies in intensity rather than marking the boundary of the concept. [Rejecting P3] Critics argue the bodily accompaniment of intellectual pleasure shows only that minds are embodied, which is true of every mental state. That a pleasure can be dulled by exhaustion no more makes it a sensation than a calculation becomes one for being harder when tired.