Thursday, January 5, 2017

Eternal pleasure

Suppose the minute of the greatest earthly pleasure you’ve ever tasted was repeated, over and over, for eternity, with your memory reset before each repeat. If hedonism were true, this would be a truly wonderful life, much better than your actual life. But it seems to be a pretty rotten life. So hedonism seems quite far from the truth.

But could there, perhaps, be a pleasure such that eternal repetition of it, in and of itself, would be worth having? It would have to be a pleasure that carries its meaningfulness in itself, one whose quale itself is deeply meaningful. It would have to have be an experience of infinite depth. Could we have such an experience? With Aquinas, I think philosophy cannot answer this question, though theology can.

3 comments:

Red said...

Hi Alex Pruss.
Don't you think annihilation is same as Eternal pleasure or at least next to it?

Alexander R Pruss said...

I don't see why.

Red said...

well I always had this strong intuition that no due pleasure is always better than no pleasure and same as or at least next to Experience of pleasure ..