an ethical position that asserts that pleasure is the highest good and the criterion for human behavior and that reduces moral demands in all their diversity to pleasure. Hedonism views the striving for pleasure as man’s basic motivating principle, inherent and predetermining all his actions; this makes hedonism a variant of anthropological naturalism. As a normative principle hedonism is the opposite of asceticism.
In ancient Greece one of the first exponents of ethical hedonism was the founder of the Cyrenaic school, Aristippus (early fourth century B.C.), who regarded as the highest good the attainment of sensory satisfaction. The ideas of hedonism were developed differently by Epicurus and his followers. Here they approached the principles of eudaemonism, insofar as the criterion for satisfaction was considered to be the absence of suffering and tranquillity of the spirit (ataraxia). Hedonist ideas were widely disseminated during the Renaissance and, later, in the ethical theories of the philosophes. In the struggle against the religious conception of morality T. Hobbes, J. Locke, P. Gassendi, and the French materialists of the 18th century frequently had recourse to the hedonist interpretation of ethics. The principles of hedonism achieved their fullest expression in the ethical theories of utilitarianism, which conceived of utility as pleasure or the absence of suffering (J. Bentham, J. S. Mill). Some modern bourgeois theoreticians also subscribe to ideas of hedonism, including G. Santayana (USA), M. Schlick (Austria), and D. Drake (USA). Marxism criticizes hedonism primarily for its naturalistic and ahistorical conception of man. It sees in hedonism an extremely simplified interpretation of the driving forces and motivations of human behavior, an interpretation that tends toward relativism and individualism.
T. A. KUZ’MINA