The Philosophical Legitimacy Of Pleasure

Delusions and misunderstandings are plentiful.  Positive and negative misrepresentations of concepts, beliefs, and motives can be found rather easily.  When it comes to the issue of pleasure, there are two popular stances: either live for pleasure above all else or shun pleasure.  Yes, some people reside in between these two erroneous approaches, but even they mostly just have arbitrary, emotion-based beliefs about which pleasures are permissible or deep.  Very few would affirm pleasure without hedonism or emotionalism and without trivializing the issue of pleasure altogether.

Pleasure is not always a distraction from a very serious and sincere pursuit of truth.  No, hedonism is the distraction from a focus on truth and what logical facts and the possibility of moral obligations mean for how we should live.  Pleasure--like pain, boredom, curiosity, and love (of truth and the knowledge of it)--can be a completely legitimate motivator to reflect on key aspects of reality.  For example, it could help drive someone to seek rationalistic awareness of what pleasure is and what its role in life should be if there is one, which can always spill over into other matters and lead to more philosophical discoveries.

The belief that a love of pleasure is antithetical to rationalism, Christianity, or general moralism (not that moralism has a basis outside of an explicitly theistic context, and a very specific kind of theistic context at that) is just another misrepresentation of another thing that is inescapably governed by the necessary laws of logic.  Pleasure can be understood and savored without even the temptation to fall into hedonism.  In fact, some rationalists might find this temptation entirely unrelatable naturally or after realizing that love of pleasure does not threaten a concern for truth or desire to uphold moral obligations.

Mistaking hedonism and love of pleasure is the philosophically illegitimate position, not the idea that a deep embrace of pleasure is to be expected if a rationalist or Christian truly understands their own worldview and the concept of pleasure itself.  Pursuing pleasure does not make someone an irrationalist who does not care about looking to reason instead of emotionalism and does not make them a selfish being without concern for harming others if they are an obstacle to pleasure.  Only fools who care more about personal satisfaction than they do about reality will go further than this in their pursuit of pleasure.

Pleasure itself is a very legitimate thing for a rationalistic thinker to dwell on and enjoy.  After all, it provides another side of personal experience to be understood alongside other aspects of reality.  It is by nature not irrational to savor pleasure when one has no fallacious or erroneous beliefs about it, and it is by nature not immoral to seek pleasure as long as one has not violated any moral obligations in the process.  The only philosophically invalid way of approaching pleasure is one that involves petty assumptions about its nature or the intent to do as one pleases no matter what is or is not morally wrong.