But through our shared basic ability to refer to pleasure, preserved since childhood, Stoics and hedonists continue to disagree about a shared subject, without the Stoics sharing in our common conception that pleasure is feeling that is actually good.
The child acquiring the ability to refer to pleasure may surely look to more than unaided inward recognition when learning to sort together sweets, hugs, and play and to name something common these typically cause or sustain.
Still, our shared ability to refer to pleasure should not be so closely connected to any concept of good as to make inconsistent the Stoic denial that pleasure is good, as Sidgwick observed (1907, p. 129), or to deny our ability to disagree with Stoics about a common subject.
We may, more modestly, appeal merely to our basic capacity to refer to pleasure, without any such sophisticated cognitive mediation — a capacity that we, Stoics, and very young children without distinct and developed conceptions of goodness, appearance, and reality may alike share.
According to Franz Marc, one of the principal painters of the German expressionist movement, "we refer with pleasure and with steadfastness to the case of El Greco, because the glory of this painter is closely tied to the evolution of our new perceptions on art".
It's strange since anhedonia's really an easy word to parse out with "an" being the not and "hedonia" referring to pleasure.
In the eighteenth century the concept started to be used to refer to sensory pleasure and delight.
Guilty pleasures refer to cultural artifacts with mass appeal — genre novels, catchy pop songs, domestic action movies (foreign action "films," no matter how awful, tend to get a pass), TV shows other than "Breaking Bad" and "The Wire" — that bring with them an easy enjoyment without any pretense to edification.
What's unclear is whether higher pleasures refer to mental states or sensations caused by higher activities or the activities themselves.
Consummatory pleasure refers to the "in the moment" pleasure experienced by the subject directly engaged in an enjoyable activity, whereas anticipatory pleasure refers to the experience of pleasure related to future activities.
