HKB
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Often appears with: will, choice, and freedom · pleasure, pain, and the good life · perception and the senses · medicine, disease, and healing · matter, motion, and cause · virtue as pleasure · tastes and smells · streams of particles · simple versus qualified desire · reason and the intellect · providence and divine governance · preservation of self
Usually: argument (6) · detachment (5) · temptation (1) · skepticism (1) · wonder (1)
Locke argues that extension cannot be the same thing as body, since ideas like tastes, smells, hunger, thirst, and pains involve no idea of extension, though extension is inseparable from visible and tangible qualities.
25. Extension being inseparable from Body, proves it not the same. It is true, the idea of extension joins itself so inseparably with all visible, and most tangible qualities, that it suffers us to SEE no one, or FEEL very few external objects, without taking in impressions of extension too. This readiness of extension to make itself be taken notice of so constantly with other ideas, has been the occasion, I guess, …
Locke explains that when a person is content with their current state (no uneasiness), there is little or no industry or action; he ties this to divine design placing hunger and thirst to preserve life and the species.
34. This is the Spring of Action. When a man is perfectly content with the state he is in—which is when he is perfectly without any uneasiness—what industry, what action, what will is there left, but to continue in it? Of this every man’s observation will satisfy him. And thus we see our all-wise Maker, suitably to our constitution and frame, and knowing what it is that determines the will, has put into man the unea…
Locke explains that people desire only the good they think forms part of their own happiness, so even acknowledged goods can be ignored if they seem unnecessary, as examples of knowledge vs. sensual pleasure show.
46. Why not being desired, it moves not the Will. The ordinary necessities of our lives fill a great part of them with the uneasinesses of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, weariness, with labour, and sleepiness, in their constant returns, &c. To which, if, besides accidental harms, we add the fantastical uneasiness (as itch after honour, power, or riches, &c.) which acquired habits, by fashion, example, and education, ha…
The narrator claims Utopians rank virtue and a good conscience as highest mental pleasures, while bodily pleasures like eating are only valuable as maintaining health against hunger and thirst.
Is there any man that is so dull and stupid as not to acknowledge that he feels a delight in health? And what is delight but another name for pleasure? “But, of all pleasures, they esteem those to be most valuable that lie in the mind, the chief of which arise out of true virtue and the witness of a good conscience. They account health the chief pleasure that belongs to the body; for they think that the pleasure of …
Socrates classifies mental attitudes as opposites—assent vs dissent, attraction vs repulsion—and analyzes desire, hunger, and thirst to argue that simple desires aim at simple objects, with further distinctions by condition and quantity.
Yes, he said, that will be the best way. Well, I said, would you not allow that assent and dissent, desire and aversion, attraction and repulsion, are all of them opposites, whether they are regarded as active or passive (for that makes no difference in the fact of their opposition)? Yes, he said, they are opposites. Well, I said, and hunger and thirst, and the desires in general, and again willing and wishing,--a…
Lucretius argues against interpreting body parts as designed for their uses, claiming that organs and senses predate the actions they later support, and he explains hunger, thirst, and bodily replenishment.
SOME VITAL FUNCTIONS In these affairs We crave that thou wilt passionately flee The one offence, and anxiously wilt shun The error of presuming the clear lights Of eyes created were that we might see; Or thighs and knees, aprop upon the feet, Thuswise can bended be, that we might step With goodly strides ahead; or forearms joined Unto the sturdy uppers, or serving hands O…