Still Life with Oysters

Last week, on Wednesday Thoughts on Art, we engaged in some hypothetical experiences to understand Jeremy Bentham’s perspective on utilitarianism. His mathematical approach allowed to measure the consequences of actions, and thus determine their value given the amount of pleasure, and absence of pain, it provided. Therefore (with last week’s example) some tortillas being more valuable than a painting. In Bentham’s equation, pleasure and pain are ultimately determined by two things: their duration and intensity. Fearing that a world viewed through this binomial lens might lead to a superfluous life, one only concerned with avoiding pain and pursuing easy pleasures, Stuart Mill confronted this perspective with yet another thought experiment, and a rather bizarre one… I bet you did’t wake up today feeling just like an oyster, but for the purposes of Mill’s experiment, lets give it a try: if you were to choose between the life of an immortal oyster, never feeling any pain; or the life of Henri Matisse (originally the experiment was made with the composer Joseph Haydn), exposed to the highest pleasures of creation, and both the pain of suffering and death, what life would you choose? With the mathematical assumption of Bentham, since the variables in the equation are the duration and the intensity, the oyster existence would be preferable: it’s infinite duration would exceed the intensity in Matisse’s life. Facing the absurdity of the result, and the decay into a sensualist's existence, Mill separates two pleasures: Superior pleasures and Inferior pleasures - being the corporeal pleasures inferior to the intellectual ones. Artur Deus Dionisio

Btw. today is a #museumselfie day - don't forget to post your selfie with a hashtag on your social media account:) See you tomorrow!