ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the second structural feature of human life: awareness. Conscious mental states need to be understood in terms of both their content and object, and this undermines pleasure theories of well-being. We argue that it is an error to regard pleasure as a mental object because this attempts to objectify the intentional or subjective nature of our mental lives. Furthermore, the conception of pleasure as a mental object instrumentalises the relation between the activity and the feeling. Instead, we should conceive ‘pleasure’ as the way one performs those activities (i.e. with appreciation). It is necessary for well-being that we experientially appreciate the desirable feature of the activities and experiences that we engage in. This depends on the quality of one’s awareness. This new conception explains the importance of happiness and other positive emotions for well-being and explores its importance for our relationship to our own desires. To emphasise the point about the quality of awareness, we introduce the idea of the construction of one’s phenomenological world.
