ABSTRACT
Pleasure and pain are pivotal in emotions, and for many investigators they form the criterion for a state being an emotion or not. Experiences such as feelings of joy and anger were conceived as states of feeling of pleasure or pain with admixtures of sensations, images, and thoughts. True, experiences of pleasure cannot be reduced to other kinds of awareness: not to images, not to judgments or thought; not to body sensations. Pleasure is not subjective. The evaluative nature of feelings is its core aspect. The intentionality of feeling, its adherence to some object–a true object, a state of oneself, a state of the world, performance of action–highlights a major question about pleasure and pain. Acceptance and commerce form the core phenomena of pleasure. Experience serves as a signal for acceptance and rejection wriggles. In this sense, and for these reasons, experience of pleasure and pain may and must be supposed to exist in animals.
