Topics Value

Question What does philosophy say about the repetitive nature of experience? For instance, say I have five grapes that I could eat but they are not necessary for my nutrition. I would be eating them purely for pleasure. I have three choices: 1) do not eat them, 2) eat some of them, or 3) eat all of them. I have memories of eating grapes, so I could just rely on the memories to experience the pleasure of eating a grape (a pale substitute for the real thing). Or, I could eat one of them, which would allow me to experience the taste and texture of a grape in the present. Or, I could eat more than one grape which would prolong the experience but not really add more taste or texture to the experience of eating just one. However, after eating one or more grapes, I would only have another (fading) memory of eating grapes which would not really add to my previous stock of memories of eating grapes. If much of life has this repetitive nature to it, is there any value to doing anything more than once (assuming that there is a value in doing it the first time)?

Accepted:
August 26, 2010

Comments

The reason we do things more than once is that we value doing them more than once, either because we find the things pleasurable or otherwise valuable in and of themselves or because doing them advances other values of ours. (Here, I am using "value" pretty loosely; I simply mean that we perceive ourselves to be gaining something from the relevant things.) So take your grape example. If I like grapes, and if I have an opportunity to eat them on numerous occasions, then, when I'm hungry and feel like eating grapes and grapes are available, I'll want to eat them. The memory of eating a grape is not going to satisfy my hunger, either for filling my stomach or for experiencing the eating of a grape. Of course, we sometimes have vivid memories of eating things -- Proust's madeleines are perhaps the quintessential example -- but a memory of something is very different (in numerous ways) from experiencing the thing itself.

When you think about it, it's not surprising that we do the same things over and over again, especially when it comes to what gives us pleasure. When it's something as simple as food, the pleasure is more or less constant from repetition to repetition, although certain factors -- such as not having had a food we love for a long time -- may increase or decrease the pleasure in various instances. In other cases -- I'm a fanatical knitter, so knitting comes to mind here -- when we repeat things we often get better at them, and there's value in this trajectory of improvement. There are also things that we have to do over and over again in order to survive: we organize our lives, both personally and socially, according to certain patterns (getting up at roughly the same time each day, transporting ourselves to work via the same route, checking our e-mail, holding election days on the second Tuesday of November, and so on). Finally, most of us value familiarity: we want to see people we like or work with or need things from on a regular basis.

In some cases, the value of doing something over and over again produces diminishing returns. After playing that Xbox game for the 1,000th time, you might get tired of it. And if you eat 50 grapes, you might feel sick. But this isn't because the 50th grape-eating-repetition is inherently worse, or no better, than the first one. It's because, when we're full, eating more grapes has no value for us.