Is the hedonist escape from suffering any better? The hedonist attempts by sheer will to accumulate a surplus of pleasure. But already earliest Greek thought did not support this teaching. Not Aristippus, or the pessimist Hegesias, who urged his students to commit suicide (peisithanatos), or Epicurus, who, in place of the positive, sensual maxim to have pleasure in the present, which Aristippus taught was the highest good, preferred mere lack of pain and equanimity (ataraxia), was able convincingly to justify hedonism.
The historical reversal of the hedonist system into the most bleak pessimism is only one concrete example of an interior law of the spirit, "There are things that do not occur when consciously sought," and its corollary, "There are things more likely to occur the more a person strives to avoid them." Happiness and suffering are such things. Happiness always flees to greater distances from one who seeks it. Suffering approaches the fugitive more quickly the more rapidly he flees. This is especially true for deeper feelings.
Aristippus began his teaching by claiming he did not aspire after riches, horses, or women but only his pleasure in them. He taught that only a fool strives for things and goods, the wise man for his pleasure in things and goods. Thus, Aristippus transformed the abundance of the world and the value of its contents into a poor, bare scaffolding for the pleasures of his flesh. He did not acknowledge that, in forming and contemplating this world with love, happiness would bloom, as it were, as a blessed by-product and reaction. He never asked whether his cherished lover loved him in return; nor, when he ate a fish, whether he was tasty to the fish, but only whether the fish was tasty to him!
However, Aristippus was the fool. Without intending to, he removed the ground on which the bloom of happiness grows by withdrawing any free, loving, and active submission to the world or to the loved one. He did not see that pleasure, especially of the greater kind, is found only if a person does not actively seek pleasure, but seeks its content and inner value. He also did not see that the core of happiness in love can be found only by turning away from oneself and surrendering to a subject who responds in love to the love given. He did not grasp the firm law of life that the practical effort to win happiness steadily lessens the permanence and depth of happiness if will and action are geared solely to achieving it, for strictly speaking only sensual pleasure can be practically realized. He did not notice that pain is intentionally avoidable only to the extent it is near the peripheral zone of the senses. And he did not recognize that the suffering involved in continually avoiding pain inevitably becomes more dreadful as a result of ones heightened sensitivity to pain. He did not see the basic fact that the emotions should be sources, symptoms, and gifts, rather than objects, of willing. Thus, his technique of feeling suffering ends inevitably in a longing for death.
Max Scheler, “The Meaning of Suffering”, translated by Harold J. Bershady, from On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing
