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Updated: June 11, 2025
HEDONISTIC. Relating to hedonism, that form of Greek philosophy which taught that pleasure is the chief end of existence. HETAERA. A Greek courtesan. This class was often highly trained in music and social art, and represented the highest grade of culture among Greek women. HETEROGENY. The spontaneous generation of animals and vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic elements.
Later it led to any idealization of existing institutions as themselves the embodiment of reason. The purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a reaction. This is generally known as either hedonism or utilitarianism.
He repudiated the shallow proofs of the existence of God, freedom, and immortality no less emphatically than he rejected materialism with its atheism, fatalism, and hedonism. He tried to save everything worth saving rational knowledge, modern science, the basal truths of the old metaphysics, and the most precious human values.
His Platonic insistence, too, on the more spiritual aspects of love separates his anti-Christian "immorality" from the easy-going, pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist as Remy de Gourmont. Shelley's individualism is always a thing with open doors; a thing with corridors into Eternity.
Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience.
We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola a hedonism that is more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder.
Strabo in a famous passage records an exceptional hedonism in Greek thought and goes on to expound the conventional belief. Eratosthenes says that the poet directs his whole attention to the amusement of the mind, and not at all to its instruction.
I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing useful; but it remained water only, none the less. Stoicism, hedonism, the gospel of 'Sweetness and Light'; what is it, may I ask, that your aesthetic priests furnish, to feed immortal British souls? Knee breeches, sun flowers, niello, cretonne, Nanking bowls, lily dados?
He appreciates to the full the hedonism of Omar but he casts it aside as emptiness. He tried the religion of pleasure and beauty. His rules of life are many and first is "eternal war with Ignorance." He says: "Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane. The Atom must fight the unequal fray against a myriad giants.
The Stoic extreme of passionlessness is almost as false as the Epicurean hedonism, and the mean between them is the ideal Jewish life, in which godliness and humanity are blended.
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