Bokrecension: The Picture of Dorian Gray av Oscar Wilde

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Enjoy life the way you like it
The Picture of Dorian Gray

We were brought to life to enjoy it, in all possible ways. No matter how you look upon life, no matter if you’re a hippie, a swot or a monk, you are a hedonist. There is no harm in hedonism; it’s principally just another expression for human feelings and logic.

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a lot about the pursuit of and devotion to pleasure, especially to the pleasures of the senses. It all starts with Dorian getting painted by Basil Hallward. Lord Henry Wotton then opens the door to a new self-centred view on things for Dorian by telling him about his life philosophy. Dorian begins to think that beauty and pleasure are the only worthwhile aspects of life, and the only things left to pursue, and wishes that his picture would age instead of him in order for him to be able to enjoy life at the top for a long time. And soon he realises that his wish has become reality. Dorian gets not only a picture and a non-fading beauty; he also gets a new life where pleasure is all that matters.

"A hedonist measures all actions on the basis of how much pleasure and how little pain they produce and thereby strives to maximize the pleasure whilst minimizing the pain" – Jeremy Bentham

In my opinion all people are hedonists; we are all out to get a good life. This is why the human mind has a conscience; to make us care about others, not only ourselves. Some of Sigmund Freud’s theories of human motivation have been called psychological hedonism; his "life instinct" is essentially the observation that people will pursue pleasure. Why would we care about our fellow friends if not so that we could feel better about ourselves. Every action we do is somewhere deep down egoistic. You do your homework so that you get better grades and eventually feel better about yourself. You give money too charity to make you feel better about yourself. And you help your friend because otherwise you probably wouldn’t be good friends and many friends make you feel successful and better about yourself. This is good healthy hedonism; if there was only this kind the world would be good.

Henry though, is a perfect example of bad hedonism, but this is not because the hedonism itself but because of Henry being a bad person. Henry is following his own Hedonistic beliefs when he tells Basil that "I hope that Dorian Gray will make his girl his wife, passionately adore her for six months, and then become fascinated by someone else. He would be a wonderful study.” Henry finds studying Dorian immensely pleasurable, and though it is not the moral thing to do to lead a young person down a path of passion and destruction, it amuses him, and therefore, by his philosophy, it is good. The matter with Henry is that he has no conscience, if he would have had any, he would feel bad about destroying Dorian’s life and he wouldn’t have done such an immoral thing to do.

When counting on if something is right to do as a hedonist, you take the pleasure the action provides and divide it with the pain it provides. Henry found that the amusement in studying Dorian’s life was worth more than the pain his conscience would experience when destroying a friends life. Therefore he would gain off leading him down a path of destruction. A nicer person would probably experience it too painful to destroy someone’s life and would therefore, despite being a hedonist, not choose to destroy his life. Maybe this nicer person would even find joy in helping Dorian get a better life and by helping him this person would get better friends with Dorian, the effort this person would put in helping Dorian would produce less pain than the good feeling about having helped someone and become better friends.

The portrait of Dorian is not only aging, the portrait also bears the burden of his shame. And this is what makes Dorian a bad hedonist, he doesn’t have to count with the burden of his shame when considering what to do and therefore he sees no need to be nice and begins to indulge in every kind of pleasure, whether moral or immoral.

If people would think more like hedonists the world would be better. People would then think more about if things are worth doing and eventually not do things they’d later regret. This is of course only if the individual has a conscience strong enough to restrain him from doing immoral things. But then again, people with no conscience often do immoral things not because they are hedonists, but because they simply can’t tell the difference between good and bad.

Hedonism is often mistaken for egoism, and even though I believe that every action a human does is egoistic deep down, this is not what most people mean by egoistic. Egoists are thought of as people who are willing to sacrifice other people’s happiness for their own and who always put themselves first. This has in no way anything to do with hedonism. Whereas Jeremy Bentham proposes doing whatever makes an individual happiest over the long run, John Stuart Mill promotes actions which make everyone happy. I think there is no bigger difference, most people can’t be happy alone the less can they make others unhappy to get happiness themselves, their conscience would simply stand in their way. This is why happiness for an individual is the same as happiness for everyone. And this is why hedonism is in no way related to egoism.

Different people seek the same thing in life in di...