My question was: Can you complete the sentences in a way that doesn't feel like something is lacking or remiss?
You've completed the sentences. Are you fully satisifed with the way you did it?

My question was: Can you complete the sentences in a way that doesn't feel like something is lacking or remiss?
You've completed the sentences. Are you fully satisifed with the way you did it? — baker

In a way yes but get to the point, what about it bothers you?

I'm asking if you're bothered by any of it.
Remember, my point that started this was that happiness and value "need to come with a sense of being apriori or else they lose their lustre", ie. a person must have a sense that happiness and value must have something inexplicable about them, must be perceived as axiomatic, otherwise, there's a sense of unsatisfactoriness about them.

Perhaps this doesn't apply to you. But it seems to me that for most people, "peeking behind the courtain" has a demoralizing effect on them.

I'm asking if you're bothered by any of it.
Remember, my point that started this was that happiness and value "need to come with a sense of being apriori or else they lose their lustre", ie. a person must have a sense that happiness and value must have something inexplicable about them, must be perceived as axiomatic, otherwise, there's a sense of unsatisfactoriness about them. — baker

If I catch your drift, you mean to say that the the question, "why is x of value?", paradoxically, diminshes the value of x; after all, if it has an answer, x is only a means of acquiring the value attributed to it and x isn't an end unto itself. If that's what you mean, you forget or overlook the fact that the "luster" x possesses is given to it by the very thing that makes it "lose luster". A paradox in its own right. It's like Caesar and Brutus: Caesar loved Brutus as a dear friend and drew strength from the friendship between him and Brutus but his last words, according to Shakespeare, were "et tu Brute!"

If I catch your drift, you mean to say that the the question, "why is x of value?", paradoxically, diminshes the value of x; after all, if it has an answer, x is only a means of acquiring the value attributed to it and x isn't an end unto itself. If that's what you mean, you forget or overlook the fact that the "luster" x possesses is given to it by the very thing that makes it "lose luster". — TheMadFool

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

The Hedonic Question: Do things have value because they make us happy or do they make us happy because they have value?

If things have value because they make us happy, hedonism is vindicated - happiness is the be all and end all in a manner of speaking and we should be, as hedonists recommend, doing everything possible to achieve happiness, nothing else matters. Life is essentially a saga of happiness. If such is true, things that have no happiness associated with them are valueless and not worth anything at all. — TheMadFool

Whichever way you look at it, it seems to me like you’re trying to justify a value system because it’s a value system. I’m not sure that’s very effective. You’ve already assumed that this hedonic value system exists. It’s like asking: does ‘God’ exist because we look for him, or do we look for ‘God’ because he exists?

I think @Joshs was spot on when he said that “The ways in which we make sense of our world are inherently affective and hedonic”, and @baker was onto something when he said that both sides of the question (happiness and value) rely on a sense of a priori.

However, give some thought to the fact that, whatever else happiness and suffering are, physically speaking, that which is pro-life (e.g. sex) causes happiness and that which is anti-life (e.g. physical injury) causes suffering. I say this with some reservation of course as I suspect there are exceptions to these generalizations. That said, there can be little doubt that sex, one of happiest activities for many, is pro-life and bodily harm (cuts, bruises, fractures, etc.), a painful experience, is anti-life. — TheMadFool

Your reservation is well-founded. There are so many exceptions to these sweeping generalisations that they lack any sense of accuracy. The experience of sex being “one of the happiest activities for many” is an example of this. Yes, sex can be a momentarily happy experience, but no more so than life in general. It can also be, has been and is, a painful and/or harmful experience for many - and may even be both happy and harmful.

These are not outliers - your rubric is inadequate. Your proposed structure of pro-life or anti-life is qualified by the limited perception of your life. I think I can safely assume that sex is necessarily a happy experience for you, otherwise it doesn’t qualify as ‘sex’. I don’t mean to get personal here - I just wanted to point out that there can be more than a little doubt.

The idea that either things have value because they make us happy, OR things make us happy because they have value, is an oversimplification that attempts to isolate an attribution of value from our limited understanding of reality. Even the simplest explanations of value that may be considered ‘objectively’ accurate have a triadic relational structure at minimum: they are inclusive of an unquantifiable system qualification (‘us’) whose perceived capacity arbitrarily defines or qualifies the upper and lower limits.

So, while we commonly describe value structure as either a plane or a linear range, we need to also account for the qualitative limitations of the system. Pain or harm that threatens the consolidation of life is a qualitative limitation of our organic system, and everyone’s pain threshold varies. Pleasure, too, has an arbitrary upper limit, beyond which any perception of ‘self’ dissolves. But this dissolution of self is not in the same linear range as our pain threshold, qualitatively speaking - and any attempt to reduce it to a single value range (ie. happiness) is fraught with subjective uncertainty.

You’ve already assumed that this hedonic value system exists. It’s like asking: does ‘God’ exist because we look for him, or do we look for ‘God’ because he exists? — Possibility

Not so. I clearly didn't assume the existence of any hedonic or nonhedonic value system, hence the question, do things have value because they make us happy or do things make us happy because they have value?

If things have value because they make us happy then all value, even purportedly nonhedonic ones, ultimately end up being about happiness/suffering - hedonism then pervades everything we think/say/do, hedonism subsumes all there is.

On the other hand, if things make us happy because they have value, hedonism is either an erroneous idea or an incomplete one for there must exist a nonhedonic system of values which supersedes the value of happiness/suffering.

The ways in which we make sense of our world are inherently affective and hedonic — Possibility

That we do something from habit - one that seems to have been widely prevalent and passed down from parent to offspring not to mention horizontally in worldwide communities - doesn't make it right. Wouldn't that be the fallacy of appeal to tradition? In addition, such a stance begs the question; after all, the question is whether hedonism is a standalone value system that, in a sense, is not a proxy for a value system that's the real McCoy so to speak but one which is concealed for reasons I, as of the moment, can't fathom. Speculative, yes, but not, in my humble opinion, beyond the realm of possibility.

Yes, sex can be a momentarily happy experience, but no more so than life in general. It can also be, has been and is, a painful and/or harmful experience for many - and may even be both happy and harmful. — Possibility

Let's not split hairs on this issue. John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of utilitarianism (hedonic through and through) did all he could do to distance his ethics from pleasures of the flesh - he created, by way of a solution, the distinction higher pleasures (mind) and lower pleasures(body). That Mill had to divorce bodily and mental pleasures like this is a clear indication that sex can, has, and will gum up the works for any philosophy founded on hedonic values that wants to avoid becoming just an excuse to have wild drunken orgies.

Returning to the main issue which is, allow me to reiterate, whether things have value because they make us happy or do things make us happy because they have value?, I'd like to narrate a short story below.

There once was a man, his name was Hedo. Hedo was an average bloke closer to fool than wise but he more than made up for it with his immense wealth. Hedo, despite lacking in the brain department loved art and wanted to create his own private collection in one of his mansions. Unfortunately, he didn't know the difference between good and bad art.

Hedo did what anyone with that much money would do - he hired a local middle-aged art critic called Nism whose task it was to separate the wheat from the chaff in the numerous galleries in the city. A happy partnership most would agree between a man who had the moolah to buy good art but couldn't recognize it and a man who knew good art when he saw one but wasn't rich enough to buy them.

Over the years, the duo - Hedo & Nism - managed to purchase the best the city's artists had to offer. Hedo's art collection became the talk of the town and that filled him and also Nism with great pride and joy.

15 years passed by and then it happened. Unbeknownst to either, Nism's abilities began to decline, age had taken its toll. Nism could no longer assess the quality of an artist's skill as well as when he was younger. Unfortunately, Hedo was still as bad at discerning an artist's talent and execution as he had been but he wasn't in any way bothered by that - Hedo had full faith in Nism's now nonexistent skills.

One hot day in July, Hedo and Nism were on their way to a gallery in which an exhibition was being held. As they were walking down the streets they saw a group of men, women, and children exclaiming loudly and clapping hard. The two decided to investigate. They weaved their way through until they came up to what all the commotion was about - a chimpanzee with half a pencil in its left leg scrawling haphazardly on a blank page torn out of a child's notebook. "Oh! Magnificent! This is art at its finest!" exclaimed Nism euphorically. "You must have this in your collection Hedo," he urged. Hedo didn't hesitate for even a second, looking at the man who looked like the chimp's handler, he asked, "how much for this masterpiece?" The man, realizing an opportunity when he saw one replied, "well, er, $10,000" and threw in "take it or leave" for good measure. Hedo filled out the check and thrust it into the handler's outstretched hand and with utmost care, gently folded the chimp's doodle and deposited it into his velvet-lined breast pocket. Hedo & Nism were never this happy in the so many years they had worked with each other.

You’ve already assumed that this hedonic value system exists. It’s like asking: does ‘God’ exist because we look for him, or do we look for ‘God’ because he exists?
— Possibility

Not so. I clearly didn't assume the existence of any hedonic or nonhedonic value system, hence the question, do things have value because they make us happy or do things make us happy because they have value?

If things have value because they make us happy then all value, even purportedly nonhedonic ones, ultimately end up being about happiness/suffering - hedonism then pervades everything we think/say/do, hedonism subsumes all there is.

On the other hand, if things make us happy because they have value, hedonism is either an erroneous idea or an incomplete one for there must exist a nonhedonic system of values which supersedes the value of happiness/suffering. — TheMadFool

But you can’t deny that the system exists, so it’s only the relational structure between happiness and value that is in question here. You can’t answer this question solely through introspection, though, because there is no introspective position in which what makes us happy does not have value for us. Whereas a position does exist in which what we value does not make us happy, even if we can recall that it did, once.

It isn’t that hedonism is an erroneous or incomplete idea, then, but a limited one. And it isn’t that a nonhedonic system of values supersedes the value of happiness/suffering, but that hedonism is one aspect of a more complex value system - one that extends beyond ‘us’.

The ways in which we make sense of our world are inherently affective and hedonic
— Possibility

That we do something from habit - one that seems to have been widely prevalent and passed down from parent to offspring not to mention horizontally in worldwide communities - doesn't make it right. Wouldn't that be the fallacy of appeal to tradition? In addition, such a stance begs the question; after all, the question is whether hedonism is a standalone value system that, in a sense, is not a proxy for a value system that's the real McCoy so to speak but one which is concealed for reasons I, as of the moment, can't fathom. Speculative, yes, but not, in my humble opinion, beyond the realm of possibility. — TheMadFool

I’m not talking about habit here, and I’m not talking about what’s right. I’m talking about the basic informative process of an organism. Regardless of what we think, we act based on how we feel and on what benefits the system. It’s the process of informing how we feel - constructing our value systems in such a way that what makes us happy is intertwined with the apparent happiness of ourselves, our parents/offspring, as well as the wider communities with whom we interact - that complicates this hedonic value system.

A child learns the value structures of language initially from their parents, for instance, in differentiating pleasurable interactions by associated sound and movement patterns. All of our value structures are built on this basic ‘hedonic’ system, and all of our intentionality reduces to the ongoing affective state of the organism - to an allocation of attention and effort based on pleasure/displeasure and arousal. That’s not to say that we are ruled by affect or emotion, but rather that affect (an interaction of pleasure/displeasure and arousal) is the base language of consciousness.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the existence of an hedonic value system does not preclude the existence of a nonhedonic value system - or vice versa.