While the view that desire and not reason determines value will suggest to many that Ehrenfels wants to assert that nothing is valuable for each individual aside from its own pleasure, the underlying assumption that one desires only one’s own feeling of pleasure. Our experience, however, shows us that this assumption is false. “In the most common circumstances of our everyday life our desiring aims directly at certain routine external tasks such as eating, drinking, waiting, sitting, sleeping, etc., without there being presented thereby the state of feeling which corresponds to these” (Ehrenfels 1897, 27; Smith 1994, 283 ff.). Nevertheless, obtaining what we desire does result in an increase of pleasure relative to the state that would be experienced without the desire being satisfied (Ehrenfels 1897, 31 ff.).