Just Enough Pleasure
I loved this article I saw on Arts & Letters Daily, about how America has gone Puritan, and how just enough pleasure -- and not too much -- is actually essential for a happy life. At Chronicle for Higher Ed, Richard Klein writes:
The agitation of love preserves the self, keeps it healthy even when--especially when--it is sick. The risk of love, which so often ends in shipwreck, is what keeps a person healthy.But there are other classic paths to health. Socrates believed in dancing every morning. We could do more for public health if the government spent a fraction of what it spends curbing smoking on promoting dancing. An Epicurean approach asks not what temptations need to be avoided in the name of health. Instead it asks, "What is health, and how do you get it?" Imagine a world in which public policy declared that pleasure is the principal means to health.
...Bartolomeo Platina, the great 15th-century scholar, papal librarian, and Epicurean, wrote De honesta voluptate et valetudine ("On Honest Pleasure and Good Health") while imprisoned in the castle San Angelo in Rome, where a vengeful Pope Paul II had thrown him. Platina starts from the classical Epicurean premise that pleasure is not only a positive value but the highest value, and that health is its necessary supplement. A person cannot be sick and still feel good. She cannot be depressed, or physically debauched from alcohol and drugs, say, and still have pleasurable feelings. Following Platina and his master Epicurus, however, the corollary is also true. Not only is health the sine qua non of pleasure (that without which there is none), but pleasure improves your health. Put another way, if you inhibit the body's pleasure, you provoke disease.
Over the gates to his garden (it was not a school), Epicurus inscribed the hedonist creed: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure." With an eye to what was fitting and measured and moderate, Epicurus indulged his senses. After all, he believed that excessive pleasure, like stoic privation, ruins one's health and weakens the will. Thomas Jefferson, himself a hedonist, agreed. In 1819 he wrote to William Short, saying that "the doctrine of Epicurus ... is the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients, as frugal of vicious indulgence and fruitful of virtue as the hyperbolical extravagances of his rival sects."
In our time, it has become un-American to be Epicurean, to consider pleasure, even moderately indulged, to be the highest good. An old strain of American Puritanism to which Jefferson was immune, if not allergic, has become the new morality. Dressing itself up in the language of public health, this new morality views the least indulgence in adult pleasure as the sign of a nascent habit on the way to becoming a dangerous compulsion. In a sense, of course, that is precisely what distinguishes adult pleasures from childish ones: Adult pleasures can quickly become habitual. But without risk, there is no adult pleasure, and risk is what keeps us alive, not just living on. Perhaps that is why every single person I know has been addicted--habituated to something--at some time in life and has had a problem dealing with it. It is an all but inevitable consequence of the pleasures we seek, particularly in America, where we are publicly spurred on to consume by advertisements and stresses that excite desire. It is not all bad. Nietzsche says that nothing in life is better than our habits, as long as they don't perdure. "I love brief habits," he writes, "and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses."
This passage reminded me of Christopher Hitchens' lust for life and a few of the bad-for-you things in it:
Whenever anyone asked Julia Child to name her guilty pleasures, she responded, "I don't have any guilt." Epicureanism not only absolves us of guilt but says that our guilty pleasures might actually be keeping us healthy--mentally, physically, or both. Like Proust, the doctor's son, we might even consider it perversely healthy to sacrifice our health in order to write the greatest novel of the century. Julia Child was vigorous into her 90s not despite slathering chickens with butter, but because of it. Only you can judge, however, what your body needs and what gives you pleasure. It may be vital to know that cigarettes are bad for your health, but you might at the same time feel, like Sartre, that life without cigarettes is not worth living.
It would be great to have an antidote for too much pleasure -- pleasure to the point of destruction -- which, in a way, seems to be a petulant brat's request for a cure for "the human condition." Part of doing life is coming up with the self-discipline to overcome bad habits, excesses and addictions. The good news is, you unlearn a habit the same way you learned it, by repetition (by repeatedly not doing it, or only doing it in moderation, when you really, really want to do it, or do it to excess).
This might be the best post you've ever made. I am at a loss for further words, as any praise would seem inadequate to the task.
Robert at November 30, 2010 5:28 AM
Amen. (I couldn't resist.)
The only forbidden pleasure should be interfering in the lives of others. Unless it harms me or mine, have at it.
MarkD at November 30, 2010 5:33 AM
A person cannot be sick and still feel good. She cannot be depressed, or physically debauched from alcohol and drugs, say, and still have pleasurable feelings.
Yet alcohol and drugs are shorthand in our society for "pleasure".
Because setting pursuit of pleasure as "the highest value" leads to a meaningless, often lonely life, whose emptiness must be numbed - which is the real goal of "getting wasted" and other types of "fun" in modern life.
The distinction between high-concept, intellectually conceived "pleasure" and "debauchery" is not so easily maintained outside the philosopher's garden... one is usually the consequence of the other.
Ben David at November 30, 2010 5:36 AM
I don't know anyone who shuns pleasure. Is my little society that different from the US as a whole?
momof4 at November 30, 2010 5:53 AM
It may be vital to know that cigarettes are bad for your health, but you might at the same time feel, like Sartre, that life without cigarettes is not worth living.
This is how I feel about bread and cupcakes.
MonicaP at November 30, 2010 6:48 AM
"Because setting pursuit of pleasure as "the highest value" leads to a meaningless, often lonely life, whose emptiness must be numbed..."
This is simplistic. I take pleasure in my work, though it involves much effort. I take pleasure in my garden, even as my back is aching after having hauled compost for 4 hours. And yes, I take pleasure in a glass or two of wine in the evening.
Epicurus was not a hedonist.
Astra at November 30, 2010 6:59 AM
"Everything in moderation including moderation" The problem here is not pleasure and never was. However banning things makes those prone to over indulgence more comfortable. No one gets fat from eating at McDonalds (not Amy style but a full value meal) occasionally. No one suffer liver failure and heart disease from occasionally getting staggering drunk. No one get lung cancer from an occasional smoke. The problem with pleasure is just that it's pleasurable to do so have a higher risk of excess then say cleaning the bathroom. Which for someone with OCD can still become an all consuming habit.
Bad habits? Well any habit can go bad no matter which one it is. There is usually a combination of cognitive dysfunction with a maladaptive behavior. Proper nutrition can become anorexia. Proper hydration becomes water intoxication and addiction. Excersise can become running till you joints start to fail. Learning can become a life long waste of your time and other peoples money, militant professional students are fucking scary.
The other issue is again a cognitive dysfunction which makes people unable to see past their own experiences. One of the biggest appears to be booze. If you grew up with a violent alcoholic parent many can't get it in their head that people can indulge safely without becoming a threat. The "I've never seen it so it can't be done" mentality. Same for guns, drugs, sex, gambling or and "vice".
vlad at November 30, 2010 7:11 AM
Great points, vlad, but there are some people who can and do learn how to indulge safely. I'm one, and know quite a few others from "back in the day" when the order of the day was dropping a hit of acid before 1st period math. And accessorising (excessorising?) throughout the day and into the evening with weed, whites and wine (earworm alert!). But most of us came through the other side, and while not indulging in needless acidic debauchery, there are some of us who still choose to drink and smoke, in moderation. But you're right in that it tends to be a learned process.
Flynne at November 30, 2010 9:26 AM
America gone Puritan? Could have fooled me. Take it from me, with my killjoy some-other-century views, Puritanism does not look like modern America. Furthermore, people hardly need to be encouraged to seek more bodily pleasure, and when a so-called lust for life includes destroying it with way too much alcohol and, let's face it, any amount of cigarettes (rationalize all you want - you're free to do it but don't call it a lust for life), people really do have their heads on backwards.
Thag Jones at November 30, 2010 10:15 AM
"America gone Puritan? Could have fooled me." Actually that exactly what Puritan America was. The more condemnation society poured on an act the more often it was done. Extra marital sex was quite common in the Puritan era though it was a hell worthy trespass. Women in labor were openly interrogated to get the ID of the father. Southerners have both the most dry counties and the most number of still. Hell Jack Daniels is located in a dry county.
There is a difference between lust for life and slow suicide. That difference is moderation.
vlad at November 30, 2010 10:40 AM
@Thag - You drink a 20 year old whisky and tell me that it does not instill a lust for life.
Don't understand cigarettes (why would you want something that goes away on its own, by design?), but cigars are potentially another thing. I say potentially because I can't get past the smell.
brian at November 30, 2010 10:57 AM
I love my cigars. I love my 32 year old bourbon, I will enjoy both until I die, which given my family history and prodigous good luck personally, will be well into my 90s or more.
The health zealots don't really live longer, time just seems to pass more slowly when you've been locked in a closet avoiding all of life's hazards for fear of what is inevitable anyway.
Robert at November 30, 2010 11:08 AM
Nothing wrong with a little; it's the excess that's the problem, which is why I said "destroying it with way too much alcohol." A little of what you fancy does you good, so long as what you fancy isn't snorting cocaine off a hooker's ass.
Thag Jones at November 30, 2010 11:25 AM
so long as what you fancy isn't snorting cocaine off a hooker's ass.
Awww, you mean I need to stop doing that, too?
MonicaP at November 30, 2010 11:42 AM
All in. But how do you get women to take off their clothes?
BOTU at November 30, 2010 3:53 PM
I'm with Thag; I don't see any evidence that America is going Puritan, in the sense that most people usually use that word. However, I will say that there is a weird sort of neo-Puritanism, if you will, which is attempting to influence society and has had some success in certain areas. These neo-Puritans hold that some indulgences are almost mandatory, while others are prohibited. And it changes a lot depending on what group of people it is being prescribed for. There is no rhyme or reason.
And you'd be surprised at who some of the neo-Puritans are. There is not any correlation with the traditional left-center-right political spectrum -- neo-Puritans can be found in all three camps.
Cousin Dave at November 30, 2010 5:57 PM
It's odd that we're supposed to indulge, but we're also supposed to feel guilty about it. My husband loves playing video games in his rare time off, but he acts like he's doing something wrong by playing.
I told him that if he's going to work 10 hours a day, he should do whatever the hell he wants when he's not working. I'm not even hardcore about making sure chores get done. Sometimes we both need to leave the dishes in the sink to watch some House.
MonicaP at November 30, 2010 6:40 PM
Leave a comment