‘We need to be those that revere Apollo, yet do not ignore Dionysus. We must give Dionysus his due, but always in a subordinate sense to Apollo.’
– Thomas Stark
The modern world and contemporary culture, particularly in the realm of the first-world, has a starkly divided and contentious relationship with the concept of pleasure. This much, I consider hard to ignore.
On the one hand, pleasure and pleasurable enterprises are unquestionably central to the lives of many people. Some of the most affluent among us are entertainers of various kinds – singers and songwriters, Hollywood film directors, authors of regular fiction, stand-up comedians, and so forth. A common element in many of these fields is that they, at least theoretically, are mediums for artistic value. A film, for instance, can be an exploration of some of the more profound understandings of our humanity, such that an audience might derive novel insights and questions to apply to themselves and their lives. But this is not always the case – and in fact, it is quite often not, when we look specifically at the most monetarily successful. You need only examine the past few decades of entertainment production to see that much of what has entered and remained in the public consciousness is, first and foremost, designed for the purpose of entertainment first – and from there, whatever other goals the creators may have in mind.
This would perhaps not mean much, were it not for the fact that monetary success overwhelmingly is derived from a common source, that being the consumer. When a singer makes more out of a single than many would make in a lifetime, it is because of the people who construct our culture engaging with it through what they find in their pockets. From this perspective, it is fairly obvious that a great deal of value is placed in the modern day on sources of pleasure, in lieu of whatever other values such endeavours might possess.
But it should feel a bit distasteful to a regular reader to insist on this line of thought, and indeed, I don’t think many would consciously align themselves with such a value. For the modern world also has a kind of demonisation, or elitism, associated with pleasure. There are great industries built on pleasurable experiences – but they are often construed in regular discussion as trivial things, and distractions in our lives from those things that are truly important. You may enjoy an alcoholic beverage on the weekend to iron out the stresses of the week; but most would say the valuable part of the life is what is contained within the stresses and what those stresses facilitate, and not the beverage one takes to mitigate it.
It is arguable, with some extrapolation, that this undercurrent is strongly powered by the modern world’s overt history with religion, and particularly Christianity. Temperance, purity, and the erasure of temptation are common themes in such domains. It is easier for a camel to travel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, as they say – a life should be dedicated to the duty one has to others and to their God-given obligations, and pleasure is merely a tempting distraction that errs us closer to the devil.
But if you go back even further, there are doubtlessly allusions to this concept as far back as our most ancient thinking. A. C. Grayling, in his book The Choice of Hercules, makes note of the use of the tale of Hercules in Enlightenment thinking and art. The story is derived from classical antiquity, and speaks of the demigod working among a herd when he is approached by two women. The first offered him a life of duty – of suffering, determination, and eventually, eternal fame. The latter offered him a life of pleasure – hedonism, beauty, sex, and ease for all his days. In these myths, Hercules was doubtlessly depicted as more of an exemplar of the latter. He was a brutish man, violent and impulsive, and with a strong appetite for the entertainment of life. Yet it was with minor deliberation that Hercules chose the path of the former woman, accepting the burdens of his labour and the worst that life may offer in the name of a virtuous path.
I find it noteworthy that this story takes such a parallel to the religious doctrines that would come far after it – and indeed, this parallel was not lost on later thinkers. The choice of Hercules is a prominent fixture in art and literature, especially so from the Renaissance when the values of religion and humanity intertwined in prominent thought. It has been used as an allusion to the advocacy of the good life – a life lived in accordance with traditional virtue, not the demonic influence of pleasure.
Yet it is still undeniable that the enterprises of hedonism are profitable, and furthermore, that there are a substantial portion of people who find such moralisms sickly. The idea that a life of duty is preferable to a life of pleasure is not universal. Why is it, they say, that it is more virtuous to enjoy a Beethoven symphony than an Ariana Grande song – for the purpose of both is the attainment of pleasure in some way, only the former is pretentiously considered a higher form of it. In this view, what we consider virtuous and what we consider mere pleasure are culturally constructed notions, and not based on a legitimately rational account.
In a sense, I think these people have a point. There are doubtlessly many in the world who segregate pleasure for little reason other than tradition and dogma – this type of pleasure is deemed as ‘good’, and a different one as ‘bad’, because that is what they were taught to believe. Such people still only conceive of the two elements as different kinds of pleasure, but pressure from the outside creates a dividing line, where what is acceptable is based outside of the individual’s perception and objective reality.
But so too do I think that these people, to some degree, miss the point. When someone speaks to the virtue of enjoying a Beethoven symphony, it is easy enough to construe this as meaning it possesses a more desirable form of pleasure – that it is simply pleasure but better, in a moral sense, than alternative forms. I think this is, unfortunately, what most people mean by it. But another way this can be understood is that the pleasure is not the point in the pleasure gained through a Beethoven symphony. The virtue is not in virtuous pleasure – it is in virtuous meaning. It is in the capacity to assimilate such an experience of art into one’s life, as to educate oneself, and make better use out of one’s leisure. Which is not to say that we cannot find such things in the likes of pop music; but it is (arguably) less common among such media. Such people who make the former point would likely also argue that this is a productive use of one’s time and humanity, in a way that other pleasurable experiences may not attain.
And so we again see the stark divide between what is considered virtue and what is considered pleasure. But in a, strangely, different form this time – because whereas much of history has denoted the two as a binary, as per the two women in the choice of Hercules defining different course of life, we are capable of conceiving that the two can in fact coincide. Virtue, and pleasure, can exist in the same life – and perhaps even the same place.
To the heart of this discussion, I would consider this to be the failure of much of our modern and historical perspective on virtue and pleasure. It is deeply ingrained, and yet I feel there is no such need for there to be so, to consider virtue and pleasure as polar opposites that must be chosen between. The life of pleasure, or the life of duty, as chosen by Hercules is one such decision that we believe we must make in our own lives. We have the stalwart ascetics, who demand with elitism that life be a pursuit of meaning in the absence of bodily satisfaction; we have as well the hedonists, who demand with freedom and liberty the right to live a life that is devoid of duty to anything outside of the individual. But the two concepts are not polar opposites, and in fact, overlap in many ways. And it is scarcely conceivable that a flourishing life could be built on only one of the two. What gives you meaning, and what makes life ‘fun’ – perhaps we would all have better, more fulfilling lives if we stopped inciting the prejudice implied in the tale of Hercules, and we sought instead to integrate these ideas into the essential values of human existence. Maybe that is one part of the good life.