The Pleasure Principle

National Review (via "Upstream") ^ | April 18, 1994 | Roger Scruton

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A philosophy of pleasure. Roger Scruton National Review, April 18, 1994 v46 n7 pS1(2)

Brief Summary: Pleasure has become unfairly associated with evil and perversion due to unsound theories by people such as Freud and Nietzsche. As a result, feelings and creations have become dehumanized and unpleasurable. Pleasure, as both intellectual and physical stimulation, makes for happier humans.

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HUMAN PLEASURE may be sensual, like the pleasure of a hot bath, or intellectual, like the pleasure of mathematical proof. But the pleasures that matter most to us, and that shape our lives and personalities, are neither purely sensual nor purely intellectual, but both at once. They arise in contemplation, when the senses feast on some favored object, or during practical activities, when we rise above our purpose and begin to enjoy what we are doing for its own sake, without regard to the results. They include aesthetic pleasures, whether in art or in nature; the pleasures of sport, whether enjoyed as a spectacle or through participation; the pleasures of the chase and the pleasures of sexual union. In all of these the human being is emancipated from sensuous existence, so as to encounter a world beyond purpose, a world in which thought and feeling come together in a synthesis that no animal can ever know.

Hence we are judged by our pleasures, which are the sign of our worth. The joy of a human being is also an expression of his moral outlook: those who see things with evil or perverted eyes have evil or perverted pleasures. It is a pernicious modern fallacy to believe that pleasure is a physical condition, a primitive sense of well-being located in some region of the body, and no more susceptible to moral judgment than is the digestive system or the sensation of pain. This "demoralization" of pleasure owes much to nineteenth-century utilitarianism, and also to Nietzsche's glorification of the instincts and Freud's theory of the "pleasure principle." If there is anything wrong with pleasure, those writers suggest, it lies merely in the causes and effects of it.

This demoralization of pleasure makes us look more like the animals than we really are. If infant "sexuality" has been a favorite concern of the demoralizers, it is because the infant is a bridge between the animal and the person. He is the proof that, whatever our final state, we begin life as animals, and become persons only by a slow process that by no means eliminates, but at most "represses," our essential nature. Freudians try to persuade us, therefore, that all our sexual experiences have their paradigms in infancy, where they exist as bodily desires and satisfactions, focused on "erotogenic" zones. In a famous passage Freud wrote that "no one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated at the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life." This ridiculous observation-- which tells us only that the baby's expression is the prototype of a postprandial doze--is about the only proof that Freud ever offered for his view that our later sexual experiences are all presaged at the breast, and are as animal and amoral as the gluttony of the infant. By describing adult sexuality in these infantile terms, you make it infantile. The demoralized view of human pleasure is self-confirming, since the more people believe in it, the more true it becomes.

But however brutish modern people may be, art and literature testify to a higher and purely human form of erotic pleasure. The sexual pleasure of animals bears no real resemblance to that which lovers feel. It involves no understanding of the other; it provides no triumph or commitment, is hedged around by no shame or prohibition; is free from judgment, praise, or blame. The sexual pleasure of an animal neither depends on thought nor responds to thought. Hence it can never be mistaken. By contrast, the literature of love is full of mistakes: the mistaken pleasure of Lucretia, as she lies with the rapist whom she thinks to be her husband (an innocent mistake, but one that only death can cure); the transgression of Emma Bovary, whose sexual pleasure empties her of hope; the desperate pleasure that gnaws the heart of Swarm, in the bottomless pit of his love for Odette. Do animals make mistakes like these? The very idea is absurd. The sexual pleasures of humans stem as much from thought as from sensual contact: they involve knowledge, imagination, and judgment, and express the whole personality of the person who experiences them. That is why they can be praised and blamed--not for their effects, but for their very existence. The sexual pleasure of the child-molester is wrong in itself, and not in its consequences only. And the same is true of the predatory sexuality which we are not supposed to judge, but which we must judge if we are to retain our true humanity.

Our greatest pleasures differ from those of the animals in another respect: they are also evaluations, in which we appreciate what we enjoy for its own sake, as an end in itself. This extraordinary fact, which Kant made the cornerstone of his aesthetics, is the proof that we belong to another and higher sphere--the sphere of judgment. For it is not only in the aesthetic experience that people learn to contemplate the world and perceive its intrinsic meaning. Even when pursuing a purpose, they garland their acts with purposelessness, and the purpose becomes the excuse for a higher meditation. This is what happens when we build, and building turns to style, ornament, and decoration. (The crime of modern architecture is that it makes the purpose sovereign over its embellishment, and so negates what is truly human in the art of building.) It is also what happens in the greatest pleasure that I know: the pleasure of hunting to hounds. This has a purpose, which is to catch and kill the prey. The pleasure of the hounds consists entirely in their absorption in this purpose, and in the animal compulsion that presses them onward to the kill. But for the follower, carried across country by a horse, whose animal pleasure courses through the human veins above him, hunting is an end in itself, The animal pleasure is transcended into something sublime: a contemplation of nature, in which life and death briefly flow together into a meaning. It is as hard to describe such a meaning as to paraphrase a Bruckner symphony. But its existence would be denied by no one who has encountered it. In hunting, as in music, we are confronted with an intrinsic good, and the pleasure we take in it needs no justification. It is such pleasures that make life worth while; and it is their absence from the life of sensuality that is the real punishment of those who are lost in it.