LISTEN. Hedonism was a report topic in CoPhi yesterday, when we spoke of the intra-Utilitarian dispute between followers of Bentham and Mill over qualities of pleasure.
It will be a report topic today too, in Happiness, when we discuss Buddhist and Stoic perspectives on our "animal and divine nature" and the meaning of human life.
Clearly, we humans are confused and conflicted about the place of pleasure in a good life.
My own view (though not my lifestyle, I'm certainly not one to burn the candle at both ends no matter how "lovely a light" it might produce) aligns pretty closely with that of the late Christopher Hitchens:
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.”--Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
We've often alluded in class to the "hedonic treadmill," and the idea that we must inevitably find ourselves inured and bored with every anticipated life-enhancing pleasure. But must we step off the treadmill and abandon life's simpler pleasures, to find real meaning?
No. Pleasure of every sort, proportionate to our capacity for varieties of experience, is appropriate for the human animal. Sensual, carnal, embodied pleasure has its place. Same for intellectual, cerebral pleasure too. And the pleasure of social solidarity. Buddhists and Stoics, in their haste to identify the sources of our suffering and impotence, can both seem puritanical and self-abnegating in their reluctance to acknowledge the range of pleasure and its rewards.
And so, I find my Epicurean loyalties largely intact as we approach the conclusion of More Than Happiness. There's much wisdom in detachment, and on occasion even in resignation. But there's more, I think, in the commitment to simple pleasures, and to living with attentive presence in the company of friends who've also made a mission of repudiating fear and enjoying what Cousin Mary called our one wild and precious life.
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