Pleasure, Suffering, and Meaning

And so the Masochist says to the Sadist, " Beat me! Whip me!" to which the Sadist replies, "No."

Our own Jia Gottlieb has spent some fifteen years thinking and writing about pleasure i.e. what it is, how to achieve it, what it means, and is now on the threshold of publishing a book on this very subject. An early draft of his Chapter One manuscript happened to be the focus of a Member Monday discussion over three years ago. We now take his soon-to-be-published Chapter One version of "aah . . The Pleasure Book" (Click Here) and discuss it through the lens of suffering and meaning.

We might start by citing Jia's working definition of pleasure as "any experience that feels good" and expand it to include the components of the "Pleasure Prism" i.e. the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. He suggests the hard-wired desire for pleasure is woven into the very fiber of our being and, indeed, is fundamental to our human existence. In the following fuller definition one hears the happy sigh of a man sinking into a hot bath:

"If it fills your body with delightful sensation, evokes warm feelings in your heart and positive thoughts in your mind, brings a smile to your lips, excites, amuses or satisfies, lifts your spirits or inspires a sense of well-being, meaning and purpose, then it's pleasure."  

Did someone say well-being, meaning, and purpose? Enter Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground (Click Here), "To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things." The character cited in the novel as Underground Man is far too conscious for his own good and, indeed, his intense awareness is what makes him so miserable. The meaning of life, he says, comes through suffering.

Perhaps what's at play here is simply the reflection of the Russian instinct for the tragic -- Dostoevsky seeing the world from the same dark perch as Kafka's who contrasted his own world with that of his imagined Amerika where everyone, invariably, was smiling.

But maybe Dostoevsky was putting his finger on something fundamental in man and his exercise of free will. The Underground Man embodies the freedom to choose and inevitably his choice is one of suffering over health, horror over delight, and immorality over morality. This freedom, at least, "proves he is a man and not a piano-key." The bottom line: "people want to feel alive, they want to discover who they truly are, what makes them gasp, what makes them bleed." Or, in the words of the popular song that could serve as the anthem for the contemporary teen-aged Cutter, "Yeah you bleed just to know you're alive."

And so we are left as we ponder the interplay among pleasure, suffering, and meaning to ask whether (as Jia suggests) pleasure is our "source and birthright." The rational man would answer "yes", that fulfillment of some pleasure quotient should itself eliminate suffering. But the Underground Man would say "no" -- man, not being rational, would soon undermine any such "Crystal Palace" and would only create, from thin air, more problems, more worries, more uncertainties. Man, you see, needs suffering to be fulfilled.

Before writing off the perspective of Underground Man as simply the rantings of a terminal grouch it might be good to recall from last year the suffering reflected in the words of a one-time veteran, "I do not know if I want to live any more . . . I served in Afghanistan (where) every single decision I made had a purpose . . . and am now working as a salesman . . . . . . there is not a day that goes by that I don't wish I was back in that hellhole . . . there what I did mattered . . . here it is all meaningless." (Beyond Self MM 8/19/19).

And so, we are left to ask, what is the meaning of pleasure in the context of Underground Man's world where being dissatisfied is what makes one satisfied. Is (as Jia suggests) the pursuit of pleasure a given -- for everyone, at every level? As to the physical component, a Mae West ("Too much of a good thing is . . . wonderful") might answer differently than the ascetic or, at a higher level, it may come down to simply one's ability to feel emotion itself.

Then again perhaps pleasure, for its own sake, is highly overrated, a mere transitory self-indulgence. Lasting pleasure, and meaning, can only come only by way of suffering.      
 
Beat me. Whip me.