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A&O – PLEASURE

ART & ORGANISM

PLEASURE

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Make the upcoming hour overflow with joy,

and let pleasure drown the brim. 

Shakespeare | All’s Well That Ends Well | Act 2, Scene 4

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Classic views of pleasure:

WIKIPEDIA.  Pleasure refers to experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something.[1][2] It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad.[3] It is closely related to value, desire and action:[4] humans and other conscious animals find pleasure enjoyable, positive or worthy of seeking. (Wikipedia)

PLEASURE and PAIN. “There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.” (William Cowper 1785) Leigh Hunt, English poet and essayist, also understood “A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain” (1862) vol. 2, p. 122). Such a boundary problem also recalls Edmund Spenser: “And painful pleasure turns to pleasing pain.  (in The Faerie Queen 159)

PLEASURE and MADNESS.  “There is a pleasure sure,  In being mad, which none but madmen know”  (John Dryden 1681)

PLEASURE and NOVELTY. “The great source of pleasure is variety. Uniformity must tire at last, though it be uniformity of excellence. We love to expect; and, when expectation is disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.”  (Samuel Johnson, 1779-1781) In developmental biology we will see extraordinary episodes of intense curiosity.  When speaking of pleasure an knowledge, we will see evidence that the creative combining of threads of new information evokes pleasure in the human brain (Biederman & Vessel 2006, below)

PLEASURE a Sin?.  The Puritan hated bear‑baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. (Thomas Babington, 1st Baron Macaulay 1849) 

PLEASURE and KNOWLEDGE:  Aristotle (d. 322BC), near the beginning of Metaphysics, Book 1, comments on the intrinsic pleasure of knowledge. (All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves…)

“All of us have felt the pleasure of acquiring information—a view of a dramatic landscape, a conversation with a friend, or even a good magazine article, can all be profoundly gratifying. But why is this so? What makes these experiences so pleasurable? // We believe that the enjoyment of such experiences is deeply connected to an innate hunger for information: Human beings are designed to be “infovores.” It’s a craving that begins with a simple preference for certain types of stimuli, then proceeds to more sophisticated levels of perception and cognition that draw on associations the brain makes with previous experiences. When the hunger becomes even moderately starved, boredom sets in.” (see Biederman & Vessel (2006) Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain. American Scientist. 94(3), 247-253. [PDF]

Is this a neurobehavioral validation and elaboration of Aristotle’s “All men by nature desire to know.” (Metaphysics, Book 1)—Sometimes by themselves: “there is pleasure in the pathless woods” (G.G.(Lord) Byron about 1817)

 

Is pleasure more than  the meeting of needs?

 

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Sounds reasonable BUT MEETING NEEDS can be complex since (for example) meeting the “supreme” need for self-actualization might compromise the need for safety — this is the stuff of countless reams of literature (“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.” –from the end of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens)

  • In our pusuit of NEEDS, we must know ourselves and do nothing in excess.  [self-knowledge … why is this important? how deep do we need to go? “Knowledge is Power.”)  “All of us have felt the pleasure of acquiring information—a view of a dramatic landscape, a conversation with a friend, or even a magazine article, people-watching, can all be profoundly gratifying. But why is this so? What makes these experiences pleasurable? // We believe that the enjoyment of such experiences is deeply connected to an innate hunger for information, connectedness, meaning: Human neuro cognition has enabled beings that are designed to be “infovores.” It’s a craving that begins with a simple preference for certain types of stimuli, then proceeds to more sophisticated levels of perception and cognition that draw on associations the brain makes with previous experiences. When the hunger becomes even moderately starved, boredom sets in.”  (Biederman, Irving & Vessel, Edward A. 2006)  Key Word: INFOVORE…  

  • Problem solving evokes pleasure for INFOVORES

In our opinion aesthetic experience does not belong to the same class of phenomena as aesthetic preference, liking, the judgment of beauty, and so on. Unlike aesthetic experience, which is an exceptional state of mind, liking and the judgment of beauty belong to the domain of everyday experience with everyday objects (eg, human faces, bodies, clothing, buildings, etc). However, beauty can be a generator of aesthetic experience, but only if it transcends its biological, psychological, and social functions and gets new ‘aesthetic’ meanings in the symbolic (‘virtual’) reality. Namely, in aesthetic experience the object of beauty is not seen as a tool for the satisfaction of bodily needs (eg, appetitive and mating functions; cf Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999), but rather as a provocation of the higher level pleasures, such as pleasures of the mind (cf Kubovy 1999). In other words, to be a part of an aesthetic experience, beauty must transcend from its extrinsic (pragmatic) to intrinsic (aesthetic) values—that is, a beautiful object must become an object of beauty. According to this, even ugly things can elicit aesthetic experience (eg, aesthetic fascination with deformation, monstrous, grotesque, morbid, horrible, and other kinds of ugliness; cf Eco 2004, 2007).  [ [i] Marković, Slobodan (2012) Components of aesthetic experience: aesthetic fascination, aesthetic appraisal, and aesthetic emotion i-Perception. 2012; 3(1): 1–17.          Published online 2012 Jan 12. doi:  10.1068/i0450aap  PMCID: PMC3485814   complete article at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485814/    This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. ]

Infovory.  Biederman, Irving & Vessel, Edward A. (2006) Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain. American Scientist. 94(3), 247-253. [PDF] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/2006/3/perceptual-pleasure-and-the-brain/1 A neurobehavioral elaboration of Aristotle: “All men by nature desire to know.” (Metaphysics, Book 1)

MEETING an AESTHETIC NEED:  Of course we get more-or-less, sometimes extraordinary pleasure from works of art.  C. Day Lewis believes that there is a crucial shared element in works of art that move us in this way:  In poetry, for example, “the pattern … gives us pleasure because it satisfies the human yearning for order and for completeness.  Beneath the pleasure we receive from the verbal music, the sensuous associations of a simile or a metaphor, there lies the deeper pleasure of recognizing an affinity.  It has been called the perception of the similar in the dissimilar: that will do very well; but the perception would not cause pleasure unless the human mind desired to find order in the external world, and unless the world had an order to satisfy that desire, and unless poetry could penetrate to this order and could image it for us piece by piece.  The poetic image is the human mind claiming kinship with everything that lives or has lived, and making good its claim.” (C. Day Lewis (1947) The Poetic Image. London, Jonathan Cape. p. 35). 

 

Read now about the critical aesthetic maxim about pursuing

UNITY IN VARIETY,  tightly tied to ALL TRUTHS.

 

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BEWARE of what you want: 

In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,  “Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. When first he united his life with hers and donned civilian clothes, he felt the delight of freedom in general, such as he had not before known, and also the freedom of love—he was contented then, but not for long. Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires—boredom. Involuntarily he began to snatch at every passing caprice, mistaking it for a desire and a purpose.” 

SCHADENFREUDE? CULTURALLY CONSTRAINED? “Is not the pleasure of feeling and exhibiting power over other beings, a principal part of the gratification of cruelty?” asked John Foster (1846). Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power  (Bertrand Russell, 1928).   In the 13th century, Genghis Khan supposedly stated that the “greatest joy for a man” is “to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.” [ii]   This was later made famous in the film Conan the Barbarian (1982), warriors after a victory were sitting around the campfire musing:  a Khitan General said, “Hao! Dai ye! We won again! [Cheers] This is good. But what is best in life? Another Khitan warrior said, “The open steppe, a fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.”  A general responded, “Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?”  Conan replied, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!”  “That is good,” said the general.”  Is social dominance related to Schadenfreude, “the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another.” associated with aggression, rivalry, and justice, and seemingly more frequent and intense in individuals with less self-esteem.”  Any connection to sadism and atrocity? Scholarly thinking on the subject isn’t very satisfying. (for example, https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/schadenfreude-sadism/ )

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NEXUS

[i] Biederman, Irving & Vessel, Edward A. (2006) Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain. American Scientist. 94(3), 247-253. [PDF] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/2006/3/perceptual-pleasure-and-the-brain/1

[ii] As quoted in Genghis Khan & the Mongols (1973) by Michael Gibson, p. 3; this has been disputed with the statement that it was “not recorded until a century after his death and is surprisingly out of character.” Variant translation: “The real greatest pleasure of men is to repress rebels and defeat enemies, to exterminate them and grab everything they have; to see their married women crying, to ride on their steeds with smooth backs, to treat their beautiful queens and concubines as pajamas and pillows ….”



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