Sure- there's not much I would disagree with there. I am in fact in favour
of continence in most things. But to extrapolate from that that pleasure is
a signal of wickedness (or the absence of intellectual substance) and should
therefore be dismissed as unimportant or at best secondary is equally
mistaken. To leach pleasure out of human activity would perhaps make life
meaningless, and certainly a more dire prospect than it already is.
Also - how to preserve a distance between enjoyment and thought if one
enjoys thinking?
Best
A
On 16/3/05 8:53 PM, "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> A critical insistance on pleasure is fine. Emphasis on critical. The
> point is to preserve some interval between enjoyment and thought
> ("emotion recollected in tranquility"), otherwise enjoyment becomes
> self-legitimating. Ethical reflection can't get very far if you start
> with the assumption that if you're doing something you enjoy then your
> lifestyle is necessarily beyond reproach.
>
> The old jibe at the puritans vis-a-vis bear-baiting was that they
> disapproved of the pleasure it gave the spectators, rather than the
> suffering it caused the bear. But that seems to me to be a quite
> correct attitude. Not because pleasure is in itself wicked, but
> because pleasure correlated with the infliction of suffering is.
> Pleasure is almost always pleasure *in* something - some activity,
> some circumstance. How does it go again? "Loves I allow, and passions
> I approve, only I would wish that men would alter their objects and
> better their intent"?
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
