> Also - how to preserve a distance between enjoyment and thought if one
> enjoys thinking?
I suppose you could qualify it as "*sensual* enjoyment", but that
opens up another can of worms again ("dissociation of sensibility",
etc.). I have been reduced to giggles by the pleasure of solving some
programming problems, for instance.
Perhaps better to say that the enjoyment one gets in thinking about
something is not the same enjoyment as the enjoyment one got in
whatever it is one is thinking about. So the distance must be between
*this* thought and *that* enjoyment, not thought and enjoyment in
general.
It is of course possible to be seduced into thinking that thinking is
good in itself, simply because one finds it enjoyable in itself.
Dominic
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:59:14 +1100, Alison Croggon
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>
--
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
