Category: Pleasure and Pain
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Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part Two)
Part One is here. Some pains, though bad in themselves, are instrumentally good. You go for broke on your mountain bike. At the top of a long upgrade your calves are burning from the lactic acid build-up. But it's a 'good' pain. It is instrumentally good despite its intrinsic badness. You are satisfied with having…
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Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part One)
A reader recalled my posts on evil as privatio boni from the old blog and wants me to upload them to the new, which I will gladly do. So far I managed to scare up two. Here is the first. ……………………… The goddess of blogging sent me Peter Lupu whose comments are a welcome stimulant.…
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The Perils of Pleasure
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis: The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my…
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Nietzsche on Bentham, Mill, & Co.
"If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." (Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," #12.) The art of the aphorism at its best. In all fairness to the English I should point out that it was…
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On the Suffering of Animals
Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of…
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Suffering Pleasure
We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be acted upon, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self. Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c: . . . excessive pains…