What Is Pleasure, Anyway?
Despite the fact that pleasure is an experience everyone has surely had, it remains oddly difficult to define. Or maybe it’s precisely because pleasure is seemingly so familiar that we wrestle with defining it. Such is the way of the everyday: in its familiarity, it eludes reflection. So tell me: What is pleasure?
The Fact of Pleasure (is the Politics—and Power—of Pleasure)
Pleasure is simply, or not so simply, a possible state of a body. It’s irrefutable precisely because there’s nothing to refute. Pleasure is a matter of fact even if, by scientific standards, pleasure can’t be proven, making it at once absolute and uncertain. Which means you can’t deny my pleasure and you can’t know my pleasure. Yes, of course you can judge my actions, even my desires, block the source of my pleasure but you can’t question the fact of my pleasure. Not because there is no such thing as morality or truth—this is not a relativity argument—but because judging pleasure is like judging pain or, for that matter, the sun rise. It’s something that happens.
And often despite us. Pleasure happens beyond the scope of both rational and moral judgment. The source of my pleasure may be reprehensible, may be illegal, but the fact of my pleasure is unassailable—even to me. It is not something I choose to do. Pleasure happens whether I, or you, like it or not. Which places pleasure in an odd position where the experience of the individual and the requirements of society are necessarily disjointed.
Think about that peculiar phrase, “guilty pleasure.” I’m not supposed to like football moans some guy, watching the game, whose friends mock sports. It speaks to the gap between so-called rational society and the irrational experience of pleasure as a neutral matter of fact. He enjoys his pleasure but, upon return to the social, that experience renders him guilty (which makes me think about Kierkegaard’s vision of Abraham: Abraham marches up the mountain, pulls the knife to murder his son, which he ends up not doing thanks to god’s intervention—then ol’ Abe returns to social life to be a father, husband, and citizen. It’s a tense, peculiar situation). The commonality of this phrase, guilty pleasures, means that at some level we all know that pleasure happens despite us, that pleasure is a matter of fact, not choice or even desire.
Of course, the need for a phrase such as “guilty pleasure” expresses some social and existential need to control the inherent wildness of pleasure. After all, pleasure happens outside, and despite, any laws, morals, mores, or rational considerations. Rather than this matter of fact liberating us all to enjoy what we enjoy—uptight friends and neighbors be damned!— the collective (which includes ourselves) demands a confession. I have to tell you guys something….I watched the Super Bowl! —the weight lightened with a nervous giggle that barely conceals the violence of the social.
A Pithy Aside: Pleasure is Revolutionary
Every society distributes pleasure in its own way—the guilty pleasures of one world are just plain old pleasures in another, and a source of displeasure in others (Herbert Marcuse via Freud). This distribution defines the borders of personal freedom and social control. Any discussion of pleasure is therefore inherently political—and inherently fraught.
Pleasure—the unabashed claiming of one’s pleasure—is revolutionary. And, no, I don’t mean the pleasure of consumerism, which is quite pleasurable. Or the pleasure of sexual liberation, whatever that is. No, I’m talking about a different distribution of pleasure, one in which pleasure is always at hand—in a breath, caress, thought: that is, inherent pleasure, not consumptive pleasure.
But before I get into all that—which I will do at another time—, before I dive into into how pleasure operates in our contemporary culture, I want to ask a question that’s simple yet rigorously elusive: what the heck is pleasure, anyway?
Pleasure Is Radically Internal
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that pain is inherently and forever silent, an internal experience that defies language. A body in pain may moan, groan, shriek, weep. But those utterances point to another person’s possibility of pain; their actual pain remains perpetually, agonizingly quiet. There is no way to know another’s pain; you can only have faith (Kierkegaard returns!). Pain remains stubbornly internal. You can be sitting next to someone in agony and you’d never know.
Pleasure, like pain, is what the French philosopher, Georges Bataille, calls inner experience. It can’t be studied the way we study an object; there’s nothing to put under the microscope. You could be sitting next to someone experiencing intense pleasure and you’d never know. You might hear moans or laughter but those point to the possibility of pleasure, not actual pleasure.
Sure, there are brainwaves associated with pain and pleasure that we can see. But those strange images on a screen are a far cry from holding pleasure, or pain, in your hands. While neurologists may identify what they call a pleasure center (I want to go to there!), the experience of pleasure remains invisible to those prying machines.
Scientists may take pictures of our brain waves. They may identify hormones supposedly responsible for pleasure—dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin. But if you say pleasure is just the release of the hormone, dopamine—something I’ve heard in my travels—have you defined pleasure? All you’ve pointed out is a correlate between that hormone and someone saying they are experiencing pleasure. There may or may not be medical applications of this correlation but all that correlation does is beg the question—a philosopher’s or poet’s question, it seems, rather than a doctor’s: what is pleasure?
What Does Pleasure Signify?
Pain, while refusing language, remains a sign. Pain signifies that something within the body’s systems has gone awry — is broken, sprained, infected, malfunctioning in one way or another. The radical interiority is not linguistic but the fact of pain has meaning. It tells us things, even if it sometimes lies (pain in one place may in fact be caused by something else entirely, what doctors call referred pain; brains and nerves are not to be taken at their word, as it were).
- If pain signifies a system in distress, does pleasure signify systemic success? That is, is pleasure the body’s way of saying that everything is working as it should? I don’t think so. In fact, I want to say that the sign everything is working as it should is a lack of awareness. The efficacy of the body’s systems lets it fade into the background. And we can say this about pleasure: it pops from the drone of life. We know it when we feel it.
- The Greek philosopher, Epicurus, is famous for saying that pleasure is the absence of pain. That definition, isolated from his other, however scant, writings is silly—a negative definition does not a definition make. Epicurus’ understanding of pleasure, however, is more complex than that. Pleasure is an intrinsic good, he tells us; it is what motivates us. If we stop worrying about things, he argues, we’ll experience pleasure (a version of Stoicism).
- But note that, for Epicurus, pleasure is not shoveling chocolate cake into your face while fondling thy neighbor. That only leads to suffering later. For Epicurus, pleasure happens in time. So shoveling cake may proffer some immediate pleasures but not so much later that night. No, to experience pleasure, he argues, we must remove our angst and pain—and it’s that absence of fretting, and stomach aches, that affords pleasure. And yet Epicurus, a smart guy, never defines pleasure per se.
- While we tend to associate pleasure with sex, we know that pleasure is not eroticism. Like pleasure, eroticism is an inner experience, never to be revealed directly to another. But while eroticism involves what Bataille calls exuberance, pleasure is more contented. The seething of desire, that agitation, that erotic drive: as we all probably know from personal experience, that is certainly not pleasure. Pleasure may or may not be the goal of the erotic but it is not pleasure.
- Is pleasure contentment, then? Dictionaries often define pleasure as gratification, a desire fulfilled. But we know from our experience that contentment is not pleasure—the content body is too calm. It may or may not accompany pleasure but, unlike contentment, pleasure is a kind of excess. It vibrates with greater intensity than mere contentment.
- Bataille famously focuses on systemic excesses. To him, sunshine is the sun ejaculating over the earth and its oceans, asking for nothing in return. Pure excess. I want to say that pleasure, too, is a kind of excess, a more — more than systemic success, more than absence of pain, more than the hum of the everyday, more than contentment. And yet pleasure is not the exuberant excess of the erotic. It is the excess of non-signification, the excess of language, of the semantic, of the social—not the excess of Bataille’s orgasmic sun.
Pleasure, alas, doesn’t signify anything. Pleasure is pleasure. It’s an haecceity, a thisness. It’s this experience. And you know it when you know it and no one else ever can and so it is as it goes, a self-defining radically inner experience that is a matter of equally irrefutable and unknowable fact.
What of Judgement? Epicurus and the Practice of Pleasure
Pleasure is as pure a good as we get. Does this mean that all experiences of pleasure should be affirmed? Is the pleasure of an alcoholic chugging formaldehyde a cause for celebration, a brave expression of his freedom? Of course not. But not because I’m passing moral or social judgement — which may or may not be apropos. I judge that alcoholic for not really understanding pleasure. Sure, he’s getting some relief and maybe some pleasure of sorts but he is not doing pleasure well at all.
Pleasure takes practice—not the brute fact of experiencing it but the art of maximizing and extending pleasure. No one who lives for pleasure is chugging formaldehyde on a regular basis. Pleasure is often slow and, as Epicurus argues, is usually measured, literally and figuratively (every good decadent owns a scale that goes to .001 grams). There are other states, such as the ecstatic, that may overlap with pleasure, a variety of excessive states that may afford pleasure. But, as we all know, getting loaded non-stop doesn’t lead to more pleasure or even greater pleasure. On the contrary, there are conspicuously diminishing returns.
The body in search of pleasure is practiced, keen, alert. It knows itself while remaining open to what may come. The practice of pleasure demands a certain wisdom and know-how. With practice, pleasure becomes ever more at hand, available in the smallest of gestures—in the passing of clouds or whisper of a warm wind. The seeking of pleasure is the highest of goods. Or so says Epicurus (and me).
