Kind Of Pleasure Research Articles

Joys

This paper is an initial effort preparatory for a more thorough “theology of joys.” I distinguish joys from other kinds of pleasure and argue that joy can be seen as the form of all the so-called positive emotions (the ones that feel good). So joy is properly treated in the plural: joys come in a variety of kinds. I distinguish canonical (joys with single-term names) from non-canonical joys. The worthiness of joys is primarily a function of their objects—what the joys are about. I look at a few examples of joys that appear in the New Testament and sketch the relation of joys to happiness.

Aristote : le plaisir des differences

Given the necessary connection between pleasure and energeia, the value of an aristotelian pleasure depends on the value of its correlative activity. Since the absolute pleasures the philokalos takes in his virtuous activities might go hand in hand with pains, the definition of absolute pleasure cannot rely on the distinction between mixed pleasure (pleasure with pain) versus pure pleasure (pleasure without pain). So, how can we characterize the pleasures of the temperate man (sophron) ? My thesis is that the right way to define the pleasures of the temperate man is to describe them as pleasures derived from differences. A pleasure derived from differences is involved in the pleasure human beings get from the formal use of their senses. It then belongs to the kind of pleasure they take in knowing. This formal use of the senses helps understanding how the pleasures of the temperate man can be separated from the pleasures enjoyed by children and animals.

Intimate Relations: Psychoanalysis Deconstruction / La psychanalyse la déconstruction

This essay will concentrate, somewhat voyeuristically, on a particular and very special textual encounter. For if there is one text in the psychoanalytic tradition that will have caused Derrida to spill more ink than any other – it's Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). For ten years, from 1970–1980, Derrida returns not once but three times, on three separate occasions, in three different contexts, to Freud's text on repetition compulsion and the death drive, each time devoting more time and energy – that is to say, more pages – to it. As we will see in this essay, what emerges from this textual encounter is not only a new kind of pleasure; it is also a chance event of repetition that brings with it something strikingly new.

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Epicurean Hedonism as Qualitative Hedonism

Epicurus’ theory of what is good for a person is hedonistic: only pleasure has intrinsic value. Critics object that Epicurus is committed to advocating sensualist excess, since hedonism seems both to imply that more pleasure is always of some good for you, and to recommend even debauched, sensual kinds of pleasure. However, Epicurus can respond to this objection much like J. S. Mill responds to the objection that hedonism is a “doctrine worthy only of swine”. I argue that Epicurus’ hedonism is a version of qualitative hedonism on which static pleasure is intrinsically superior to other kinds of pleasure. I also argue that Epicurus conceives of pleasure as a phenomenal or felt quality of experience, and that this is compatible with his troublesome claim that there is an upper limit to pleasure and wellbeing.

St. Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Temperance and Aristotle

St. Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Temperance and Aristotle Leo Elders S.V.D. For some decades now, one can witness a renewed interest in the non-Aristotelian sources of the thought of St. Thomas, and in particular in his debt to the Fathers of the Church and neo-Platonist sources.1 Fully acknowledging the importance of these studies and St. Thomas's real indebtedness to these sources, the editors of a recent volume underscore—and rightfully so—that, "for this reason, Aquinas's theological use of Aristotle requires renewed attention, lest the study of Aquinas's theology become one-sided."2 It is in this same spirit that I will survey and analyze, after a brief introduction into temperance in the Greco-Roman world, the use of Aristotle in St. Thomas's treatise on temperance in the secunda secundae of his Summa theologiae [ST]. What a close reading of these questions and the use of Aristotle's arguments therein, and in particular from his Nicomachean Ethics [EN], will show, I hope, is the extent to which Aristotle is Aquinas's principal philosophical interlocutor. [End Page 465] Temperance in Ancient Greece and Rome In ancient Greece, the words sōphrōn (σώφρων) and sōphrosynē (σωφροσύνη) signified reservation and restraint in one's conduct and knowing one's place. To behave oneself in a temperate way is the opposite of being passionate.3 In particular, the young should be trained to adopt this attitude of self-restraint. In the Charmides of Plato, sōphrosynē is the beginning of spiritual health, and in the Republic, Plato formulates his doctrine of the four cardinal virtues as corresponding respectively to the mind and the three appetitive parts of the soul4. Aristotle treats temperance extensively in EN 3.10 as a virtue that has its seat in the irrational part of the soul and makes us attain the mean with regard to bodily pleasures. However, he excludes from this need of restraining our desires the delight we find in objects of vision and of hearing, and part also of the delight in odor. Natural appetites may go wrong in the direction of excess, which is a sort of self-indulgence. Here, the virtue of temperance should intervene. A temperate person moderates his desires. Temperance is a disposition of the appetitive part of the soul that makes it obey reason. If one possesses this virtue, his desires will be moderate and there will be no need to repress them. Reaching "the mean" is to desire in the right degree, the right time, the right manner, and so on.5 Aristotle endorses the view that some pleasures are good while others are bad.6 He confirms, therefore, the commonsense view of moderation and a generally accepted distinction between the different kinds of pleasure. The position of Epicurus on pleasure must be understood as a recommendation to seek moderate pleasures of taste, sex, vision, and hearing. He wrote about himself the following words: "I know not how to conceive the good, apart from these pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful form."7 But, as J. M. Rist observes, Epicurus writes elsewhere that he [End Page 466] is not talking so much about the sensual pleasures as about freedom from bodily pain and mental affliction: sober reasoning brings us the happy life.8 Epicureanism became a missionary doctrine that spread through the Roman Empire in spite of the strong opposition it met from the Academy, the Peripatetics, and Stoicism, in particular from Chrysippus.9 The beginning of its decline was brought about by its denial of afterlife.10 As to the ethical doctrine of the Stoa, the four main moral virtues were strongly confirmed by Chrysippus: he considered them expressions of one and the same reason11 that unfolds itself into four directions, the four cardinal virtues. With regard to choosing desirable things, this central reason and activity of the hêgemonikon12 becomes sōphrosynē, self-control, which brings all our movements and impulses into conformity with reason. It is the expression of the harmony of the soul. For the Stoics, the connection between the virtues is so strong...

Is There Really A Puzzle Over Negative Emotions And Aesthetic Pleasure?

Two seemingly contradictory aspects have marked art’s appreciation – and aesthetic appreciation in general. While an experience of pleasure seems to ground judgments of aesthetic value, some artworks seem to gain our praise by the very negative – unpleasant – experience they provoke. Known as the paradox of negative emotions, aestheticians have, at least since Aristotle, tried to deal with these cases and offer different explanations of the phenomenon. In this article, María José Alcaraz León does not directly offer an alternative explanation; rather she focuses on the apparent tension between an understanding of aesthetic experience in terms of a certain kind of pleasure and the negative aspect that is necessarily involved in our appreciation of painful art. The purpose of her article is to show that cases of artistic appreciation that involve negative emotions do not need to give up on the idea that aesthetic value is ultimately grounded upon an experience of pleasure.

Remembering socialist entertainment: Romanian television, gestures and intimacy

This essay tackles the question of why people enjoy the re-broadcasting of state socialist programmes, asking whether their desires are driven by nostalgia, manipulated by neocapitalist schemes that commodify the past as an audience-raising strategy or simply linked to a compulsive desire to revisit a ‘traumatic’ past. To do so, I first draw on existing literature on mediated nostalgia to examine some of the possible explanations for the continued popularity of socialist-era television in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Focusing on the Romanian context, I discuss audience memories of socialist TV and then zoom in on some of the most prevalent memories of socialist entertainment in this country: the New Year’s Eve comedy sketches and Pistruiatul, one of very few television series made in Romania during socialism. I argue that in order to understand the popularity of socialist-era reruns, we need to look both into how audiences remember these programmes and into how these programmes construct long-term affinities with the audience. To do so, I discuss two kinds of pleasures: first, the pleasure of recalling one’s ability to resist ideological messages and, second, the pleasure of re-watching familiar content and, through that, reliving the sense of intimate connection with television characters.

The Pleasure of Art

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a new account of the pleasure we take in art. It distinguishes first between two types of pleasure. Relief or r-pleasure is transient and marks the end of a state that is difficult to maintain. Facilitation or f-pleasure accompanies an activity and lasts as long as the activity does. It motivates this activity and optimizes it by activating a suite of preparations and modes of acting specific to the activity. Aesthetic pleasure is a distinct form of f-pleasure. It arises from mental engagement with an object, and motivates and optimizes such engagement by activating a nexus specific to it. Aesthetic pleasure acts in two ways. In the short run, when we are in contact with a particular artefact, it keeps aesthetic engagement running smoothly. Over longer periods, it plays a critical role in shaping how we engage with objects to get this kind of pleasure from them. This account is yoked to a broadly functional understanding of art: it is not the nature of the object that makes it art, but the nature of the response that it is designed to elicit. The view does not, however, rest on individual psychology alone, as some other functional accounts do. Crucially, it is argued that shared cultural context is a key determinant of the pleasure we derive from aesthetic artefacts. The pleasure of art is always communal and communicative.

Zabawy młodego pokolenia kobiet

Uczestnicy wszechobecnej kultury popularnej doświadczają, według jej badaczy, dwojakiego rodzaju przyjemności: bezpośredniej, zmysłowej, ekstatycznej oraz przyjemności zdystansowanej, która ma charakter dyskursywny – dostępna dla jednostek o wysublimowanych gustach. Popularna kultura staje się obecnie sposobem na spełnienie potrzeb i pragnień jednostek. Jej wyjątkową cechą jest masowość. Elementem wspomagającym zabawowy styl życia, podejmowany przez kobiety, są różnego rodzaju używki. Współczesna kobieta jest postrzegana jako jednostka samodzielna, integralna, niemalże od początku XX wieku rozpatrywana w całkowitym oderwaniu od mężczyzny. Dąży do otrzymania praw, które dotąd były wyłącznie do jego dyspozycji. Kobiecość zyskała nowe cechy, stanowiące inną niż w poprzednich wiekach jakość. Sama siebie odkrywa jako silną, zdeterminowaną, wolną od słabości. Jej atutem jest jej siła. Staje się świadoma swych pragnień, dążeń, także wyrażając to w doborze zabawy, której się oddaje. Modele kobiecości, propagowane przez media, są schematyczne i uproszczone, nie dopuszczają indywidualnych pragnień, dążeń i przekonań.

Looking beyond the Frame

Reconsidering the US military presence in East Asia in the post-World War II period as a “violent embrace,” this article argues that soldiers' expectations of East Asia as an erotic paradise combined with US military policies to legitimate and normalize sexual access to Asian women, creating an unequal climate of gendered power relations that comprised dating, sex work, and frequent rape. This article considers how the violent embrace shaped historical narratives of US power in East Asia, obscuring both imperial power and systemic sexual violence in military archives and later historians' accounts. Through a close reading of soldiers' snapshot photographs from the Korean War, this essay illustrates how the violent embrace came to frame wartime as a kind of pleasure, fun, or benevolence, only hinting at the scale of coercion and violence that lay outside the photograph's borders.

Browsing the past: Leigh Hunt and the memorial function of shopping

Previous scholarly commentaries on shopping in the long eighteenth century have tended to focus on the immediate sensual, communal and imaginative pleasures of this activity – namely, the aesthetic spectacle of things, the shaping of public sites and communities of sociability, and the facilitation, via consumer goods, of hedonistic fantasy. The entertainment value of shopping was thought to lie in these three sometimes entangled diversions. Yet this article argues that a wholly different kind of pleasure emerges in Leigh Hunt's 1820 essays ‘Of the Sight of Shops’ and ‘A Nearer View of Some Shops’. Hunt's flâneuresque descriptions of shopping in London focus on the memories, both personal and more broadly cultural, evoked by the consumer spaces entered and products seen. Hunt in fact anticipates the conflation of the museum and the shop that theorists of popular culture associate with the twentieth-century emergence of the department store. For Hunt, the pleasures of shopping – whether in a crowded toy store or in the cavernous gallery of Benjamin West – are of a nostalgic sort that recapture the very experiences, like solitude and reflection, thought to be eroded by the advent of consumer capitalism.

Looking at a Candid Photograph of Myself

Looking at a Candid Photograph of Myself Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Marion Rust’s interpretation of my work in “Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women’s Studies” surprised and delighted me. It surprised me that anyone would give such serious attention to personal essays tucked away in obscure journals. It delighted me because it told me things about myself and my work that I did not know. Reading it gave me the kind of pleasure I get from seeing candid photographs of myself taken on the sly by my son, not because those photographs are always flattering but because they are both kind and true. Rust’s careful reading of my scholarship in the light of my personal essays has inspired me to think anew about my own convictions and my ways of expressing them. Remarkably, Rust managed to write a detailed review of my work without ever mentioning my most popular production: a five-word slogan that we all know too well. In a way, however, she did ponder the question of whether well-behaved women make history. Her essay suggests, if I read it correctly, that they can and do. In her opening pages she argues that my historical work has thrived precisely because it is disciplined, rigorous, and obedient to rules—men’s rules. In Rust’s words, “Ulrich repeatedly declares her allegiance to the very model that kept both her and her subject matter out of the picture: precisely, it would seem, to bring them into the light” (149). Rust asks whether A Midwife’s Tale “succeeded so well at avoiding contamination by unruly personality that it brings up short those who feel less capable of such rigor” (149). In contrast, my seemingly casual personal essays are filled with my own personality and fueled by advocacy. The voice may be humorous; the agenda is not. In essay after essay, she explains, I take on the double bind of identity politics that subjects Mormon feminists to disdain both from those in their own community who fear their convictions and from feminists dismayed that they would defend their faith. In these passages Rust portrays my historical work as in some sense conformist and perhaps even self-serving. In my essays, however, I come out from the screen and act up. Rust concludes that in the essays, “freedom from academic oversight” allowed me to produce work that is “both highly self-referential and imbued with a deep sense of purpose” (151). Having set up this vivid contrast between my scholarly work and my first-person [End Page 170] essays, Rust then makes a quick U-turn, demonstrating that the same sensibility is at work in both. In her estimation, my approach in both genres has been “productively oxymoronic” (147). I admire the deftness of this analysis. Still, as a birthright member of the Thatcher debating society, I cannot leave it at that. Rust’s essay depends on a stylized contrast that I first posited in an essay published in the Journal of American History in a forum on “Self and Subject.” I raise that point simply to acknowledge that historians, too, are interested in the self and to counter the far too common assumption that historians are engaged in a mindless quest for objectivity. Historical monographs and personal essays are both literary constructions with rules and conventions. One is neither more nor less constraining or more or less authentic than the other. I’m sure Rust knows that, but there were points in the essay where she seemed to assume that historical writing is a kind of straitjacket. That has not been my experience. In fact, I ended my essay by writing, “At a critical point in my own life, history empowered me. It sent me to school, taught me a new way of being a writer, and gave me a critical perspective on my own dilemmas” (“Pail of Cream” 47). The latter point seems to me the most important. I remember a motto posted over the entrance to the tiny library in my high school: “A person wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.” I too recoil at...

The harm principle and the greatest happiness principle: the missing link

In this article I present a possible solution for the classic problem of the apparent incompatibility between Mill's Greatest Happiness Principle and his Principle of Liberty arguing that in the other-regarding sphere the judgments of experience and knowledge accumulated through history have moral and legal force, whilst in the self-regarding sphere the judgments of the experienced people only have prudential value and the reason for this is the idea according to which each of us is a better judge than anyone else to decide what causes us pain and which kind of pleasure we prefer (the so-called epistemological argument). Considering that the Greatest Happiness Principle is nothing but the aggregate of each person's happiness, given the epistemological claim we conclude that, by leaving people free even to cause harm to themselves, we still would be maximizing happiness, so both principles (the Greatest Happiness Principle and the Principle of Liberty) could be compatible.

Something from Nothing:

The relentless negations in these lines—denials of action, thought, being, and feeling—emphasize the narrator’s lack of productive intellectual or social influence and his emotional void. Yet “nothing” takes on an allegorical force as it “cometh or gooth” and as the narrator describes his “felyng in nothyng.” This allegory illogically suggests that the Dreamer finds something—a feeling—in nothing, a paradoxical notion that anticipates a deep

An Inconsistency in the Philebus?

Plato's Philebus contains an intricate difficulty. Plato seems to hold both (a) that all pleasures are processes of becoming, a crucial premise in the argument that no pleasure is good (53c–55c) and (b) that some pleasures contribute in their own right to the goodness of the best life (64c–67b). Since it seems also plausible that only things which are good can contribute to the goodness of the best life in their own right, Plato's view seems to be inconsistent. Interpreters usually reject either (a) or (b). As Plato seems firmly committed to both (a) and (b), I propose a third way of dealing with the inconsistency. The apparent inconsistency highlights a vital contrast between what is independently good (good per se), what is dependently good (good through participating in what is independently good), and what is derivatively good (good through standing in a certain relation to dependent goods). I argue that while pleasure's being a process of becoming marks it out as derivatively good, some kinds of pleasure are also dependent goods in virtue of their objects – irrespective of their being processes of becoming.

Exorcism, or the Road Not Taken

<i>Exorcism</i>, or the Road Not Taken

Representing Entertainment(s) in Infinite Jest

Representing Entertainment(s) in Infinite Jest Philip Sayers (bio) The title of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest refers, amongst other things, to several films of the same title directed by one of the novel’s characters, James O. Incandenza (also known as Himself and the Mad Stork), the last of which provides what Wallace refers to (using, not untypically, a term taken from the realm of cinema) as the novel’s “MacGuffin” (Lipsky 157). Incandenza’s final Infinite Jest, referred to throughout the novel and henceforth in this paper simply as “the Entertainment” (Infinite Jest 90) is, however, “not just a MacGuffin” (Lipsky 157). It is a film apparently so compelling, so entertaining, that anyone who catches as much as a glimpse of it becomes utterly entranced, unable to engage in any activity other than watching the film, over and over, until death. As such, it is also “kind of a metaphorical device” (Lipsky 157), through which Wallace explores the role of film and television in contemporary US culture. Wallace uses the term “entertainment” throughout the novel, and elsewhere in his writing (e.g., Supposedly Fun Thing 148), as a synonym for movies and television shows. This paper, then, explores first Wallace’s representation of entertainment in general, and second his representations of specific “entertainments.” In his short 1975 essay “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater,” Roland Barthes writes about the cinema in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the Entertainment in Infinite Jest. He compares the movie-going experience to hypnosis, and he describes the spectator as glued by the nose to the screen, “riveted to the representation” (3). Essay and novel are both concerned with the question of how to “loosen the glue’s grip” (3), and both present film as conducive [End Page 346] of sleep: Barthes writes of “spectators slip[ping] into their seat as they slip into a bed, coat and feet on the seat in front of them” (2). This description is echoed in the way Wallace describes the viewing habits of the Canadian/ Saudi medical attaché who becomes the Entertainment’s first victim. For him, watching a selection of entertainment cartridges is a method of relaxation after a long and stressful day of dealing with the maxillofacial yeast of the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment: “at the day’s end, he needs unwinding in the very worst way” (Infinite Jest 34). “Worst,” here, presumably means most effective, but the choice of word implies that the attaché’s methods of relaxation are bad for him. Indeed they are. After Wallace explicitly compares entertainment with drugs and alcohol (“the medical attaché partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits” [34]), the soon-to-be-victim settles down to watch the lethal Entertainment. His usual routine is to eat dinner “before the viewer in his special electronic recliner,” which, when his entertainments have had their soporific effect, tilts backwards so that he “is permitted to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night’s sleep, still right there in the recumbent recliner” (34). The torpor-inducing effect of the Entertainment is far more potent than that of the attaché’s usual selection of cartridges, but, for Barthes and for Wallace, even normal entertainment (as opposed to the Entertainment) brings about sleep. Entertainment, for Wallace, lies on one side of a “continuum,” at the other side of which is art (Lipsky 80): whereas entertainment’s “chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise” (Lipsky 79) and it “gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly passive” (80), art “requires you to work” (174). Wallace portrays entertainment in terms that recall Barthes’s descriptions of his visits to the cinema, and Wallace’s own essay on David Lynch: “a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it” (Supposedly Fun Thing 170). He also frequently compares it to candy—“Real pleasurable, but it dudn’t [sic] have any calories in it” (Lipsky 79)—in...

IL PIACERE COGNITIVO E LA FUNZIONE DELLA TRAGEDIA IN ARISTOTELE

The essay provides a critical assessment of the objections raised, especially by P. Destrée, against the cognitivistic interpretation of the pleasure of tragedy. It is pointed out that in the Poetics, chapter 4, it is unsound to distinguish between the pleasure of artistic imitation and the child’s pleasure for learning through imitation or the pleasure of the philosopher engaged in theoria. Moreover, the reference to children and philosophers proves that it is uncorrect to distinguish in the verb manthanein between the meaning “to understand” and “to learn” and to say that the latter does not fit the example of painting. Consequently, this example cannot mean that contemplating the picture has as its only out-come a trivial recognition of the identity of the real object and the painted subject-matter. Actually, the tragedy’s audience sees in the plot a case which is exemplary (because it is universal) for particular actions and states of affair already known; and of these situations the audience understands and learns the causes with pleasure. Also the position of chapter 4 in the opening section of the book (chapters 1-5), which is entirely devoted to a general treatment of mimesis, confirms that all is said there of the pleasure must be a general premise for the treatment of all particular kind of pleasure recorded in the book: consequently, for the treatment of tragic pleasure in chapter 14 as well.

Moltiplicare la vita: Un’esperienza di lettura

Every narrative creates a new world. The pleasure of narrative is largely constituted by its capability of multiplying life. This is the main thesis of this short essay, based on field work with school teachers and young students. This kind of pleasure goes with some kind of knowledge: a knowledge referring to human experience and its range of possibilities. It is a kind of knowledge particularly useful for those committed both to social work and social sciences.