Hedonism and History

O M University of Oxford Hedonism and History Pleasure of course has no history J G L’histoire de l’hédonisme n’interesse pas les philosophes universitaires. Elle n’est pas enseignée, et les textes de ses représentants ne sont pas publiés. Cette negation de l’hédonisme est agrante. On a même laissé penser que l’hédonisme et la philosophie étaient contradictoires. L’appel à la jouissance dans l’exercice de la philosophie a été complètement rejeté. Comme résultat la philosophie a été dominée par des textes arides, sinistres et abscons. M O It is very easy to confuse pleasure with frivolity, especially in a historical context; colleagues and funding bodies are not really prepared, either in Britain or perhaps in Poland, to believe that studies in the history of pleasure might have a serious point. So I think it is necessary to attempt some explanation of what I hope this volume will reach towards, and to explain why I think we are engaged on a task which, however pleasant and interesting it may be, still has a deeply serious point. is not least because there have been and will be many academic colloquia on topics such as wine, food and sex which do not take themselves particularly seriously, and which are at least in part a meta-excuse to indulge in the pleasures under discussion. I confess to having myself spent many happy hours with ‘Les amis de Dionysos’ together with the negociants and the vignerons of the Midi in 99 Ś – Z – U their châteaux, or at Pézenas, Nîmes or Montpellier, talking about the cultural history of wine in the intervals between some splendid dégustations and formal banquets laid on by the wine producers of the Languedoc. ere have been no such frivolities here, and some thought about our aims is a proper prophylactic against such deviation from the seriousness of our task in the future. So I want to explain rst why I think the study of the history of pleasure is or ought to be an essential part of the task of the cultural historian, and how a theoretical framework is essential to that study. My own interest in this subject began of course in my studies of the Greek symposion, which must occupy a central position in any study of pleasure in the ancient world.1 An area of Greek culture for which there was more evidence than almost any other aspect of ancient social history had been systematically neg lected by earlier historians, simply because it was thought not to be serious. Yet closer study seemed to reveal that in the archaic age at least the rituals and practices of this particular style of drinking had dominated Greek cultural life, creating and sustaining the art form of painted pottery and the majority of the literary genres of lyric poetry, both of which oered an enormous range of representations related to that lifestyle. Beyond this it seemed to me that sympotic rituals had strongly inuenced whole areas of Greek social life – Greek warfare, aristocratic politics and factions, Greek religion and Greek sexuality (both homosexual and heterosexual attitudes), to say nothing of the processes of production and distribution, the development of long-distance trade and relations with non- -Greek peoples – indeed the whole process of acculturation, as it is seen in Italy, Gaul, Spain, South Russia and the Black Sea, and in Palestine. I became convinced that the ritualisation of the consumption of alcohol was an important causative factor in the development and spread of early Greek civilisation, and that (more signicantly for cultural history) many of the interrelations between dierent aspects of Greek life could only be understood in sympotic terms. e classical polis itself developed out of and in opposition to this characteristic style of archaic life. Yet conviviality and commensality continued to be dominant aspects of Greek culture, remaining important at least until the Hellenistic period. Of course this conclusion was not unique to myself; there were others in Britain, but more importantly in France and Italy (notably at the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris and in the University of Urbino) who were already working along similar lines (which has given the excuse for some very pleasurable meetings in 1 O. Murray (ed.), Sympotica: a Symposium on the Symposion , Oxford 1990. 100 H H Oxford, Paris and Rome). More obviously, there is a great deal of comparative material in anthropology and the social history of other civilisations, such as China, Polynesia and early medieval Europe; some of the most sophisticated studies have been devoted to fully developed western societies – Medieval and Re- naissance Europe, Judaism, the Dutch ascendancy, nineteenth-century industrial societies. e study of this phenomenon of commensality and its place within any particular cultural system extends beyond the capabilities of any single historian or anthropologist to master. at led me to the search for a theory, an explanatory grid, against which to plot the characteristics of any particular system. And perhaps I should say here that I don’t think social or historical theories are causative metaphysical entities or universal laws: they are simply ways of organising the evidence in more or less useful forms of order, and are therefore highly dependent on the purpose, the function of the ordering that we wish to create. eories, like maps, are designed for particular purposes: you can’t bicycle with the help of a motorist’s road atlas, and you can’t walk with a bicyclist’s map. Some maps are actually designed to mislead you in case you might be an enemy (notably those produced for sale in Greece and Russia) – but there is usually then another secret map available only to the military. eories work like maps. My rst attempt to explore the question of a wider theoretical basis for the study of pleasure was in an article published in 1995 entitled ‘Histories of Pleasure’, which tried to do two things.2 e rst was to establish that pleasure was an essential aspect of cultural history (in the nineteenth century Warburgian meaning of the term, rather than in the modern cultural studies sense), and that it was the impossibility of fully explaining pleasure in terms of other social forces, whether economic or power relations, which protected the notion of Jacob Burckhardt that culture was an independent variable within the domain of historical forces. e second aim of that paper was to explore the various theories of the place of pleasure in the historical process, in the hope of nding some clues as to what a theory of the role of pleasure in history might look like. I investigated rst theoretical attempts which rested on the aim of explaining the relationship of pleasure to other primary concerns of society, such as power structures, the economy or religion; the theories discussed included those of the sociologist Veblen, of the historians of religion in the tradition of Fustel de Coulanges at the Centre Gernet, and of historians of mentalité, like Freud and Foucault. en 2 O. Murray, M. Tecuşan (ed.), In Vino Veritas, Rome 1995, pp. 3–17. 101 Ś – Z – U I turned to theories of pleasure which asserted the autonomy of culture and the pleasure principle from other aspects of social organisation; the historians studied included Jacob Burckhardt, Johan Huizinga, Ernst Gombrich, Norbert Elias and Mikail Bakhtin. My conclusion was that only Epicurus had seriously and systematically tried to explain history in terms of pleasure, although a number of other theorists in history, economics and psychology might oer some help towards constructing such a theory. Many theories, notably those post-Adorno and post-Foucault, were left out of account, and it is perhaps a limitation of my attention span or ability to learn new jargons that subsequent reading and discussion has not convinced me that the most modern theories are an important advance on those put forward by the classical ‘modern’ thinkers, such as Marx and Burckhardt and Freud. I am still looking, but I don’t think that continuing the search for ready-made theories is the right way forward. Instead I would like to suggest a more detailed and more wide-ranging investigation of how pleasures actually operate in their historical context, in the hope of clarifying what it is that constitutes pleasure in any particular historical situation, and the extent to which the characteristics of pleasure remain constant across societies. To that I would, however, like to add an attempt to understand how pleasure has been theorised in dierent periods and dierent cultures. It seems to me for reasons which I will now try to explain that it is important to try to relate the real pleasures of human societies to the theories of pleasure that those societies produce, in order to discover whether it is possible to produce a general theory of the place of pleasure in human societies. In formulating this problem to myself I have omitted to consider the contributions of a number of people who might indeed have helped us considerably, physiologists and experimental scientists investigating the chemical and neurological basis for sensations of pleasure and pain; more controversially perhaps, I have not considered the possible contribution of psychology. It is even claimed that neuroscience has identied the synapses of pleasure and pain in the human cortex, and that doctors are now able to stimulate with a touch the sensations of ecstasy or its opposite. But such extreme scientic Reductivist notions presuppose that pleasure and pain are simply sensations: that is clearly both historically and philosophically an implausible view. But also I do not think we should at this stage be engaging in the Socratic question, what is the denition of pleasure – as if it were a single denable entity; for surely what we historians at least know is that such a wide variety of pleasures have existed in 102 H H human history that we are unlikely to agree on a common denition.

Load more