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 oŠered an enormous range of representations related to that lifestyle. Beyond this it seemed to me that sympotic rituals had strongly in€uenced 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 diŠerent 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.

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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.

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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 oŠer 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 diŠerent periods and diŠerent 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. It is more possible and more important to discover what people have meant by pleasure in diŠerent periods and how they have theorised about it, in order to illuminate the question of whether pleasure is a constant or a common characteristic in social organisation. In other words, my primary concern has been the cultural signi­cance of the search for pleasure, and the explicit theoretical discourse that has grown up around it. Which brings me to another very obvious and indefensible limitation of my project. I have for the moment excluded non-European pleasures: China, Islam and India at least are cultures with very active and complex pleasure elements, and so too is ancient Mesopotamia; we ought also to allow at least some input from anthropology. Perhaps I will convince you that what is needed is a permanent institute devoted to pleasure; but for the meantime I will take refuge behind the claim that my research falls under the general rubric ‘cultural history and the classical tradition’, and this taken strictly might justify a restriction to the Eurocentric perspective. is limitation does however highlight one important aspect of the theory of pleasure. ere is in the western world a continuity in this theory, which is connected with the classical tradition, from the thinkers who lie behind the ­rst substantial discussion of pleasure in Plato’s Philebus through the whole of western philosophy as far as the Utilitarians, Marx, Adorno and Foucault. Hedonism, de­ned as the doctrine that pleasure is or ought to be that which all human action aims at, is one of the three great continuing strands of western philosophy, along with idealism and scepticism; indeed, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hedonism was closely connected with scepticism. From Aristippus and Epicurus through to Montaigne, Erasmus, More, Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick, Marx, Freud, Marcuse and modern philosophers like Rawls, the number of thinkers who have regarded this truth as self-evident, or argued for it, and built large parts of their theory on it, is impressively large and varied. It does not for instance seem to be true that the spread of hedonism as a theory was inhibited by the alleged atheism of Epicurus; Jill Kraye has pointed out that Lorenzo Valla actually claimed that Epicureanism was closer than Stoicism to Christianity, because Christ promised rewards of pleasure in heaven for virtue (de voluptate 1431, de vero falsoque bono).3

3 C.C. Schmitt, Q. Skinner, E. Kessler, J. Kraye (ed.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge 1988, ch. on ‘Moral Philosophy’.

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It is therefore rather surprising to ­nd that there is, as far as I know, no serious study of the continuing tradition of hedonism to compare with A.O. Lovejoy’s work on e Great Chain of Being, R.H. Popkin’s e History of Scepticism (1979), or the many attempts to analyse the basic continuities in Platonic idealism or in the Darwinian concept of progress. Apart from specialist works on individual authors and aspects, the bibliography on hedonism seems thin, and those books that do exist are not very distinguished. ere is a useful survey by Dorothee Kimmich, Epikureische Aufklärungen: philosophische und poetische Konzepte der Selbstsorge (1993), but that is largely con­ned to Epicureanism. If anyone knows of a good book on the history of hedonism or is intending to write one, please reveal it now. Michel Onfray has indeed undertaken the task of writing such a philosophy of hedonism, in his delightful and provocative Contre-histoire de la Philosophie, to say nothing of earlier works such as L’Art de Jouir (1991);4 but his approach is polemical, designed to attack what he sees as a philosophical orthodoxy; and his aim is protreptic rather than profound, in that his conception of pleasure seems con­ned to those pleasures which used in the classical tradition to be referred to as ‘the animal pleasures’, ignoring spiritual or rational conceptions of pleasure: he wants to turn us towards hedonism as a principle of life rather than as a philosophical theory working in history. is absence of an overall study of pleasure in the history of ideas perhaps relates to what seems to me a modern decline of interest in hedonism as a philosophical theory. Scepticism is the dominant modern preoccupation in the history of philosophy as it is the central strand in post-modernist theory; hedonism went out with the nineteenth century; and the best one can hope for now is a latter-day utilitarian liberal consensus that laws and governments ought still to aim at the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In ancient philosophy hedonism was a central problem because of the teleo- logical nature of ethical theory. As Aristotle put it, all people aim at happiness – the problem is that they disagree about what happiness is. e view that there is a telos which explains all purposive or intentional action necessarily has to consider pleasure or happiness as a plausible candidate for the universal end; and even if (as many partially hedonist philosophers did) one allows for the possibility of a number

4 e six volumes of this work appeared between 2006 and 2009: Les Sagesses antiques (Paris 2006), Le Christianisme hédoniste (2006), Les Libertins baroques (2007), Les Ultras des Lumières (2007), L’Eudémonisme social (2008), Les Radicalités existentielles (2009).

104 H    H of competing ends, pleasure must always be one of these: only the anti-hedonist, who holds that pleasure is a state to be avoided by the philosopher, can escape placing a certain value on pleasure – and even he is compelled to argue against the almost self-evident idea that pleasure is a good. As Rawls put it, ‘I should not say that a teleological doctrine is necessarily driven to some form of hedonism in order to de­ne a coherent theory. Yet it does seem that the tendency in this direction has a certain naturalness. Hedonism is, one might say, the symptomatic drift of teleological theories insofar as they try to formulate a clear and applicable method of moral reasoning.’5 So, given the importance of the telos in ancient philosophy, the place of pleasure in human motivation is an essential concern of all ancient philosophers; and the sophistication of their arguments is remarkable. e modern philosopher seems to have lost interest in the end, or the explanation of human action as directed towards a permanent goal. Nowadays it seems that the interest in hedonism is con­ned to a few small areas. e ­rst is whether pleasure is a sensation or an emotion, or some supervening quality inherent in the perceiver because of a mental state or disposition. is question was already much discussed in ancient hedonism, from Plato onwards: it lies behind the whole Epicurean distinction between kinetic and katastematic pleasure. In contrast to the sophistication of ancient accounts, the problem is not, I think, well treated in modern philosophy, simply because the range of pleasures considered in each case weights the argument towards a particular conclusion. us Gilbert Ryle could write a solemn and standard article about the diŠerence between going for a walk and enjoying going for a walk.6 Modern philosophical pleasures are indeed rather quiet and sedentary ones, like smoking a pipe, climbing a mountain, enjoying a bottle of good wine, choosing between Paris and Rome for a holiday; one cannot help thinking that an introduction to hang-gliding, car-racing, deep-sea diving, orgies or drugs might have a dramatic eŠect on the theory. To repeat questions posed to me by the young philosopher Ed Skidelsky: Would Epicurus have enjoyed bungee jumping? What would Catullus have made of internet sex?7 Actually, I can answer both those questions. ere is a point at which downward motion ceases and upward motion commences, when the two forces

5 J. Rawls, A eory of Justice, Oxford 1972, p. 560. 6 G. Ryle, ‘Pleasure’, Proc. Aristotelian Society Suppl. 28 (1954), pp. 135–46; also in idem, Collected Essays II, London 1971, pp. 325–35. 7 In a debate on the question, ‘Does pleasure have a history?’ organised by the Chequers Philoso- phical Society in Oxford on February 5th 2001 (the Chequers being a well-known Oxford pub).

105 Ś – Z – U    of gravity and elasticity are in equilibrium: although Epicurus would undoubtedly have disapproved of pleasures of motion, the perfect pleasure is expressed in the katastematic moment of suspension; so I think he would have enjoyed one moment at least in the experience of bungee jumping. And Catullus, as is well known to modern scholars, is not a real lover, but simply a literary persona exploring the love of an imagined literary construct known as Lesbia; so he was the ­rst practitioner of virtual reality or internet sex. e second important area of philosophical interest lies in the residual power of Utilitarianism. Pleasure, it may be admitted, is de facto an important motive force in human action, at least among those who have not studied philosophy – and this is one reason why we should talk about pleasure rather than happiness or enjoyment, because pleasure includes the demotic pleasures rather than directing attention to a restrained and bourgeois intellectual life-style. e question of whether we can construct a hedonic calculus which will enable us to quantify or at least rate pleasures, and therefore seek to create a moral or political theory aiming at the greatest happiness of the greatest number, seems still to be alive and kicking in political economics if not in pure ethics.8 Such attempts will inevitably have important implications in history, for (if successful) they will enable historians to reintroduce the dimension of moral judgment into history: we can abandon relativism and return to a value theory of history, in which governments or social systems can be rated according to their promotion of happiness. is is one sense in which hedonism matters for the student of history; but I would rather emphasise the importance of linking history and philosophy through the history of philosophy, in order to understand why hedonism has taken diŠerent forms in diŠerent periods, and what eŠect it has had on the historical development of pleasures. For the historian who is unwilling to theorise, the history of pleasure becomes the history of pleasures, and can only take one of two forms. It may simply be the history of changes in fashion, in which each new development is arbitrary – hems are longer or shorter, retro-fashion is in or out, sexuality is homo- or hetero-, meditation is su or maharishi this year. Of course novelty is an important added characteristic of pleasures, so it is not unreasonable to take account of it in the development of the history of pleasure; but it will hardly serve as a satisfactory base for a full study. Alternatively, explanations in the history of pleasure may be given in terms of ambient and more conventional forces – economic, political, religious or whatever

8 R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science , London 2006.

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– the availability of cloth after a period of scarcity, the economic demands of the fashion industry, changes in medical theory, the shift in conceptions of orientalism, the perception of power and control. It was this sort of subordination of pleasure theory to more conventional forms of history that I attacked in my earlier article on ‘Histories of Pleasure’, so I will not explain again here why I think such moves are ultimately unconvincing. In that sense the remark of Jasper Gri‚n that I began with, that pleasure has no history, is justi­ed: pleasure is not reducible to conventional history. I do believe that the historian needs hedonism to provide a framework for analysis, as much as the hedonist needs history to explain what pleasure actually is and why it changes. Just as historians have a problem with the ordering of their ­ndings, so philosophers have a problem with the way that the idea of pleasure changes. Indeed, what I think is missing in modern philosophy has in fact been missing from almost all discussions of pleasure in philosophical writings, and that is a true sense of the variety and the realities of pleasures. To philosophers pleasure seems a constant, an abstraction without content. And they tend therefore to equate pleasure with whatever they themselves ­nd pleasurable in their particular generation and social class, without further re€ection. It is not just Professor Ryle who privileges the pleasures he ­nds enjoyable over those of more ordinary people. However much Plato could see (and disapprove of) the variety of pleasures, his analysis concentrates on a very small and select group of pleasures, whether physical or mental. Cicero and Seneca show that the Stoics have a similarly limited view. ere is a need for the historian to come to the help of the philosopher. Aristotle was right: there are as many pleasures as there are activities. But as pleasures vary through history, so the meaning of hedonism varies: historical or social conditioning has a great in€uence on the range of pleasures available in any society, and therefore on the formulation of the theory of hedonism. So let me give an outline of the history of pleasure in order to show how theory and practice interrelate. I will try not to be restrictive in this outline, but to include all those appetitive tendencies that the history of humanity has recognised as belonging to the hedonic sphere – happiness, blessedness, joy, delight, enjoyment, ecstasy, pleasure, contentment, satisfaction, charm. And part of my intention is that you should object and add other types of pleasure to the broad categories I shall mention. I shall try to give this outline some form of movement or relation to social forces, rather than making it a purely descriptive category of diŠerent forms; but there is of course a tension between

107 Ś – Z – U    the categorisation of types of pleasure and the attempt to order them in any chronological form, and you must not take too seriously a succession which is as much conceptual as historical. Should we suppose that human beings began with the simple pleasures shared as sensations with the higher mammals, feelings of warmth, satiety, natural aŠections, sexual desire, and that pleasures can be seen as becoming progressively more complicated in the course of history? It is a natural assumption to those who hold a Darwinian view of society, but one that is historically unveri­able. Leaving aside the needs and emotions of Neanderthal man, the artistic disco veries in the Ardèche (in the Grotte Chauvet, at Vallon Pont d’Arc) show that humanity’s desires and artistic talents were already more complicated around 20,000 BC. Nevertheless, in all periods the simple pleasures as physical sensations must be the starting point, allowing the evidence and theories from medicine and physiology to be integrated with hedonic theories, and ensuring that our theories maintain a democratic interest in the ordinary pleasures of the street. In addition, the arguments of hedonism have always had to counter the claim (once again put forward by Michel Onfray in the libertin tradition) that the simple physical pleasures are the ultimate criteria for determining hedonic goals. e ­rst explicit complex and self-conscious conception of pleasure in western thought seems to me to be centred on the idea of the symposion as the place of pleasure, involving the triad of pleasures: wine, women and song. e connection of feasting and music is already present in Homer; by the beginning of the archaic period women have already been added, and the earliest explicit statement of the triad is found in that curiously serious sympotic poet, Solon. e privileging of these three pleasures over all others to constitute the archaic conception of happiness, euphrosyne, can only be understood in the context of the social institution of the symposion; they are not a naturally self-evident triad. However, in the Greek world they did acquire that canonical status as the primary pleasures: Dr Manuela Tecuşan pointed out to me many years ago that virtually all the metaphors in Plato and virtually all his examples concerning pleasure relate to these pleasures of the symposion; for a Greek these are the archetypal pleasures, and it is these of which one is deprived by death. I cannot resist pointing out that in the western tradition, long after beer had replaced wine and the hetaira or courtesan had disappeared from the drinking group, this triad has retained its symbolic status as the conception of pleasure: here is a statement written by a philosopher in 1967:

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It is true that the associations of the word “pleasure” are such that if an English- -speaking person says he favors a “life of pleasure”, he is naturally taken to be advocating a life dedicated to the sensory enjoyments – wine, women, and song.9

Political correctness apart, I doubt whether any normal English-speaking person in the last ­ve hundred years would have regarded either wine or song as the essential aspects of the life of pleasure; but they are part of the unthinking philosophical tradition. e ­rst substantive surviving investigation of pleasure in western thought, Plato’s Philebus, reveals that there has already been a complex discussion about the nature of pleasure and the variety of pleasures. We know the names and doctrines of some of these forerunners, notably Eudoxus, whose views are discussed in book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and Dicaearchus.10 Plato himself argues that there are three states involved, those of feeling pleasure and feeling pain, and an intermediate state of rest. He also has a complex series of distinctions between various pleasures, those proper to the body, those belonging to both body and soul, and those proper to the soul, together with complex psychological/physiological explanations of how each operate. But it is perhaps already interesting that Plato’s conception of which states or activities are pleasures is already rather limited and hypothetical. e examples of bodily pleasures are those of food and sex, feeling hot or cold, while those of mixed ones simply add the idea of anticipation or remembrance; while the pleasures of the soul merely concern other senses than touch and taste - smell, sight (beautiful shapes and colours) or learning (mathemata 52b). While he complains of the multiformity of pleasure and the absence of limit, he is not actually interested in the concrete diversity of historical pleasures. Plato already complicates the idea of simple pleasures of sensations by pointing out that such pleasures can be extended into the mental sphere by means of pleasures of anticipation or recall. But the most important step in the history of pleasure in antiquity is surely the recognition that there exist forms of pleasure which are not related even indirectly to physical sensations, which exist purely in the mind or soul. For Plato pleasure is a tricky subject which lacks ‘limit’: there are true and false pleasures, mistaken judgments about greater and lesser sensations of

9 R.R. Brandt, ‘Hedonism’, Encyclopedia of Philosophy 3 (1967), ed. P. Edwards, pp. 432–5. 10 See the very traditional book of J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor, e Greeks on Pleasure, Oxford 1982. On the modern usefulness of Plato in the understanding of drug addiction see the fundamental book of G. Sissa, Le Plaisir et le Mal: Philosophie de la Drogue, Paris 1997.

109 Ś – Z – U    pleasure, and ordinary pleasures are mixtures of pleasure and pain, often involving both body and soul. Even those pleasures which involve only the soul, like envy (regarded as a pleasant experience), fear, love and so on, are mixtures containing both pleasure and pain. Pure pleasures do exist, and involve what we would call the senses of sight, hearing and smell – beautiful shapes, sounds and scents, the exercise of the intellectual faculty; and these are the only pleasures which may be admitted into the good life. Beyond these there are simply forms of thought or contemplation, which involve no sensory experience, and cannot therefore be regarded as pleasures, but merely as good in themselves. So Plato recognises certain quiet or passive pleasures; but these pure pleasures are still related to sensation and separated from the activity of the soul; his contemplation of the Good is not a pleasure, but the highest activity exercised in a sphere without pleasure and pain, akin to the life of the gods, who of course feel neither. e realisation that there are pleasures of the mind separate from the body is due I think to Aristotle. For according to him, there is a pleasure attached to every activity, and the greatest pleasure is created as an accompaniment to activity when both object and agent are perfect. e pleasures related to thought or knowledge (episteme) of contemplation, are therefore to be valued at least as highly as the pleasures of action; indeed, since they are more perfect and partake more of the divine, they are the highest pleasures. is is surely the great turning point in the history of hedonism, for it allows intellectual and spiritual pleasures to be compared with physical pleasures. It does, however, remain puzzling that this emphasis on activity did not lead the Greeks to recognise any pleasures associated with that most characteristic of all ancient activities, the agon. Sport is not, for instance, a pleasurable activity: such pleasure as is associated with the Olympic games lies in the victory, rather than in the activity itself; sport as a source of pleasure was a (rather dubious) nineteenth-century invention. But the situation is actually more complicated; for before a universal theory of hedonism can emerge as a theory of moral action, there is need for a stable hierarchy of pleasures. Even Epicurus found that he had to establish two categories of pleasure, those involving movement and those not involving movement, kinetic and katastematic pleasures; and the most controversial and problematic areas of his theory of pleasure concern how we de­ne each of these and how we rate each type in the aim of achieving the life of most permanent pleasure. I think this was already realised by Plato, with his various distinctions between true and false pleasures, although in making this claim he seems to have been

110 H    H primarily interested in emphasising the transitory character of bodily pleasures and their admixture of pleasure and pain. Curiously, one of the most important pleasures for him is a new one, which scarcely existed even in Athens before the ­fth century, the pleasure/pains of watching theatrical performances, comic and tragic (Phlb 50); this is one of the few occasions when a philosopher actually recognises that there are complex social pleasures related to non-permanent states or types of event. So I would suggest that the classical theories of hedonism involve both the need for a hierarchy of pleasures and a belief in the existence of mental or spiritual pleasures. It is often held that an important stage in the development of hedonism is the growth of individualism in the Hellenistic period. Although this may help historically to explain the popularity of the problem of hedonism in the post-classical age, I am not convinced that it made any change in theory necessary. Both Stoicism and Epicureanism seem to oŠer simply developments of existing ideas, rather than new departures. e Stoic still believes with Plato that the true sage has no need of pleasure, while the Epicurean is still enmeshed in the problems of determining a hierarchy of pleasures which will allow him to say that the quieter, more contemplative pleasures (or absences of pain) are more valuable. I see two further developments in the history of hedonism, both of them related to the connection between religion and philosophy. e ­rst is the creation of an area of transcendental pleasures. For Plato the contemplation of the good was not in itself a pleasure; for Aristotle the pleasures of thought were simply pleasures related to an activity that was in fact the highest activity available to humanity. e growth of mystical hedonism, the idea that the contemplation of the divine is the highest pleasure, and subsumes all other pleasures is an element common to both late antique neo-Platonist philosophy and to mystical versions of Christianity, where, if God is the source of pleasure, the contemplation of God is the ultimate pleasure. Such pleasures indeed are often spoken of not as being superior by virtue of their absence of movement or freedom from pain, but rather as being supreme in intensity, as the most pleasurable experience that it is possible to have, involving communion with or identity with the divine. is is the true experience of ecstasy, standing outside oneself, unity with the other who is the divine. We often suspect medieval mystics of being too concerned with the physical aspects of marriage with Christ; but the point is that the supreme experience of pleasure includes all other pleasures, carnal as well as intellectual. If pleasure is the satisfaction of desires, union with god is union with the source

111 Ś – Z – U    of desire. In this respect hedonism is compatible with most forms of mystical religion, and the growth of such religions both extends the range of pleasures and changes the theory of pleasure, because it oŠers the possibility of a divine or transcendental justi­cation for the theory of pleasure. e second area where religion has made a diŠerence is more dubious. e pleasures of the afterlife were not part of the Greek conception of death. But the various mystery religions of ancient Greece owed most of their appeal to the fact that (in the words of Plato at the start of the Republic), in return for virtue in this life they promised eternal drunkenness in the next: both Orphism and the Eleusinian Mysteries (together probably with a variety of Dionysiac initiatory cults) promised the continuity of the sympotic pleasures after death. It is clear to me (though not to everyone) that the rituals and burial practices of the Etruscans presupposed the continuity of bodily pleasures after death. is in itself is harmless; it is pleasant to believe that we will continue to experience pleasure after death, especially if that pleasure relates to the state that heroes and gods ­nd themselves in. What is problematic, I think, is the idea that we need to postpone our pleasures until after death, that only by deprivation will we become worthy of those pleasures which we could have here and now, or that we can only win ultimate pleasure by undergoing torture and suŠering. at Christian idea developed out of the experience of persecution, and was combined with the even more pernicious belief that we must pay in the afterlife for any pleasures in this life, that eternal damnation is the reward of the rational hedonist. is nexus of ideas is of course also related to the notion that what we experience now is only imperfect pleasure, constrained by the physical existence of the body; only after death will the soul experience perfect pleasure. While a form of Christian hedonism based on the pleasures of the afterlife is defensible, the notion that pleasure should be postponed until after death is opposed, not only to hedonism, but also to mysticism, which (however much it values the unity with God after death) believes we have a duty before God to attempt to experience true pleasure in this life. It is such attitudes which Freud analysed in his study Beyond the Pleasure Principle. e realisation that immediate pleasures may have to be postponed in order to maximise ultimate pleasure is a simple prudential calculation; but it can lead to a pathological state where the individual under the perverted in€uence of the reality principle seeks to postpone all pleasures, or even to follow the demands of the superego towards the death wish, annihilation of the life force.

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is common form of Christianity is one may say fundamentally anti-hedonist, rather than a disguised form of hedonism. But there is nothing like the pleasures of a convent girl when she breaks the rules. Hedonism has its escape route. e pleasure of sin is surely the greatest contribution of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to the history and theory of pleasure: did the forbidden apple taste sweeter just because it was forbidden? e knowledge of good and evil that the fruit of the tree of knowledge symbolised includes the ability to choose evil. Is this the meaning of paradise? e power of religion to enhance pleasure lies in its prohibition of pleasures. Are medieval pleasures often more intense than ancient ones because they include this element of guilt? Society too has its ability to constrain pleasure, and so to enhance it, and in this sense it was not religion which seems ­rst to have introduced the pleasures of guilt. at is surely a particularly Roman contribution. e insistence on the simple life as an essential part of mos maiorum, and the complex working out of tabus in relation to such undesirable Greek customs as reclining at banquets, poetry and other forms of luxuria, from the elder Cato onwards, made the Greek lifestyle irresistibly attractive to those who wished to provoke the ‘rumores senum severiorum’. In addition, in common with the Etruscans, Roman convivial practices allowed respectable matronae to attend convivia, whereas the presence of a woman at Greek symposia was evidence that she was a hetaira. is confusion of two styles of life, expressed in the Roman antiquarian debate about whether Roman women should recline at the convivium on the couches alongside men, led inevitably to a confusion of roles between the ideal femina univira and the elegant hetaira. For the ­rst time in educated society adulterium became a major social problem: Roman poets from Catullus to Ovid celebrated the pleasures of adultery, and Augustus was forced to pass a lex Julia de adulteriis and exile his two direct descendants along with the last of the poets of adultery. It is quite clear in Latin love elegy that the danger of a liaison with a married woman gave added pleasure to the standard banalities of love; guilt was transformed into an additional source of pleasure. Foucault has explored these paradoxes of human behaviour in the volumes of his History of Sexuality. Indeed, as Foucault argues, the development of perversions is dependent on rules declaring the tabus which must then be broken. Without exploring the question whether some rules may not be necessary for the orderly working of society, the willingness of society to make rules of behaviour has always provided

113 Ś – Z – U    a rich source of added pleasure to those who enjoy breaking rules. Whether all activities classi­ed as perversions in any particular society come within this category is not clear to me; but along with the increase of the discourse of sexuality, there seems a willingness to discover or bring into the open pleasures that previously would have been categorised diŠerently. Sadism and masochism belong to the confusion of pleasure and pain that Plato recognised; their appearance in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as substantive categories may owe something to the morbid imagination of an early romanticism, but it marks a shift in the understanding of the pleasure principle, without which Freud would not have been possible. at can surely be seen by contrasting the conception of pleasure promulgated by the philosophes of the eighteenth century in opposition both to the libertin tradition and to Christianity. Gibbon’s conception of the ‘rational voluptuary’ who moderates his pleasures in order to achieve a permanent state of pleasure owes much to an earlier interpretation of Epicurean hedonism and the rede­nition of katastematic pleasures in terms not of the absence of pain, but of something more positive. When Diderot came to de­ne jouissance in the Encyclopédie he chose to write a panegyric of married love; which brings us up short in its sentimentality, until we realise that the jouissance of the eighteenth century was not so much enjoyment or ecstasy as ‘bliss’, a permanent state of happiness:

Jouissance

Entre les objets que la nature oŠre de toutes parts à nos désirs, vous qui avez une âme, dites-moi, y en ait-il un plus digne de notre poursuite, dont la possession et la jouissance puissent nous rendre aussi heureux, que celles de l’être qui a les mêmes idées, qui épreuve la même chaleur, les mêmes transports, qui porte ses bras tendres et délicats vers les vôtres, qui vous enlace, et dont les caresses seront suivies de l’existence d’un nouvel être qui sera semblable à l’un de vous, qui dans ses premiers mouvemens vous cherchera pour vous serrer, que vous éleverez à vos côtés, que vous aimerez ensemble, qui vous protégera dans votre vieillesse, qui vous respectera en tous tems, et dont la naissance heureuse a déjà forti­é le lien qui vous unissoit? Diderot, Encyclopédie

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Among the objects that nature oŠers in abundance for our desiring, you who possess a soul, tell me are there any more worthy of our pursuit, whose possession and enjoyment can make us more happy, than those belonging to the being who has the same ideas, who experiences the same warmth, the same feelings, who stretches her tender and delicate arms towards you, who entwines herself with you, and whose love-making gives rise to the existence of a new being who resembles one or other of you, who in its early movements will seek you out to hug you, whom you will bring up at your side and whom you will love together, who will look after you in old age and respect you at all times, and whose happy birth has from the start strengthened the bond that unites you?

As Roy Porter and others have shown, it is the eighteenth century which most embodies the search for a permanent state of happiness derived from the rational exercise of sensibilities, with new pleasures such as conversation, reading, contemplating the order of nature or the art of pictures.11 Enthusiasm and excess are the enemies of true pleasure. is might make us consider how in contrast our own search for pleasure is degraded into a striving after the death wish, a search for oblivion through drunkenness or abuse of drugs, where the maximum in terms of quantity is misidenti­ed with the concept of greatest pleasure. at is the ultimate in consumerist manipulation, designed merely to increase the pro­ts of the brewers and the ma­a, through the death of pleasure for the consumer. e hangover was previously idealised only in the poetry of China. I have tried to suggest that the philosophers’ view of hedonism is too simple, and that it needs to be complicated by an attention to the changing nature of pleasures. I have tried also to suggest that the historian’s view of pleasures as being either explicable in terms of the politico-social pressures, or determined in a wholly arbitrary fashion, does not explain the phenomena. Pleasure has both a history and a philosophy, it accepts both practical and theoretical changes. What I am less certain about is whether the history of hedonism that I have tried to outline exhibits a progression in terms of our understanding of the nature of pleasure, or simply an enrichment of the varieties of pleasure. I am also uncertain whether such an account could in principle be extended to oŠer a universal history of pleasure, or whether this development with all its

11 R. Porter, Enlightenment, London 2000; cf. J. Brewer, e Pleasures of the Imagination, London 1997.

115 Ś – Z – U    variety is actually a consequence of the western ‘classical’ tradition, whether the western idea of hedonism is what de­nes and creates pleasure for us. At least I hope my analysis will help us to make more realistic the excessively simple conception of pleasure held by both philosophers and historians, and enable us to understand better how pleasures take their eŠect within society, as historical forces, and how pleasure can be theorised either as a means of social control or as an end in itself.12

12 I have tried these still somewhat inchoate ideas out on a number of audiences, in Paris at the Centre Gernet, in Oxford in the Chequers Philosophical Society, and perhaps elsewhere. But I hope they will stimulate and provoke discussion also among Polish classicists and historians.

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