Pleasure [SFI-4]

This is the second of two “Sermons For Individualist” about pain and pleasure. The first was on “Pain.” This is on Pleasure.

It’s only pleasure; pleasure never fed anyone, clothed anyone, or earned anyone a penny; but the pursuit of it has cost many people their entire fortunes and their lives.

In the previous article on pain we learned that pain is an indicator of something wrong, either with our bodies (physical pain) or a consciousness of something wrong (emotional pain). We might think of pleasure as the opposite of pain, that just as pain is an indicator of something wrong, pleasure is an indicator of something right.

Pain and pleasure are not really complements of one another, however. Pleasure is not merely the absence of pain, for example. The absence of pain is comfortable, and though comfort may be thought of as a pleasure, a life that is merely comfortable, that is, a life absent any pain, would not really be life—it would be mere existence.

The individualist despises the idea of mere existence. The desire to achieve and accomplish, to excel in everything, to be all one can possibly be, makes the idea of mere existence, for the individualist, worse than death.

I often make the point, living is doing—your life is what you do, not what happens to you. I make that point now, because most people understand their lives in terms of their experiences, in terms of pain and pleasure; but neither pain or pleasure are things you do, but things that happen to you.

Both pain and pleasure are important barometers or gauges of our states, the consequences of our choices and actions, but neither pain or pleasure can be the purpose of life or a reason for living—both living to avoid pain and living in pursuit of pleasure are terrible moral mistakes.

We’ve already seen why the avoidance of pain cannot be the purpose of life in the previous article on pain. Here we’ll examine why the pursuit of pleasure cannot be the purpose of one’s life.

Pleasure Is No Purpose

Most people have no real purpose, no “reason” for living. The sum total of their life, the only objective of their life, if they ever give it any thought, is avoidance of death.

Most people live for pleasure. Their entire life is a pursuit of that illusive experience they call “enjoyment, “fun,” or “excitement,” which they expect to find in their entertainments and diversions. But pleasure is not life, nor the purpose of life, and experiencing pleasure is not living.

Pleasure sought for its own sake is always a shallow, empty, and meaningless thing. Pleasure is our nature’s way of approving and rewarding our right choices and actions, the appropriate physical and emotional accompaniment of a life lived according to principles and truth. Seeking pleasure directly is a form of stealing, stealing from one’s own nature, one’s own life, and in the end it leaves one incapable of enjoying anything, empty and emotionally dead.

The direct pursuit of pleasure is hedonism. It is the seldom stated moral principle by which most people live their lives. My article, “My Friend, Ayn Rand“explains what is wrong with hedonism, and why the independent individualist despises it.

It is the reason you, as an independent individualist, find the pleasure-mad world so bewildering. This is why that world does not understand you, why it does not understand why you have no interest in their shallow pleasures and diversions, why you are not interested in their “parties.” They do not understand what it means to have something to live for, or even what it means to live.

To them you are a workaholic, a radical, a fanatic, an idealist, perhaps even a, “prude.” It is impossible for them to understand the kind of joy and happiness that is only possible to those who have a real purpose in life, real goals and objectives. That genuine joy, happiness, and pleasure without guilt experienced as the reward for accomplishing and achieving those goals and objectives are so far above the immediate physical pleasures and emotional “thrills” experienced by the hedonists, to the independent individualist, the hedonist’s “pleasures” are the equivalent of pain.

Physical Pleasure

All pleasure is physical pleasure, even that which we think of as emotional, because all pleasure is a direct experience of the body. What we call physical pleasure has a more direct physical cause, like the pleasure of eating or performing physical exercise.

The one pleasure that is considered the most important physical one is the pleasure of sex. Like all other pleasure, the body provides it, but in spite of the physical aspects of the pleasure, it is actually profoundly psychological in nature.

In the following, Rand is talking about desire, but the relationship between the physical and psychological is made clear.

“His [man’s] first desires are given to him by nature; they are the ones that he needs directly for his body, such as food, warmth, etc. Only these desires are provided by nature and they teach him the concept of desire. Everything else from then on proceeds from his mind, from the standards and conclusions accepted by his mind and it goes to satisfy his mind—for example, his first toys. (Perhaps sex is the one field that unites the needs of mind and body, with the mind determining the desire and the body providing the means of expressing it. But the sex act itself is only that—an expression. The essence is mental, or spiritual.)” [The Journals of Ayn Rand, “13-Notes While Writing: 1947-1952.”]

When how we use are bodies, how we take care of them, and what we choose to do with them are guided by our reason and based on the requirements of our bodies’ natures, we will be rewarded with all the best physical pleasures the body is capable of providing, not because we successfully pursued that pleasure, but as the reward for successfully pursuing the truth.

Joy, Which Is Emotional Pleasure

The subject of emotional pleasure is much to broad and rich for this short discussion. Here, I want to emphasize that the greatest emotional pleasures are consequence of living rationally and objectively, that is, in agreement with reality and the truth.

The emotional pleasures are forms of joy, and they spring from our virtues, the actualization of our values and principles:

The virtue of integrity results in the joy of wholeness, the sense of one’s own completeness without any inner conflict or contradiction, and a sense of being in total control.

The virtue of responsibility produces that sense of worthiness, necessary for the unlimited enjoyment of all one has and is.

The virtue of honesty is experience as that guiltless joy of purity in agreement with all truth and reality.

The virtue of competence is enjoyed as an exalted self-assurance, self- confidence, and poise.

The virtue of productivity is experienced as that joyful sense of inner strength by which one create all values, both one’s physical needs as well as one’s own mind and soul.

The virtue of dignity is that deeply profound joy in the awareness of the value and importance of one’s own person from which one’s sense of inviolable privacy springs.

The virtue of courage is that joyous sense of victorious invincibility we call heroic.

These are all experienced as the sum of one’s life, the continuing experience of what one has made of themselves, the experience we call happiness.