Pleasure, Purpose, And Fulfillment

[hyperdulia again]

Pleasure, Purpose and Fulfilment

Moralists are typically unsympathetic to hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure. On one level this is correct, pleasure is not (properly speaking) a "good" in itself. The appetites exist to motivate us to put effort into obtaining things that are (in some sense) good for us. Pleasure is the immediate reward for attaining a good. It signals to us that we've "done good". In a sense, the appetite is the efficient cause and pleasure the final cause of our loving what is good for us. If pleasure is obtainable divorced from the attainment of a good, this tends to have a disastrous effect. Two obvious examples are the experimental "hot wiring" of laboratory mice and the tragedy of heroin addiction.

In the first case, electrodes were implanted in the "pleasure centre" of the brains of living mice. A switch was provided that the mice could press, and which triggered a weak current from the electrode. Once the mice twigged that they could have instant ecstasy over and over again, at no cost, on the push of a button, they lost all interest in anything else. I think that they eventually starved to death.

The chemical effect of heroin on the brain is similar to the electrical effect of the mice electrodes. Once you have experienced a heroin rush, there is nothing else that matters more than experiencing it over and over again. After a few fixes, one also becomes physiologically addicted, so that one becomes unable to function without the regular consumption of the drug. In effect it becomes an artificial psychological vitamin.

[aquamarine]

Well, I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, but I tend not to like lab-rat scenarios being applied directly to human behavior other than for clinical trials of legitimate prescription medication, etc.

Ya - we all know heroin is extremely addictive. Extremely. Crack cocaine more so, actually - the first time you do heroin, you just get violently sick. You have to come back at it again to get yourself hooked. Crack takes all of a few seconds to get addicted to, should you be prone to addictions.

But, anyway...I think the reason humans seek out pleasure is because they're indirectly, misguidedly seeking out God's love, even though it's through some pretty convoluted, twisted ways. Why does someone become a drug addict? Mostly because they're either looking to medicate some very painful realities, or they're looking for fulfillment of some kind. Same goes for lots of easy sex, or accumulating ridiculously useless possessions, etc.

So, for me, I don't see a heroin addict or a person caught up in an endless string of bad relationships as someone who seeks pleasure for pleasure's sake without any 'good' attached. I see someone in an awful lot of pain and confusion desperately trying to find 'good' (love, God, self-worth, etc.) in a lot of very self-destructive, negative ways. To me, someone in pain is actually representative of our own failures - our failure to make those around us feel valued and loved (using 'our' in a very general sense).

Dunno if that makes any sense, but I guess I just don't like to see human pain and suffering categorized as a mere string of chemical reactions and behavior modification techniques. Other people's pain is God's call for the rest of us to ante up, IMO, not to separate ourselves from those people by analyzing them to death.

Just to clarify, what I'm really trying to say is that we're not just blindly seeking to stroke the pleasure centers in our brains (as the mice were), but we're crying out in pain and isolation and fear when we seek out self-destructive forms of pleasure.

Edited December 26, 2003 by aquamarine

[phatcatholic]

well said aqua........welcome to phatmass!

[hyperdulia again]

*sighs*

*rolls eyes*

*kicks wall*