The Problem of Pleasure

Why is sex fun? Some animals simply split in two when they want to reproduce, and even human beings use methods of artificial insemination that don’t involve pleasure. Why, then, is sex fun?

Why is eating fun? Plants and the lower animals manage to obtain their quota of nutrients without the luxury of taste buds. Why can’t we?

Why are there colors in the world? Some people get along fine without the ability to detect color. Why complicate vision for all the rest of us?

Another question: What hubris drove our Founding Fathers to include the pursuit of happiness in a list of three unalienable rights? “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they said by way of explanation. Self-evident? Considering the evidence of history, how could anyone conceive of the pursuit of happiness as a self-evident, unalienable right? Death, maybe—no one can steal that from us—but the pursuit of happiness? On what basis do we take it for granted?

It struck me the other day, after I had read my umpteenth book on the problem of pain (the theological obsession of this century, it seems), that I have never even seen a book on “the problem of pleasure.” I have never met a philosopher who goes around shaking his head in perplexity over the basic question of why we experience pleasure.

Where did pleasure come from? The more I think about it, the more I see it as a huge problem: the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. On the issue of pleasure, Christians can breathe a little easier. A good and loving God would naturally want his creatures to experience delight, joy, and fulfillment. We Christians start from that given and then look for ways to explain the origin of suffering. But don’t atheists and secular humanists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?

One person, at least, faced the issue squarely. In his indispensable book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton traced his own Christian conversion to the problem of pleasure. He found materialism too thin to account for the sense of wonder and delight that sometimes marks the world. Here is how he tells it:

I felt in my bones, first that this world does not explain itself.… Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art.… Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.… And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as [Robinson] Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.

In a single sweep, Chesterton has clarified the problem of pleasure. For the unbeliever, the problem centers in the question of origin: Where did pleasure come from? Chesterton searched all alternatives, and settled on Christianity as the only reasonable explanation for the existence of pleasure in the world. Moments of pleasure are remnants, like goods washed ashore from a shipwreck, like bits of paradise extended through time. But once a person has accepted that, and accepted God as the source of all good gifts, new problems stir up.

Teetotalers may not appreciate Chesterton’s choice of beer and Burgundy as illustrations, but the notion of thanking God for his good gifts by using humility and restraint expresses well the Bible’s own approach to pleasure. Actually, it occurs to me that I have read a book on the problem of pleasure: the Book of Ecclesiastes. That story of decadence by the richest, wisest, and most talented person in the world serves as a perfect allegory for what can happen when we lose sight of the Giver who gave us good gifts to enjoy. The Bible presents pleasure as a good, certainly, but also as a grave danger. We may start chasing pleasure as an end in itself and, along the way, lose sight of who gave us the good gifts of sexual excitement, taste, and beauty. As Ecclesiastes poignantly records, such wholesale devotion to pleasure paradoxically leads to a state of utter despair.

In the same context, Chesterton said that sexual promiscuity was not so much an overvaluing of sex as a devaluing:

“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it.… Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in a mere absence of mind.”

All of which leads me to consider a whole new approach to our society’s decadence. Every Sunday I hear media preachers decry the drugs, sexual looseness, greed, and crime that are “running rampant” in the streets of America. But rather than merely wag our fingers at such obvious abuses of God’s good gifts, perhaps we would do better to work at demonstrating to the world where good gifts actually come from and why they are good. I think of the old adage “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue”: drugs as homage to true beauty, promiscuity as homage to sexual fulfillment, greed as homage to stewardship, and crime a shortcut way to seize all the rest.

Try out this approach on a skeptic. Are Christians uptight bores who forfeit half the fun of life by limiting their sex to one marriage partner, and eating in moderation, and living lives of simplicity, not excess? If you find a skeptic who thinks so, try turning his or her attention to the inherent goodness of one ripe, juicy pear, a goodness that would be somehow devalued if a person ate five pears in a mere absence of mind. If you get a glazed, condescending, “Pity you poor ignoramuses” look in return, try out a few questions on that skeptic: Why is sex fun? Why is eating fun? Why are there colors? And if you hear a good explanation that does not include the word God, please let me know.

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