Enjoy!

Philosophers have traditionally been highly suspicious of fleeting pleasures, but to enjoy the moment is a radical act

One fine evening a band is playing. People are dancing and enjoying themselves. A woman is there, relishing the event. Then she thinks to herself:

Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers.

These thoughts from the journal of the American poet Sylvia Plath ask whether there is something inescapably painful about enjoyment. Maybe enjoyment makes you anguished and miserable; perhaps this vitiates its worth entirely. Certainly, there have been many philosophers who have endorsed just such a negative position. But they are wrong.

To understand why that is so, we need to clarify what we are debating. Philosophers have puzzled over the question of what enjoyment is, proposing competing accounts of pleasure, but we can take a straightforward view that enjoyment is a distinctive state of finding an experience pleasurable. The hallmark feature of pleasure, in turn, is its feel-good quality. An enjoyable experience feels good. And it can be distinguished thus from a painful one, which feels bad. Does then the transitory nature of enjoyment undermine its worth? Or might that very brevity of enjoyment be part of its importance in human life?

(continues, Aeon)