The Tyranny Of Pleasure

This provocative book stands the Sixties' Liberation on its head, taking an inventory of its unintended side-effects. No, liberty has not made us happy.

This provocative book stands our sixties' liberation on its head, taking an inventory of its unintended side-effects.--Le Nouvel Quotidien. (Philosophy)

Discusses the eight core pleasures--primal pleasure, pain relief, the pleasures of play and humor, and mental, emotional, sensual, sexual, and spiritual pleasure--and how they can enrich one's life

Much has been written of the forbidden pleasures. But what of the "unforbidden" pleasures? Unforbidden Pleasures is the singular new book from Adam Phillips, the author of Missing Out, Going Sane, and On Balance. Here, with his signature insight and erudition, Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the unforbidden, from the fall of our "first parents," Adam and Eve, to the work of the great psychoanalytic thinkers. Forbidden pleasures, he argues, are the ones we tend to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from unforbidden pleasures than from those that are taboo. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us. An ambitious book that speaks to the precariousness of modern life, Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological, and social dynamics that govern human desire and shape our everyday reality.

Trust is vital in so many dimension of our private and public life. But why? Well, it is first and foremost about believing. It is a primary attitude one person shows toward another. Before we even learn to understand, our first condition is that of vulnerability which demands trust. Every helpless infant must trust in the good of humanity. Trust, we learn, can be given to persons and things, to an individual or a community, to an ideal, or to an object. It indicates a sense of reliability that both fashions and upholds the relationship. It also names the truth of the relationship, a genuine honesty of things. It can also speak to us of the abilities of another person or of things as trustworthy. That is the question this first in a trilogy on trust explores. It raises for us the question of a kind of default suspicion in society, a trend to assume the negative. Each work in the trilogy will explore the sources of suspicion, the deep seated absolute distrust of all pleasure, wealth, and power regardless of virtuous or noble purpose. The philosophical genesis of this suspicion can be found in the thought of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Together they have been called the "Masters of Suspicion" by Paul Ricoeur for their negative presuppositions in all interpretation. And yet, trust is perhaps as critical to our environment as are clean air and clean water. A climate of trust is vital to human flourishing and skepticism is like a poison that destroys a community's ability to risk and to be vulnerable. We have seen a steady decline in the levels of trust. The Pew Research Center has been studying the question of trust in society for decades. Alarmingly, 71% of adults believe Americans are less confident in each other than they were 20 years ago. "About three-in-four Americans (79%) think their fellow citizens have too little confidence in each other. Relatedly, a fifth of adults (21%) think personal confidence in the country has worsened for little good reason" (29). The question of distrust is alarming and we need to examine its harm and what will heal it. In this work, The Tyranny of Perfection, we see how suspicion has robbed us of the simple delight of being. This Freudian fracturing and critical analysis of the person into id, ego, superego has left us unable to trust pleasure itself. This self-alienation denies that necessary wholeness of life. It compartmentalizes life and how we think about life. Freud is just one player in Modernity's abuse of science, casting it as superior to all other disciplines. Fragmentation and specialization have alienated the disciplines of science, art, and religion. Rather than the three together providing the integration of life and living, science, art, and religion have wrongly been cast as opposed to each other. The tyranny is this undermining of the greatest pleasure, our ability to love life with all its fragile qualities. Wealth and power, we will see, also attack our sense of trust, but for now, we will look at the tragic loss of trust in pleasure. The other two works in this trilogy, The Want of Wealth and The Bondage of Power, examine the seeds of suspicion that have led us to mistrust both economics and politics, both wealth and power. It is this widespread mistrust that has brought us to tragic levels of alienation and isolation, not pleasure, wealth, and power per se. These can be abused as tools of alienation, division and suspicion. As we will see in this trilogy, we must learn to love, to believe, and to hope again as our social corrective. If these three books help to initiate greater interest in our learning to trust once more, then they will have served a good and noble purpose

The ghosts that haunt our sexual pleasure were born in the Stone Age. Sex and gender taboos were used by tribes to differentiate themselves from one another. These taboos filtered into the lives of Bronze and Iron Age men and women who lived in city-states and empires. For the early Christians, all sex play was turned into sin, instilled with guilt, and punished severely. With the invention of sin came the construction of women as subordinate beings to men. Despite the birth of romance in the late middle ages, Renaissance churches held inquisitions to seek out and destroy sex sinners, all of whom it saw as heretics. The Age of Reason saw the demise of these inquisitions. But, it was doctors who would take over the roles of priests and ministers as sex became defined by discourses of crime, degeneracy, and sickness. The middle of the 20th century saw these medical and religious teachings challenged for the first time as activists, such as Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Sanger, sought to carve out a place for sexual freedom in society. However, strong opposition to their beliefs and the growing exploitation of sex by the media at the close of the century would ultimately shape 21st century sexual ambivalence. Book Two of this two-part publication traces the history of sex from the Victorian Era to present day. Interspersed with ‘personal hauntings’ from his own life and the lives of friends and relatives, Knowles reveals how historical discourses of sex continue to haunt us today. This book is a page-turner in simple and plain language about ‘how sex got screwed up’ for millennia. For Knowles, if we know the history of sex, we can get over it.

From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, a thought-provoking volume of nine essays that elegantly and fiercely addresses recent developments in American culture and argues for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition. Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a precise and nuanced insider’s look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming. Part memoir and part polemic, an anatomy of important and dangerous ideas, and a cri de coeur lamenting the erosion of standard liberal values, Boyers’s collection of essays is devoted to such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.

Ch. 10 (pp. 381-454), "Fromm, Neumann, and Arendt: Three Early Interpretations of Nazi Germany", discusses the views of Franz Neumann and Hannah Arendt on Nazi antisemitism. Neumann, in his "Behemoth" (1942), stated that the Nazis needed a fictitious enemy in order to unify the completely atomized German society into one large "Volksgemeinschaft". The terrorization of Jews was a prototype of the terror to be used against other peoples. Arendt contends in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951) that it was imperialism which brought about Nazism, Nazi antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Totalitarianism is nothing but imperialism which came home. Insofar as imperialism transcends national boundaries, racism may be very helpful for it, because racism proposes another principle to define the enemy. Jews and other ethnic groups (e.g. Slavs) became easy targets as groups whose claims clashed with those of the expanding German nation. Terror is the essence of totalitarianism, and extermination camps were necessary for the Nazis to prove the omnipotence of their regime and their capability of total domination.