Unforbidden Pleasures

by Adam Phillips

  If the pursuit of our highest cultural ideals – truth and knowledge – destroys us, our highest cultural ideal must be self-destruction. Unless, that is, we have the wrong ideals. But then what should these ideals be? What kind of cultural ideals could we have if ‘the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction’? If the ‘very best thing is utterly beyond [our] reach’ and it is, in fact, ‘not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing’? ‘Nietzsche asks,’ Peter Berkowitz writes in his book Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, ‘how an infectious optimism, an over-brimming cheerfulness, a manly healthiness, epitomized by the Greeks’ savage and sensual myths, could emerge in full awareness of man’s inherently miserable lot.’ We might say: it could only emerge once that full awareness was fully acknowledged. If there can be no true satisfaction – if there is only (psychic) alchemy, idealization, bravado, self-deception, the art that Nietzsche claims we have that we might not perish of the truth – then the implication is clear. Either we seek, or have been educated to seek, the wrong satisfactions, or we are living in the wrong world, a world utterly unsuited to our nature. Since, at least for secular and modern people, there is no other world, we must, as Nietzsche intimated, have the wrong cultural ideals. It can only be better not to have been born if either what happens subsequently is unbearably painful, or if we have – at least in part – made it unbearably painful through the wildly inappropriate cultural ideals that we have construed for ourselves. This is what Nietzsche’s phrase ‘the transvaluation of all values’ refers to. We have unsuited ourselves for the world as we find it. So we end up thinking of it as a world well lost. Or we end up thinking, as Nietzsche did in The Birth of Tragedy, that we must choose Dionysus or Hamlet.

  And yet it was reactive to Silenus’s apparent wisdom and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics that Nietzsche became the philosopher who invented a new kind of modern person, a person who could conceive of himself as undefeated, unembittered, unintimidated by life. ‘We, however,’ he wrote in The Gay Science (distinguishing his new group from those who ‘chatter’ in ‘such bad taste … who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present’; those people Freud would later call neurotics),

  want to become those we are – human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world.

  If this is excessive it may also be the kind of excess that acknowledges what it is up against – and how much people can suffer from other people’s descriptions of themselves (other people’s descriptions of ourselves being what culture is). So we can usefully bear in mind William James’s salutary point in Pragmatism: ‘The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing’; while also taking Nietzsche’s point pragmatically. Silenus’s wisdom, and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical contraption, Nietzsche insisted, have been perniciously misleading; but they also, as he acknowledged, freed Nietzsche to become what he called ‘the great Affirmer’. We must become what Nietzsche called ‘the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world’ to avoid becoming imitators rather than creators. We need to remember that when Silenus says that it would have been better not to have been born, to be nothing, we can take him to be saying that his demand on us is that we must agree; that he is forbidding us, by exploiting our temptation to resign ourselves, to take alternative views seriously; that, indeed, he is forbidding us from getting enjoyment from life. There may, in other words, be pleasures in life that have eluded Silenus, that he knows nothing about. And yet he is talking not only on behalf of everybody who has ever lived – on behalf of the past and the future – but on behalf of life itself (life tells us that it would be better not to have lived).

  All essentialist statements – of the kind, this is what life is really like, this is what human nature is – are prone to function as prohibitions; as instructions masquerading as descriptions; as routes disguised as maps. Omniscience is always prohibitive; and prohibition always smacks of omniscience. Unlike Silenus or Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is always, explicitly or implicitly, self-ironizing. We can, fortunately, be as sceptical of Nietzsche’s cultural ideals – of becoming who one is, of being self-legislating, of being masters rather than slaves – as he is of his heroes that became anti-heroes. Like Wilde and Freud, Nietzsche teaches us how to read him without the wrong kind of seriousness. Without, that is, his becoming too forbidding a presence.

  II

  ‘To be or not to be’ is only the question when something about being alive has become at once unavoidable – impossible not to know – and insufferable – possibly beyond one’s capacity for suffering. Or when one has been able to make one’s unbearable suffering into one’s paramount pleasure. What Silenus and Schopenhauer proposed cannot be, within their own terms, merely one view among others; something one might feel in a certain mood, or state of mind; or that people believe when they are suffering from depression. It is, for them – and for one part of Nietzsche – the truth from which all else follows. Not to acknowledge this would not be a blind spot, or an oversight, it would be delusional. For them it would be like a fundamental criterion; there are people who acknowledge this truth about life, people who can allow themselves to see it, and live (or not) in the light or darkness of this truth. These would be the real realists, the adults. And then there would be the others: the young, the naive, the intractable optimists, the believers in progress and satisfaction, the fabulists of redemption and enlightenment. It is clear in this story who the joke is on. Like all essentialist stories it ultimately depends on having to humiliate the disbelievers. It is not entirely surprising that one version of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values issues in yet another version of the story about masters and slaves. So the question needs to be raised, partly to avoid the all too human, all too familiar sadomasochistic conclusions about winners and losers, the strong and the weak, the intelligent and the stupid, the knowledgeable and the naive; the question needs to be raised – because it is a recurring question – even though to be answered properly it would have to be properly historicized: is life unbearable, or have we been forbidden from enjoying it? And if life is, or is also, a forbidden pleasure, who has forbidden it, and why? And we need to bear in mind, in thinking about these questions, Deleuze and Guattari’s salutary point in Anti-Oedipus that ‘the law prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the “instincts”, so as to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction’. The law simulates and stimulates false desires, desires created by rendering them illicit. The law creates a desire for what it forbids; it suggests an interest by prohibiting it. And by the same token prevents our thinking about what may be pleasurable but unforbidden; the pleasures, for example, of what is bearable, and more than bearable. If life, or something about life, has been made, in some sense, into a forbidden pleasure, we need to be able to talk about how the act of forbidding intrigues us and distracts us.

  It is, in a sense, Nietzsche – not Silenus, or Schopenhauer – who leads us to the question of whether we have also been forbidden from enjoying life; or to what extent, in what ways, we may have been forbidden from enjoying life; forbidden, not least, by cultural ideals that make the enjoyment of life well-nigh impossible. How we have been distracted from what Emerson called in his essay ‘Fate’ (1860), building ‘altars to the Beautiful Necessity’, because we have been seduced by false necessities, by spurious essentialisms. And Freud, among others, follows up on this in his psychoanalytic apprehensions. If, for example, it was a cultural ideal and not a supposedly natural predisposition – a cultural instruction, as it were – that we should marry our mothers and murder our fathers, we might think that someone was setting us up to fail. That someone was making our lives untenable through offering us impossible choices. The pere
nnial question of whether it would have been better not to have been born at least lets us wonder about the difference between the raw and the cooked, the material and what we make of it. Whether we are making it unbearable, and if so how (for Hamlet, say, his parents have made his life unbearable, in his view, and so have made life unbearable)? It is a question that is asked when discontent is at the end of its tether; like a tantrum it bespeaks an accumulation of frustrations. It is the product of a circumstance and a moment, and their history. But it is not a question that inevitably inspires a politics; it is rather the question that is left once despair about politics, despair about what people can do for each other, has set in.

  Silenus’s wisdom, like Schopenhauer’s, is above all a rejection of sociability, of a confidence in what people can do for each other with a view to making their lives worth living. This may feel like a stark choice: revolution or life as unbearable (you may not be interested in politics, Trotsky said, but politics is interested in you: but what interest does politics have in you once you believe it would be better not to have been born, to be nothing?). The question of whether it would have been better not to have been born, is a way of acknowledging, when it is asked, that life can seem so unbearably painful that an unintelligible alternative is suggested; a solution proposed that is always already too late. Not, it should be noted, that it would be preferable to be dead, but that it would have been better not to have been born. Not even that it is better to have had the opportunity, the chance, to come to one’s own conclusions about it, about being alive; but that it would have been far better not to have been precipitated into this at all. That the question is not worth an answer and in that sense is not a question at all. That it really isn’t, and so hasn’t ever been, worth it. That the pleasures do not offset the suffering. That we did not ask to be born – it was not our desire, it was not one of our demands – and that we have realized that we would have preferred not to have been. The question – whether it would have been better not to have been born – invites us to think, in other words, about the pleasure of pleasure. Of what it is about pleasure, or the absence of pain, that might make it seem sufficient. Of whether, and in what sense, pleasure works, is holding us in life, keeping us going – even if it works, as Freud says on several occasions, as a bribe. And if it is a kind of bribe, how do we experience our lives, or life itself, if bribery is required?

  And then, of course, there is the question of what has to happen to pleasure – what we can do to pleasure – that stops it working; of whether, as Freud suggested, there is a part of ourselves, called a Death Instinct, that hates life and wants to put a stop to it; and that is in some kind of mythic life-and-death struggle with the part of ourselves that loves life and can’t get enough of it. The implication being that we – or at least the modern people that Freud was describing – are the animals that need, in some sense, to be persuaded, to be convinced, that life is worth living. That we are always tempted, as Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), by inertia, by insentience. That it doesn’t, as we say, come naturally, this belief that our lives are worth or more than worth living. For us, life is not a self-evident good. So as the only animals that, at least sometimes, seek and give reasons for being alive, who need to justify life to ourselves, we can’t help but wonder what kind of pleasure reasons, and indeed justifications, are. When we are telling or are being told stories about what matters in life, it is assumed that life itself matters, that life itself is of a value that makes all other values of value. So as a preliminary to this discussion we need to bear in mind a famous remark of Wilde’s. Having listened to Wilde, over dinner, hold forth in his characteristically provocative way about morality, one of the other diners asked impatiently, ‘But, Mr Wilde, don’t you think morality is important?’ To which Wilde replied, ‘Yes, but I don’t think importance is.’ What would be important if life wasn’t? And if life wasn’t important what would importance be?

  The idea that it would have been better not to have been born presents the future as without promise, and the past before the past as desirable. The unknowing and the unknowable is preferred to the apparently all too known. Not the pleasure of there being no pain and no pleasure, and not the desire for more pleasure than pain, but release from all the pleasure–pain calculations, the appropriately phrased nineteenth-century ‘hedonistic calculus’. It is the ultimate wish: the wish not to be done with pleasure and pain, but for the pleasure and pain never to have begun. More ambitious, in some ways, than suicide or a death wish, the desire not to have been born is the desire to have been exempted from all such considerations. It spells the futility of all the questions, all the preoccupations, all the desires, that being alive presents. But only in retrospect, when such a state can only be imagined; and you have to be alive, of course, to imagine it. The precondition for wanting never to have been born is to have been born. It is not a wish for an end before the beginning, but a wish for the abolition of beginnings and endings. It is the imagining of no imagining, a release from the need to be released from anything. Instead of the so-called perfectibility of man – the sense that there can be better future versions of ourselves, more just societies, more equable economic conditions, the hope in anticipation – it promotes the irrelevance of all ameliorative projects. As though every wish, except the wish to have never started wishing, were a fundamental misrecognition of what life was really like.

  So it is also important to note that, to ask the question, whether it would have been better not to have been born, is to have already become, wittingly or unwittingly, an essentialist; or at least to have been tempted by the consolations of essentialism – to become someone who knows, or believes that they know, what life is really like. It is an omniscient position; the position, that is to say, that tragedy exposes as wildly destructive. The person who believes – however absurd such a belief can sound – that it would have been (it is a question of tenses) better not to have been born, cannot, by definition, believe in multiple perspectives, alternative views, or competing aspects. An essentialist is someone who has limited his options by always knowing where he is starting from. ‘The idea that we are all strangers to each other,’ Adrian Poole writes in a review of A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, ‘is no more nor less of a fiction than the idea that we can reach fair understandings.’ The idea that life and the world contain no true satisfaction, or that it would have been better not to have been born, is no more nor less of a fiction than the idea that we can reach other, less dispiriting, descriptions. Because Silenus cannot believe in change for the better he is an essentialist about time, for time is the medium of the endlessly unbearable. He has become the emperor of one idea. But he is also, by definition, even if only in his own mind, the person who has had the wrong parents. If they had really loved him they would never have conceived him, given birth to him, lured him into life. Good parents wouldn’t bring their children to unbearable life. And if they have, they must be sadists, they must be monsters: evil monsters, or naive monsters, or both. Before psychoanalysis, as it were, personalized the issue, this was the stuff of theology.

  So it isn’t odd to wonder whether being alive is a pleasure and what kind of pleasure it is – for oneself, at any given moment, but also for others, for one’s contemporaries, as well as previous generations. Nor indeed to ask whether life is sufficiently pleasurable; pleasurable enough to be going on with, or just something to endure with adequate anaesthetics. But if we were to ask, more abstractly, and more absurdly, whether being alive itself was, or had become, a forbidden or an unforbidden pleasure – a question that Nietzsche was clearly puzzled by – we would have to ask the confounding question: forbidden by whom? Our Creator? Our parents? And, if so, why would God or our parents create creatures that they had forbidden from enjoying their lives? What kind of god, or goddess, what kind of father or mother, would do that? Only a torturer, surely, or someone with an enigmatic sense of the good. And what kind of creatures would we be if we were the p
rogeny of that project, of those figures? These questions – which have a long theological history – are worth broaching because no young child wonders whether it would have been better not to have been born. The question itself, one could say, is a developmental achievement. Indeed, it tends to be in adolescence that versions of this question begin to occur. That is to say, with the emergence of sexuality. It seems worth saying that if it would have been better not to have been born it is also true that everyone has been born only because two people have had sex. It is, in other words, at least from a psychoanalytic point of view, a question about, and a questioning of, both the parents and sexuality. Is sex worth it? Are the consequences of sex worth having, or living with? Clearly, there could be no naturalistic answer to this question because life as organic process neither makes us nor sponsors us in the ordinary sense in which we use those words; it can neither forbid nor unforbid pleasure. It, life, doesn’t care whether we are enjoying ourselves or not; only deities or people can do that; the forbidden and the unforbidden require agents – agents who know the difference between right and wrong, the acceptable and the unacceptable, good and evil. Agents are people for whom pleasure and pain organize intention. People who forbid some things to protect supposedly better things; and for whom the better things are of ultimate, indeed legitimating, value.

  As Nietzsche knew, the question of whether a life unsanctioned by a creation myth, or a genealogy – a story about why having and living and suffering and even reproducing a life was a necessary pleasure – was worth living, was pleasurable enough to be worth the suffering, was up for grabs. If it would have been better not to have been born, survival and reproduction, like all our other so-called aims and ends and values, mean nothing. Silenus’s wisdom solves all the problems of philosophy. Silenus stops Darwin in his tracks; from Schopenhauer’s point of view, Darwin is beside the point (why survive and reproduce if no true satisfaction is forthcoming?). Nietzsche leaves us, really, with only one question, which combines the two traditional questions. ‘What makes a good life?’ and ‘Is it worth it? become ‘Is a good life worth it, whatever our criteria for what makes a life good?’ What can we come up with, what descriptions, if any, can we create that would make the problem Silenus sees in life disappear? Or allow us to see it, as Silenus could never in his own terms see it, as simply one view among many? Could we, for example, have it both ways and realize that it would have been better not to have been born, and enjoy having been born, at the same time perhaps? What would our enjoyment then consist of? Not mastery, then, but the pleasure of what Empson called ‘straddling the contradictions’? Yet we can’t get round the challenge, or easily resist the nihilism, that Nietzsche, through Silenus and Schopenhauer, can’t get round either, and presents us with: if our lives, our selves, our societies, were to be as good as we can make them, would it be worth it, would it be enough? Is life – even the apparently perfect life of the ancient Greeks – worth the suffering, the contingencies and determinisms and choices we are heir to? A life that can be better may never be good enough, may never give us true satisfaction. We may want more from life, more from ourselves and other people, than can be given. And it may be impossible for us to want less. We may be moral perfectionists, or what Stanley Cavell in Cities of Words calls ‘Emersonian perfectionists’, because this question, of what living without what we want turns us into, and whether we can bear this, is unsettlable; as is what, if anything, we can do about it. ‘What I call Emersonian perfectionism,’ Cavell writes,