Pornosophy: The Problem With Hedonism

Epicurus (photo: Interstate295)

The problem with hedonism is that it's so self serving. If you're constantly thinking about how you can maximize your pleasures there's no time for anyone or thing that isn’t an immediate source of pleasure. Here's a quote from a new Showtime series called Submission, which has an S&M theme that's obviously trying to capitalize on the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey. “sometimes losing control has it’s own kind of power.” But though "submission" in an S&M context camouflages itself as a kind of surrender of the self, it's merely a technique of creating sexual excitement and ultimately of maximizing the intensity of the orgasm. Though such surrender  camouflages as a spiritual pursuit, it's totally egocentric. Epicurus is a philosopher whose name is associated with pleasure by virtue of the fact that epicureans, or would be followers of the dictates of Epicurus might be devoted to the cultivation of taste—at least in so far as food is concerned. But Epicurus was a proponent of moderation and the pleasure he proslyetized for was characterized by the diminution of pain. It was not based on a raging need to increasingly gratify urges, but a more even-handed ability to define sensibility, something which is ultimately a social phenomenon in which other peoples’ needs and desires are taken into consideration. But let's employ what might be called a "last supper test," something like one of those conundrums in ethics, in which, in this case, the condemned prisoner gets anything he wants. Imagine yourself hypothetically occupying your own death row. It’s your last day on earth and you sate your desires for wine, women (or men), song and of course glazed donuts. Every orifice is stuffed. Unfettered by the fear of consequences you have satisfied all your desires. But are you happy?

Diasporic Dining XXXVII : La Grand Bouffe

We always associate Epicurus with pleasure, but he really believed in moderation and considered pleasure to reside in the diminution of pain. So what would Epicurus have thought about the all you can eat buffets that are so popular with Americans. The idea of a buffet is that you don’t have to order one thing. Buffet applies not only to food, but to love. Open marriage and swapping are the buffet idea applied to sexuality. Why should you have sex with only one person? Why must fidelity be considered a requisite of true love? There’s the old expression, "you can read the menu but you don’t have to order." But why not order? That in effect is what you do when you go to a buffet and simply move through successions of chafing dishes, one seemingly more sumptuous than the other. Then there are the old-fashioned midnight buffets which used to be a requisite of most cruises, with their groaning boards of meats and roasts. The buffet absolves you from having to make a choice, but there’s also something lost in the process and it relates back to free love. At a certain point during the buffet you begin to get stuffed, one food obliterates the next. Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi were the stars of a move called La grand bouffe in which a group of aristocrats make a pact to have group sex and eat themselves to death. La Grand Bouffe was a buffet in extremis and what it did was to kill people as well as taste. Say you can have any woman or man you desire and you become a licensed serial adulterer. You may satisfy all your fantasies. But what happens when everything starts to taste the same?

Save Your Appetite!

“VM" is Ventromedial Nucleus 

If you are philanthropically inclined and looking for a cause to become involved with take a look at The Satiety Center. Located at the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, The Satiety Center is instrumental in regulating appetite. While The Satiety Center has many functions, we all know that the desire for sex and food rank high on the list and a craving for either can lead to spurts in irrational activities such a promiscuity and gluttony. Epicurus believed that pleasure was based on the amelioration of discomfort and centuries later Freud would controversially propose that the pleasure principle and the need to gratify desire were drives that even infants experienced. Located on a prime piece of cortical real estate with an excellent view of the the upper brain, The Satiety Center is mandated with attending to all of these activities and is open 24/7 for business. Whether it’s an endorphin flood or a traffic jam on a neurogenic pathway, The Satiety Center is always there. It’s your biogenic surge protector when there's increased activity in the brain, allowing serotonin reuptake inhibition when necessary for the prevention of burn outs and break downs. For more information about The Satiety Center please fill up on your favorite sweets or soft drinks or take a gander at porn loop. If you take Cialis and  "get an erection lasting more than 4 hours seek immediate medical help to avoid long-term injury.”

The Lunchbox

There’s an expression “make the first bite the feast” which could easily be applied to Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox. The consummation of passion may be far from the director’s game plan. However, The Lunchbox is a movie in which every little bit of experience matters. Though there's something contrived about in the story of Saajen Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), the dour civil servant and widower who mistakenly receives the lovingly prepared dishes of Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a housewife who is trying to win the heart of her indifferent husband Rajeev (Nakul Vaid), the canvas is large. The appeal to the senses becomes the conduit of love and it’s through the olfactory sense that Ila, in a wonderfully crafted moment, discovers her husband’s infidelity--in the course of smelling a shirt. The Lunchbox is truly an Epicurean movie, if we understand that pleasure for Epicurus was predicated, not on gluttony, but a modulated gratification ultimately aimed at alleviating pain. If there are epistolary novels, Batra has created an epistolary movie, as his two love interests only meet each other through letters. The off-camera theme also takes an auditory form in the relationship between Ila and her Aunt (Bharati Achrekar), a Mumbai Molly Picon, who screams advice and recipes out of an upstairs window. These absented characters might be looked at as a cat and mouse game, but the missed connections are precisely what infuses the movie’s sights, sounds and smells with so much significance. “The wrong train will sometimes get you to the right station,” is one of the movie's mantras and it’s a perfect antidote to the bustling version of modern Indian life that threatens to engulf the humanity of Batra’s characters. “There are many people and everyone wants what the other has,” Saajen writes at one point. The Lunchbox is almost anachronistic in its slow moving cultivation of sensibility, but it lets you smell the roses.

It’s Not a Rehearsal

Edwin Booth’s Hamlet

“It’s not a rehearsal” has become a common saw, the laymen’s carpe diem, a term that’s become as popular as a piece of argot as “sounds like a plan.” We’re all familiar with the expression which is a barely disguised jeremiad urging us to live in the now, to live “a day at a time,” so as not to hold back from acting in the present, in the name of some unsung destiny. But actually the expression is a spiritual black hole. The underlying idea is if you’re going to die, you’d better live it up. The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa understood the ambiguity of intention in his movie Ikiru which translates as “to live.” Learning that he is dying of incurable cancer, his main character Watanabe, at first has his Faustian Walpurgisnacht in which he indulges the pleasures he’s deprived himself          of during his life as a bureaucrat. But indulgence is ultimately unfulfilling and the only way he can find happiness turns out to be through helping others (in his case through the creation of a park). Even Epicurus, a philosopher, whose name is associated with the senses, argued for the golden mean. So looking a life under the aspect of impending death, which is, according to Heidegger the only way to have an “authentic existence,” the individual is actually faced with a choice. If he or she is to live every day as his last, then he has to decide if his or her last day on earth, his or her last supper, as it were, will be an occasion to grab for as much as much material pleasure as he or she can get or an occasion to do something for others. What will characterize the final act of our lives? Gluttony, generosity or something in between?