Pleasure and Pain

[sdi]

Many systems—for example, Buddhism and Hermetism—assume as a matter of course that pleasure and pain are opposed extremes, that one cannot exist without the other. This makes not the least sense to me: one may easily have the one and not the other. For example, consider an anhedonic, chronically depressed person: they exhibit a tremendous amount of pain, but have no pleasure (nor, often, even the desire of pleasure) to show for it. The existence of such people seems to me a fatal flaw undermining such systems.

Rather, it seems to me that pleasure and pain are simply independent sensory impulses attached to the various bodies: the physical, the imaginal, etc. This is why, I assume, that the highest beings that humans can interact with—those who have bodies, but are least attached to them, like the higher grades of angels—seem so impassive to us: their sensory experience is minimal, and so they are almost completely unmoved by these impulses.

The soul, I presume, has no such impulse to pleasure or pain, and has only its Eros to guide it.

In the same way, and contra most of the Platonists, I see no meaningful relationship between virtue and pleasure. In many times and places, it is those who are kind and good who are miserable, and the wicked who are happy. The purpose of virtue is not to make one happy, it is to mitigate karma and loosen the bonds which hold a soul to the sensible world [Sentences XXXIV].