Pleasure...

An examination of a neglected facet of stoicism.

A blurry 4:50AM substack post.

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Every time you go run, pleasure is a goal. It doesn’t have to be the only one, but should be a major one. Every part of the lead-up to the run is part of the pleasure: the scheduling, waiting, dressing, driving or walking, stretching or warming up. All pleasure. All redolent of self-indulgence.

And it doesn’t stop there. After running, pleasure emanates from having run. The tingling muscles and the glowing skin: all pleasure. The regenerated energy and interest in life: complete pleasure. And after years and years of doing this: the mind and body that responds immediately to pleasure, even as society might start to tell you that you’re too old or too busy or too important to enjoy yourself.

I recently couldn’t sleep and posted the above photo of myself at 4:50 am, waiting for dawn and for my run. WolfepakMom commented “Why wait?!” And I considered it. Why was I waiting, aside from the fact that I’m on vacation and running in a place I don’t know with no streetlights? There was, after all, no traffic, and mostly enough ambient light to see by.

I went back and forth for a while, because even though this is social media, I’m a real person, and I take my responses to real people seriously.

I finally realized: I was waiting for the sheer pleasure of indulging my preference for waiting. I wanted to both anticipate my run and to run in the rosy-fingered dawn. I was having fun. I was experiencing pleasure.

This exchange made me think more broadly about the entire topic. What is pleasure, after all? How do you get it? How do you get it and be stoic?

So first, what is pleasure? Here are two modern takes:

“what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do it.” — Renton, Trainspotting

“the future no longer feels concrete enough to sacrifice for…pleasure today starts outperforming security tomorrow.” — soy.vilnius, “nobody believes in later anymore” on substack

Many ancients would agree with the above descriptions. The Epicureans, the Hedonists, and the entire cult of Dionysus, found pleasure in the immediate, the visceral. But they go even farther: these philosophers find pleasure to only exist in pairing with destruction: the destruction of the future by the indulgence of the present.

The trouble is, that doesn’t sound like pleasure.

If you know you’re destroying yourself and making all your tomorrows as fun as a cardboard box in a heavy rain, how can you have a good time? That sounds like a submission to power, or a relinquishment of power, or both at the same time. And power is not pleasure. So these philosophers are not experiencing and examining pleasure; they are experiencing and examining power. Not the quest they think they’re on.

In regards to running, the visceral and immediate parts of pleasure sounds right: the power part sounds wrong. In running, your own power produces more of your own power. As Harry Styles* recently said in Runners World, he considers running a “conversation with himself”. Styles, a powerful person, uses running as a dialogue: power conversing with power. Internal and self-propelled. There are no externalities like drugs or audience, quite the opposite.

So if pleasure as described by the hedonists and epicureans and capitalists is not pleasure at all but is just the interplay with power, what is pleasure, and how do you get it?

The ancient Stoics didn’t have good answers to this. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, etc, wrote about pleasure as part of their meditations on moderation, virtue, and obligation, which seems cowardly in that it does not examine the issue itself. They didn’t deny pleasure’s importance to human existence, which is crucial to note, but they were intensely wary of it, which gained them a millenias-long reputation as dour prigs.

In this, they left unaswered a substantial philosophical problem set. Meaning it is ours to answer.

Here are some assumptions:

1. Pleasure is necessary to the human experience.

2. To be complete, pleasure must be immoderate, immersive, visceral, and provide a period of anticipation and one of post-pleasure enjoyment.

3. Pleasure taken in moderation loses half its fun. If you know you’re going to hold back, you’re not going to indulge.

4. Pleasure based on power, either relinquished or won, is not pleasure. It is interplay between you and the powerful or less powerful object (drugs, audience, money—whatever). In this way, we ban the hedonists’ definition of pleasure.

5. The complete denial of pleasure is cowardly and puritanical, and cowards or big-or-small-P puritans live awful lives.

Pleasure, therefore, occupies a very specific, narrow, desirable space in our lives. It is not a place to live, but it is a place to go regularly. It is an island within ourselves, because pleasure cannot interact with power and power is inherent to almost all interactions.

That is, I conclude, why running is pleasurable. It is not something you can do all the time, but it is something you can do regularly. It provides anticipatory and post-event enjoyment. It denies an interplay with power. Its practice is immoderate, immersive, and visceral, even while its overall effects are beneficial.

Running, therefore, is one way to achieve pleasure. And pleasure is human. Therefore, pleasure is stoic, because stoics are humanists. So go enjoy yourselves. Go experience pleasure. Go run.

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*https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a70499412/harry-styles-marathon-haruki-murakami/