2011年9月22日 星期四

How Pleasure Works - Paul Bloom

The main argument here is that pleasure is deep.  What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses.  Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is.  


A snob is someone who applies an inappropriate standard.  A social snob is someone whose choice of friends is guided by their status, not their deeper qualities.  Koestler tells us about a sexual snob, a young woman from Berlin, in the days before Hitler, who would have sex with any author, male or female, as long as his or her books had sold more than 20,000 copies.  Koestler finds this ridiculous: "the Kama Sutra and the best-seller list were hopelessly mixed up in her mind."  For him, Catherine is an art snob.  She gets pleasure not from the artwork itself, but from knowing who created it.

Ian McEwan takes this universality claim further, proposing that you can find all the themes of the English nineteenth-century novel in the lives of pygmy chimpanzees: "alliances made and broken, individuals rising while others fall, plots hatched, revenge, gratitude, injured pride, successful and unsuccessful courtship, bereavement and mourning."

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