Pleasures and Pains

I am trying to undersatnd what is at stake in Thomas Aquinas writing about pleasures and pains! I am mid-thesis-writing here and too close to the material to understand what is going on. But I think it is also more than that - in working with pleasures and pains in Aquinas, my naivete and lack of psychological wisdom and depth and pastoral experience bumps up with that of a wise person who has had all these things, nourished by grace and reflection. And I am trying to jam it all in a little over a month (well I have been playing with it before but taking it far too much for granted). Pleasures and pains... Aristotle said somewhere (it has been a long time since I have read him!) that this is what morality consists of (in a way). For diagnostic purposes, I think immediately - if someone is pleased in something it means their whole intensio is directed that way. And it is a good thing I said that because it shows the lack of learning which Aquinas can give me. If this is how I thought, it is no wonder that I have had such a difficult time in my youth. It is not an "all or nothing" with Aquinas - all human beings take pleasure in sensible things, and these are not the rule of morality. I placed a study of 3-6 prior to 1, 2, and 7 because I was working best with the idea of the whole that comes out in question 22. In 22, it is not a case of different degrees and powers having different ranges and intensities - having a more democratic common effort than a military common effort, it is absolutist. Oh, there are many degrees along the way - but the thing itself is conceived of as a unity. The subject is sick, or well, or perfect, not only in peak condition but peak operation of all the parts. And I preferred to see this "ontologically" although it isn't really because I was able thereby to set up a barrier between the "me" that I was subonsciously determined to protect. Not that I thought there was a "me" but that something was there that couldn't allow me to understand. I wonder why - it seems so simple! Why should I be miserable when it is possible to be happy? Why do I default on the side of sin? Just sorrow enters into Aquinas, but there is no specific category of guilt. Freud had a tremendous insight - I wonder if he knew how great it was. Was it sexual repression, though? Or is sex the best and "most known" paradigm - insofar as bodily pleasures are known to us? Is it rather that we strain towards perfection and towards pleasure and being happy and that sex is "more knowable" in that sense. Because "repression" doesn't have to be just about sex - that is one symptom or indicator or example or paradigm.

Probably one of the best parts in Aquinas, speaking from the viewpoint of a humble philosopher, is when he talks about the morality of pleasures. He says something to the effect that people have challenged that pleasures are moral, but he points out that when it comes to doing stuff, in which experience or example are more influential than any doctrine, because pleasures are necessary for human life that when people are caught red-handed taking pleasures it rather embarrases their philosophical position. This is one of the most jolly looking things I've ever seen - although nothing really looks jolly in Latin which is why I get bored and have to squint when I read. Which reminds me I want glasses before I'm not on my dad's plan anymore. But Aquinas was wrong - waht about all us poor stupid little students? What about all of us who read too much without trusting to experience and example? (or HAVE no experience BECAUSE we are reading?) What about the eggheads who form their lives on ideologies, not being in the kind of community - or at least a community that is immediate enough - to translate it into practice? When I look at the lives of all the world around me, so different, I realize how much harder it is for me to artifically make my own way and discover the same things through the painful process of "learning" - too, too slow compared with life. When these things happen, I used to hit myself over the head for my stupidity, but I don't even think it is because I am so particularly slow-witted or acedic. I don't know what to blame for unilateralism - and sometimes I don't know whether to hunt down causes that I may address them or press forward and things get corrected through time - which is the "experience" way. I think the second way is more useful, but experience is also only as good as you learn from it. And there is experience in my life. But this is not to forget things I may have learned along the way. For instance, in Aquinas, it is possible to have sorrow usefully and morally. I shouldn't look to my own life as a model or an affirmation of this, becuase I tend too readily to melancholy backed up by habits which have been created in a concrete history for concrete causes - it is "me" but it is not all "me". But the only way I can get a little objectivity is be as capable of pleasure as I am of sadness. And while some pleasures are "imperfect" in this life still they can be more perefct than many. And I realize that I cut off too many sources of pleasure becuase I really thought that all of me was invested in every pleasure - but this is not the case. One needs to distinguish between pleasure and joy - too. I thought all pleasure was pleasure - even joy I sought to - what I thought was "moderate". Looking back I don't undersatnd how I could have been so deceived. Why I became so suspicious of good feelings at all - I guess it was because I was afraid of being blinded and too secure in myself, but I was blinded in another way. I mistrusted pride and I wanted to keep my mood ready for work, but I had long and ceased to have been capable of working because I was so focused upon it, and this led to disintegration which I refused to recognize but which gnawed at me nonetheless. In prizing all those things which St. Paul recommends, there is room for "drinking, eating," and all "to the glory of God." Even watching Star Wars which I am discovering for the first time (as it is hard to find full-length movies on Youtube). (I am astonished how similar it is to Lord of the Rings). I guess I had a kind of anxiety about art for a while inasmuch as I didn't find it to be enough.
maybe also because I have also been very suggestible to art in the past, as well as to other things. And this suggestibility has worked greatly against me - WHETHER I am multi-valent or whether I am one-sided - either way, I can become completely defragmented and overly docile, or I can become rigid and enclosed to protect. I have had both.
And when the intellectual cores were challenged, when the stories I had spun to keep going on the inside - some became tested and thrown away, but I thought that I would have to keep on continuing. I knew nothing of "wheat" - all became "chaff" until there was nothing left.

So what of all this and passions and pleasures?

But this is the kind of thing that leads a person to reject any sensory or imaginative indulgence - becuase it is too much, and one sees the need to develop another part of oneself. And this can accidentally be good - LIKE SO MANY OTHER PATHS! perhaps this is where the individuality really comes in - when something has worked for me because of my peculiar constitution - and other things work for other people with theirs - which is why we really are different - disparate - the degrees of better and better do not really have room to come in until something like that comes in - but we are so much in the world of change that it really is impossible to judge ourselves or others- perfection for us happens in moments which is why we can be critical of others, or of ourselves, or of ourselves in light of others, because we are at different moments because it is becoming virtuous and harmonious.



but it can be extremely painful living without allowing yourself really to take rest in anything.


And extremely counter-productive in another senes, as one has an anxiety that cannot rest.


But what of theology in all this?



Theology does not come in until the second part - where charity is the friendship of God and man, by which God shares the "divine beatitude" with the human being. And I cannot think this abstracted entirely from charity. I can think it independently from charity which leads me to ask about charity. And this is philosophy. And that's why I wouldn't mind finishing up a doctorate.



So what does it mean to take pleasures in a virtuous manner? It is no longer a question of meaning, but of living nad learning and grace and nature. In a way, one cannot look for answers like this, not because it is hopeless or indefinable in the sense of being unknowable, but that they are more lived than said - the saying is infinitely behind, infinitely slower, infinitely piece-by-piece. And yet it is only in the thinking and the articulating that the reflexivity can happen - that life can be conscious. And sure one can reflect immediately in one's head but then it is only one of a gazillion reflections - this is why "intention" (while not being something absolute, being about a "more" of a person in the midst of the infinities of trivia and important things that cross the mind) signifies something that seems really humble in that it is isolated, but really is not humble absolutely speaking, because the "absolute" for us is being a human being - what we have access to, and Christ has made it possible that this no longer means that being ourselves also means that we are left to ourselves, but it is through being human in the body of Christ that glory happens.