Pleasure and pain are emotionalized sensations accompanying
various physical and mental states. The psychological truth about
their "pursuit" is simply that we "pursue" certain objects or
conditions because of their immediate attractiveness or "attractive
terribleness," and that the accompanying pleasure becomes first a
kind of orchestral background to our pursuit; and then, later,
becomes, by the action of the law of association, part and parcel of
the thing's attractiveness or "attractive terribleness." Thus what
really occurs is precisely opposite to the hedonist's contention. For
the thing "pursued" swallows up and appropriates to itself the
pleasure and pain of the pursuit; and, by the law of association,
becomes more vividly, even than at the start the motive force
which lures us.
The most ghastly, the most obscene, the most intolerable thing in
the world is when the pain of pure sensation, the pain of the body,
is accentuated to such a pitch of atrocious suffering that the other
attributes of the soul are annihilated; and the humanity of the
person thus suffering is temporarily destroyed; so that what "lives"
at such a moment is not a person at all but an incarnate pain.
That this ultimate ghastliness, this dehumanization by pain, can
only occur where the aboriginal malice of the soul has previously
weakened the soul's independent life, is proved by the fact that the
most atrocious tortures have been successfully endured, even unto
the point of death, by such as have been martyrs for an idea. And
the reason of this endurance, the reason why, in the case of such
martyrizing, the victim has been able to resist dehumanization is
found in the fact that the soul's creative energy or the power of
love has been so great that it has been able to assert its
independence of bodily torment, even to the last moment of
human identity.
Since pain and pleasure, although so often the direct evocation of
the soul's attribute of bodily sensation, are always composed of the
primordial "stuff" of emotion; and since emotion is a projection of
the soul independently of the body, it is natural that the soul
should, in the reverse manner, colour its emotion with the memory
of sensation. Thus it follows that although it is possible for the
soul, when its emotional feeling is outraged or excited, to
experience pain or pleasure apart from sensation, there is usually
present in such an emotional pain or pleasure a residual element of
sensation; for the soul is not a thing which simply "possesses"
certain functions; but a thing which is present in some degree or
other in all its various aspects of energy.
What we call "memory" is nothing more than the plastic consciousness
of personal identity and continuity. And when once the pain
or pleasure of a bodily sensation has been lodged in the
soul, that pain or pleasure becomes an integral portion of the soul's
life, to be worked upon and appropriated for good or evil by the
soul's intrinsic duality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account