Looking Beyond Pleasure

Do we do things because they feel good? How unsatisfying would that be?

Morning routines abound. I want to raise some questions about what their value lies in.

I begin my day by making a bowl of tea. I find the prescribed movements of the tea ceremony, the sense in which one must be constantly aware of what he is doing (and yet, at the same time, also not too stiff, too aware) intriguing and exciting.

c. Paul Cézanne - Link.

But the point of my writing here is not meant to be so limited in scope. Some begin with a silent cup of coffee, others with proper meditation, and others with a morning walk. The questions I raise here will apply to them all.

Things like these benefit us in at least two ways. The first comes easily, but the second doesn't. I think it is worth spending some time thinking about why. It brings out a special way in which we become confused. We look for the value or benefits behind things, and can be tempted to forego them completely. Then we feel as if we have lost something. But we do not need to think like this.

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But first let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. One benefit of such rituals is that they provide a sort of structure to our day.

The repetition of these practices creates a sort of boundary. When we begin, when we boil water or take our first step out the door, the fact that it is a new day becomes all the more apparent.

People feel all sorts of benefits from this. Often, you'll hear that it allows one to leave the problems, anxieties, and thoughts of the evening and day prior behind oneself. The new day is welcomed in!

But this is a secondary benefit. The main appeal of such rituals is not a therapeutic effect, or an impact they have on our understanding of time, but the value that they impart, then and there, through our very engagement with them. To understand them merely as ways of beckoning in the day is to do them a disservice.

In my case, making a bowl of tea leaves me with an increased feeling of awareness, of alertness, but also a calm appreciation that follows me through the morning.

Seems simple enough. Perhaps it is this kind of value that we are looking for. Such rituals leave us feeling good. And they feel good to do. Hm.

But that is still a description of their 'effects,' their 'consequences.' The picture is still incomplete; there is also a real value that I come into contact with in the midst of making my tea.

Worse, it threatens to deprive such rituals of the sense in which they are special. They may make us feel good, but so do many other things. And so we may feel that there is nothing about the rituals themselves that is special, but that their value lies beyond them.

We are looking for something specific. A value not of the form:

- 'This feels good'

Or

- 'This is calming'

Or

- 'This has such-and-such benefit'

Rather, it will be something different in kind.

I am tempted to draw an analogy to writing, to the act of putting into words a feeling that one has, for a time, been unable to express. Yes, doing so is pleasurable, but we would not understand the value of such an act as merely a good feeling. Even if a good feeling is involved, it is a good feeling in response to something. A growth in our self-knowledge, maybe. And so yes, it does feel good, but to leave it at that is to underdescribe things. It feels good because we are doing something of serious, of human importance: we are putting a feeling into words, we are, so to speak, 'knowing ourselves.'

And I do not think this is true only in my case. I imagine that the person who takes morning walks, who begins the day by journaling, by reading a chapter of a book -- they do not do such things only because they are pleasurable. Or, if they do, it is a special kind of pleasure. It is exalted, to be revered -- certainly more so than other things we do for pleasure: we watch videos, eat yummy food.

So what makes these things special? -- Maybe we connect with a deeper form of value? Something metaphysical, perhaps?

---

I want to pause for a moment. So far, I have been asking what the value of these kinds of rituals consists in. An initial answer was their consequences, how they make us feel. But I did not want that to be the answer, because I felt it cheapened the things themselves.

I think, specifically, I did not like that I was inclined to appeal to something outside of our rituals -- outside or beyond tea, a morning run, a journal entry -- to justify them. Otherwise, I worried that they would be drained, robbed of everything that made them special, and turned into a species of something else. Just another pleasure, maybe. (How ironic! We are looking for something beyond them and thus not them to explain why they, themselves are uniquely special!)

But even this project was doomed to fail. We often think of pleasure as one thing: a positive feeling, across the board. The pleasure we get from scrolling on TikTok is one instance of it, the pleasure of a good joke another, of a good piece of food, of a pretty sunset, of art, of literature. And, of course, of sex, drugs, or rock and roll. And so even looking beyond the rituals failed to make them special.

We might at this point despair. Perhaps our rituals are not special, perhaps they are really just the same kinds of things as sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

But maybe it is precisely such a picture -- one of pleasure as a single, unified, thing, that we ought to reject. The idea that all pleasures are of the same kind. Maybe they are not. And on reflection, this is obvious! The good feeling I have while making tea is certainly different from the one someone might have after a run, or reading a book. And all of these are different from the sorts of pleasure involved in taking a drug (We do not have to do anything to take pleasure in a drug -- but reading a book is more active; we are more involved in enjoying it).¹

And I wonder whether this last word -- enjoying -- might clear up a great deal of our confusion. We enjoy different things differently. We savor a walk in quite a different way than as we might savor a sunset, or a good book, or a cup of tea.

Enjoying and savoring, unlike pleasure, imply not only feelings, but a sort of activity. And it is for that reason, I think, that they capture quite well the sense in which our morning rituals are unique. We are active with respect to them; we do not simply receive their benefits, the good feelings that come from them, but we enjoy them, we savor our walks, our tea, our runs. And that is what makes them special.

So we were mistaken, in a way, to try to look for something behind such rituals that they connected us with. They are enough themselves!

1. I believe I have been inspired in this conclusion by Contours of Agency, p. 209.