a rose is a rose is a rose

A prática da religião católica tem permitido aos seus mais fervorosos devotos e aficionados, ao longo dos tempos, elaborar sobre aquilo que seria o Inferno, esse ‘todo-devorador lago de chamas’.

Contra todas as leis da física e da biologia, a infinita capacidade imaginativa humana descreve, por linhas vis, a dimensão da culpa. Arma para contrariar, ou resfriar a, toda-poderosa, pulsão do prazer.

"Master and Margarita", de Viktor Lazarev

Forbidden pleasures and taking things for granted / Picturing human interactions / on Morality

"When we are most excited and most endangered, we’re likely to feel we’re about to have the realistic experience available to us. In other words, there’s something about something that feels dangerous that’s linked to something that’s forbidden.

So that’s one bit of it.

And I think that’s likely to make us think, not that unforbidden pleasures are so boring, but that they’re just fine. We just don’t think about or talk about them. That’s just what we do.

And then there’s the whole world risk taking and courage and bravery and all that stuff, saying that if you privilege forbidden pleasures, it’s a way of not talking about most of the pleasures we have. Because most of the pleasures most of us have are unforbidden. And again it seems me that (not that everything has to do with childhood), if you look at the origin of this, most of the pleasures of childhood are, actually, unforbidden. And most of our everyday pleasures… How much time can you spend doing unforbidden things? Not that much! So, even though if you were a professional criminal, there’s still going to be a limit. Most of your day is going to be spent sustaining yourself, hopefully, on unforbidden pleasures.

Because it’s arranged like this, for whatever reason, our conversations or our language about pleasure is severely diminished. There’s lots of exciting language about exciting dangerous pleasures, but there is very little language about most of the ordinary pleasures. So, for me, it’s partly to do with imagination. Which is, we’ve been induced to imagine forbidden pleasures much more, because they’re forbidden. What else would we be imagining? Whereas the unforbidden pleasures, like having a cup of coffee… Why would you want to think about that... much? But there could be something very immediately and intensively pleasurable about that, that is kind of set aside or taken for granted. So that’s really THE point. We're being instructed about what to desire, by the forbidders. And I think that's a shame, because it's so limiting."

Adam Phillips



Adam Phillips and Chris Oakley: Unforbidden Pleasures

Other stuff in the interview:

“There may always be things we care about more, than the things we care about most.”

This seems to suggest that we never really know what we want. And if we think we do know what we want, we’re, in some way, in error. So let’s problematize:

I think the point in the sentence is to say: ‘We are, largely out of anxiety and need to survive, we have to be conscious of our pleasures, to some extent’. But we’re likely, I think, to be more unconscious of the pleasures and desires that are more troubling or more conflictual for us. So… we might have a quite rigid sense of what or who we like most. And this is a way of, both, expressing a preference and it’s also a way of narrowing our minds, that it creates a kind of internal security along the lines of ?I know what I want’ (even though I can’t have it) or I know what I like.

So what the sentence holds out for is that there’s an unknown repertoire of things and people we might enjoy that we might be unwilling or we might feel unable to engage in. It’s like a phobic model of the mind. In which you think, ‘I know exactly what I want and if I stick to that I’ll be fine’. And, in fact, what one’s doing is fundamentally narrowing the repertoire. So it’s like not allowing oneself to be as receptive as one might be, not to the whole world, but (because of our education) to be extremely selective in terms of our attention."

The unforbidden pleasure of living obedientely...


"The most obscene form of desire is doing one's duty"
Slavoj Žižek

"The good is that which is and can be argued about".
Rowen Williams

The thing about obedience is that it's a conversation stopper. That it's as though, at a certain point, the conversation stops and people abide by whatever the rules are taken to be.

"The book in a very ordinary and sort of liberal way, is promoting the idea that it's possible to, in conversation with other people, work out which rules you might want to agree to and consent to and be able to give reasons why that is to somebody who asks you, including yourself, and that this could evolve, so that it's ongoing".

[...]

on SUPER EGO:

Freud’s idea of ‘super ego’ is an attempt to secularize a more religious idea of conscience. In other words, if the question is: where do the internal authorities come from? Well, Freud’s saying they don’t come from God. Freud says the super ego does two things: It punishes you and restricts you and it can also sustain your ideals for you. It gives you a picture of how you ought to be, or of your preferred or better self. In a way, Freud wants the super ego to do too much, because it’s very difficult to, actually, talk lucidly about internal authority, because, of course, you can only imagine it on the basis of external authority.
From here

I think conscience, or our super ego, feeds us our worse lines. I think talking about the super ego can feed us our best lines.

"The extent to which self criticism is a refuge... It's a refusal to think about something. It's a refusal to engage, that looks like a profound engagement."

"We can only recognise in ourselves what we are capable of judging [...] The extreme version of this would be, we've judged ourselves before we found out who we are. So that judgement is privileged over experience, in some way. So that, internally, we're very very quick to judge, criticise, assess, evaluate what's going on inside us or between us and other people, at the cost of or instead of experiencing it. What psychoanalysis does is to invite you to suspend your judgement insofar as you're able to. And it does it for a very interesting reason which is: you don't actually know the value of what you said until you say it. But, of course, the internal censorship says, you know exactly the value of what you said before you say it.


Habit is almost always linked to failure and we should try out other habits.

Desire is inconceivable without imagining it's satisfactions. here.

To want more wanting.

[...]

Two versions of a dependent self:

— The happily dependent self thinks, 'How wonderful it is to live in a world where other people have different thoughts and feelings than I do'

— The unhappily dependent self thinks, 'Shit. Why couldn't I have thought of that?'

In the first picture you have an open world full of unknowable thoughts and feelings that other people might have that you don't know about.
In the second version you've got a closed system where 'it's all about me' And it's fundamentally all about my envy and all about my depravation.

So the book is on the side of an openness that is not an over anxious, and therefor, violent narrowing of the mind and other peoples minds.

[...]


The Story of the Traffic Lights

In Holland, on a rather complicated roundabout crossing, the oficial view was that it would be necessary to put traffic lights on this crossing. Because traffic lights actually enable the flow of traffic. And a very interesting traffic engineer decided that it would be much better to take away the traffic lights. Because if we do so, people will have to cooperate with each other to make the traffic flow. And that’s exactly what happened.
So there was much less road rage, much less congestion and the traffic flowed better. One of the things this example illustrates is that, if you take away the oficial rule (the red light), people will be much more attentive to each other. It’s more like coreography and less like prison.

Certain kinds of discipline preclude collaboration between people. In fact, they are an attack on people’s capacity to collaborate.


The ‘one forbidden thing’
There’s the one forbidden thing, and then the ‘hero’ goes and does exactly that thing that was forbidden… And the story of Adam & Eve is an excellent example of the one forbidden thing. And if the hero or the heroin does that one forbidden thing, things actually begin to happen and the world is no longer the way it was before. So it’s a very good thing to do the one forbidden thing… And also, the ‘one’ who forbids, if he has any wisdom at all — and we assume that God is full of wisdom — he knew precisely that his one forbidden thing would be broken

https://youtu.be/z1uHQmCn7JQ?t=2898

[...]


The book is all about morality, because pleasure is about morality. About what we want to believe we should be able to do with each other. Why are people so frightened of each other? It's easy to say why we are frightened of each other, but less easy to say why we might not need to be frightened of each other. And I think one of the ways we intimidate each other is through morality. It doesn't mean to say that we have to get rid of morality but it might mean that we need to get less intimidating forms of morality. That seems to be a good project— here

Pleasure vs Flow

During flow you can't feel anything. You are one with the music.
Time stops. You have intense concentration.

Diz a estatística:
The pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction.
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.
The pursuit of engagement is also very strong.
Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and meaning. Then pleasure is the whipped cream and the cherry.
The sum is greater than the parts.



Positive emotions, alienated from character can lead to emptiness.
People who lead lives in which they pursue as much pleasure as possible, end up with this feeling that they're fidgeting unto death.

Meaning has to do with using your highest strengths in the service of something larger.

Na sua pesquisa, Martin Seligman conclui que o sucesso tem mais a ver com optimismo do que com talento ou motivação."