Joy Cannot Be Grasped - Victor Frankl Against the Pleasure Principle

The Moral Imagination - Michael Matheson Miller

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Joy Cannot Be Grasped

What makes a good life? How can we be happy? Pleasure? Wealth? Honor or Fame? Aristotle argued that all play a role in happiness, but none of these suffice.

• Pleasure is obviously fleeting.

• Wealth is always acquired for the sake of something else – a house, a nice car, influence.

• Honor and fame rely on other people’s opinions and can be taken away.

Only a life of striving for virtue and excellence, Aristotle argued, can actually make you happy.

But is this really correct? Isn’t the pleasure still the real goal? Couldn’t you argue that even the reason for a life of virtue is to get pleasure? Pleasure as the goal of life has an ancient pedigree, and was popularized in the modern period by thinkers like David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and of course Sigmund Freud, who argued that the pleasure principle was the driving force of all our actions.

Podcast on Aristotle and Good Life

Is Pleasure the Goal?

At first glance a life of pleasure makes sense - especially in a materialist “pure bourgeois” epoch like ours. After all, if we are merely material beings like many Silicon Valley celebrities hold; or there’s no free will like Stanford ProfessorRobert Sapolsky “concluded;” if there is no God and no afterlife, then why should we spend time worrying about some ephemeral notion of “good?” Isn’t pleasure enough?

To be fair, many who argue for pleasure don’t simply equate pleasure with eating, drinking, and merriment. Epicurus argued for the importance of friendship and philosophy.

Yet, the lure of physical pleasure is strong and we have an amazing ability to rationalize our actions. The “pleasure principle” can very quickly lead to the use of others, to excess, and licentiousness. There is no doubt that pleasure is a powerful motivator, should we make it the goal? And is it the main motivator as Freud seemed to have argued?

“The Door to Happiness Opens Outward”

In contrast to Freud, the great 20th century psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, author of the brilliant book Man’s Search for Meaning argues that the “pleasure principle” actually works against happiness. In The Doctor and the Soul, Frankl argues that a life in pursuit of pleasure leads to “ethical nihilism” and prevents us from gaining any authentic happiness. Why? Because happiness – and even more so, joy— is a byproduct. It cannot be grasped. It can only be received. The man who strives for happiness as his goal can never find it. Frankl writes:

“only when the emotions work in terms of values can the individual feel pure “joy.” …joy can never be an end it itself…How well Kierkegaard expressed this in his maxim that the door to happiness opens outward.”

The German philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand echoed the same idea. Joy cannot be grasped, it is rather the “superabundant” fruit of a love relationship. It comes from opening oneself up to another person, not for what we can get, but willing the good of the other above our own desires. (This does not mean we are totally disinterested, or that we remove ourselves completely from the equation. This is a false dichotomy that does not due justice to human desire or the mutual reciprocity of a true love relationship which requires vulnerability and donation of self. Joseph Pieper explains this beautifully in About Love )

One of my former professors, Michael Healy, gave an example of this grasping that stuck with me. He told of how, as a young man, he visited a friend who played Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis for him. It was the first time he had ever heard the piece and he was deeply moved by its beauty.

The following week he visited the friend and asked if he could hear the piece again. But this time, instead of opening himself up to the music and listening to it for its own sake, he tried to evoke and cultivate the powerful emotions he felt the first time he heard it. It fell flat. He was trying to use the piece for his own benefit. He was grasping for the deep emotions. But these only came as the “superabundant” fruit of his original, genuine response to the beauty and value of the music itself.

Another simple example of how this works is to think about a great night out with friends filled with good conversation, laughter, and joy. It was so enjoyable that the next weekend you go out again looking forward to a great time, but it does not deliver. In trying to recreate the event, everyone was looking for the feelings of happiness. But those feelings were the fruit of the friendship, not the goal of it.

This can also happen with prayer. Think of a time you had a deep experience in prayer - peace, joy and the deep sense that you were loved by God. The experience can be profound. And it can call us back for more. But if we go into prayer trying to grasp for the feelings, instead of trying commune with God, we end up disappointed and we can give up. But again, we felt the peace and sense of God’s love precisely because we were not focused on ourselves. The joy and peace were a gift. And a gift cannot be grasped. It can only be received.

In some ways this is the curse of a philosophical attitude — too often we tried to analyze life instead of just experiencing it.

Pleasure Undermines Meaning

The search for pleasure doesn’t just fail to deliver. It undermines meaning. In The Doctor and the Soul, Victor Frankl described how many of his patients, looking for the meaning of their individual lives would end up in “ethical nihilism” because they held that the goal of life was pleasure. This long quote by Frankl is worth considering:

The patient will flatly assert that, after all, the whole meaning of life is pleasure. In the course of his arguments he will cite it as an indisputable finding that all human activity is governed by the striving for happiness, that all psychic processes are determined exclusively by the pleasure principle…

Now to our mind, the pleasure principle is an artificial creation of psychology. Pleasure is not the goal of our aspirations, but the consequence of attaining them. Kant long ago pointed this out… Scheler has remarked that pleasure does not loom up before us as the goal of an ethical act. Rather an ethical act carries pleasure on its back.

The theory of the pleasure principle overlooks the intentional quality of all psychic activity. In general men do not want pleasure. They simply want what they want.

Human volition has any number of events, of the most varied sorts, whereas pleasure always takes the same form whether secured by ethical or unethical behavior. Hence it is evident that adopting the pleasure principle would, on the moral plane, lead to a leveling of all potential human aims. It would become impossible to differentiate one action from another since I would have the same purpose in view…

When we set up pleasure as the whole meaning of life we insure that in the final analysis life shall inevitably seem meaningless. Pleasure cannot possibly lend meaning to life. For what is pleasure? A condition. The materialist – and hedonism is generally linked up with materialism – would even say pleasure is nothing but a state of the cells of the brain. And for the sake of inducing such a state, is it worth living, experiencing, suffering, and doing deeds?

Suppose a man condemned to death is asked, a few hours before his execution, to choose the menu for his last meal. He might then reply: is there any sense in the face of death, in enjoying the pleasures of the palate? …

Yet all life is confronted with death, which should cancel out this element of pleasure. Anyone holding this hapless view of life as nothing but a pursuit of pleasure would have to doubt every moment of such a life, if he were to be consistent. He would be in the same frame of mind a certain patient was hospitalized after an attempted suicide. The patient in question described to me the following experience: in order to carry out his plan for suicide he needed to get to an outlying part of the city. The streetcars were no longer running, and he therefore decided to take a cab.

“Then I thought it over…Wondering whether I ought to spend the few marks. Right away I could not help smiling at wanting to save a few marks when I would be dead so soon.”

Life itself teaches most people that “we are not here to enjoy ourselves.” Those who have not yet learned this lesson might be edified by the statistics of a Russian experimental psychologist who showed that the normal man in an average day experiences incomparably more unpleasure sensations than pleasures sensations.

How unsatisfying the pleasure principle is in theory as well in practice is evident from a commonplace experience. If we ask a person why he does not do something that to us seems advisable, and the only “reason” he gives is: “I don’t feel like it: it would give me no pleasure,” we feel that this reply is distinctly unsatisfactory. It is apparent that the reply is insufficient because we can never admit pleasure as an argument for or against the advisability of any action.

Frankl maintains that man’s greatest desires are not simply for a easy life with no struggle or tension, but for “worthy goals” and for a life of meaning and purpose where we forget ourselves in the service of others. Pleasure cannot make us happy. Joy cannot be grasped. It can only be received.

If you have not read Victor Frankl or know about his ideas of Logotherapy - I cannot recommend highly enough his profound and moving book, Man’s Search for Meaning. The first half of the book tells of his experiences in the concentration camps, and the second half summarizes his ideas about logotherapy. I used to teach this book to undergraduates years ago and many would tell me they could not put the book down. This book is a must read and always in my top 10 recommendations.

A shorter. earlier version of this was published on Acton.org