Article Title: Enjoy!
Article Summary
This article deals with ideas of various philosophers about pleasure and enjoyment. It was a common view that enjoyment is a distinctive state of finding an experience pleasurable. But the underlying question of this article is whether the transitory nature of enjoyment undermines its worth or that very short – lived span of enjoyment is an integral part of its importance in human life.
Philosophers who have been supporting pleasure even struggled with the issue of brevity. This school of thought has the view that we should live for the pleasure of the moment and this brevity does not reduce its worth but helps us to gain self-control and contentment. Some others were of the view that lifelong pleasure is unattainable. They emphasised on avoidance of pain. For some philosophers, pleasure was stupidity, as the only form in which actuality exists is the present, thus one should not run to pleasure as it vanishes.
Modern Philosophers are of the view that life consists of only some moments of pleasure. Their theory too depends on self-control; focus on making pain transitory and not expecting too much enjoyment. The author is of the view that pleasure makes a person go beyond the given situation and enjoyment can be creative, bearing the possibility of creating different ways of feeling that disrupt extant modes of selfhood. In our society, we deal with fabricated pleasures, doing things to maintain our ego or status. These do not give us pleasure, we just name it so. Now enjoyment is appropriated into circus of consumption. Enjoyment becomes truly transformative when it questions the egoistic self. She impresses that enjoy is based on our surroundings and then and when individually experienced is contagious .It is in principle available to everyone but its access is unequal.
She concludes that practice of enjoyment means changing the way you feel and who you are not just the way we think.
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Words to Learn from this article:
Ephemeral: lasting for a very short time
Tranquillity: calm
Imperceptibly: so slight, gradual or subtle as not to be perceived
Folly: foolishness
Hedonism: the pursuit of pleasure
Meticulous: showing great attention to detail
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