The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [33]
To judge the pleasures of a Hamlet soliloquy as a somehow higher pleasure than a Keith Richards riff is without foundation if Keith’s riff provides more pleasure than the good old “To be or not to be.” Any notion that some pleasures are higher and others lower must be rooted in prejudice. Hell, even animals experience pleasure and pain and, as Bentham well knew, if right and wrong, good and evil, happiness and unhappiness can be boiled down to pleasure and pain, then the moral community would expand not only to include marginalized members of society, but animals and as well.
Monkey Man
So what about rock’n’roll? Does it really start from the neck down, as Keith said? Or is it a higher pleasure? I think there is something inherently cool about Mill’s disagreement with Bentham on the very possibility of a distinction. Mill was responding to centuries of criticism against a doctrine given perhaps its fullest formulation by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 B.C.). That doctrine is hedonism—the view that what’s ultimately of intrinsic value is pleasure—whose chief twentieth-century proponents were—coincidentally—The Rolling Stones.
Throughout history, hedonism has always been tagged “the doctrine of the swine.” Mill thought this unfair. To downgrade pleasure simply because the swine and other beasts of burpin’ are capable of it is to misunderstand human beings. Many pleasures derive from the exercise of various mental capacities, sensitivities, and capabilities—in a word “faculties”—some of which only humans possess. These are what Mill called the higher faculties, and their use and satisfaction create what Mill called the higher pleasures.
Mill ranked music among the higher pleasures, apparently taking it for granted that the brute beasts were incapable of taking pleasure in music. Mill was writing this at just around the time of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), but the questions evolution raises here have really been addressed only recently. Here are some of the big ones: do the evolutionary continuities between humans and other animals have any bearing at all on the alleged divide between higher and lower pleasures? Is pleasure the missing link between survival value and aesthetic value? Do the pleasures of listening to music rely more on our animal or on our uniquely human faculties? Obviously, as human beings evolved from other primates, we not only developed the capacity for thought, language, and cave painting, but for rock’n’roll itself. In fact, evolution is probably key to understanding what Mill’s supposedly “higher” pleasures are all about.
Only Rock’n’Roll?
Have you ever listened to “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (But I Like It)” through headphones? Do it. This song perfectly illustrates the way that your musical expectations, built up through a lifetime—of being introduced to language through motherese and nursery rhymes, of listening to music (live, on AM radio, then FM, vinyl, cassettes, CDs, mp3s), going to parties and concerts, playing in bands—give rise to the partly shared, partly private emotional experience of listening to The Stones.
There’s a moment about forty-four seconds in when the first chorus and a new rhythm guitar part kick in (I’m hearing it just behind my forehead), which sounds a hell of a lot like a horn section (at least I can imagine it being played by a horn section, and in fact, always thought it had been till I recently listened more carefully). I’m not sure exactly what leads me to expect a horn section there, but there’s something very Memphis about it. Then a strange