The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [36]
Satisfaction
The neurorockology of pleasure is in its infancy, but based on our current best understanding, can we say with any confidence whether (listening to) rock’n’roll is a higher or lower pleasure? Although we’ve looked at it scientifically, this is more fundamentally a philosophical question. At the core of the higher-lower debate there is an ambiguity about the terms “higher” and “lower” that, once resolved, may make the debate … well, perhaps not fade away but at least reach a rapprochement. Look at it this way: Keith’s cause is to preserve for rock’n’roll its connection with sex and, presumably, the other animal pleasures, that make it a distinctive musical form.
When placed in the service of “higher causes” such as “No Nukes” and “Rock Against Racism,” rock’n’roll ceases to be valued solely for its intrinsic, visceral pleasures, but instead as a means to achieving some “higher” cause. The hedonist and purist in Richards seem to bristle at this distortion. Conceiving of “higher” and “lower” as polar opposites in a scale of moral, social, or even religious values, Richards seems to be saying that rock’n’roll can do just fine without dragging any of that into it, thank you very much.
Bentham thought that pleasure-pain could serve as a common currency for what’s of intrinsic value (or disvalue) across all human beings and even other animal species. Ranking the pleasures of the aristocracy or the industrialists as “higher” than those of artisans, farmers, and factory workers, or the pleasures of animals as “lower” than those of humans reflected, as far as Bentham was concerned, nothing other than unjustified societal prejudices. So from a moral point of view, we can think of pleasure and pain as the great levelers, collapsing any distinction between “high” and “low.”
Mill resisted this. By introducing the distinction between pleasures high and low, Mill sought to rescue hedonism from its reputation as the “doctrine of the swine.” Higher pleasures rely on “higher” faculties, such as the ability to think abstractly, to reflect on our own psychological states (including states of pleasure and pain), and to contextualize our pleasures and pains. Although Mill argued that higher pleasures were preferable to lower pleasures (according to any competent judge who had experienced both kinds), “higher” and “lower” as he used them mark a neurobiological or perhaps an evolutionary distinction that is based on the distinctive cognitive capacities of humans (as opposed to swine and other animals). Mill’s insistence on the importance of the higher pleasures, as Martha Nussbaum suggested in her article “Mill between Aristotle and Bentham,”18 may simply reflect his hard-won belief that greater levels of pleasure—and satisfaction—would come to those who flourished most fully and tasted the many different pleasures the world offered.
If Mill, Bentham, and Richards were to spend the night together hashing this all out (with Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg as competent judges), neurorockology would shine a light on the source of the disagreement, and, I think, could help contribute to its resolution to the satisfaction of all involved. For Keith rock’n’roll exploits (albeit in an open G tuning) the same neurochemical pathways as life’s four F’s and thus takes its place among the animal pleasures. Surely, Bentham