The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [47]
But The Stones shove all that in our face and shatter it. And we should thank them for it. The Rolling Stones have played a valuable role involving nothing less than the ongoing development of human self-understanding for the last fifty years. Their music has aided many millions of people in our time to recognize their own capacity to look on life and negotiate their way through it in a quest for the good life. Like ancient Greek ‘theorists,’ the Rolling Stones have shown the way to philosophy, whose ‘theoria’ too arises out of the spirit of music.
I can even claim that The Stones have shown me a way to religion (of a kind). I discovered it as I was travelling across Canada in 1974. It was on a washroom wall in a youth hostel on Prince Edward Island. One evening I was sitting around a campfire with other people staying at the hostel, playing guitars and singing songs. My contribution to the songfest were various songs from The Stones’ catalogue.
After everyone called it a night, I went to the washroom where, totally exhausted, I sat down and looked up to read:
Zen is like the mind which understands The Rolling Stones.
I was enlightened.
8
Epicurean Satisfaction
RUTH TALLMAN
The Rolling Stones have long embodied the quintessential rock’n’roll lifestyle. If asked what moral code The Stones and their music endorse, many people would say that they don’t have any morality, or that they embody an immoral lifestyle.
As it turns out, however, there is an important difference between morality, immorality, and amorality. Morality is the willful and considered adherence to a particular set of actions in the belief that those actions are right, and opposing actions are wrong. Immorality is just the opposite—the willful and considered deviation from a particular set of actions that are believed to be right. Both morality and immorality require that the agent recognize a moral code, and either choose to follow it, or choose to violate it. Amorality, on the other hand, involves acting without consideration for morality at all. Amoral people do not choose to follow or to break a moral code, but simply act with no thought to morality.
Although we tend to see the world in terms of polar opposites—there is moral, and then there is immoral—in reality there are many different, conflicting moral belief systems. If I accept moral code A, and you accept moral code B, it might be that I call some action moral while you call it immoral. Yet we’re both accepting a moral system, and we could each live faithfully according to our accepted system, even though the two systems might prescribe different courses of action.
Why do people choose to live by particular moral codes? Although many of us follow a moral system without giving it much thought, simply because our parents, church, or society tell us to, when people adopt a moral system after thinking about it carefully, their reasons usually boil down to one simple answer: living according to that moral system is good, and will lead to happiness. This answer can help us see why there are so many different moral codes, for there is a great deal of disagreement regarding what kind of behavior leads to happiness. Regardless of how you think happiness is achieved, if you make decisions about how to behave based on those beliefs, you are living according to a moral code.
Though the music of The Rolling Stones may seem either immoral or amoral, an underlying moral system is there, if you know where to look. There’s even a name for it: hedonism. Hedonism is a moral theory that tells us happiness is to be found through the fulfillment of desire and indulgence in pleasures. This might sound like immorality to you—or just a really good time!—but if you make the conscious decision to live in this way so as to achieve happiness, you are following the moral system called hedonism. This should come as good news to some of you, as you can now tell