The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [48]
Out of Control
Our oldest record of people choosing to live according to a hedonistic moral code dates to the fourth century B.C. The people were called the Cyrenaics because their leader, Aristippus (around 435–356 B.C.), was from a place called Cyrene, in Greece. Although historians believe that the Cyrenaics were the first to systematize the moral code of hedonism, they lived so long ago we no longer have any of their writings. So, we have to rely on a biographer named Diogenes Laertius (third century A.D.), who was kind enough to write a book called Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in which he explains the belief systems of the many philosophers of his time, including Aristippus and the Cyrenaics.
Diogenes tells us that the Cyrenaics’ version of hedonism was the first and most basic form of hedonism. It is sometimes called simple hedonism. The Cyrenaics believed that all pleasures are equally good, differing only to the extent that more intense, frequent, and long-lasting pleasures are better than more subtle, rare, and short pleasures. Basically, for the Cyrenaics, it was the more pleasure the better, and get it any way you can. Does this sound like anyone we know? Let’s take a look at a few lyrical examples. “Shake Your Hips,” a song from Exile on Main St., urges us to focus on moving our bodies in pleasant ways. “Don’t move your head / Don’t move your hands / Don’t move your lips / Just shake your hips / Do the hip shake, babe.” The hips are the crux of many of life’s pleasures. Of course, rock’n’roll was always about more than just the pleasures of dance form, and the pleasure from one gyration often hopes to lead to another. The lives of the Stones seems to make that clear.
In addition to just pursuing pleasure, we see an example of a “no holds barred” attitude to pleasure conveyed in the song, “Brown Sugar,” from Sticky Fingers. Here, rough, bondage and discipline-type sex with sixteen-year-old black girls is endorsed. “Ah, brown sugar, how come you taste so good? / Ah, brown sugar, just like a young girl should.” “Out of Control” from the 1998 album, Bridges to Babylon, sends a dual message : not only is it okay to pursue pleasure with untamed abandon, it’s better to grab all the pleasure you can in the moment. There is an urgency, a sense that the best pleasures are fleeting and so must be seized before they are gone, that is clear example of Cyrenaic hedonism. “Now I’m out / Oh out of control / Now I’m out / Oh out of control /Oh help me now / In the hotel I’m excited / By the smile on her face.”
The Stones’ emphasis on bodily pleasures—sex and drugs—is in keeping with the Cyrenaic views on pleasure. What’s more, the Cyrenaics tell us that, “pleasure is a good, even if it arises from the most unbecoming causes … for even if an action be ever so absurd, still the pleasure which arises out of it is desirable, and a good.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers). This type of thinking serves to justify the sorts of limit-pushing behavior described in “Brown Sugar,” as well as “Rip This Joint,” from Exile. “Mama says yes, Papa says no /Make up you mind ’cause I gotta go / Gonna raise hell at the Union Hall / Drive myself right over the wall.”
Cyrenaic hedonism is about attaining particular instances of pleasure. Diogenes Laertius explains:
Happiness is a state consisting of a number of particular pleasures, among which, those which are past, and those which are future, are both enumerated. And they consider that particular pleasure is desirable for its own sake; but that happiness is desirable not for its own sake, but for that of the particular pleasure. (Lives of Eminent Philosophers)
Rather than believing that we seek pleasure in order to be happy, the Cyrenaics think that happiness simply is a life of successive pleasures. They also believe that pleasures of the flesh will always trump pleasures of the mind.