Principle Two

Do not seek pleasure for its own sake. (Miyamoto, Musashi)

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, a dying Elder Zosima describes to novice Alyosha a sickness plaguing the modern soul. He describes it as the desire for more desires, like a hunger which feeds on itself, emptying instead of filling, insatiable.

Dostoyevsky’s description could be likened to a bottomless pit, a Hell on earth. This is not a stretch if one is familiar with the maxims of the Taoists and Buddhists: all desire is suffering; therefore, to desire more desires is to spiral into ever increasing suffering.

The image of a whirlpool works, too. The ancient Chinese sages associate water and lakes with dangerous, pleasurable temptations. When one drinks for the sake of drinking and not to quench is thirst, he has no reason to stop—no higher principle. He becomes inundated and drowns in the very pleasure in which he was so joyously engaging.

This is the folly Musashi is warning against, the conscious pursuit of pleasure for the sake of indulgence in the moment of consumption or engagement. There are many particular components to contemplate.

Firstly, he says “Do not seek,” seeking meaning the active intention to attain. This is a matter of attention. The warning might be rendered, “Do not aim,” and communicate even more of its meaning. Why? Because one aims at his end goal. Whether or not one intends or desires it to be the case, what one seeks becomes what he holds as highest and most worthy of emulation. It becomes an end in itself, which opens the jaws of Hell in pleasure’s case.

Pleasure is the satiation of an unfulfilled desire. Satiation is the fulfilling of desire. Here lies the contradiction which initiates the recursive spiral into nihilistic desperation. One cannot remain continually in a state of pleasure, because to do so would mean the satiation of the desires required for pleasure in the first place. The only solution is desensitization. By desiring more, the individual does not succumb to the inevitable paralytic contentment (which the soul abhors so much as to prefer destruction, as Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals, “Man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all”) The mechanism is this: human beings require a motivation to act, and not acting results in suffering and death; gratified desires eliminate motivation, while self-propagating unfulfilled desires supply endless motivation to end the pain that is their very existence. And this cancerous pattern is named “for its own sake.”

It should be noted, though, that seeking is not itself a sin. In order to get anywhere in life, one must first consciously aim, or else one is—by definition—lost. Likewise, pleasure it not an intrinsic moral evil. When pleasure visits, it is a gift that should be cherished. However, it is a necessarily finite experience and insignificant when juxtaposed against the infinite, ineffable Way. And it is the Way, the Path, the Road and Great Course which is analogous to the theistic God and the secular objectively reality. Do not seek pleasure in accordance with seeking pleasure, for that dialectic can lead only to annihilation. Instead, seek what is highest, and take pleasure in the pursuit of that highest of ends. Then pleasure won’t be an enemy; it will, instead, become a friend.

Miyamoto, Musashi. Dokkodo, translator unknown, 1645.