1.
Марина Антропова
THE FIRST AND SIMPLEST PLEASURE IS THE PLEASURE OF OUR
SENSES
The
five senses performing a cognitive function are nothing more than our keys to
the world of colour, sound, smell, form, and taste. Try to imagine for a moment
that you have been deprived of just one of them. I believe there is no such a
combination of four remaining senses that could fully satisfy the perceptive
needs of a human being. Lack of all five ones at the same time would make a
person and the surrounding world closed to each other. They would be extremely
far from each other. One can endlessly philosophize about colossal importance
and everlasting value of each of the five, but this would be the subject of
another work. Whereas in the course of this piece of writing, I am paying
attention to that particular kind of pleasure which is contained in the very
interaction with reality through channels of the senses.
Habits,
habits! Unfortunately human beings are prone to inevitably get accustomed to
any frequent events. This thought makes me deeply upset. This fact is the
main problem which hinders a person from taking pleasure in having the very opportunity
of sensation and – to an even greater degree – in the process of
sensation. In order to reveal what is hidden beyond the veil of routine, we
will try to divorce simple things available at a moment's notice from the chain
of similar things. This will make their beauty visible.
If
we conducted an experiential research, I would propose such an experiment: to
restrict for a time testees’ sight and hearing, and dim their smell, taste and
touch as far as possible. One can easily suppose that after a while our guinea
pigs would be parched with thirst for feeling, perceiving. As a consequence, there
is almost 100% probability that the test subjects will find genuine pleasure in
returning to the initial state. I wonder how the participants would arrange
their perceptional possibilities they had been deprived of during the
experiment after they got them back, what such value hierarchy will be like. If
a test subject gets back only one sense (which he himself has defined as the
most important one), what will his reaction be like? How will the presence of
only one of the five senses tell upon the absence of the rest?
Let
me consider one more aspect of the five senses’ pleasure. There is different
kind of pleasure besides the basic pleasure contained in satisfaction of the
perceptive needs. For each of us ‘pleasure’ means incredibly different things.
Every person has his own unique framework of pleasure. Someone is crazy
about a scene of stellar sky. Someone is bewitched by eternal current of the
river. Someone is ready to give away everything he has to listen to the sound
of a breaking wave in a silent summer night. Someone goes in field to listen to
a ringing crickets’ chorus. Someone loves buzzing noise of the city. Someone
abandons his regular life in favour of living where silence can be heard.
We
like different sounds, have different tastes, and different smells make us
close our eyes dreamily. Touching one and the same thing, everyone regards it
according to his own bouquet of sensations. We look at the same things, but
sometimes see them in completely different ways. And despite all these
differences and varieties, we all concur in the fact that sight, hearing,
smell, touch and taste certainly are the most powerful
source of pleasure. Thus the crucial point is not to allow routine and habit
to deprive us of it.
Оставьте свой комментарий
Авторизуйтесь, чтобы задавать вопросы.