St Augustine on the function of pleasure

The best explanation I’ve ever found of what’s wrong with our technological culture comes from a monk who lived 1500 years ago in the deserts of Algeria: St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, his views on what pleasure should be, and a very modern critic of our age of machines.

St Augustine, of course, knew nothing of chemistry or modern factories. But he knew something about sex and its pleasures, and being a Christian bishop, he was rather wary of it.

Sex, the Saint said, has a function, and that function is, in principle, good: it allows us to make children and keep the human race alive. Certainly, God has wanted it that way, and so there could be nothing wrong with that. So where’s the problem with sex?

The problem, Augustine said, is when we separate the function (what he calls “the good”) from the pleasure of an activity. 

For St Augustine, the pleasure inherent in any activity is good as long as the activity is performed because of its intended function. When we try to get the pleasure without the function of the activity, we are violating the order of nature and committing a sin.

It’s not sinful (or in any other way bad) to have sex in order to make children. All the problems with people’s sex lives begin at the moment when we forget what sex is for and start doing it for fun. It’s even worse when we have cheap and effective contraceptives available because then we can have the fun _all the time, _without ever utilising our sexual pleasure the way it was meant to be used: as an incentive to make children and keep our genes alive.

Now, we don’t need to buy into St Augustine’s theologically-motivated aversions. There are much better examples of what he was at, and they are vitally relevant today for our lives, and perhaps for our survival as a species.

If you look back at the development of modern, technological society, what we have done in all areas of life is systematically to separate pleasure from function, and then to suppress the function and take the pleasure alone.

Think of sugar.

St Augustine and the pleasure of sugar

Originally, sugars in fruits are there to make us eat the fruit. Plants stuff their fruits with sugars because then mammals like us will eat them and distribute their seeds. That’s the sugar’s function. And we, on the other hand, have developed those sweetness receptors because we need sugar, and the energy it provides, to survive. That’s the point of having a sense for sweetness: our taste leads us towards those foods …

Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)