Hedonism – the gloomy philosophy 음울한 쾌락주의

[soso]

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism

 – the gloomy philosophy //which says that Pleasure is the only good.

But we have hardly yet begun [what may be called Hedonics], the science or philosophy of Pleasure. 

* once and for all ; a settled matter, finally 마침내

* 형역인 동격 명사구  the gloomy philosophy //which says that Pleasure is the only good ; Hedonism 수식

                                  the science or philosophy of Pleasure ;  Hedonics 수식

* hardly ; barely or scarcely at all, almost never 거의 하지않다

* hedonics  2. : of, relating to, or characteristic of hedonism or hedonists.

* 목적인 의문사절  [what may be called Hedonics], 

And I submit that [the first step in Hedonics] is [to knock the Jailer down and keep the keys henceforward

in our own possession]. 

* to submit ; to put forward as an opinion or contention

* 보어인 명역 부정사구 to knock the Jailer down and (to) keep~

* 비교 ; 숙어 be+to 부정사 ; ~하기로 되어있다는 주어가 부정사의 동작자이나 보어인 경우는 동작자가 아님

I am to do it. 내가 그걸 하기로 되어있다, My job is to do it. 내 직업이 그걸 하는 것이다/그거 하는 게 내 일이다

* 타동사구 knocked down, transitive verb. 1. : to strike to the ground with or as if with a sharp blow : fell. 쓰러뜨리다

* 타동사구가 목적 양쪽으로 분리됨 knock the Jailer down, 

The jailer is the inner impulse //that urges us to reject simple and seemingly trivial joys /when they are offered us. 

* 보어인 명사구 the inner impulse //that urges us to reject simple and seemingly trivial joys /when~

* 일반동사 5 형식  urges [us] [to reject simple and seemingly trivial joys] 

* 형용사구 seemingly trivial 부+형 ; 눈에 띄게 하찮은/하찮게 보이는 

* 4 형식 능동문 sb offered [us] [simple and seemingly trivial joys]. 

He has dominated our minds /for thirty years or so, 

and specially in the field of literature and literary criticism. 

He is a sham realist. 가짜 사실/현실주의자

* The term ‘sham’ comes from the trickster of the bedding world, meaning “a thing that is not what it is purported to be

He accuses all myth and fantasy and romance of wishful thinking;

[the way to silence him] is [to be more realist than he]

—to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment

and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity //which [the literature //that he calls realistic] omits. 

For [the story //which gives us the experience /most like the experiences of living]

is not necessarily the story //whose events are most like those in a biography or a newspaper.

From Present Concerns

Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays. Copyright © 1986 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form,

we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground.

I know () we have won many a soul /through pleasure.

All the same, it is His invention, not ours.

He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.

[All () we can do] is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures //which our Enemy has produced,

at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.

    [This problem of the pleasure in what Aristotle called an “unimpeded activity”] is one that exercises me very much…

when the work done is a duty, or at least innocent.

    On the one hand, Nature, whether we will or know not, attaches pleasure /to doing as well as we can something () we can

do fairly well: and as it is a clear duty to practise all virtuous activities /until we can do them well

—possess the Habit of doing them—

it is a sort of duty to increase such pleasures.

On the other hand, they are pleasures of a particularly urgent, absorbing sort, very apt to become idols,

and very closely allied to Pride.

I heard it recently said in a Lenten sermon that even self-denial can become a kind of hobby

—and in a way it is true.

https://matiane.wordpress.com/2021/09/17/hedonics-by-c-s-lewis/

Hedonics by C. S. Lewis

There are some pleasures which are almost impossible to account for and very difficult to describe. I have just experienced one of them while travelling by tube from Paddington to Harrow. Whether I can succeed in making it imaginable to you is doubtful; but certainly my only chance of success depends on impressing you, from the outset, with the fact that I am what used to be called a country cousin. Except for a short spell in a London hospital during the last war I have never lived in London. As a result I not only know it badly but also I have never learned to regard it as a quite ordinary place. When, on the return from one of my visits, I plunge underground to reach Paddington, I never know whether I shall strike daylight again at the staircase which comes up under the hotel or at a quite different place out near the end of the departure platforms. “All is fortune” so far as I am concerned; I have to be prepared for either event as I have to be prepared for fog, rain, or sunshine.

But of all London the most complete terra incognita is the suburbs. Swiss Cottage or Maida Vale are to me, if not exactly names like Samarkand or Orgunjé, at any rate names like Winnipeg or Tobolsk. That was the first element in my pleasure. Setting out for Harrow, I was at last going to burrow into that mysterious region which is London and yet wholly unlike the London that country cousins know. I was going to the places from which all the Londoners whom one met in streets and buses really came, and to which they all returned. For central London is, in one deep sense of the word, hardly inhabited. People stay there (there are, I gather, hotels) but few live there. It is the stage; the dressing-rooms, the green room, all the “behind the scenes” world is elsewhere—and that was where I was going.

Perhaps I must labour here to convince you that I am not being ironical. I beg you to believe that all these “vales” and “woods” and “parks” which are so ordinary to Londoners are, to my ear, a kind of incantation. I have never been able to understand why the fact of living in the suburbs should be funny or contemptible. Indeed I have been trying on and off for years to complete a poem which (like so many of my poems) has never got beyond the first two lines—

Who damned suburbia?
“I”, said Superbia.

There is, indeed, only one way in which a Londoner can come to understand my feeling. If it gives him pleasure to see for a moment how London looks to me, then this pleasure—the pleasure of seeing a thing the wrong way round, which makes the magic of all mirrors—is the very same which I get from the mere idea of the suburbs. For to think of them is to think that something to me so unhomely as London is to other people simply home. The whole pattern turns inside out and upside down.

It was early evening when my journey began. The train was full, but not yet uncomfortably full, of people going home. It is important to insist—you will see why in a moment—that I was under no illusion about them. If any one had asked me whether I supposed them to be specially good people or specially happy or specially clever, I should have replied with a perfectly truthful No. I knew quite well that perhaps not ten per cent of the homes they were returning to would be free, even for that one night, from ill temper, jealousy, weariness, sorrow or anxiety, and yet—I could not help it—the clicking of all those garden gates, the opening of all those front doors, the unanalysable home smell in all those little halls, the hanging up of all those hats, came over my imagination with all the caress of a half-remembered bit of music. There is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens. I intend no cheap sneer at one’s own domesticities. The pleasure is, once more, the mirror pleasure—the pleasure of seeing as an outside what is to others an inside, and realizing that you are doing so. Sometimes one plays the game the other way round.

Then other things come in. There was the charm, as we went on, of running out into evening sunlight, but still in a deep gulley—as if the train were swimming in earth instead of either sailing on it like a real train or worming beneath it like a real tube. There was the charm of sudden silence at stations I had never heard of, and where we seemed to stop for a long time. There was the novelty of being in that kind of carriage without a crowd and without artificial light. But I need not try to enumerate all the ingredients. The point is that all these things between them built up for me a degree of happiness which I must not try to assess because, if I did, you would think I was exaggerating.

But wait. “Built up” is the wrong expression‎. They did not actually impose this happiness; they offered it. I was free to take it or not as I chose—like distant music which you need not listen to unless you wish, like a delicious faint wind on your face which you can easily ignore. One was invited to surrender to it. And the odd thing is that something inside me suggested that it would be “sensible” to refuse the invitation; almost that I would be better employed in remembering that I was going to do a job I do not greatly enjoy and that I should have a very tiresome journey back to Oxford. Then I silenced this inward wiseacre. I accepted the invitation—threw myself open to this feathery, impalpable, tingling invitation. The rest of the journey I passed in a state which can be described only as joy.

I record all this not because I suppose that my adventure, simply as mine, is of any general interest, but because I fancy that something of the same sort will have happened to most people. Is it not the fact that the actual quality of life as we live it—the weather of the consciousness from moment to moment—is either much more loosely or else very much more subtly connected than we commonly suppose with what is often called our “real” life? There are, in fact, two lives? In the one come all the things which (if we were eminent people) our biographers would write about, all that we commonly call good and bad fortune and on which we receive congratulations or condolences. But side by side with this, accompanying it all the way like that ghost compartment which we see through the windows of a train at night, there runs something else. We can ignore it if we choose; but it constantly offers to come in. Huge pleasures, never quite expressible in words, sometimes (if we are careless) not even acknowledged or remembered, invade us from that quarter.

Hence the unreasonable happiness which sometimes surprises a man at those very hours which ought, according to all objective rules, to have been most miserable. You will ask me whether it does not cut both ways. Are there not also grim and hideous visitors from that secondary life—inexplicable cloudings when all is going what we call “well”? I think there are; but, to be frank, I have found them far less numerous. One is more often happy than wretched without apparent cause.

If I am right in thinking that others besides myself experience this occasional and unpredicted offer, this invitation into Eden, I expect to be right also in believing that others know the inner wiseacre, the Jailer, who forbids acceptance. This Jailer has all sorts of tricks. When he finds you not worrying in a situation where worry was possible, he tries to convince you that by beginning to worry you can “do something” to avert the danger. Nine times out of ten this turns out on inspection to be bosh. On other days he becomes very moral: he says it is “selfish” or “complacent” of you to be feeling like that—although, at the very moment of his accusation, you may be setting out to render the only service in your power. If he has discovered a certain weak point in you, he will say you are being “adolescent”; to which I always reply that he’s getting terribly middle-aged.

But his favourite line, in these days, is to confuse the issue. He will pretend, if you let him, that the pleasure, say, in other people’s domesticities is based on illusion. He will point out to you at great length (evidence never bothers him) that if you went into any one of those houses you would find every sort of skeleton in every cupboard. But he is only trying to muddle you. The pleasure involves, or need involve, no illusion at all. Distant hills look blue. They still look blue even after you have discovered that this particular beauty disappears when you approach them. The fact that they look blue fifteen miles away is just as much a fact as anything else. If we are to be realists, let us have realism all round. It is a mere brute fact that patches of that boyhood, remembered in one’s forties at the bidding of some sudden smell or sound, give one (in the forties) an almost unbearable pleasure. The one is as good a fact as the other. Nothing would induce me to return to the age of fourteen: but neither would anything induce me to forgo the exquisite Proustian or Wordsworthian moments in which that part of the past sometimes returns to me.

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism—the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good. But we have hardly yet begun what may be called Hedonics, the science or philosophy of Pleasure. And I submit that the first step in Hedonics is to knock the Jailer down and keep the keys henceforward in our own possession. He has dominated our minds for thirty years or so, and specially in the field of literature and literary criticism. He is a sham realist. He accuses all myth and fantasy and romance of wishful thinking: the way to silence him is to be more realist than he—to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that he calls realistic omits. For the story which gives us the experience most like the experiences of living is not necessarily the story whose events are most like those in a biography or a newspaper.