Of the various fundamental motivations that stir us to action, few are as essential and as wide-ranging as pleasure. For it is this desire to experience joy and reward, happiness and satisfaction, that compels us to achieve our dreams. Without it, life would be a dreary exercise, a plodding monotony that would culminate in nothing more elevating than the completion of ones tasks. It is pleasure that activates our passions and drives our needs. It is pleasure, and its pursuit, that make us more than what we are. And this is a truth championed in Mr. Bloom's brief and troubled exploration.
From food to sex, from competition to gender, pleasure has captured the human mind for thousands of years. It enlivens our days and makes of our nights realms of anticipation and glee into which we all wish to plunge. But what is the essence of pleasure? And how does it manifest? Mr. Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University, draws upon the theory of Essentialism to answer these basic questions. From the whys that underpin why people will pay more for a celebrity's dirty clothes than for their clean ones to why boys and girls distinguish themselves before the broader culture sorts them out, he argues that human pleasure is derived from our understanding of the world, both in its categorization and in its structure, and that everything from why we drink bottled water to why we believe in spiritualism can be traced back to how we perceive and comprehend our world. Peppered in amongst this philosophical journey are fun facts about how humans relate to the world, tidbits that lend focus to the author's broader arguments.
However much How Pleasure Works may be convincing to scientists and philosophers, there can be no doubt that is a disaster as a piece of literature. Mr. Bloom possesses a lively voice that finds little difficulty in switching between hard science and soft anecdote in order to maintain the attention of his readers. In every other respect, though, he fails miserably in both his attempt to entertain and his attempt to built a case for his argument. Large swaths of this all-too-brief excursion into the roots of human pleasure are unimaginatively surrendered to anecdotal science, singular events that will be familiar to anyone that has consumed the news in the last ten years. To anyone that has cracked a book on popular science in that same timeframe, though, they are not only uninspired and repetitive, but deeply suggestive of cherry-picked circumstances deployed here to support what is, in every other respect, the ephemeral notion that human pleasure is connected to a metaphysical view of our world. In this, the reader is left feeling chilled by the absence of a genuine demonstration of the author's own research which is almost nowhere to be seen.
Mr. Bloom is a deeply accomplished individual, a man whose achievements must be respected. But in the wake of the disgrace of characters like Jonah Lehrer, men who not only read sweeping, societal conclusions from scientific data, but take dicey shortcuts to do so, we must be wary of books that use anecdote to draw conclusions about human nature. We must have higher standards. For How Pleasure Works reads like a cheap attempt to earn a little coin from the credulity of those seeking answers, none of which will be found rooted in what is clearly more of a philosophical text than an empirical one. If we do not demand more, this is what we will get, 150 pages of one man's half-hearted attempt to say something profound.
Thoroughly disappointing... (2/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment