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Something that has held my thoughts for a long time is the correlation between good and evil, love and hate, pleasure and pain. It seems that to know one, we must know the other. As Alexander Dumas so clearly relates in The Count of Monte Cristo, those who have known the greatest pain can also most clearly appreciate happiness. If this is so, then must we willingly seek pain in order to better appreciate pleasure? And might this pain, or more precisely the knowledge that the pain will bring greater future pleasure, become a sort of pleasure in itself? The difficulty here is that it seems quite apparenty that persons who seek to hurt themselves willingly are often considered mentally deranged. But is that illness the fact that they hurt themselves for fun, or the fact that they are pursuing pleasure in the first place?
Clearly, there is a quandry, a basic understanding of the nature of reality as it relates to these experiences that is missing from our common thought. However, such an understanding might play a significant role in how we go about our lives in the face of tragedy and suffering. Perhaps we frustrate our own pleasure by seek it at the expense of pain. And maybe we have created a society where persons must do extreme things for fun by trying to hard to remove from our lives the very pain that could render our lives meaningful.
Does your brain hurt yet?
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