Come Back to Pleasure Richard Shu s terman Despite his image as the sober genius of high modernism, T. S. Eliot often spoke of art as essentially amusement. The poet, he claimed, "would like to be something of a popu- lar entertainer .. . would like to convey the pleasures of poetry ... . As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game." Such deflationary remarks are striking in their contrast to the lofty claims made for art since romanticism. Debunking the artist's putative status as world legislator, prophet, and savior, Eliot claimed he would be pleased to secure for the poet "a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music-hall comedian."' But his view of art as amusement was much more than an ironic rhetorical thrust against romantic attitudes. In suggesting what art is and how it satisfies, he revived the classical ideal of aesthetic pleasure, which had been buried by almost two centuries of modernity's sacralization of art. Though Plato condemned art for distorting reality and corrupting character, his admiration for beauty as the source of our highest enjoyment never wavered, nor did his recognition of art's hedonistic rewards. Art's very danger, he argued, was that its seduc- tive pleasures hide its corrupting errors and distract us from the truth. Aristotle coun- tered that art's pleasures derive from mimetic truth, that we take pleasure in recognizing images of things that would horrify us in real life. Thomas Aquinas, the foremost medieval philosopher, defined beauty as what gives pleasure in immediate perception, while the Enlightenment's Denis Diderot (renowned as the inventor of modern art criticism) echoed Horace's classic claim that art's "supreme merit lies in combining the pleasant with the useful." Even the puritanical Prussian Immanuel Kant insisted that however much duty and truth dominate the practical and scientific spheres of life, pleasure rules when it comes to beauty and art. He in fact defined the "feeling of pleasure" (or con- trasting "displeasure") as "the determining ground" of aesthetic judgment! Up until modern times, to identify art with the pursuit of pleasure was not at all a way of trivializing it, for pleasure was anything but a trivial matter, even for philosophers. The ancients (most notably the Cyrenaics and Epicureans) often defined pleasure as the prime good and usually saw it as an essential component of happiness. Even Plato, to make his case for philosophy's superiority to art and other practices, needed to argue for its superior joys. Looking back on the ancients at the very dawn of modern thought, Michel de Montaigne confirmed the primacy of pleasure: "All the opinions in the world agree on this-that pleasure is our goal-though they choose different means to it." Even, he adds, "in virtue itself, the ultimate goal we aim at is voluptuousness."' Montaigne's unabashed hedonism was not a plea for radical debauchery with the aim of asserting difference from conventional morals. It was simply an affirmation of the common recognition that "pleasure is one of the principal kinds of profit" and a neces- sary ingredient in "this most valuable of all the arts, the art of living well." If, as Montaigne stated, "our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately," then we should not deny our natural pleasures but more skillfully organize our life to increase their number, power, and enjoyment. "It takes management to enjoy life," he concluded. "I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of en1oyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it." Montaigne could emphasize the profit of pleasure because pleasure (in the post- Aristotelian tradition) was not conceived as a mere passive, pleasant sensation. It was instead construed as a quality of any activity that enhances that activity by making it