The novelty of this week’s vomitout brought some challenges with it.
“Pleasure vs. Duty” is a relatively new addition to the 7 problems (replacing an earlier Problem that was too closely related to existing ones). Because it was new, my ideas about how to pursue it were even more sketchy than in previous vomitouts.
I had some vivid personal entanglements (I guess you would call them) with Pleasure vs. Duty.
For example, I still rehash the part of the Disney movie of Pinocchio where Pinocchio, along with some real boys, turns into a donkey. (It’s a consequence of not applying himself to his studies, which, of course, turns a boy into “nothing but” a little donkey.)
And other fairy tales: the Ant and the Grasshopper. The Ice Queen, perhaps.
And these fairy tales, as I worked on the draft, suggested other “re-casts” of the antinomy: Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” vs. “Reality Principle”. “Passion vs. Necessity”. “Self vs. Other.” “Work-Life Balance”. All of them cousins of “Pleasure vs. Duty.”
I went with the flow of these various cuts at “Pleasure vs. Duty”, teasing out various nuances in each one.
Finally, at the end of the Deep Work “week” (yesterday) I realized that Aristotle (and Kant and Hume, among others) had had a lot to say about Pleasure and Duty and the Good Life. I resolved to dig into these sources some.
So:
- There’s a deep agenda for this section
- Lot of work still to do
As I’ve done with previous sections, I’m batching the work into projects to do downstream, and I’ll be proceeding with the vomitout — “Local vs. Global” next — this coming week.
Welcome your comments, as always.