Harmony, Authentic or Contrived: On ‘Power, Pleasure, and Profit’
It seems appetite is limitless and everyone is its victim. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, University of York historian David Wootton explores how and why the appetite-driven modern values that make up the title of his book have endured since they were elevated in the Early Modern and Enlightenment eras. Appetite, after all, is an inconstant constant always ranging about for objects, and it doesn’t seem to point the way to sustainable happiness, as most any honest person who grew up near wealth or power can attest. But if happiness can be built on something other than appetite, it’d have to be abstract, the product of reasoned reflection and acknowledgement of human frailty and limitations.
The alternative to appetite, then, is moderation and civic and personal virtue. Put another. “Just as Aristotle’s cosmos was limited,” he writes, “so too his moral and political philosophy depended on recognizing and respecting limits.” The problem is, with the advent of the modern era, appetites (and with them happiness and ambition) were increasingly viewed as limitless. What Aristotle’s worldview had held at bay through the medieval period was breaking out, and so thinkers had to reconsider how virtue and happiness could actually be predicated on limitless pursuit. The Western world is still sorting out the effects.
