This post will be a bit off the cuff and was inspired by a combination of recent reading and a recent argument. It is meant, partly, as an unconventional argument in favor of traditional piety and lawfulness, including taboos against gluttony and excessive sexual license (which is another topic which deserves a dedicated treatment another time).
Pleasure is a large and complicated topic, but a quick description of its function rather than its essence is in order. Pleasure, above all, is a signifier and not an end. Like all signifiers, humans are perennially susceptible to mistaking it for an object in itself. We are also susceptible to having its anchors spoofed - sugary processed food is an excellent example. Our tastes are finely tuned to value rarity because the most exceptionally nutritious foods in our evolutionary environment were fairly rare. Our senses were drawn to a signifier not for itself but for its correlation - high caloric density.
Our modern environment, which is at once paradoxically man-made and yet hostile to our deepest needs regarding health and connection, presents us with a glut of signifiers: Candy, fast food, chips, etc. This is because our economy is ruled by market forces, and a market is nothing but a place where desire and currency intersect. The more currency circulates, the more freely desires are accommodated. I am here to tell you something absurd and yet something which underlines so much of our cultural rot: Desire is inflationary.
The phenomenon of the “empty calorie” is not restricted to food. There are empty calories in our art and in our music and in our sex. Abundance and competition combine to produce a race to the bottom where the entire monetary system relies on a pursuit of the goal of maximizing both chemical pleasure and efficiency. Fast food without having to leave your house, sex without needing to form bonds (or, soon, without even needing to find a partner), even a politics without confrontation - a polite tyranny. Currently the only things standing in the way of this goal are clueless baby boomers and the limited supply of petroleum.
But anyone who has ever eaten a meal after lifting weights or become addicted to substances will be able to tell you that pleasure diminishes itself when it is unopposed. It retreats from you like a lizard’s eyelid when it senses you are not worthy. The unbound, impossible ecstasy of Dionysus is only possible because he brings with him terror, madness, his retinue of leopards and bulls and raving, dying lunatics. Called “Liberator” by his worshippers, Dionysus opens the way to surpassing the material and knowing the forms not because he allows us to wallow in pleasure but because he shows us how to pass through it, transcending the infernal dance of opposites. There is nothing in the modern regime of hedonism which encourages us to pass through itself. To do so would be to endanger itself - we are its fodder.
Dionysus, too, is the brother of Apollo and in many ways his partner. They share the Delphic throne and the arts of theater, and both teach us how we should navigate the sentimental life of mortals. Apollo, above all, is the god of the principle of balance. Balance is necessary for the harmony of the cosmos, a work which he shares with Hermes (who rules motion) and Aphrodite (who rules connection). His arrows are nocked in the very center of his bow, and the strings of his lyre are perfectly in tune, not too tight nor too loose. Inherent in the balance which Apollo fosters is tension - the tension from which Dionysus frees us. And Dionysus, when his ravings have run their course, delivers us to a state of ultimate balance, balance-beyond-tension, total peace and non-contingence. Like the arrow which flies most accurately from Apollo’s balanced bow, this is a state which would not be possible if we were not once bound otherwise. Thus Apollo is at Delphi, the axis mundi, for nine months and Dionysus there for three. Likewise, mortals are to live our lives with Olympian balance, and this balance is what ultimately allows us to proceed through Bacchus’ gauntlet without being annihilated.