Stuart Walton reviews Euphoria and Symposia: The Dialectic of Desire in Thinking, Drinking, and Well-Being by Kieran Bonner.
Euphoria is one of those aspects of human experience that is in permanently short supply. As the forms of ghastliness multiply exponentially in a world more fanatically keen on exploring misery than on facilitating happiness, an instinct for moments of transcendence, however prompted or confected, arises in the human soul, and is remorselessly quashed over and over. People look for glee where they can and find it wanting precisely where it seems part of the contract: the hypermarket, the sports store, the multiplex movie theater, the big game, the vacation.
William James, in the series of lectures that constituted his great masterwork The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), contrasts the arid disappointments of everyday consciousness with the altered state we know as intoxication. Before the first drink is taken, we are at the mercy of “the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core.” That this was written, and spoken publicly, a good three quarters of a century after the foundation of the Temperance movement in the United States makes it altogether one of the most remarkable reflections on intoxication ever uttered—the more so since the immediate cause was not drink but nitrous oxide—but it also harks back to the time of antiquity, when inebriation and reflective thought, far from being inimical to each other, went hand in hand.
James thought that the sense of unity with others, furnished by the altered state, was what powered its psychological effect of a reconciliation with reality, rather than an ignoble abnegation of it. The dialectical conundrum represented by these sentiments is the theme of Euphoria and Symposia, an inspiring study of the relations between drinking and thinking, and between desire and well-being, by Kieran Bonner, an Irish-Canadian professor of sociology and legal studies at St Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario. Bonner has written a densely argued but repeatedly enlightening work that will doubtless be much cited in the burgeoning discipline of intoxicology.
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The intellectual trail Bonner follows in Euphoria and Symposia leads him into a sensitive consideration of the problem of alcoholism, with chapters on the cognitive model of AA and related recovery groups, as a way of conceiving whether excess, the loss of control, lies behind the Western philosophical tradition inaugurated in Athens and personified in the texts of Plato by Socrates and by the figure of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws. In a lively discussion of classical-era cultural relativism, the Athenian contrasts his own society’s attitude to intoxication with that of the abstemious Spartans. One of the problems with virtue, as much as with pleasure, is that it makes us want more of it, potentially to excess. What is needed to counteract this is not abstinence but cultivation, an education to maturity (Bildung is the German word) in how to experience and manage drunkenness.
Drinking, Bonner argues, encompasses the extremes of joyous confidence and rueful depression, which already lie on either side of human well-being. It bridges the chasm that yawns across these temperaments and, in its more successful practice, reconciles the opposing poles. What matters is that we understand that different stages of life require different approaches. In the Platonic humoral view, while it is risky for youngsters to overstimulate themselves with intoxicants, an observation comprehensively tested the world over, whether intoxicants are legally available or not, the elderly would do well to learn to be disorderly again, to guard against becoming cold, dry, and excessively rational.
The cultivation of euphoria requires “judgment and practical wisdom,” a maxim that was once more thoroughly understood than it is in the medical fundamentalism of the present hour. Although it is often pointed out that Temperance is a misnomer for groups predicated on complete abstinence, it was once historically the truth. Early meetings of American temperance societies in the early 19th century were often accompanied by wine. It was distilled spirit that was seen as the social problem, but the term “temperance” stuck when abstentionism supplanted moderation. There is a sense that the militant prohibitionism that temperance societies later engendered fits seamlessly into the Utopian social movements of the 19th century, the many attempts made—socially, politically, religiously—to conceive of a perfected state of society, in which something previously illimitable in human experience would have been abolished for all eternity.
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When Bonner turns his attention to Plato’s Symposium, to which these debates will never cease returning, he accurately captures the mood of productive ambivalence that frames the discussion of the participants. They are mostly still hungover from the day before and are resolved to take it a little more easily for the present debate on the topic of love. And yet, in one of the great disruptive entrances in ancient literature, the candidly sozzled soldier-politician Alcibiades arrives to turn the tables and apostrophize his teacher and erotic favorite, Socrates. He admits that power and adulation are important to him, that his own life has followed a ruinous and self-destructive course, and that he has tried to learn from Socrates. If the master appears to have acquired the art of drinking without getting drunk, we should recall, as Bonner suggests, that this is the drunkard’s perception of another drinker, the somebody else we all know who drinks more wisely than we do.
Desire lies at the heart of these questions, a lesson contemporary philosophers and psychoanalysts sometimes imagine themselves to be the first to point out. Socrates’s own teacher Diotima states that desire lies between wisdom and ignorance: If we are wise, we don’t need to desire to be so, and if we are ignorant, we are in that proverbial bliss in which we are not conscious of needing what we don’t have. Desire is homeless, Bonner declares, in that it always by definition points beyond itself. Is desire essentially driven by the wish to be free of longing—winning the lottery will enable you to stop wishing for what you cannot have—or is its founding impulse the eternal renewal of itself? The point is that desire is not consistent. Its constant alteration is what sabotages its realization.
Philosophical and practical
Bonner considers the communal reinforcements that drive both recovery groups such as AA and the ritual communities of drinkers, in everyday sociability and in contexts I wrote about in Out of It (2001), like the Oxford debating society. Abstentionists have occasionally tried to argue that, without these social contexts, alcohol would have nothing to recommend it. An American utilitarian thinker of a century ago, Durant Drake, tries to claim that nobody could argue for drinking for its own sake—a fancy that half an hour with a bottle of Vintage blanc de blancs might put to bed. At the professionalized end of the modern temperance movement, researchers writing in The Lancet in 2018 announced that the level of consumption that most effectively minimizes the risk of drinking is zero, a pure tautology if ever there was, but in any case a performative wholesale withdrawal from the conversation, which is presumably not quite what the doctors intended.
Kieran Bonner grew up in an Irish Roman Catholic family that forswore drink. When he began teaching in Canada, he worked at a devotional college with a dry campus, where one of the iron rules was that faculty staff must in no circumstances take intoxicating drink with students. He eventually found socially ingenious ways around these privations. Euphoria and Symposia is imbued with an impressive level of dialectical subtlety, and he has some sharp critical points to counter the arguments of both prohibitionists and libertarians alike. Those of us less persuadable that the euphoric experiences to be had from flights of intellectual speculation or from the condition of falling in love are homogenous with the state of actual drunkenness will remain as impermeable to Platonic reason as we ever were. And indeed, Bonner presses to its logical exigency the question of whether reason is the right medium for arguing for the abandonment of reason. True philosophers—lovers of wisdom, etymologically—may well not need to compare their elating moments of insight to throwing back wine. Intoxicated wisdom may make it possible, as Plato’s Athenian in essence argues, to be wise about intoxication, but leaps of erudition don’t make us drunk.
There is much to admire in Bonner’s stimulating disquisition. I have no idea why he consistently names the Greek wine deity Dionysius, like the Areopagite, as opposed to the conventional Dionysus, but I did relish the slip of the keyboard that made an alcoholic of William James’s brother, the novelist Henry, rather than their disreputable father Henry, a one-legged, bumptious, sottish, heterodox theologian. The author of The Wings of the Dove would have coughed into his thimble of Chambertin. But then, one often struggles to recognize oneself in the accounts of others. My own caricature, cited by Bonner, of the unit-counting system promulgated by today’s medics, is an example not of a finely honed sense of absurdity, as I imagined, but of “classic British sarcasm.” Yeah, right.
Euphoria and Symposia: The Dialectic of Desire in Thinking, Drinking, and Well-Being
Kieran Bonner
Published by McGill-Queens University Press; 348 pages; $29.95 / £23.99
