Mista, Arianne Melody L.

December 13, 2019

Ph. D. Eng Philo 602

LOVE AND LIFE

The Philosophy behind Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Fifty Shades Darker (2017) and Fifty Shades Freed
(2018) are erotic drama films based on the novel series of EL James.
The movie tells a straightforward story about Christian Grey – an intelligent,
handsome, and very rich young man – and Anastasia Steele – an English literature major
at a local college. They meet during an interview, find each other attractive, and initiate
an affair. Christian is secretive, possessive, and controlling, and he is very much into
BDSM. Anastasia lets Christian do some of his BDSM things with her, and she enjoys
parts of it.
BDSM refers to activities such as bondage, domination, discipline, submission,
and sadomasochism. BDSM is what can be called a sexual diversion, “serious leisure,”
and sometimes even a lifestyle. It is often practiced in clubs and other social venues
where the performers and their audiences can enjoy the show. Of course, BDSM also
takes place privately. It is important to distinguish between BDSM proper, BDSM-inspired
sexual foreplay, everyday sadism and masochism, and commercial pornography: BDSM
is a social activity, which is to say the participants share a common view of its definition,
rules, and values. Let us pay attention to the dialectical interplay between what is
intrinsically desirable and undesirable, like pleasure and pain. Must I discuss the
motivation of and the relevant reasons for BDSM activities, given the enigma of how pain,
humiliation, and bondage can be so desirable. The standard view is that the explanation
is related to sexual and erotic pleasure, but BDSM enthusiasts may also have deeper
personal, cognitive reasons for doing what they are doing.

Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and the Philosophy behind BDSM
A person inevitably loves. To love is to go beyond oneself and to fasten
one’s affection upon the object of love. Augustine pointed out that there is a wide range
of objects that people can choose to love which can be physical object, other persons, or
even oneself. From there one can derive satisfaction for some desires and passions.
Augustine’s moral philosophy claimed that all things are legitimate objects of love, hence,
everything that people love will provide them with some satisfaction and happiness.
However, Augustine also asserted that nothing is evil in itself; and thus evil means an
absence of something. Furthermore, he pursued that humanity’s moral problem consists
not so much in loving or even in the objects that they love but in the manner in which they
attach themselves to these objects of love and their expectations regarding the outcome
of this love. Everyone expects to achieve happiness and fulfillment from love, yet people
are miserable, unhappy and restless. This is what Augustine called disordered love.
 Bentham preluded that nature has placed mankind under the governance of two
sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. To be subject to pleasure and pain is a fact we all
recognize, and that we desire pleasure and want to avoid pain. Herein lies Bentham’s
principle of utility which he specified as to approve or disapprove is the same as saying
about an act that it is good or bad, or right or wrong. Between saying that people desire
pleasure and saying that they ought to or that is right that they should, there is a gap with
what is conformable to the principle of utility which one can always say either that it is the
one that ought to be done or hence, that is the right action.
Just as pleasure and pain give the real values to acts, so do they also constitute
the efficient causes of our behavior. Bentham distinguishes sources from which pleasures
and pains can come and identifies these as causes of our behavior calling them sanctions
– which gives a binding force to a rule of conduct or to a law.
In the view of BDSM, the sanction which is the efficient cause of behavior, is the
threat of pain. In the public life, the legislator understands that men feel bound to do
certain acts only when such acts have some clear sanction connected with them, and this
sanction consists of some form of pain if the mode of conduct prescribed by the legislator
is violated by the citizen. The legislator’s chief concern is, therefore, to decide what forms
of behavior will tend to increase happiness. Each individual and each legislator is
concerned with avoiding pain and achieving pleasure. But pleasure and pains differ from
each other and therefore have different values.
Other than that, in reality, at times, even not in bed, we find pleasure with the things
or with the people who gives us pain. We treasure more the persons who makes us
anxious and wary and just prayed for the person to become good or the situation to
become better; rather than entrusting ourselves to the persons who love us the way we
wanted to be loved.
Since the ending of the first series (Fifty Shades of Grey) did not seem to be a
happy ending, the second sequel of the movie illustrated how Anna yearned for a
passionate love from Christian more than a BDSM sexual pleasure, as the story unfolds
how Christian become “a fifty shades fucked-up.”
As a phenomenon, the Principle of Sufficient Reason explains becoming or
change. Schopenhauer theorizes that physical objects exists and are causally related in
space and time, which we know through our ordinary experience of things. Schopenhauer
follows closely Kant’s basic theory that knowledge begins with experience but is not
limited, as Hume thought, to what is empirically given or presented to us. Instead, the
elements of our experiences are organized by human mind, which brings to our
experience a priori categories of space, time, and causality as though these categories
are lenses through which we look at objects.
Whereas, in logic, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is applied as abstract
concepts. Hence, physical objects are taken as conclusions drawn from other concepts,
as when we apply the rules of inference or implication. The relationship between concepts
and the conclusions they infer or imply is governed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
 Schopenhauer says that the self is the subject that wills and that this willing (or
behaving) subject is the “object for the knowing subject.” This we call self-consciousness.
The principle which governs our knowledge of the relation between the self and its acts
of will is “the principle of sufficient reason of acting or the law of motivation.”
This element of necessity or determinism Schopenhauer stresses in the nature of
things holds that people behave and react to the motives produced by their character,
leaving aside the question whether people are capable of altering their character.