Arsen Dallan - The Pursuit of Pleasure: Overcoming a Civilizational Challenge

This is not quite a common academic or mass-market book. As it has been co-authored by a doctor of philosophy, Professor Dallakyan, and Arsen Dallan, a corporate giant ' s top manager with a wealth of experience in applied marketing, the book is not merely a result of theoretical reflection and research but also a practical guide providing answers on how to change one ' s life. We can safely say that the book refers to both personal and public lives of all people.

The Ultimatum of Pleasure captures the nature and essence of the pleasure phenomenon both as a behavioral stimulus for all humans and as the most important determinant of the personal development of individuals and the shared human culture. Learning the mechanisms of pleasure management, humans can become their own masters, similarly to how behavioral marketing specialists manage consumer behavior and the societal development. As a matter of fact, this book reveals the essential transmutation of the 21st century ' s marketing by disclosing how it targets not the individual ' s needs but the pleasure seeking urges and has a long-term goal of managing these urges.

The natural and philosophical concepts of pleasure are discussed in the book. We will present and evaluate the major philosophical, psychological and physiological schools that interpret the phenomenon of pleasure in their own way. We will pay a particular attention to the behaviorist approach based on psycho-physiological experiments that illustrate the brain's response to pleasure.

Co-evolution of the human pleasure and degree of personal freedom is presented within the retrospective analysis. It is shown that rising above both biological and ego nature is a general line of the social evolution. Th is is the ultimate goal of the achievement of a human being, self-realization of the true human nature. The historical and genetic insight of the pleasure phenomenon illustrates the mood change in the society, various cultural attitudes and epochs in relation to pleasure. From the very beginning, when in the primitive society a human being was completely submissive to the pleasure principle and differed little from animals, the reader will advance in time and see how a new form of behavior put a ban on all pleasures, which was particularly obvious in the Medieval culture, when radically religious fanatics tried to put a person into the " Procrustean bed " of moral values. And, finally, we will show that emergence and development of capitalism led to the emancipation of pleasure from all moral restrictions. But that is not all, the most interesting is yet to come. We will help you, our reader, peek into the near future, where humanity will face the Ultimatum of Pleasure: rise above or degrade!

What does it mean? We will provide a detailed answer in the book.

In a word, however, it is a choice the evolution forces the humans to make. As individuals, we must either overcome the pleasure principle in our decision taking or become free from our primitive instincts and build a new humanistic culture, wherein pleasure is a personal reward for the intelligent decisions. Otherwise we will continue tormenting ourselves in stress from the expectation of pleasure we will never be able to feel or achieve. This, in the era of a consumer society, would degrade humans to the being-functions, whose only purpose is to support the market and social exchange.

The book provides the arguments to support the thesis that today there exist not merely a need, but also necessary conditions for the creation and development of a new culture, in which a person would not be motivated and driven by pleasure-seeking urges, but will be able to create the pleasures that are essential for the self-realization of our human and personal potential.

This present research, in fact, is a sort of the New Anthropological Paradigm Manifesto boding the appearance of a new Overman. The authors hope that through the resolution of the Ultimatum of Pleasure the mankind would not slide into the Nietzsche ' s Man-God era, but would rather start the new God-Human epoch, wherein, free from the pleasure principle, people will direct all their energy to actualize the true human nature.

We hope our readers will enjoy the reading and learning adventure.