That is, although D’Alembert acknowledges that the Genevans are in
some respects two hundred years ahead (of educated, late eighteenth-century
Parisians) when it comes to morals, there’s something lacking that could
be provided by the theatre. As he later put it, the theatre is‘a school of
morals and virtue. [...] It is morality put into action, it is precepts reduced
to examples’.^5 As well as benefiting from an improvement in moral senti-
ment, the theatre at Geneva would provide the city with‘decent plea-
sures’–that is, well-earned amusement and entertainment.
The two claims that D’Alembert makes for theatre–that it entertains,
and that it can be moral–can and have been made either separately or
together in defence of theatre. Certainly, they go back as far as Horace’s
claim for poetry in general, that it should be useful and pleasant (‘utile et
dulce’). We shall look at each in turn.
Pleasure and entertainment
First, a word about the difference between pleasure and entertainment.
For our purposes, distinguishing between three ideas is helpful: first,
pleasure as a sensation; second, pleasure in general; last, entertainment.
First, for some, pleasure is best understood as a kind of bodily sensation,
perhaps as an opposite to pain; this, roughly speaking, is the view that
Aristotle presents in hisNichomachean Ethics.^6 Pain, following this line of
argument, is the feeling that we get when something is going wrong
with the body–it is an indication that the body is being hurt, damaged
or over-exerted in some way. So when I put my hand into very hot water,
the pain I feel is an indication that the body is being harmed. Corre-
spondingly, pleasure is the sensation that we get when we are doing
something that is naturally good for us: warming my cold hands by the
fire. Although it might cover some of what we call pleasurable, this view
can’t be all there is to it. For one thing, it can’t easily explain why, for
example, some food gives us more pleasure than other food. Sadly, the
food that is most pleasurable to eat isn’t always the food that gives us the
best nourishment. But even among foods that are equally nourishing, it’s
normal to get more pleasure from one than the other. So if I prefer my eggs
boiled, rather than poached, the difference in pleasure isn’t reducible to a
difference in how nourishing they are. Furthermore, there are things in
which we take pleasure that don’t look natural at all (but that don’t look
perverse or unnatural either).
Second, then, we speak about taking pleasure from activities, where it’s
clear that this is neither a bodily sensation nor a natural improvement.
Writing poetry, playing music or watching sport may be pleasurable, but
it seems reasonable to say that this pleasure is neither a bodily sensation
nor related to the satisfying of some natural need (music and poetry aren’t
102 From the Stage to the World