(like theatre) might indirectly be useful and advantageous, if all the
people who attend it would otherwise be doing much more unpleasant
things like stealing,flattering and fornicating. But if they would otherwise
be engaging in useful, natural activities, then entertainment becomes
suspicious.^9 This is hardly a defence of theatre that any sympathiser
would welcome and seems more a rhetorical device than a serious claim.
It’s also hard to escape the conclusion that this is a comparison between
fornicating Parisians and hard-working citizens of Geneva–or at least
between Rousseau’s idealised conception of the two. D’Alembert’sperfectly
reasonable response to Rousseau on the brevity (and misfortune) of human
life is: well, then why not have a little fun?^10 However, the key point for
Rousseau is obviously that theatre isunnatural–hence it’s not useful, just
mere entertainment.
As we saw above, one can distinguish different kinds of pleasure–
specifically the natural, bodily sensation can be distinguished from simply
taking pleasure in a variety of different things. Rousseau evidently thinks
that pleasure should be connected withnaturalactivity and hence that
pleasure deriving from artificial (i.e. non-natural) activity is somehow
inappropriate.^11 Pleasure ought to be natural: natural pleasure is good
because natural; and artificial pleasure is bad because non-natural.
There are at least two ways to respond to Rousseau on this point. The
first is to argue that theatre is in fact natural (whether by Rousseau’sor
another standard). The second is to argue that using nature as a criterion
for which pleasures are and aren’t acceptable is deeply suspicious. First,
then, one could point out that theatre brings people together, stirs their
emotions and (sometimes) gives them pleasure–and, in doing so, satisfies
some natural inclinations (just as in religion, sport, and so on). Theatre, for
example, moves people; and people, in general, as D’Alembert remarks,
need and like to be moved.^12 This, as I suggested above, seems rather
tenuous. Another line might be that the mimetic element of theatre
(discussed in Chapter 1) is somehow naturally pleasurable: it’s a natural
desire to imitate, copy, enact the doings of others around us; indeed,
Aristotle suggests this in thePoetics.^13 Second, and more convincingly,
one could question the notion of‘nature’as a good criterion for making
judgements about whether things are good or bad, useful or useless. One
should always ask,first, how one can possiblyknowwhat is natural and
what is not? Is this a matter of what animals do, what humans used to do
a long time ago, or what you think humanswould ideally do, if not
interfered with in various ways? Each answer is unsatisfactory, for any
number of reasons.^14 We might wonder, contra Rousseau, whether being
a‘citizen’is all that natural–or what‘natural’means if it is. Note that
this objection also counts against thefirst response to Rousseau: if we
don’t know what’s natural and what isn’t, then we can’t defend theatre on
104 From the Stage to the World