If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra

or, the explicable appeal of spicy food

Daniel Pallies, a philosophy postdoc at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, recently wrote a blog post entitled "The inexplicable appeal of spicy food". Pallies, from his bio, indicates that one of his key interests is the question: "What makes a feeling pleasant, or unpleasant?" And so he is puzzled by a phenomenon that he and I share: we enjoy eating food high in capsaicin, even though the sensation of eating these foods is painful. He adds: "And like most people, I think that pain makes your life worse. All else being equal, your life goes worse for you to the extent that it is painful. So why do I, and lots of other people, eat spicy food?"

I think that this opening already mischaracterizes what pain does. In general, pain makes your life worse. But this is a significant exception to that general case. And notice, the "in general" is not the same as the "all else being equal". It is not that things other than the pain compensate for it, that they make an equivalent pain worthwhile (as Pallies considers in some of the possibile explanations he explores, which he agrees are unsatisfactory). It is that the pain itself, in this case, makes your life better – because the pain is itself a part of the pleasure on offer.

Hot food is far from the only such case. I recall an exchange some years ago between two people close to me. One asked "I don't get it. Why would you eat food that hurts you?" The reply came: "Why would you spank someone you love?" And the original questioner replied, "Ohhhh!" For the phenomenon of sexual masochism is quite similar: the pain itself does not merely enhance pleasure, but provides it. Admitting to enjoying this phenomenon is much more common and socially accepted now than it was even a couple of decades ago, but the phenomenon itself is not at all new. Nearly two millennia ago, the Kāma Sūtra was already discussing the pleasures of being scratched and bitten during sex.

In both these cases, the pain comes within a context of something else – eating, sex – that is otherwise pleasurable. That makes a big difference. Simply getting the sensation of being spanked in a non-sexual context, from someone you're not sexually attracted to, would be unlikely to give the same frisson. (That is leaving aside questions of harrassment, inappropriateness, etc. It would be true even where those concerns were not at issue: say if a spanking were medically necessary for some reason, or delivered by a machine designed to feel like a human hand.) With hot food, the pain contributes to the overall pleasure of the dish. I've frequently had the thought – perhaps especially in Americanized Thai restaurants – that "this dish is missing something", and consequently reached for the hot sauce or dried chiles. The dish then tastes much better with the addition of the painful heat – just as an under-salted dish would when salt (or fish sauce or soy sauce) gives it a proper saltiness.

This soup already looks tastier to me when I see the chiles on it. Adobe Stock image, copyright by doucefleur.

These points go some way to answering Pallies's objection to an explanation similar to mine, in which the burning feeling of hot food is "painful but not unpleasant". To this explanation Pallies counters:

The burning feeling is unpleasant. I prefer to have my spicy food with a tall glass of almond milk, and for good reason. Drinking almond milk relieves the burning feeling, which is good because that feeling is unpleasant. If the burning feeling never went away, or if recurred at all hours of the day, that would be terrible. [Pallies's emphasis]

The burning feeling is indeed unpleasurable when it lingers too long after the food has gone down – after the overall pleasure of the food has subsided. But that doesn't mean that the burning feeling is unpleasurable while you're eating it – quite the opposite, it is pleasurable, it feels good. I specify "(un)pleasurable", note, because I don't think "unpleasant" means quite the same thing: "pleasant" in everyday English has the connotation of a sort of mellow niceness, which is not quite the same thing as "giving pleasure". BDSM sex can often involve dark or frightening scenarios that are the opposite of "pleasant" in that sense – yet their practitioners still find them pleasurable, just as one might draw pleasure from the similarly "unpleasant" aesthetic of a horror movie or doom metal.

That subtle conceptual confusion points us in turn to a broader one. There is a longstanding tendency for English-speaking philosophers to treat "pleasure" and "pain" as opposites, such that an increase in one is an absence of the other. This tendency goes back at least to the early utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, whose 1783 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation proclaims "By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered…" But in fact these do not "come to the same thing" at all. We have clear counterexamples to show that they do not.

Bentham's philosophy, it turns out, could have been a lot more sophisticated if he had read and digested the Kāma Sūtra! Not that he would have been able to – the first English translation, by Richard Burton, didn't exist until 1883, a good century after the publication of Bentham's text. (Even that was illegal and had to be pirated – though that part probably wouldn't have stopped Bentham.) But still, more than a millennium before Bentham wrote – even before they had chile peppers – Indians had already recognized how pleasure can come from pain. They are not opposites; the one can support the other. And that, in my view, is why eating spicy food – the pleasure of eating spicy food – is perfectly explicable.