Euphoria and Symposia: The Dialectic of Desire in Thinking, Drinking, and Well-Being

Euphoria and Symposia explores the relationship between euphoria, desire, and well-being in the human practices of drinking and thinking, both phenomena in which seeking more – more alcohol, more knowledge – can be understood, ambiguously, as simultaneously positive and negative. Drinking leads to both euphoria and depression and is potentially destabilizing for both the individual and the collective. While medical science understands it is risky for our health (dependency, addiction, illness), anthropology sees drinking as contributing to communal celebration (euphoria, sociability). Since health and celebration are both desirable goods, Kieran Bonner suggests that it is this balancing act – our desire for what is better and good, our preference for one thing over another – that creates ambiguity, revealing a grey zone that is fundamental to a fuller understanding of well-being. In a series of case studies, revealing intricacies and ambiguities not usually picked up in typical scientific, philosophical, or sociological discourses, Bonner posits well-being as harmony, requiring nuanced judgments about the various things that humans desire, including wealth, health, beauty, power, vitality, leisure, pleasure, love, and wisdom. Informed by a creative synthesis of Socratic interrogation, hermeneutic perspectives drawn from post-phenomenological thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt, and distinctive perspectives found in the tradition of reflexive sociology, Euphoria and Symposia asserts that reconciling unlimited desire with the finite nature of the human condition is essential for the understanding and enjoyment of life itself.