NONFICTION - Jan. 26, 1992

THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE by Lionel Tiger (Little, Brown: $21.95; 330 pp.). At a time when the recession seems nearly as deep as our guilt about the profligate ‘80s, one hesitates to pick up a book hailed by its publishers for “celebrating our ability to experience pleasure” and symbolized on its cover by the painting of a sensuous, bare-backed woman. Self-sacrifice would seem to be the order of the day, not self-indulgence.

But while Lionel Tiger, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, certainly does rejoice here in life’s simple pleasures--from conversing with a pet to enjoying fresh and fragrant air and some seedless grapes--he also acknowledges that pleasure is not a commodity available to everyone: “For someone desperately thirsty during a drought, earnest natter about which Medoc of the 1980s has a more elegant bouquet is an idiotic, insulting irrelevance.”

The manner in which pleasure is doled out selectively in our culture, in fact, turns out to be Tiger’s overriding concern. As a resource “rather like wealth, its distribution is subject to certain forms and limits,” he writes. “These can range from the restricted hunting grounds of the European nobility to the sumptuary laws that determined which colors were reserved for which echelons of the population.”

Too much pleasure can be equated with social irresponsibility, Tiger points out. When he asked a colleague who constantly complained about his “punishingly hard” work why he did not simply switch jobs, for example, the man was both deflated and angry. “Clearly, I did not understand and did not appreciate the richly redemptive value of his activity,” Tiger writes. “I had violated a given, almost a sacred given. I had failed to be awed by his very hard work . It was virtually inconceivable that he would have launched into an equivalent aria about . . . how deftly and swiftly he completed each of the pitifully simple tasks his misguided and overgenerous employers assigned, and how gleefully enjoyable was each and every working day.”

Tiger will be criticized by political philosophers for not considering the possibility that self-sacrifice may lead to broader social good, and by scientific philosophers for not exploring the implications of new pleasure-producing drugs such as Prozac. But throughout these pages, this Lionel is a tiger of a writer: witty, frank, elegant and insightful.