Desire

Plato's account of desire in the Republic and the Symposium is systematic and double-edged. In the Republic, appetite is the lowest part of the soul, the part that craves food, drink, sex, and money. Left ungoverned, it drags the soul downward into tyranny and misery. The tyrannical man, ruled by his appetites, is the most wretched figure in Plato's gallery precisely because his desires are insatiable.

But the Symposium tells a different story. There Socrates recounts the teaching of Diotima, who describes eros as a force of ascent. Desire begins with the love of a beautiful body, rises to the love of beautiful souls, then to beautiful ideas, and finally to the contemplation of Beauty itself. Eros is not appetite in disguise; it is the soul's native longing for what is real and eternal. Desire is what moves the philosopher, because philosophy is the love of wisdom, and love always begins in a felt lack.

Plato thus splits desire into two currents. Bodily appetite pulls downward and must be controlled by reason. Erotic longing pulls upward and must be cultivated. The philosophical life is the redirection of desire from lower to higher objects.

Plato's account leaves two strands for later thinkers: desire as the enslaving force that must be controlled by reason, and desire as the ascending power that, rightly directed, leads the soul toward its highest objects. Both strands recur in the treatments of desire by Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and later writers.

Aristotle refuses Plato's sharp division between higher and lower desires. In the De Anima, he identifies desire (orexis) as the common genus that includes appetite (epithumia), spirit (thumos), and rational wish (boulesis). All animals desire, but human beings alone can deliberate about what they desire and choose accordingly. The difference between the virtuous and the vicious person is not that one desires less but that one desires the right things.

In the Ethics, Aristotle argues that virtue is a settled disposition (hexis) to feel pleasure and pain in the right way: to desire what reason approves and to take pleasure in what is genuinely good. The temperate person does not merely resist appetite through willpower; the temperate person actually wants the right amount of food, drink, and pleasure. Education habituates desire so that it accords with reason, and this harmony, not the suppression of desire, is the mark of good character.

Aristotle also insists that desire is the efficient cause of action. Without desire, reason alone cannot move the body. "Thought by itself moves nothing." Practical wisdom (phronesis) requires both correct judgment and correct desire working in concert.

Aristotle makes desire integral to the moral life rather than an obstacle to it, but this raises a question Kant will press: if the virtuous person acts from trained desire, and if desire can be corrupted by bad habituation, what ensures that what someone enjoys doing is actually right? Kant will respond by insisting that an action's moral worth depends solely on acting from duty, not from any desire, however well-trained.

Lucretius, following Epicurus, diagnoses desire as the root of human misery. We want more than nature requires, and we want it endlessly. The fear of death, the craving for wealth, the anguish of erotic love: all of these arise from false beliefs about what we need. Nature asks very little. A body needs food, shelter, freedom from pain. Everything beyond that is projection, anxiety, and custom.

In Book III, Lucretius attacks the fear of death as the master desire that corrupts all others. Because we dread annihilation, we grasp at pleasures, hoard possessions, and pursue fame as a hedge against mortality. But death is simply the dissolution of atoms; there is no afterlife to fear and no hell to dread. Once this is understood, the frantic pursuit of more loses its urgency.

Book IV contains Lucretius's extraordinary analysis of sexual desire. Erotic love is an illusion generated by the body's need to reproduce. The lover projects perfections onto the beloved that no real person possesses, and the consummation of desire brings only temporary relief followed by renewed longing. The cure is not abstinence but clear-sightedness: see the beloved as a natural body rather than an idealized object, and the torment fades.

Lucretius proposes a therapeutic approach to desire: it is not to be gratified or transcended but cured by a clear understanding of its causes. A similar concern with the causes of desire, and with the possibility of being freed from its most destructive forms through adequate knowledge, recurs in Hobbes and Spinoza.

The Confessions offers Augustine's most extended account of the desires that shaped his own life before his conversion. He narrates his enslavement to lust, ambition, and intellectual pride, tracing each disordered desire to the same root: the soul's turning away from God toward lesser goods. The famous theft of the pears in Book II illustrates the point. He stole not from hunger or need but for the sheer pleasure of wrongdoing, of willing what was forbidden. Desire, when cut loose from its proper object, becomes perverse.

Augustine inherits Plato's language of ascent but redirects it. The soul does not climb toward the Form of the Good through its own effort; it is drawn upward by grace toward the God who made it. "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Desire is not eliminated by conversion but reordered. The loves that once pointed toward creatures are redirected toward the Creator, and in that redirection they find their proper satisfaction.

The key concept is ordo amoris, the right ordering of love. Every created thing is good, but we sin when we love lesser goods more than greater ones, or finite goods as if they were infinite. The miser loves gold rightly insofar as gold is useful, but wrongly when gold becomes the object of ultimate devotion. Augustine does not condemn desire; he insists on its proper hierarchy.

Augustine's analysis adds a theological dimension to the problem of desire: the question is not only what we want, but whether our wants are rightly ordered. The bearing of this on the questions treated in the chapters on LOVE and SIN is considered more fully there.

Aquinas develops a detailed analysis of desire by drawing on both Aristotle's psychology and Augustine's theology. He distinguishes three levels of appetite: natural appetite (the tendency of any being toward its proper end), sensitive appetite (the passions shared with animals), and rational appetite (the will). Each level desires according to its mode: stones fall by nature, animals pursue by instinct, humans choose by reason.

The passions of the sensitive appetite, which Aquinas calls the "concupiscible" and "irascible" powers, include love, desire, delight, hatred, aversion, and sorrow (concupiscible) along with hope, despair, daring, fear, and anger (irascible). These passions are not evil in themselves. They become morally significant only when the will consents to or resists them. A flash of anger is not sinful; indulging it when reason counsels otherwise is.

The will, as rational appetite, naturally tends toward the good as such. No one can will evil under the aspect of evil; we always pursue what appears good to us, even when we are mistaken. The ultimate object of the will is God, the infinite good, and no finite good can fully satisfy it. This is why, Aquinas argues, every worldly desire carries a residue of dissatisfaction: we are made for more than any created thing can provide.

On Aquinas's account, desire and appetite are central to the moral and spiritual life. His analysis holds together only if the will is genuinely free to resist sensitive appetite, a claim Hobbes denies by reducing will to the last appetite before action, and that Spinoza reframes by arguing that what is called free will is simply desire accompanied by adequate understanding of its causes.

Dante inherits from Aristotle and Aquinas the doctrine that each thing has a natural inclination toward its proper end, and he gives that doctrine its fullest poetic expression. In the central cantos of the Purgatorio, Virgil explains to the pilgrim that love is the seed of every virtue and every vice. In the Convivio, the claim is broader still: neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, either natural or of the mind. Fire seeks its sphere, the magnet draws toward its pole, plants turn toward the sun. What the metaphysicians and physicists of the schools had described in prose as natural appetite, Dante renders as a cosmos ordered throughout by love.

Two kinds of love concern the rational creature. The first is natural and cannot err, since it moves each being toward its proper end by the Creator's design. The second is elective, and here error enters. Elective love may fasten on the wrong object, or upon a right object with excess, or with deficiency. The whole architecture of Purgatory rests on this typology. Pride, envy, and wrath are loves of evil for one's neighbor; sloth is deficient love of the true good; avarice, gluttony, and lust are excessive loves of secondary goods. Purgation does not consist in extinguishing desire but in retraining it, so that each love is rightly ordered in its measure and its object.

Dante's poem completes in verse what Aquinas treats in the articles of the Summa. Desire reaches all the way down into the inclinations of matter and all the way up into the beatific vision. At the close of the Paradiso, the pilgrim's journey ends not in a cessation of desire but in its perfect alignment with its true object, where will and longing turn together as a wheel moved by a single love.

Later writers who treat desire as essentially corrective, or as a symptom of privation to be tempered or suppressed, inherit from Dante the alternative picture in which desire is the very pulse of being and the order of the universe is an order of loves. Spinoza's account of conatus, Hegel's treatment of desire as the motor of spirit, and the ethical theories that measure goods by the natural tendencies they fulfill all stand at some distance from Dante yet recognize in him the most developed statement of the view they either extend or resist.

Spinoza argues that desire is not a faculty alongside reason but the fundamental nature of every existing thing. In the Ethics Part III, he defines conatus (striving) as the tendency of each thing to persevere in its being. In human beings, conatus conscious of itself is called desire (cupiditas). "Desire is the very essence of man."

This overturns the classical hierarchy. Plato and Aristotle subordinated desire to reason; Spinoza identifies desire as what reason serves. We do not desire things because we judge them good; we judge them good because we desire them. The apparent authority of reason over desire is an illusion produced by inadequate understanding of our own nature.

Spinoza distinguishes active from passive affects. When we act from adequate ideas (clear understanding of causes), our desires are active and lead to joy and power. When we act from inadequate ideas (confused or partial understanding), our desires are passive and lead to bondage. Freedom is not the elimination of desire but its transformation through understanding. The more we understand the causes of our desires, the less they control us and the more they become expressions of our own power.

Spinoza's account removes the traditional opposition between reason and desire by identifying desire as what reason serves. The question it raises is whether understanding can transform desire from within, rather than whether reason should govern or suppress it.

Hobbes reduces desire to mechanics. In the Leviathan, all mental life is motion. When something external causes a small inward motion toward an object, that motion is called appetite or desire; when the motion leads away, it is called aversion. There is no separate faculty of will, no rational appetite distinct from animal appetite. Desire is simply the body's inclination toward what preserves and pleases it.

The classical tradition assumed a final end, a highest good at which all desire terminates: happiness for Aristotle, God for Aquinas. Hobbes denies this. "There is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers." Desire is perpetual and restless; to stop desiring is to die. Happiness (which Hobbes calls "felicity") is not a state of rest but the continual success in obtaining the objects of desire, one after another, without end.

This creates a problem. If desire is endless and all men desire similar things, competition is inevitable. The state of nature is a state of war precisely because desires multiply and conflict. The sovereign's job is not to satisfy desire but to regulate it enough that the worst consequences of unchecked competition are avoided.

Hobbes presents desire as endless, mechanical, and politically dangerous, requiring a sovereign to prevent its most destructive effects. Kant's response is to insist that moral life requires acting from duty rather than from any desire, however natural.

Kant distinguishes sharply between desire and morality. Desire belongs to the "faculty of lower desires," the part of our nature determined by sensibility, inclination, and the pursuit of happiness. Moral action belongs to the "faculty of higher desires," the part governed by pure practical reason and the categorical imperative. An action has moral worth only when performed from duty, and duty often requires acting against what we desire.

This is a deliberate break with Aristotle. Aristotle said the virtuous person desires the right things and takes pleasure in doing good. Kant says that taking pleasure in doing good does not make the action morally worthy; only the motive of duty does. The merchant who is honest because honesty is profitable acts from inclination. The merchant who is honest because honesty is a duty, even when dishonesty would be more profitable, acts morally.

Kant does not deny that desire is natural or powerful. He acknowledges that human beings are creatures of inclination and that the pull of desire is constant. But the entire point of moral freedom is the capacity to override that pull. The moral law does not flow from desire; it legislates to desire from above. Happiness, the satisfaction of desire, is something we may hope for, but it cannot be the ground of moral action.

On Kant's account, desire and moral freedom stand in fundamental opposition. The suggestion that what Kant calls duty may itself be a disguised form of desire, raised by Freud among others, raises questions about the independence of the moral law that are treated more fully in the chapter on WILL.

Moby-Dick gives the tradition its fullest literary study of desire gone monomaniacal. Ahab's hunt for the white whale is a will that has found a private object and will not relinquish it at any cost. It does not fit the earlier philosophical frames: it is not appetite in Hobbes's mechanical sense, nor erotic longing in Plato's, nor an unruly passion that reason might in principle govern. The whale stands in for something Ahab cannot name: an offense, a mask, a wall behind which an inscrutable thing hides. The hunt continues regardless of profit, weather, prudence, or the lives of the crew, and Ahab knows this, and persists.

Melville shows how such a desire reconfigures everything around it. The crew is bound to Ahab's purpose by oaths and rituals that transform the ordinary business of a whaling voyage into a private crusade. Starbuck's reasoned protests and the appeals of Captain Gardiner of the Rachel cannot touch it. Even pleasure and pain become, for Ahab, mere obstacles or instruments of the quest. He reflects, in the great interview with Starbuck in "The Symphony," that some inscrutable power has him on its leash and that he is no longer free to choose otherwise. The self he once might have been is already gone, displaced by the object that has fastened on him.

The fixation that the Syntopicon discusses under the heading of the attachment of desires finds its literary exemplar in Ahab. Where earlier writers imagined desire as either a natural appetite seeking its proper end or an erotic longing rising toward the Good, Melville shows a desire that has broken free of both. Such a desire is neither aligned with the order of nature nor corrigible by reason. It is the figure of a want that has become, in itself, the whole content of a life, and it discovers in that condition a terrible kind of freedom.

Freud would later give a theoretical name to such attachments and develop an account of their formation in the history of the libido. Melville had already given them a face, and the novel remains the most thorough depiction in the tradition of the ruin worked in a human being by a single desire that has found its object and refuses any compromise with the rest of life.

James, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, treats desire as a specific state of mind open to careful introspective description. In the Principles of Psychology he distinguishes the mere entertainment of an absent object from the felt wanting of it. An object is desired when we are aware of it as absent, when the thought of it is accompanied by a sense of blockage or impossibility, and when attention returns to it of itself despite interference. Nothing more recondite than this is needed, on James's view, to pick out the phenomenon that the earlier tradition had variously called appetite, passion, or inclination.

More original is James's theory of the will. On his account, every idea of a movement tends of itself to produce the movement, unless another idea inhibits it. He calls this the ideomotor principle, and he argues that volition does not require a separate faculty standing behind the idea and pushing it into action. What is required is that the idea of the act should occupy consciousness without rivals. In easy cases the transition from desire to deed is immediate. In the hard cases, where contrary impulses are present, volition consists chiefly in the effort of attention by which one holds the chosen idea in mind until it discharges into action. The site of self-control is thus not a hidden will behind the passions but the ordinary process of attending.

James also separates instinctive desires from those shaped by experience, and emphasizes how rapidly the early instinctive impulses become plastic under the pressure of habit. The result is a picture in which nothing in human desire is wholly fixed by nature, yet in which each person's settled character is a deposit of the past and very difficult to revise. His treatment of the conflict of desires draws on the same analysis. What appears as a struggle of the will against passion is, for James, a struggle of attention among ideas for the possession of the mind.

James stands between Kant's picture of a rational will that resists inclination from without and Freud's discovery of desires at work beneath the threshold of consciousness. The ideomotor theory denies that the will is a separate force; the emphasis on attention as the seat of self-control recasts the old opposition of reason and passion as a question about what gets and keeps the mind's regard. Freud takes up that reframing by locating the decisive struggles below the level of attention altogether, while the behaviorists take it up by discarding introspection as a method and treating desire as a pattern of conditioned response.

Freud transforms the question of desire by insisting that its most powerful operations are unconscious. The tradition from Plato onward assumed that we know what we want, even when we choose badly. Freud argues that we often do not. The desires that shape our behavior, our dreams, our slips of tongue, and our neuroses are frequently hidden from us by repression, distorted by displacement, and expressed through symptoms rather than acknowledged intentions.

The fundamental force is libido, a psychic energy rooted in the sexual instincts but capable of being redirected. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that civilization depends on the systematic suppression and redirection of desire. Society demands that individuals renounce instinctual gratification, and the result is a permanent tension between what we want and what we are allowed to have. Culture, art, religion, and morality are all sublimations of desire: transformed expressions of drives that cannot be satisfied directly.

The implications of this account for the philosophical tradition are considerable. If Kant's sense of duty is (as Freud suggests) the internalized voice of the father, enforced by guilt, then the opposition between desire and morality is not what it appears. What looks like freedom from desire may be desire in disguise, repressed and redirected but never eliminated.

Freud does not resolve the philosophical debate about desire, but he adds to it a consideration that later accounts cannot easily set aside: the possibility that the real sources of human motivation are hidden from the person who acts.