Desire has been the subject of religious and philosophical
speculation in most cultures. The problem of desire has been a
fundamental obstacle to the attainment of personal happiness as well of
social harmony. The problem of desire has been the problem of which
desires are appropriate to personal and social morality as well as
beneficial to society. Desires are roughly categorized by their result.
Some are uplifting and edifying while others are either self-destructive
or destructive to the social organization. Since desires don't come
with a clear outcomes attached, cultures have created ways of thinking
about them and moral rules and guidelines to help their society and
their society's members navigate the realm of desire.
Eastern tradition
Tahna
Taṇhā (Pāli: तण्हा) or Tṛṣṇā (Sanskrit: तृष्णा) means "thirst, desire, craving, wanting, longing, yearning."
Synonyms:
- 愛 Cn: ài; Jp: ai; Vi: ái
- Tibetan: sred.pa
The most basic of these meanings (the literal meaning) is "thirst";
however, in Buddhism it has a technical meaning that is much broader.
In part due to the variety of possible translations, taṇhā is sometimes used as an untranslated technical term by authors writing about Buddhism.
Taṇhā is the eighth link in the Twelve Nidanas of Dependent Origination
(Pratītyasamutpāda/Paṭiccasamuppāda). Taṇhā is also the fundamental
constituent of Samudaya–the Noble Truth of the Origination of Suffering,
the second of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhist teachings describe the
craving for sense objects which provide pleasant feeling, or craving for
sensory pleasures. Taṇhā is a term for wanting to have or wanting to obtain. It also encompasses the negative as in wanting not to have.
We can crave for pleasant feelings to be present, and for unpleasant
feelings not to be present (i.e., to get rid of unpleasant feelings).
According to Buddhist teachings, craving, or desire, springs from the
notion that if one's desires are fulfilled it will, of itself, lead to
one's lasting happiness or well-being. Such beliefs normally result in
further craving/desire and the repeated enactment of activities to bring
about the desired results. This is graphically depicted in the
Bhavacakra. The repeated cycling through states driven by craving and
its concomitant clinging Upadana.
The meaning of Taṇhā (craving, desire, want, thirst), extends beyond the
desire for material objects or sense pleasures. It also includes the
desire for life (or death, in the case of someone wishing to commit
suicide), the desire for fame (or infamy, its opposite), the desire for
sleep, the desire for mental or emotional states (e.g., happiness, joy,
rapture, love) if they are not present and one would like them to be. If
we have an experience, like depression or sorrow, we can desire its
opposite. The meaning of Taṇhā is far-reaching and covers all desire, all wanting, all craving, irrespective of its intensity.
Taṇhā is sometimes taken as interchangeable with the term addiction,
except that that would be too narrow a view. Taṇhā tends to include a
far broader range of human experience and feeling than medical
discussions of addiction tend to include.
Further analysis of Taṇhā reveals that desire for conditioned
things cannot be fully satiated or satisfied, due to their impermanent
nature. This is expounded in the Buddhist teaching of Anitya
impermanence, change (Pali: Anicca).
The Buddhist solution to the problem of Taṇhā (craving, wanting) is the
next of the four noble truths, Nirodha, the cessation of suffering which
is Noble Eightfold Path and the Six Paramita. The cessation of
suffering comes from the quenching (nibbuta) of tanha, which is not the
destruction of tanha as much as the natural cessation of it that follows
its true and real satisfaction. The problem is not that we desire, but
rather that we desire unsatisfactory (dukkha) things, namely sensual
pleasures, existence and non-existence. When we have Right Effort, when
we desire that which yields satisfaction, then tanha is not the obstacle
to enlightenment but the vehicle for its realization.
Western tradition
Desire in Western Philosophy
Plato
Desire is identified as a philosophical problem in The Republic, a
dialogue by Plato. Plato observes that people in the city should follow
its leaders rather their their own interests and that therefore they
must exhibit moderation. Personal desires must be postponed in the name
of the higher ideal.
In Plato's Phaedrus the soul is guided by two horses, a dark horse of
passion and a white horse of reason. Here passion and reason operate
together. Socrates does not suggest the dark horse be done away with,
since its passions make possible a movement towards the objects of
desire, but he qualifies desire and places it in a relation to reason so
that the object of desire can be discerned correctly, so that we may
have the right desire.
Aristotle
In Aristotle's De Anima the soul is also seen to be involved in
motion. Animals desire things and in their desire acquire locomotion.
Thus, desire is implicated in animal interactions and the propensity of
animals to motion. But Aristotle acknowledges that desire cannot account
for all purposive movement towards a goal. He brackets the problem by
positing that perhaps reason, in conjunction with desire and by way of
the imagination, makes it possible for one to apprehend an object of
desire, to see it as desirable. In this way reason and desire work
together to determine what is a 'good' object of desire.
Modern philosophy
In Passions of the Soul Rene Descartes addresses the passions. As
suggested by the etymology of the word, the passions were passive in
nature; that is to say the experience of a passion was always caused by
an object external to the subject. An emotion, as it is commonly
rendered in both contemporary psychological discourse as well as popular
culture, is usually explained as an event internal to, or taking place
within, a subject. Therefore, an emotion is produced by the subject while a passion is suffered
by the subject. The passion of desire is an agitation of the soul that
projects desire, for what it represents as agreeable, into the future.
(In some ways Descartes anticipates Freud's Beyond The Pleasure
Principle.
In A Treatise on Human Nature David Hume suggests that reason is
subject to passion. Motion is put into effect by desire, passions, and
inclinations. It is desire, along with belief, that motivates action.
Desire in Kant can represent things that are absent and not only objects
at hand. Desire is also the preservation of objects already present, as
well as the desire that certain effects not appear, that what affects
one adversely be curtailed and prevented in the future. Moral and
temporal values attach to desire in that objects which enhance one's
future are considered more desirable than those that do not, and it
introduces the possibility, or even necessity, of postponing desire in
anticipation of some future event.
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant establishes a relation between the
beautiful and pleasure. He argues that "I can say of every
representation that it is at least possible (as a cognition) it should
be bound up with a pleasure. Of representation that I call pleasant I
say that it actually excites pleasure in me. But the beautiful we think
as having a necessary reference to satisfaction." Desire is found in the
representation of the object.
Hegelian desire
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel begins his exposition of desire in
Phenomenology of Spirit with the assertion that "self-consciousness is
desire." It is in the restless movement of the negative that desire
removes the antithesis between itself and its object, "...and the object
of immediate desire is a living thing...," and object that forever
remains an independent existence, something other. Hegel's treatment of
self-consciousness, or desire, is grounded in his larger project of
Spirit coming to know itself. It is literally the self-realization of
the Holy Spirit.
In the famous section on "Lordship and bondage," Hegel specifies that
self-consciousness requires the recognition of the other. He creates a
myth of the encounter between two self-consciousnesses who struggle to
the death for mastery, to be recognized by the other. The result is that
one becomes master, the other slave. Hegel's idea of the development of
self-consciousness from consciousness, and its sublation into a higher
unity in absolute knowledge, is not the contoured brain of natural
science and evolutionary biology, but a phenomenological construct with a
history; one that must have passed through a struggle for freedom
before realizing itself.
Death struggle
A struggle to the death ensues. However, if one of the two should die
the achievement of self-consciousness fails. Hegel refers to this
failure as "abstract negation" not the negation or sublation required.
This death is avoided by the agreement, communication of, or
subordination to, slavery. In this struggle the Master emerges as Master
because he doesn't fear death as much as the slave, and the slave out
of this fear consents to the slavery. This experience of fear on the
part of the slave is crucial, however, in a later moment of the
dialectic, where it becomes the prerequisite experience for the slave's
further development.
Enslavement and mastery
Truth of oneself as self-conscious is achieved only if both live, the
recognition of the other gives each one the objective truth and
self-certainty required for self-consciousness. Thus, the two enter into
the relation of master/slave and preserve the recognition of each
other.
Post-Hegelian developments
Hegel's myth proved very productive, becoming the basis for an entire
vein of theories of desire, particularly in the wake of Alexandre
Kojeve's anthropomorphic treatment of it in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
Kojeve
For Kojeve, the goal of the struggle is not "Spirit coming to know
itself," as it had been in Hegel, but rather a development in
hominization. The goal is recognition, what he equates with Hegel's
self-consciousness. Man was born and history began with the first
struggle, which ended with the first masters and slaves. Man is always
either master or slave; and there are no real humans where there are no
masters and slaves. History comes to an end when the difference between
master and slave ends, when the master ceases to be master because there
are no more slaves and the slave ceases to be a slave because there are
no more masters. A synthesis takes place between master and slave: the
integral citizen of the universal and homogeneous state created by
Napoleon.
Mimetic desire
Kojeve's analysis was fundamental for the development of two theories of
mimetic desire that arose in the twentieth century. This first was that
of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan's désir unites the Kojevian desire with the Freud's wunsch
as the central concept to his thought. For the aim of the talking
cure—psychoanalysis—is precisely to lead the analysis and to "recognize"
the truth about his/her desire, yet this is only possible when it is
articulated in discourse. Thus, "It is only once it is formulated, named
in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of
the term"; "...what is important is to teach the subject to name, to
articulate, to bring desire into existence," and "That the subject
should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the
efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing
something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject
creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world." Now, although the
truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never
articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to
articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.
In the "mirror stage," the subject of Lacan's first official
contribution to psychoanalytic theory (Fourteenth International
Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936), the formation of the
Ego occurs via the process of identification. The Ego develops as a
result of infant's identifying with its own specular image. At six
months the baby still lacks coordination, however, he can "recognize"
himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily
movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image
produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which
is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the
infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the
image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives
rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To
resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image:
this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.
(Dylan Evans, op.cit) The moment of identification is to Lacan a
moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery.
Yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction,
when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the
omnipotence of the mother. (La relation d'objet) This
identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise
of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.
However, the mirror stage shows that the Ego is the product of
misunderstanding—Lacan's term "méconnaissance" implies a false
"recognition"—and the place where the subject becomes alienated from
himself, since the ego is formed outside the self, or Lacanian terms,
the process by which the ego is formed in the Mirror Stage is at the
same time the institution of alienation from the symbolic determination
of being. In this sense méconnaissance is an imaginary
misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge that the subject possesses
somewhere. It must be emphasized again that the Mirror Stage introduces
the subject into the Imaginary order.
In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire
from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated
in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates
need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need
articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains
unsatisfied and this leftover is desire. For Lacan "desire is neither
the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the
difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the
second" (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the
articulation of need in demand (Dylan Evans). Lacan adds that "desire
begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated
from need" (article cited). Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as
Slavoj Zizek puts it "desire's raison d'etre is not to realize its goal,
to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."
It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. If
they belong to the field of the Other (as opposed to love), desire is
one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial
manifestations of a single force called desire (see "The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis"). If one can surmise that objet petit a
is the object of desire, it is not the object towards which desire
tends, but the cause of desire. For desire is not a relation to an
object but a relation to a lack (manque). Then desire appears as a social construct since it is always constituted in a dialectical relationship.
René Girard
René Girard was a professor of French literature in the United States at
the end of the 1950s and sought a new way of speaking about literature.
Beyond the "uniqueness" of individual works, he tried to discover what
they have in common and he noticed that the characters created by the
great writers evolved in a system of relationships that was common to
the works of many authors: "Only the great writers succeed in painting
these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a
system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically
at all, has less variability the greater a writer is." So there did
indeed exist "psychological laws" as Proust calls them. These laws and
this system are the consequences of a fundamental reality grasped by the
novelists, which Girard called the mimetic character of desire. This is
the content of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel
(1961). We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous,
our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of
another person—the model—for this same object. This means that the
relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is
always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through
the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator:
it is in fact the model who is sought. René Girard calls desire
"metaphysical" in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something
more than a simple need or appetite, "all desire is a desire to be," it
is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.
Mediation is external when the mediator of the desire is socially beyond
the reach of the subject or, for example, a fictional character, as in
the case of Amadis de Gaula and Don Quixote. The hero lives a kind of
folly that nonetheless remains optimistic. Mediation is internal when
the mediator is at the same level as the subject. The mediator then
transforms into a rival and an obstacle to the acquisition of the
object, whose value increases as the rivalry grows. This is the universe
of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, which are
particularly studied in this book.
Through their characters, our own behavior is displayed. Everyone holds
firmly to the illusion of the authenticity of one's own desires; the
novelists implacably expose all the diversity of lies, dissimulations,
maneuvers, and the snobbery of the Proustian heroes; these are all but
"tricks of desire," which prevent one from facing the truth: envy and
jealousy. These characters, desiring the being of the mediator, project
upon him superhuman virtues while at the same time depreciating
themselves, making him a god while making themselves slaves, in the
measure that the mediator is an obstacle to them. Some, pursuing this
logic, come to seek the failures that are the signs of the proximity of
the ideal to which they aspire. This is masochism, which can turn into
sadism.
This fundamental discovery of mimetic desire would be pursued by René
Girard throughout the rest of his career. The emphasis on imitation in
humans was not a popular subject when Girard developed his theories, but
today there is an amazing amount of convergent support for his claims
coming from empirical research. As Scott Garrels (Fuller’s School of
Psychology) wrote: