Relation to desire

Absurd man does not repress his desires but seeks to exhaust the possible, to multiply and intensify experiences for want of a meaning that would rank them. This affirmation of desire, close to a hedonism of intensity embodied by Don Juan, sets him clearly apart from detachment, even if lucidity tempers the pure pursuit of quantity.

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Don Juanism"

Far from tempering or extinguishing desire, as Stoics and Epicureans wished, Romanticism exalts it as the very life of the soul: it is infinite aspiration, Sehnsucht, that desire with no assignable object which carries one toward the distant, the absent, the unreachable. Dissatisfaction is not an ill to be cured but the sign of our vocation to the infinite.

Novalis, Henry of Ofterdingen · Schiller, Longing (Sehnsucht)

Beauvoir refuses to mutilate desire in the name of a higher order: to take up one's existence is also to take up one's passions and desires in a free project, against the abdication of the spirit of seriousness that subjects them to fixed values. Desire is neither to be extinguished nor merely sorted, but to be lucidly assumed as an impulse toward the world and toward others.

The Ethics of Ambiguity

Far from Stoic or Buddhist extinction, Rousseau takes desire and imagination to be the very source of the feeling of existence: one enjoys less what one possesses than what one hopes for, and happiness lies in the striving, not in full satisfaction. Yet this affirmation is not without sorting: one must follow the simple desires born of self-love and pity, and beware of those insatiable ones that amour-propre inflates through comparison.

Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, VI · Rousseau, Emile, book II

Existentialism takes up desire and passion as part of free engagement in the world, against any morality of resignation or asceticism. Desire is neither to be extinguished nor merely disciplined: it expresses the way the existing self projects and chooses itself, to be lucidly assumed rather than fled.

Sartre, Being and Nothingness · Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

Hume overturns the classical primacy of reason over desire: the passions are the legitimate springs of all action, which reason serves without being able to oppose them, only the calm passions tempering the violent ones. No asceticism, then, but the acceptance of desires as the primary data of life, ordered from within rather than repressed.

A Treatise of Human Nature, II, 3, 3

Marx preaches neither asceticism nor mere consumption: he denounces the impoverishment of needs under capitalism, which reduces the worker to survival and makes having the only desire. Emancipation aims instead at the free development of human needs and powers, the individual rich in manifold, cultivated desires, an affirmation of desire as a wealth to be won collectively.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 · Grundrisse

For Sartre, desire is not an accident to be corrected but the way the for-itself, a lack of being, throws itself toward the world and toward others: freedom is experienced in desiring engagement, to be assumed rather than fled. The analysis of Being and Nothingness nonetheless marks it with a tragic note, the desire to coincide at last with oneself being a useless passion.

Being and Nothingness, IV

Marxism rejects both asceticism and mere consumption: it denounces the mutilation of needs under capitalism and makes emancipation the free development of human needs and powers. Desire, far from an evil, is a wealth to be unfolded collectively, once the conditions that reduce it to survival or to having are abolished.

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 · Marx, Grundrisse

Bentham expressly rejects the principle of asceticism, which would hold privation to be a good: pleasure is the only good, pain the only evil, and the end is to maximize the former. Desires are therefore not to be extinguished but satisfied; the only legitimate sorting is the calculation of the quantities of pleasure and pain they produce.

Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I-IV

Against Locke, Leibniz makes uneasiness, the muffled push of the small appetitions, the permanent spring of action and the engine of our advance toward greater perfection. Desire is no evil to be repressed but a positive force, provided it is enlightened and ordered toward the true good by the understanding: affirmation and reasoned sorting balance out in him.

New Essays on Human Understanding, II, 20-21

Desire is neither to be affirmed without restraint nor extinguished, but ordered by practical reason: the mean consists in desiring what one ought, when and as one ought. The temperate person has not abolished appetite but brought it into accord with deliberate choice, yielding a reasoned selection of desires rather than detachment or sheer affirmation.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 10-12

Thomas does not condemn desire: the passions and appetites are good in themselves, willed by God, and the virtue of temperance does not extinguish them but orders them according to reason, after the manner of the Aristotelian mean. Reasoned selection therefore prevails, but it is ordered to an ultimate end: every finite desire is only the sign of a natural desire for God, alone able to still it, which inflects the balance without lapsing into detachment.

Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 22-48 (the passions); IIa-IIae, q. 141

Confucianism does not condemn desire but civilizes it through the rites and the sense of propriety: one satisfies one's inclinations in the right forms and to the right measure. The ideal is the perfect accord of desire and norm, which Confucius says he reached only at the end of a long self-cultivation.

Analects (Lunyu), II.4 and XII.1

Confucianism civilizes desire through the rites and propriety rather than extinguishing it or affirming it without restraint: one satisfies one's inclinations in the right forms and to the right measure. Moral education aims at the accord of desire and norm, where propriety becomes second nature and the good is done without constraint.

Analects (Lunyu), II.4 and XII.1 · Xunzi (on rites and desires)

Locke makes desire an uneasiness, the goad that moves action toward what is lacking. But a person has the power to suspend the pursuit of a desire in order to examine it and judge whether it leads to the true good: freedom lies in this reflective delay, which sorts desires instead of following them blindly, without for all that extinguishing them.

Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 21

Mill corrects Bentham's hedonism with a qualitative hierarchy: not all desires and pleasures are equal, those that engage the higher faculties are worthier than those of the body. The sorting no longer bears on quantity alone but on the quality of pleasures, against a background that affirms satisfaction as the end of life.

Utilitarianism, ch. II

Master of his appetites, able to bear cold, hunger and wine without giving in, Socrates embodies enkrateia, self-mastery through reason. He neither abolishes desire as the ascetics will, nor celebrates it: he submits it to reason's sorting, holding good only what serves the soul. Reduced need is for him a strength, not a deprivation.

Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 2-3; I, 5 (self-mastery) · Plato, Symposium, 219b-220a (Socrates impervious to cold and wine)

Empiricism holds the passions and desires to be the natural springs of action, to be understood as facts rather than condemned. Far from asceticism, the point is to satisfy and to govern them through experience and judgment, which distinguish desires by their effects: a naturalistic affirmation tempered by a prudent sorting.

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II · Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 21

Pragmatism naturalizes desire: far from opposing it to reason, Dewey sees in it the spring of value, the interest that moves inquiry and orients conduct. Desire is neither to be extinguished nor followed as is, but to be educated by intelligence, which turns it into a reflective end: an affirmation of desire ordered by its practical examination.

Dewey, The Quest for Certainty · Dewey, Theory of Valuation

Utilitarianism takes as its end the satisfaction of desires insofar as they produce pleasure, and rejects asceticism as contrary to happiness. But it sorts: by the calculation of quantities in Bentham, by the qualitative hierarchy of pleasures in Mill. An affirmation of pleasure, then, ordered by a rational sorting of desires according to their effects.

Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, Utilitarianism

Descartes holds the passions to be useful when well governed: the point is neither to suppress nor to follow them, but to make the soul their master through judgment and a firm will. Stoic in inspiration, his provisional morality bounds the will to what depends on us and counsels changing one's desires rather than the order of the world. Yet he joins to this the affirmation of a desire guided by reason: virtue lies in resolutely doing what one judges best, the source of an inner contentment even in failure. Detachment, sorting and affirmation balance out in him.

Discourse on Method, III · The Passions of the Soul, arts. 144-148 and 211-212

Desire for objects binds one to saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirths: it arises from the ignorance that takes the self for the body and chases after what it lacks. Among the conditions of knowledge, Śaṅkara places renunciation (vairāgya) of the fruits of action, here and hereafter, and the ardent quest for liberation alone. The slope is clearly that of detachment: not because pleasure would be culpable, but because every desire turned toward the manifold misses the one real and the only stable good. A sorting remains in the background, the desire for liberation (mumukṣutva) being itself cultivated, but as a desire meant to extinguish once its end is reached.

Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, I.1.1 (the fourfold prerequisite) · Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā

Refined desires arise not from need but from the artifice that manufactures them: it is the five colors, the five flavors and the craving for rare goods that blind the eye and lead the heart astray, so that multiplying desirable objects never fills the lack but hollows it. The pursuit of wealth and honors scatters the mind and draws it away from the dao 道 (the Way): the remedy is not to satisfy desire better but to dry it at its source, returning to pu 樸 (simplicity, the uncarved block of wood). Thus no misfortune, for Laozi, is worse than not knowing when one has enough: the contentment of one who desires little is a wealth that nothing external can threaten.

Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 12, 46 · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 19

Desire and aversion aim at attaining or avoiding: directed at what is not up to us, they doom us to miss our aim and to suffer what we flee, hence to unhappiness. The first of the three disciplines, that of desire, is to withdraw them from everything external so as to desire only what is in our power, until progress makes desire safe. For the beginner Epictetus goes so far as to recommend suspending desire altogether and using only aversion, and that solely toward what depends on us. A reasoned sorting of the preferred indifferents remains in the background, but the lived tendency is detachment from all that fortune can take back.

Enchiridion, §2 · Enchiridion, §8

It is not needs that trouble us but the desires manufactured by craving: "the five colors blind the eye." Wisdom lies in diminishing desires and being content, for "to know contentment is true wealth" and "no disaster is worse than not knowing what is enough." The detachment aims less at a Buddhist extinction of desire than at a return to the natural: to fill the belly, not the craving eye.

Dao De Jing, ch. 12 and 19 · Dao De Jing, ch. 33, 44 and 46

Desire fixed on what is not up to us tears the soul from its nature and gives it over to disturbance; it must be withdrawn from externals and consent given to the course of things. A reasoned selection of the preferable remains, so that the point is less to extinguish all desire than to redirect it toward the one true good.

Meditations, II, 16 · Meditations, III, 6 · Meditations, XI, 16

Happiness comes from limiting desire to necessary and natural goods. Seneca preaches detachment from fortune and superfluous goods, while granting a reasoned selection of preferred indifferents, which may be welcomed without attachment.

Letters to Lucilius, II (only the one who craves more is poor) · Letters to Lucilius, XVI and CX (natural and necessary desires)

The appetites form the lowest part of the soul and must be mastered and curtailed under reason's guidance, for a soul given over to its desires becomes a "leaky jar" that nothing can fill. Plato preaches not the extinction of desire but its redirection: sublimated erōs becomes the drive that carries the soul toward the Beautiful and the Good.

Gorgias, 493a-494a · Republic, IX, 571a-580a

Nāgārjuna takes up the Buddhist diagnosis: craving (taṇhā, the grasping thirst that clings) and appropriation feed the cycle of rebirth. But he illuminates its root: one clings because one ascribes to objects an inherent existence; seeing their emptiness (śūnyatā) loosens attachment at its source. The path remains one of detachment, here grounded in metaphysical lucidity.

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), ch. XXIII (the examination of errors) · Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, ch. XXVI (the examination of the twelve links of existence)

Desire turned toward sensible things disperses the soul and chains it to the manifold; wisdom demands withdrawing it so as to redirect it wholly upward. Plotinus does not abolish the desiring drive but converts it into an erōs for the intelligible and the One: the soul finds rest only by ceasing to desire what is beneath it. The lived tendency is therefore detachment from the sensible, more austere still than in Plato.

Enneads, III, 5 (On Love) · Enneads, VI, 7, 22-35

The Cynic reduces desire to the strictly natural and detaches himself from all the rest: the less one desires, the freer one is. Askēsis consists precisely in training oneself to want nothing more from external things, so that nothing can be lacking or enslaving.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 105

By ceasing to hold anything good or bad by nature, the skeptic frees himself from the vehement desires and aversions that disturb the soul. He feels only the unavoidable affections (hunger, thirst) and meets them with measure: a discipline of detachment, akin to that of the other schools, but grounded in the suspension of judgment rather than in a doctrine of the good.

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30

If nothing is good or bad by nature, then no object deserves to be pursued or feared: Pyrrho draws from this an indifference (adiaphoria) toward things, the lived spring of his detachment. Where Epicurus sorts desires into the necessary and the empty, Pyrrho does not sort: it is the value judgment itself that he withdraws, which defuses desire at its root rather than ordering it. Tradition credits the sage with such evenness of soul that nothing moves him, yet without advocating an ascetic extinction: he lives by what appears, hunger, thirst, customs, without attaching to them as goods.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 61-66 · Cicero, On Moral Ends, II, 35 and IV, 43

The torment of desire comes, for Sextus, from holding certain objects to be good or bad by nature: one pursues or flees them with vehemence, and is disturbed. By suspending this value judgment one is freed from anxious pursuit, without aiming at the complete Stoic extinction of feeling. The skeptic keeps the natural inclinations, hunger, thirst, and answers them with measure: a detachment from supposed goods, tempered by acceptance of the unavoidable affections, which holds him a little short of strict asceticism.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30 · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 235-238

Inclinations are not evil in themselves, but they cannot ground moral worth: an action has value only when done from duty, independently of any inclination. This moral disinterestedness requires that the will make itself autonomous with regard to desire, acting against it where need be; without preaching the extinction of inclinations, Kant keeps a distance from them that leans toward detachment more than toward their eudaimonist sorting.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I-II · Critique of Practical Reason

Platonism orders the soul in three tiers, where reason must govern the appetites with the help of spirit: left to themselves, the desires of the body enslave and trouble. Wisdom consists in mastering them and in sublimating eros, in turning its force away from the sensible toward intelligible Beauty and the Good. A severe sorting of desires, then, leaning toward their transcendence more than their satisfaction.

Plato, Republic, IV and IX · Plato, Symposium; Phaedrus

Zhuangzi does not preach the extinction of desire as a discipline, but the lightening of the craving soul that clutches at gains, ranks and duration. The sage "fasts the heart" (xinzhai), empties himself of his preferences so as to espouse whatever comes, without however mortifying the body or condemning the simple joys he gladly celebrates. The leaning is toward detachment, but a playful detachment that lets desires pass like clouds rather than tearing them out, which sets him apart from Stoic asceticism as much as from the affirmation of desire.

Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the fasting of the heart) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)