Relation to oneself· Happiness and desire

Affirmation

Axis: Relation to desire — What should we do with our desires: affirm them, sort them, or detach from them?

Desire is not a lack to be filled but a creative power to be affirmed and intensified. To restrain one's desires is to diminish oneself: the successful life says yes to what moves through it and carries it beyond itself.

Who holds this position

Movements 3

Show inferred positions (3)

Romanticisminferable

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, , 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)

Existentialisminferable

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

Marxisminferable

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

Philosophers 10

Nietzscheexplicit

Against the idea that the living first seek to preserve themselves, Nietzsche holds that every force wills to grow: this is the . The drives are therefore not to be extirpated, the castration preached by the ascetic ideal, but to be shaped: to give style to one's passions, to sublimate them in the service of a more intense life, rather than extinguish them or surrender to them.

Twilight of the Idols, "Morality as Anti-Nature" · The Gay Science, §290

Spinozaexplicit

Each thing, as a finite mode of God's power, tends to persevere in its being: this is its actual essence. Desire is therefore not a lack to be filled, against a whole Platonic tradition, but the very affirmation of our being; wisdom does not extinguish it but uses reason to select what increases the .

Ethics, III, prop. 9, scholium and definitions of the affects (desire, the essence of man) · Ethics, III, props. 6-7 (conatus)

Rousseauexplicit

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 , and beware of those insatiable ones that inflates through comparison.

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

Humeexplicit

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

Benthamexplicit

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

Show inferred positions (5)

Camusinferable

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 of intensity embodied by , sets him clearly apart from detachment, even if lucidity tempers the pure pursuit of quantity.

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

Beauvoirinferable

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

Marxinferable

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

Sartreinferable

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

Leibnizinferable

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

Characters 1

Calliclesexplicit

Against temperance, he holds that living well means letting one's desires grow as large as possible instead of pruning them, then having the courage to fill them; unleashed without restraint is virtue itself. Socrates counters with the leaky jar, the insatiable soul no inflow can fill; Callicles embraces it, preferring the life that ceaselessly streams and refills to that of the stone, motionless and sated.

Plato, Gorgias, 491e-492c (the praise of intemperance) · Plato, Gorgias, 493a-494c (the leaky jar)

Arguments and objections

ArgumentDesire as power — Far from being the mark of what we lack, desire is the impulse by which life affirms and enlarges itself: to curb it is to diminish oneself.

A whole tradition, from to , defines desire as lack: we desire only what we do not have, so to desire is to suffer, and wisdom would consist in desiring less.
But this definition takes the effect for the cause. The artist, the lover, the creator do not desire out of a want of something: they overflow with a force that seeks to express itself and to produce the new. Desire is first this that wants to grow.
To curb this force in the name of tranquility is to prefer a smaller life to a greater one. To affirm one's desires, even in their risk, is to say yes to what one is and to want life to reach beyond itself.

Therefore So a good life is not the most peaceful, but the most intense: the one that affirms its desires instead of guarding against them.

ObjectionThe blind-desire objection — Affirmation does not tell the desire that uplifts from the one that ravages: lacking a compass, it hands life over to its strongest leanings, even the worst.

Affirmation draws its strength from refusing nothing: it says yes to what moves through life, without judging it in the name of an external morality.
But not all desires uplift: some consume, obsession, jealousy, the never-slaked thirst to possess or to dominate. To affirm without sorting is to say yes to these too, and to leave them the life they ravage.
To tell the desire that enlarges life from the one that undoes it, one needs a criterion, hence an examination, hence the very sorting that affirmation claimed to dismiss.

Therefore So affirmation, if it is not to become the slave of its worst leanings, must borrow from the wisdom it refused: learning to choose among one's desires.

ObjectionThe leaky jar — A satisfied desire calls up another without end: in always wanting more, we chase a fulfillment that recedes as we approach it.

Affirming desire assumes that, by following it, one can reach a kind of fullness: we want, we obtain, we enjoy.
But a satisfied desire does not die out, it shifts: no sooner is the wanted thing reached than a new lack arises, and the pleasure of having gives way to the desire for something else. compared the insatiable soul to a leaky jar, filled without ever being full.
Whoever says yes to all their desires is therefore not the master of their life, but the servant of the next lack: they run, and what they pursue draws back by just as much.

Therefore So unreserved affirmation does not lead to the promised fullness, but to a restlessness that never closes.

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

↑ What grounds it

Where the sacred resides

If there is no transcendent order above life to which desire ought to submit, desire ceases to be a fault to correct and becomes the very power by which life affirms itself. Immanence, from Spinoza to Nietzsche, grounds affirmation: there is nothing higher than life in whose name to curb it.

Status of emotions

If our affects are not obstacles to reason but a way of sensing what matters, desire ceases to be an impulse to correct: it reveals what carries us. To hold emotions to be a source of value rather than a disturbance inclines one to affirm one's desires rather than master them, from Romanticism to a sensitive reading of Nietzsche.

↓ What it implies

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

Practices

Amor fati: to love your fateStanceAttested · Nietzsche

Not merely to bear what is necessary, but to love it.

called amor fati the love of fate: not to endure what happens with gritted teeth, but to will that nothing had been otherwise, down to the smallest setback. It is not a routine to run but a disposition to cultivate: before what is already here and cannot be undone, you stop wishing it away and take it into your life as a part of yourself. The « if only » rumination dies down, and the energy it consumed returns to the present action.

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The eternal-return testExerciseAttested · Nietzsche

offers a thought to weigh your life and your desires: were you to live this again, identically, eternally, would you will it? is not resignation but a filter for affirmation. It sorts desires not by prudence, as 's calculus does, but by what you can say a wholehearted yes to. Practiced regularly, it transforms desire: from a lack you chase, it becomes a power you own.

Pick a desire or pursuit that drives you right now: a project, an ambition, an attachment.
Ask yourself slowly: if I had to live this desire and all it entails, over and over, without end, would I will it?
Notice the answer in your body as much as in your reasons: a surge, or a flinch.
If it is yes, commit fully: stop treating the desire as a means toward some later rest, and live it as worthy of returning.
If it is a flinch, ask what you would have to change to be able, one day, to will it without reservation.
Over time you affirm fewer things, but more wholly: this is , loving what you will to the point of willing its return.

once a week, unhurried · Attested · Nietzsche

This is not a call to accept everything passively: affirmation transforms what it can make its own, it is not consent to harm or stagnation. If the test breeds anxiety rather than clarity, set it down.

Standing before what is greater than oneself: the test of the sublimeHabitInspired by Romanticism

Before the immense, worry shrinks and the soul breathes.

The Romantics sought out the high mountain, the sea, the storm or the night sky to feel the : that mixture of vertigo and exaltation before what overwhelms us. To expose oneself willingly to something vaster than oneself dislodges the self for a moment from its worries and reopens the sense of the infinite that busy life covers over. A salutary counterpoint to a world where everything is on our scale and under control.

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Problems

PracticalVital Situation
The desire that destroys us
A desire we know to be harmful returns despite every decision against it: should we affirm it as part of ourselves, dismiss it as a stray impulse, or admit that we do not really govern our desires at all?
a harmful desire
Descriptive
Lack or power
Is desiring a matter of lacking what one does not have, and so suffering an emptiness to be filled, or is it the overflow of a power that creates? On the answer hangs whether desire should be quieted or intensified.
desire
PrescriptiveVital
The insatiable nature of desire
Every satisfied desire is reborn or gives way to another, and the pleasure subsides at once: can satisfying our desires ever fulfil us, or has desire no end, so that the only way out is to step outside it?
satisfying a desire
Descriptive
Are my desires my own?
Do my desires arise from me, or do I desire what others desire, what society manufactures for me? If they are not my own, affirming or sorting them takes on a different meaning.
the origin of desire
PrescriptiveVital
The hierarchy of desires
Are there higher and lower desires, with some part of us meant to govern the rest, or is this ranking merely a morality imposed on a life that asks for none?
the ordering of desires