Reasoned selection

If suffering springs chiefly from thwarted desires, it is their object that must be examined: a natural and necessary desire (food, shelter, freedom from fear) has a limit and is easily filled, whereas a vain desire (wealth, glory) is by nature unlimited and never quieted, for it rests on a false opinion. Wisdom therefore consists in selecting the first and extinguishing the rest: not by renunciation, but because the reckoning shows that necessary goods are easy to obtain and that pursuing the unlimited is to doom oneself to disturbance. Where the Stoic suspends every desire for an external object, the Epicurean keeps a part of it, the part that bounds need, and through this sorting attains self-sufficiency (autarkeia).

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 127-128 · Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, XXIX

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

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)

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

Unhappiness comes from desires one cannot fulfil, or whose satisfaction soothes nothing: the therapy is therefore to sort desires by whether they are grounded in nature and necessary to happiness. The natural and necessary desires, few in number, are easily met; the empty desires, born of a limitless opinion such as glory or wealth, are insatiable and yield only disturbance. Wisdom thus neither suppresses desire wholesale, against Cynic asceticism, nor frees it from all bounds: it schools it, confining what one should want to what nature demands and makes easy. This is a reasoned selection that brings happiness within everyone's reach.

Letter to Menoeceus, 127-130 · Principal Doctrines, XXIX and XXX (the classification of desires)

Disturbance comes from boundless desires that nature does not demand: the greed for wealth and honours, fanned by the fear of death, throws men into an endless race. The cure lies in knowing the limit nature sets to pleasure, little being enough to keep pain away; beyond that, empty desire only feeds anxiety. Taking up the Epicurean sorting of desires, Lucretius makes of it the spring of a biting critique of Roman ambition and luxury. This is a reasoned selection of desire according to nature.

On the Nature of Things, II, 1-61 (empty terrors and measureless desires) · On the Nature of Things, III, 59-93 (greed and ambition born of the fear of death)

Aristotle does not repress desire but orders it: appetite (orexis) must obey practical reason as a child lives according to its father's command. The virtue of temperance aims at the mean, desiring what one ought, when and as one ought, neither asceticism nor unbridled affirmation but a reasoned selection of desires.

Nicomachean Ethics, III.11-12; I.13 (1102b)

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

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

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

Odysseus neither represses his desires nor becomes their slave: he governs them by calculation. Warned of the Sirens' deadly song, he does not stop his ears like his men but has himself bound to the mast to hear it without yielding, satisfying the desire to know while stripping himself in advance of the power to succumb. Not asceticism, not excess, but an economy of desire ruled by the end.

Odyssey, XII, 39-54, 158-200 (the Sirens and the binding to the mast)