The insatiable nature of desire
On the axis: Relation to desire · satisfying a 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?
Justification
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
Justification
To will is to lack: every desire springs from a painful privation, and its satisfaction, purely negative, falls at once into a new desire or into , which lays bare the emptiness of existence the moment nothing occupies it. The wheel of stops for an instant only in disinterested contemplation, and is broken only in the denial of the will; to those who cannot renounce, the Aphorisms concede no more than a prudent economy of desire.
So life swings like a pendulum, back and forth, between pain and boredom.The World as Will and Representation, §57
The World as Will and Representation, §57
Anchors: Plato · Schopenhauer