Lack or power

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

In the Symposium, Diotima defines erōs as desire born of lack: child of Penia (Poverty) and Poros (Resource), love desires what it does not have and strives to possess it. This upward drive rises from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself, which lends a residual weight to gift.

Symposium, 199c-204c · Phaedrus, 244a-257b

Each thing, as a finite mode of God's power, tends to persevere in its being: this conatus 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 power to act.

Desire is the very essence of man, insofar as it is conceived as determined to do something by a given affection of itself.Ethics, III, definitions of the affects, def. 1

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

At the heart of love Spinoza sees neither lack nor gift but a joy: to love is to pass to a greater perfection, a joy referred to the idea of its cause (Ethics, III). Love is therefore not the surge of a void toward what would fill it, but the striving (conatus) of power toward what increases it, which keeps a kinship with eros without its pathos of lack. Among human beings this striving culminates in the friendship of those guided by reason, who agree in nature, are mutually useful and want nothing for themselves that they do not also want for others: a rational philia, reciprocal and chosen. At the summit, the intellectual love of God exceeds every interpersonal bond: a love without return, in which the sage does not require to be loved back, closer to disinterested gift than to possession.

He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.Ethics, V, prop. 19

Ethics, III (definition of love); IV, props. 35-37 and 70-71 (the friendship of reasonable people); V, props. 19 and 32-37 (the intellectual love of God)

Against the idea that the living first seek to preserve themselves, Nietzsche holds that every force wills to grow: this is the will to power. 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