I'd hazard to say that desire is more complicated than needs/wants, especially when needs and wants are imagined along a scale of intensity more than some kind of difference between them.

Think of fear. Where would that fit in your schema? I imagine that we'd posit that it is a pain, and to relieve pain is a kind of pleasure. But I would say this is to misunderstand fear. Fear is neither a need nor a want, and it can vary in intensity so that it is more pressing than either needs or wants. Yet I would classify it as a desire, though it is unrelated to pleasure per se (though I do believe there is a pleasure in a continued state of non-pain -- that is a specific kind of pleasure, but I wouldn't define fear along the lines of this pleasure-pain)

But this is somewhat grammatical. I tend to think of desire in fairly wide terms -- and I also tend to believe that the satisfaction of desire is somewhat illusory, that there is no lack which is being filled in the pursuit of desire. I would say that 'filling a lack' is more characteristic of our needs than desires, as a whole. (food, shelter, sex -- the craving returns, but they are satisfiable too, unlike many of our desires)


Also, I'd posit to you that desires don't force us to do things, but rather as you note near the end that desires are "woven into" our being. Not sure if I'd go so far as to say all sentient creatures are like this, but I think it's safe to say humans are. But if that be the case, then desires don't force us to do things, but rather that desires are a necessary condition for our being -- without them we wouldn't be. An analogue to desire would be the body; we are not our bodies, at least as we usually understand what a person is (whatever the factual scientific picture might paint in the end), but we certainly wouldn't be without a body.

As such, a concept of freedom which denies desire is literally a super-human concept. It may in some sense be coherent and even make sense for super-human beings. But not human beings. (and, I'd hazard, that we posit it as we, as human beings, often have the desire to be more than what we are)

This is what makes desires manipulative, then: they instill a sense of dissatisfaction that a person did not previously have, and force the person to extend effort to relieve this dissatisfaction. — darthbarracuda

Indeed. The human condition in a nutshell.

Pleasure, an apparent good, is something that must be earned - but why do we need to earn anything to begin with? Why do we need to be part of the rat-race, always chasing a cheese, like a mannequin controlled by otherworldly manipulators? — darthbarracuda

Indeed. Instrumentality. Why bring in more people in order to need in the first place? How do you think absurdity fits into the picture? Specifically, the idea that we must endure each day finding ways to fulfill desires, day in and day out.

It is my argument, then, that sentient creatures have the N-property of being beings of desire. It is in the very nature of sentient beings that they desire, woven into their very being, in the same way living organisms are Beings-towards-Death, sentient organisms are also Beings-towards-Desire. — darthbarracuda

Nice distinction and provides a good framework to see the whole inherent desire thing.

As such, a concept of freedom which denies desire is literally a super-human concept. It may in some sense be coherent and even make sense for super-human beings. But not human beings. (and, I'd hazard, that we posit it as we, as human beings, often have the desire to be more than what we are) — Moliere

Indeed. I think the point was that we cannot escape it, but we can prevent future beings-that-desire and are dissatisfied.

Think of fear. Where would that fit in your schema? I imagine that we'd posit that it is a pain, and to relieve pain is a kind of pleasure. But I would say this is to misunderstand fear. Fear is neither a need nor a want, and it can vary in intensity so that it is more pressing than either needs or wants. Yet I would classify it as a desire, though it is unrelated to pleasure per se (though I do believe there is a pleasure in a continued state of non-pain -- that is a specific kind of pleasure, but I wouldn't define fear along the lines of this pleasure-pain) — Moliere

I would say that fear is an negative emotion that motivates a desire-creation that further motivates action. Fear makes us uncomfortable. So basically all desires are spawned from the instantiation of a negative experience. The insidious part about all this is that positive experiences, although being positive, will always promote a negative experience.

But this is somewhat grammatical. I tend to think of desire in fairly wide terms -- and I also tend to believe that the satisfaction of desire is somewhat illusory, that there is no lack which is being filled in the pursuit of desire. I would say that 'filling a lack' is more characteristic of our needs than desires, as a whole. (food, shelter, sex -- the craving returns, but they are satisfiable too, unlike many of our desires) — Moliere

The point I was getting at was that the requirement to fulfill desires, however illusory this satisfaction is, manipulates us into harming ourselves.

As such, a concept of freedom which denies desire is literally a super-human concept. It may in some sense be coherent and even make sense for super-human beings. But not human beings. (and, I'd hazard, that we posit it as we, as human beings, often have the desire to be more than what we are) — Moliere

Yeah, it seems related to the paradox of desire. The point being, however, is that a happy slave is still a slave.

Indeed. Instrumentality. Why bring in more people in order to need in the first place? How do you think absurdity fits into the picture? Specifically, the idea that we must endure each day finding ways to fulfill desires, day in and day out. — schopenhauer1

I continually flip-flop between believing that adding additional happy people improves the world to believing that addition of happy people does not change the overall value of the world.

In either case there must be an answer to the question: is there anything wrong with the existence of happy people? As I said to Moliere above, a happy slave is still a slave. Does this change anything?

The flip-flopping emerges when you start to compare authenticity with brute hedonic experience. Both aforementioned positions have their pros and cons - the former being logical but also difficult to swallow while the latter is more relaxed but also rather ad hoc.

This is what makes desires manipulative, then: they instill a sense of dissatisfaction that a person did not previously have, and force the person to extend effort to relieve this dissatisfaction. — darthbarracuda

Does a desire have some sort of independent existence in my brain in such a way that a desire can manipulate me? It seems like desires are the wishes of the individual. The individual motivates, drives, tortures, whips himself by devising desires whose satisfaction is not in easy reach, or in reach at all.

Why are we discontented? Why do we desire more than we have, or different than we have? We can learn to cool off our discontents, lessen our desires. We can learn to be content. I'm not suggesting that we should, just that we can.

That we know we can do these things (lessen desire) ought to take the sting out of our auto-manufactured desires. I don't know precisely what the beginning of desire is. Perhaps it is rooted in hunger (not literal hunger for food). Perhaps it is rooted in fear -- a fear of insufficiency. Perhaps it is rooted in the capacity to imagine -- whether the imagined thing is worth having or not. There are other possibilities.

At any rate, desires aren't manipulating us. It's the self working on itself. Maybe it all comes from not enough love. And by the time we grasp that, we've gone a long way chasing our tails down the highway.

Hint - has horns, pitchfork. Very cunning. (Speaking as one who just fell of the wagon, again.)

A few thoughts on your comments:

* On my view, needs always hinge on wants. They're conditional. You only need y if you want x, and y is logically required to satisfy x (and where in at least some cases, y can equal x).

* Good observations about pleasure not being identical with satisfying desires.

* Re "But our brains were not meant to be stimulated like this." Our brains are not meant to be anything.

* Re "A happy, content organism is not conducive to the manufacturing of genetic copies." I don't agree with this section, at least not in the context of talking about desires and pleasure. Pleasure, evolutionarily, seems strongly correlated with survival and procreation necessities. We achieve pleasure by eating, by exploring (and engaging in concomitant exercise), by sexual activities, in the wake (if not the midst) of significant adrenaline releases, etc. Organisms that experience pleasure from these things, especially once we're talking about organisms that can alternately feel sadness, annoyance, etc., are evolutionarily advantageous, because they'll pursue activities that keep them healthy and procreation-oriented. Re "happy/content" you're right in the sense of there needing to be relative lulls in pleasure levels, so that organisms do not just sit there and vegetate--there needs to be a drive to keep pursuing pleasures, but I think you're mistaken in taking the regular pursuit of pleasures as indicative of a general lack of happiness or contentment, which is strongly correlated with pleasurable experiences. The drive to pursue more and at least slightly different pleasures doesn't have to arise from a lack of happiness or from dissatisfaction (at least re the latter with any negative emotional connotation--we could tautologically define "dissatisfaction" as "the drive to pursue more and different pleasures," but that wouldn't imply negative contra positive emotional states).

I would say that fear is an negative emotion that motivates a desire-creation that further motivates action. Fear makes us uncomfortable. So basically all desires are spawned from the instantiation of a negative experience. The insidious part about all this is that positive experiences, although being positive, will always promote a negative experience. — darthbarracuda

I suppose this is what I'm trying to get at -- your account seems to focus on what we would term are pleasures derived by satisfying needs and wants. But desire is not all about pleasure, or even concern (which seems to enter your account in the same way as desire -- at the beginning, but isn't mentioned again). It's not even all about wants or needs, or the combination of these four. Desire is not separate from emotion, as you seem to indicate in your treatment of fear. Emotions don't make desires, but emotions motivate us -- just as desires motivate us. They do similar things, and are often concurrently with one another, and may even be synonymous (though I'm not willing to state that). It would be better, at least from my standpoint, to just use the terms "pleasure", "wants", and "needs" rather than "desire" -- especially as your account of desire seems to somehow exclude emotion.

Further, I thoroughly disagree that desire is spawned from negative experiences only. Smoking cigarettes, for instance, is a positive experience which reinforces the desire for cigarettes. (or, at least, is that way for many people -- obviously not everyone has a positive experience smoking cigarettes. But you get the point).

The point I was getting at was that the requirement to fulfill desires, however illusory this satisfaction is, manipulates us into harming ourselves. — darthbarracuda

I would say that pursuing our desires can lead to self-harm. I may desire to maintain a healthy diet, for instance, and pursuing that desire wouldn't harm me. I may desire the best tasting food all the time, and pursuing that desire could (insofar that "best tasting" is, as is often the case, unhealthy)

Further, "harm" is already a word bound up in the logic of desire, no? It's not like I have my desires over here which manipulate me in the middle to go to the harms over there. I want to avoid harms. And these are the things which I need to avoid.

Yeah, it seems related to the paradox of desire. The point being, however, is that a happy slave is still a slave. — darthbarracuda

But your terminology of "slave" is only relative to some sort of demi-god-like character, because it is based on a freedom that is not only unattainable, but could reasonably be interpreted as some kind of super- or post-human freedom. You seem to believe that we could only be free and not a slave if we were to act out of something other from desire.

What, literally speaking here, on earth would that be?

As such I would submit to you that there is such a thing as freedom even if we have desires. It is not the freedom of ex nihilo, but it's certainly different from being a slave. (or even a slave to our passions, which can, of course, lead to harm -- I think I'm more disagreeing with the scope of your claims than anything. Desire can certainly lead to harm as well as a deprivation of freedom, even human freedom. It's just not universal of desire)

Does a desire have some sort of independent existence in my brain in such a way that a desire can manipulate me? It seems like desires are the wishes of the individual. The individual motivates, drives, tortures, whips himself by devising desires whose satisfaction is not in easy reach, or in reach at all. — Bitter Crank

But desires are always there. There are brief moments of contentedness but then you must get up, eat some food, take a shit, and generally, ya know, we don't like just talking to ourselves and staring at walls.. we get up and do stuff. Even the desire to be a monk in a monastery with other monks doing stuff to not do stuff...

Why are we discontented? Why do we desire more than we have, or different than we have? We can learn to cool off our discontents, lessen our desires. We can learn to be content. I'm not suggesting that we should, just that we can. — Bitter Crank

We can change certain desires but not our need for need.

That we know we can do these things (lessen desire) ought to take the sting out of our auto-manufactured desires. I don't know precisely what the beginning of desire is. Perhaps it is rooted in hunger (not literal hunger for food). Perhaps it is rooted in fear -- a fear of insufficiency. Perhaps it is rooted in the capacity to imagine -- whether the imagined thing is worth having or not. There are other possibilities. — Bitter Crank

You cannot get out of the possibility for desire. Every motivation that is volitional is based on a desire.

At any rate, desires aren't manipulating us. It's the self working on itself. Maybe it all comes from not enough love. And by the time we grasp that, we've gone a long way chasing our tails down the highway. — Bitter Crank

Perhaps manipulation is not the right word, but certainly the discontentedness of being is rooted in the need for something which is not present now (hobbies, philosophy, other people, food, water, etc.).

At any rate, desires aren't manipulating us. It's the self working on itself. Maybe it all comes from not enough love. And by the time we grasp that, we've gone a long way chasing our tails down the highway. — Bitter Crank

As Schopenhauer said, a man can do as he wills but he cannot will what he wills. If he didn't have a desire to get x, would the man still consent to go through all the pains of the journey? That's manipulative, even if the pay-off is "worth it".

We always have an aversion to pain. We don't always have a desire for truly pleasurable experiences, because having these experiences may cause us much pain.

Pleasure, evolutionarily, seems strongly correlated with survival and procreation necessities. We achieve pleasure by eating, by exploring (and engaging in concomitant exercise), by sexual activities, in the wake (if not the midst) of significant adrenaline releases, etc. — Terrapin Station

I agree that we could not have "made it" if evolution had programmed us to live in misery our entire lives. We would have needed to feel positive and up-beat at times. So although nature is mostly bloody, tooth and nail, it also produced the capacity to feel happy or content as a means of making sure nobody goes crazy. Again, though, this is basically manipulation (by our genes): the focus isn't on our welfare per se, but rather on keeping our welfare up to a certain minimum standard so that we can effectively spread our genes.

Pain warrants change, while pleasure itself changes. Both motivate action. That is why life is structurally manipulative: the bad is guaranteed and the good only comes about by experiencing bad things. In any case, evolution has programmed most animals to be slightly anxious all the time.

It would be better, at least from my standpoint, to just use the terms "pleasure", "wants", and "needs" rather than "desire" -- especially as your account of desire seems to somehow exclude emotion. — Moliere

Yes, I would agree that moods have a very important place here. Moods can essentially over-ride brute hedonic calculus. If you are truly happy, then aches and pains don't really matter. It's all worth it.

The question remains, however: is it still manipulative to experience these pains? Are these pains still bad even though you don't care about them?

Further, "harm" is already a word bound up in the logic of desire, no? It's not like I have my desires over here which manipulate me in the middle to go to the harms over there. I want to avoid harms. And these are the things which I need to avoid. — Moliere

True, this is why I definitely see a difference between the experience and the process of obtainment of this experience. However I would say that we always want to avoid harm, while we don't always want to obtain pleasure because the costs (pain) may be too high.

But your terminology of "slave" is only relative to some sort of demi-god-like character, because it is based on a freedom that is not only unattainable, but could reasonably be interpreted as some kind of super- or post-human freedom. You seem to believe that we could only be free and not a slave if we were to act out of something other from desire. — Moliere

Well I suppose this is where cosmic metaphysics might start to come into play. If we can't actually conceive of someone as not being a slave to their will, then perhaps it is actually the case that the will is metaphysically superior than the do.

However I would say that we always want to avoid harm, while we don't always want to obtain pleasure because the costs (pain) may be too high. — darthbarracuda

Have you met anyone that cuts themselves? Or has done so in the past?

If he didn't have a desire to get x, would the man still consent to go through all the pains of the journey? That's manipulative, even if the pay-off is "worth it". — darthbarracuda

This question reminds me of Tennyson's famous line, "'tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Poetically worded, but still gets at what you're asking, I think. And I'm not sure if I agree with Tennyson all of the time.

Have you met anyone that cuts themselves? Or has done so in the past? — Heister Eggcart

This is an interesting point. Pain and pleasure are somewhat close as feelings from a phenomenological standpoint. The distinction doesn't appear to me to be so clear cut. Many things, like for example warmth, are pleasurable. Increase the temperature too much and it becomes painful. The masochist enjoys harming himself as another example. We find that to be wrong and immoral simply because we understand that from an objective point of view, harming yourself has objective future ramifications, and it's not worth it for a mere subjective feeling.

The distinction doesn't appear to me to be so clear cut. — Agustino

Jesus Christ, Agu, did you have to so savagely pun right there? >:O

From this, several questions can be raised:

• Is a happy slave still a slave?
• Can slavery ever be good for someone? Is manipulation always bad in-itself?
• Do the ends of desire-enslavement (pleasure) justify the manipulative nature of desire?
• Can sentients (desire-slaves) ever be seen as positive contributions to the value of a world, or
• Are sentients always a liability?
• Is pleasure ever an impersonal good, or is it restricted as a personal good?
• How does the feeling of power affect our views on desire-slavery? (i.e. "I can do this!" rather than "I must do this!")
• Is pleasure still a good if it has only been obtained by the addition of bad (discomfort), or does the uncomfortable process of obtaining the good invalidate the good as truly good?
• If there is no alternative to existence as a sentient other than by desire-enslavement, should we embrace this as an acceptance of our fate and essence, or should we reject it?

Suffering motivates us to act, in order to stop feeling it, or prevent it being felt. This is perpetual. We will do this till the day we day, because we have bodily needs - food, water, shelter, etc. Hunger is suffering, thirst is suffering, cold is suffering. So we must act, expend effort and energy, struggle to avoid it. Because if we don't, the suffering will intensify greatly, until we die a horrible painful death, of starvation, thirst, exposure, etc. Life is a constant struggle to avoid suffering, and the consequence of avoiding all these various sufferings is that we continue to exist (and suffer). So I would not say that "we avoid suffering because we want to continue living". Rather, I'd say that we want to avoid suffering (because it feels bad, it's unwanted, it hurts), and the consequence of this is continued existence. Evolution has fine tuned this, whereby we feel hunger, so we struggle to find something to eat, and then we feel thirst, so we must expend effort to drink, and then we get cold, so we find some clothes or heat, etc. It's a constant series of sufferings in various forms, which motivate us to perform different actions - which produces the overall effect of continued existence (and continued suffering).

The horrible thing is that when we avoid all our bodily sufferings, we're not rewarded with anything (aside from not feeling suffering), there's no prize, no compensation for our struggle. All we achieve is a state which the dead get through no effort at all, and don't have to suffer and struggle for it. We just feel 'not-bad'. Our physical needs are met, now what? We are confronted with the emptiness of existence, it's inherent lack of value, it's ambivalence - you could take it or leave it. And we become bored, and restless. We are so used to perpetually being in action, struggling from suffering that when we rest, we simply don't know what to do with ourselves. We need tofind something to do. When our attention isn't being absorbed into something, when we lack a goal or purpose, we face life itself. And it's empty. So we must invent goals, we must invent something to absorb our attention into. We must put made up goals ahead of ourselves, so that we struggle towards those instead.

And we are so dumb, that psychologically we imagine it all paying off in the future. "I'll be happy when I achieve x, or when I reach y, or when I get z". But when we reach xyz, perhaps we feel some momentary excitement, or joy, but soon, due to our once again lacking purpose, goals or direction to distract us from the emptiness of existence, we are confronted with it again, and lapse into suffering. We become anxious and restless. And it just repeats. "I'll be happy when I reach a".

And due to psychological complexity, how complicated we are (as opposed to say a cow), we have more needs than just bodily. We experience a far greater range of suffering than other animals. We need social contact, we need to feel valued, we need to feel like what we do is meaningful, we need to feel part of a wider, greater whole (a society, a country, the human race, etc). It's just endless. Life is just a constant race, a struggle to avoid a vast range of sufferings. Because we experience such a wide range, we develop the complex and complicated societies we see today. There's no real end goal. We may tell ourselves we do it all for 'x', it all has 'y' meaning, and that's why we live and struggle. But this isn't the case. We struggle simply because suffering hurts. Pain hurts, cold hurts, hunger hurts, and so we do whatever we need to, to avoid these various sufferings. The resulting effect being continued biological existence. But we also feel the suffering of meaninglessness, and so we must invent justifications/reasons for our struggle ("we may tell ourselves we do it all for 'x'), to try and give us some psychological comfort, to avoid the ennui and anxiousness.

And there's all kinds of other sufferings as well. This is just the normal functioning humans life. Everything can go wrong, addiction, mental illness, physical illness, heartbreak, rejection, fingers down chalkboard, car crashes, being harmed by empathy (you feel bad when others do), I could go on for days.

But yet, there's no true pleasure in this world. There's no genuinely positively valued experiences. Suffering has negative value, and yet pleasure is not positive. At best it's neutral. What pleasure actually consists of, is an experience of 'losing oneself'. We say that we feel pleasure in moments when we become absorbed into something so much that we forget our existence, our struggle. We say eating good food is pleasurable. What actually happens is we become lost into the flavor sensation, we focus so much on it that we lose our sense of ourselves and forget we exist. This is what happens in sports, movies, music, sex, massages. Pleasure is nothing but a brief respite from suffering, through completely absorbing ones attention into something. An orgasm feels good, not because it's an actual genuinely good sensation in-itself. Rather, the feeling is so strong that our attention is overwhelmed into it, and we lose our sense of self, of being in the world, if only for a brief moment.

I'm writing this post right now, because I have secured my bodily needs, and the emptiness of the world is confronting me head on. I need to find something to do, to distract myself, to absorb my attention into. Just so happens that the complicated thought involved in doing philosophy, much like a puzzle to solve, takes a lot of concentration/attention, so that I don't have to face the emptiness of merely existence anymore. Soon this wont be enough, my attention will stop being absorbed by my thoughts, it doesn't last. And so I'm downloading an episode to watch soon. I've prepared to avoid the future suffering.

I don't think most people are really aware of how bad their lives are, and the world is. It's suffering all the way down. There are no motivations for action that are not a kind of suffering. We seek 'pleasurable' (which we falsely believe are genuine goods) experiences only because the lack of them is a kind of suffering. Anyone with any sense of empathy should conclude that creating another being that will have suffering inflicted upon them, day in and day out, until it finally overwhelms them and they die, is clearly not the right thing to do. It's cruel and unnecessary. But most people are deluded about the value of their lives. They are masters of pollyannaism, or just genuinely lack empathy. Some of the reasons people have children are downright shocking. "So someone will care for me in my old age", "to save my marriage", "to get money from the government". And then there's people who do it unthinkingly, because that's the thing that you do. You become an adult, you find a partner, you have children and settle down. And so they do that, because that's the thing that you do. thedoxa.

Life consists of nothing more than a struggle away from suffering, and brief respites from suffering by forgetting you exist, essentially. Losing oneself into a moment, or a sensation. That's it. We delude ourselves by perpetually imagining the future better than it will be in reality. We imagine happiness ahead, we don't really understand that we'll never reach the future, we'll always be here, presently suffering and struggling. And then one day our bodies will be lethally harmed, or give out, and we will die.

Humour and laughter is an important and effective counter to suffering. It's probably the best way to deal/respond to it. Find a way to keep laughing, try not to get too depressed.

As Schopenhauer said, a man can do as he wills but he cannot will what he wills. — darthbarracuda

So, who wills what, then, if not the man? We will what we want, even when it is what we don't want. It just isn't a rational process. It's a paradox.

Willing desire one doesn't "want" (like, "I ferociously crave that man, and I know he is going to lead to nothing but trouble -- but I want him anyway, RIGHT NOW!" is only a problem for the model of man who is overly rational. For the normally rational, embodied man the experience of willing his wants even when he doesn't want what he currently craves is perfectly normal, if annoying.

The non-existent man who has an overly rational model doesn't have a robust body capable of generating desires one doesn't want. Jane is on a diet, she is having some success, and is proud of it. She's looking forward to a slimmer Jane. Suddenly she is struck by a ravenous longing for chocolate ice cream, cookies, and lavishly buttered popcorn--successively, all during the same evening. Jane desires to stay on her diet and become svelte, but she wills the journey of sin and debauchery to the store where she buys premium chocolate ice cream; big, thick chewy chocolate chip cookies; butter, and popcorn.

4,000 calories later, sated, she no longer craves these things and is beset by waves of remorse. So, who willed this act of gluttony if not Jane? No one else, of course. Her body (blood sugar levels, memories, limbic system, an ad she couldn't avoid for the new Hagen Daz deep dark chocolate ice cream with added lard) combined to overwhelm her rational mind. Jane is her body. Her body doesn't have an independent existence apart from Jane, or belong to somebody else. Jane, and everybody else, is capable of willing desires they do not want.

We will what we will, even if we don't consciously and rationally choose to do so--which is why Freud said "We are not masters of our own house".

... I am using desire as synonymous to concern, with two sub-categories involved: needs (pressing desires) and wants (relaxed desires).

Pleasure is the experience we normally receive when we satisfy a desire....

But our brains were not meant to be stimulated like this — darthbarracuda

I disagree with all three of these opening claims. We should not confuse philosophy with a belief that we can understand human psychology.

(1) To me 'concern' is quite different from 'desire'. Concern is like sorge in German, it's about what matters to a creature. 'Desire' is a word we give to a tendency we see in ourselves. I am with bc here, you seem to regard 'desire' as some kind of independent force.
(2) It would sound rational if pleasure were indeed the normal reward for satisfying a desire, but I think this is to rationalise or give un-evidenced reasons, not to explain successfully. Much of the pleasure I see other people having, or that I observe in myself, has nothing to do with satisfying desires, and the satisfaction of many desires does not result in pleasure..
(3) It's hard to be sure what our brains were meant to be stimulated by. I don't know what would support a good claim.

We will what we will, even if we don't consciously and rationally choose to do so--which is why Freud said "We are not masters of our own house". — Bitter Crank

What most parents would know and what studies show to be present at the age of about 6, is that we become capable of negating our desires to a degree. At a latter age we tend to develop a knack for wisdom whereby we appear to learn to rationally analyse our motivations. We're able to use meta cognition to negate our own direct desires, I wouldn't know what it means when we have a desire to not only negate, but generate our own desires. Increasing mental self-awareness could be seen as a desire to become a master of our own house.

In a similar vain I would say that a happy slave is a slave who doesn't know he's a slave. (provided physical conditions aren't overly detrimental).

So, I don't know if desire is the name of it, but certainly, we are in a way "slaves" in the sense that, as Sartre said, we are "condemned to be free". There is a burden of being of sorts.. Let's use an everyday example..

You wake up from your slumber. You are laying in bed. You are bleary-eyed but you are FORCED with a familiar decision- get out of bed or lay there... I supposed you COULD lay there until you get bed sores, shit your bed, and die of starvation, dehydration, and infection, but most likely you CHOOSE the decision to get up. Now you feel the urge to take a shit.. You COULD shit your pants, but you decide that you want to do it in the toilet. Now you are on the toilet.. You COULD wipe your ass or just leave it.. Now you are just sitting there on the toilet.. You COULD stay there for days on end until you die of dehydration, starvation, and infection, but you decide to get up and wash your hands. Now you could decide to go without brushing your teeth, taking a shower, putting on deodorant, changing your clothes, and decide to stay in the same clothes day in and day out.. You COULD decide to make breakfast or go without food and starve. You COULD just sit on your couch until you starve, dehydrate, stare at the wall, be intensely bored just sitting there, or you could get up and find something to do, go to work, visit people, make plans, visit places, find entertainment, give to charities...

The need for need does not go away.

You are bleary-eyed but you are FORCED with a familiar decision- get out of bed or lay there... I supposed you COULD lay there until you get bed sores, shit your bed, and die of starvation, dehydration, and infection, but most likely you CHOOSE the decision to get up. — schopenhauer1

Fortunately, life goes on because you don't need to make choices at all these junctures of various bodily functions. You are a body, and your body won't put up with your decision to lay there in a pile of shit, wet cold mattress, while your are chilled, stinking, a-hungering, a-thirsting, and a-rotting from infection--unless you in your body is afflicted with terminal dementia.

Your body likes being warm, dry, fed, watered, and pain free. It will get you out of bed. Plus your mama deeply programmed you during potty training. Once successfully trained, we urinate and defecate in our beds and clothing only when something goes haywire, and we generally feel pretty bad about it.

It isn't your conscious mind that sustains your life: it is your body doing its thing as a body that keeps you alive. (conscious mind and somatic function are all part of the same body system--no dualism here.)

That said, there was a guy in my home town, Freddie Dewitt, who was quite smart, fairly well off, and and apparently not crazy. Freddie was middle aged when I saw him walking around town (back in the 50s). Freddie never washed, never changed clothes, never repaired his boots. His clothes were black and stiff with dirt and grease. His truck was a ramshackle contraption. He owned a number of buildings in the village's "downtown" and was a bad landlord. He never did anything to maintain, let alone improve, his buildings. He did eat and drink, though, and apparently used a toilet (outhouse, probably) of some sort. He looked and smelled repulsive.

Mr. DeWitt hadn't always been like this. As a young person he did well in the 1 room school he attended. An Aunt remembered his being very smart in school. He got married and starting farming. Things didn't work out maritally, I heard. When his wife told him she was divorcing him and expected a share of the farm, he threw a shovel full of manure in her face and said that was all the farm she was going to get.

So, did Freddie choose to become a repulsive pariah, the village idiot, in a small down, or did he fail at being a human being, ending up as a miserable wretch not by his own doing?

Fortunately, life goes on because you don't need to make choices at all these junctures of various bodily functions. You are a body, and your body won't put up with your decision to lay there in a pile of shit, wet cold mattress, while your are chilled, stinking, a-hungering, a-thirsting, and a-rotting from infection--unless you in your body is afflicted with terminal dementia. — Bitter Crank

Well there we go..So we do desire not to lay in shit, and we make a choice (however habitual), not to lay in shit. But, whether out of long habit, or more deliberate decision-making, we indeed choose, and life always presents us with those choices. Now, underlying and "manipulating" these choices are desires based on conscious and unconscious preferences, cultural programming, or what have you; but indeed, there are desires that underly the choice, however free or however influenced by society and/or historical contigency it may originate from.

So, did Freddie choose to become a repulsive pariah, the village idiot, in a small down, or did he fail at being a human being, ending up as a miserable wretch not by his own doing? — Bitter Crank

He was presented with choices, as life will always do, and based on nature/nurture and preferences he desired a certain route for better or worse that led to (what we would perceive as) undesirable health/hygienic conditions and lower status in society.

However I would say that we always want to avoid harm, while we don't always want to obtain pleasure because the costs (pain) may be too high. — darthbarracuda

Why would you say say that?

I mean, if people were rational, then perhaps that'd be the case.

But there are people who desire harm, and not just as a form of pleasure. An act can be both painful and harmful, and people will still desire it. I don't know if you know people like this -- but one example that sticks out to me is a series of bad relationships I've witnessed. They desire the person, even though that person is harmful for them, and results in pain. But they want that person, in spite of the evidence that that person is neither healthy or pleasurable for them.

Well I suppose this is where cosmic metaphysics might start to come into play. If we can't actually conceive of someone as not being a slave to their will, then perhaps it is actually the case that the will is metaphysically superior than the do. — darthbarracuda

I think we can conceive it. Most certainly it is conceivable. I'm stating that even though we may conceive of god-like features, and even desire ourselves to be god-like, and pursue this status, that in spite of desire we just aren't the sort of creature who can be without desires. If we were to succeed in making a one who acted out of something other than desire, then I don't think we'd be able to reasonably say that that one is human.