Desire

Moral problem of the desire

The desire supposes the conscience of a lack which would translate our imperfection. Also the moralists often stress the painful character of the desire, and on its unlimited aspect when it refers unceasingly on new objects. The Bonheur would reside of this fact in the absence of desire.

This negative design of the desire implies certain questions:

does one Have to reduce our desires?
is it possible to make the distinction between truths and false desires?
is This reduction a Owe moral?
does the reduction of the desires lead to the Bonheur?

These questions are commonplaces of the moral reflection since the Antiquité. One can schematically oppose two types of answer:

the desire must be reduced; happiness is then conceived like a state of inertia reached by the suppression of all the tensions. The desire is thus a cursed share of which émanciper is needed;
the desire cannot and does not have to be reduced: it is essential with the life. Morals must thus recognize its value.

Natural desires and vain desires

The philosophers, since the origins of philosophy, asked for which place to make with the desires. The answers are very varied. In the Phédon , Plato presents the idea of an ascetic life where the man must fight against turbulences of his body; the Cyrénaïques, on the contrary, make satisfaction of all the desires the supreme good. All these reflections led to many distinctions, as one sees it for example at Épicure.

The classification of the desires

The Morale épicurienne is a morals which makes well pleasure the , and pain the Mal. To reach happiness (the Ataraxie), the epicurean follows the rules of the quadruple remedy, called the " Tétrapharmacos" :

the gods are not to fear;
death is not to fear;
the pain is easy to remove;
happiness is easy to reach.

It is for the latter that the desire should more particularly be thought. Épicure classifies the desires thus:

This classification is not separable of an art of living, where the desires are the object of a calculation in order to reach the Bonheur.

The calculation of the pleasures

For Épicure, the calculation (or “arithmetic”) of the desires is opposed at the same time to asceticism, where one is satisfied with a frugal life to respect a moral law, and with the vice, which involves sufferings of the body and disorders of the heart.

In general, the pleasure is necessary to happiness, and one seeks it while fleeing the pain. In certain cases however, we treat the good like an evil, because it is necessary to flee a light pleasure which would have as a consequence a pain. For example, for the body, drinking of alcohol is pleasant, but can involve the physical forfeiture; and for the heart, the love is the suppression of a lack, but can involve the pain owing to the fact that a perfect union (as in the myth of Aristophane) is impossible.

In other cases, we accept the pain if it is momentary, and if it is the condition of a higher pleasure. For example, the physical exercise of the body is painful, but the health which results from it is a pleasure.

If one devotes to a veracious calculation pleasures, happiness will be perhaps easy to reach. A hypothetical result would be autarky, state where one would suffice oneself for oneself by limiting his desires: one would not depend on the others, and one would not pass his life to the continuation of external objects. If to limit its insatiable search of external object is possible to a certain extent, being independent of the others is a phantasm which is not realizable and which is not always desirable. We are by nature in harmony with the rest of the world.

While being satisfied to satisfy natural desires, one reduced the desire to the nature's needs. But this limitation of the desires raises the question to know if one can reduce the desire to the need; and if one can distinguish from the nature's needs and the artificial needs.

The desire of truth

This talk of the doctrines épicurienne shows that it is not easy to distinguish reality from the desires. The epicureanism supposes a fundamental dissatisfaction. Which is then the true desire of the man and how to appease it?

For Plato, this desire is the desire of Vérité and it is necessary to appease it to release itself from “this bad thing” which is the body. It identifies true and well, and thus the true desire is the research of the good. The false desires are those of the body which disturbs the heart, prevent it from reaching the truth and are sources of illusions.

This Platonic idealism thus makes body a source of error and evil:

the desires of the body are morally condemnable, except when they give access the Ideas;
the desire of truth is at the same time desire of the Good.

All the philosophers did not condemn the desire; it is necessary moreover notice that if Plato condemns Morale the desire lies, this last remainder the condition of a spiritualization of the instincts which passes by philosophy and the policy and which is the expression of the desire of immortality.

But can one condemn the desire also categorically? If it is the cause of our actions, it would not be owed, because it would be then the gasoline even of our Nature.

Gasoline of the man

In the distinction of the " désir" and of the " besoin" , one can see the desire like a characteristic, not only of the human being, but of the individual in what it has of single. Thus a desire specific to a person with its is lived and at the same time its unconscious.

The mimetic Desire of Rene Girard

The example, given by Rene Girard, children who dispute similar toys in sufficient quantity, conduit to recognize that the mimetic desire is without subject and object, since it is always imitation of another desire and that it is the convergence of the desires which defines the object and which starts competitions where the models are transformed into obstacles and the obstacles in models. The resolution of mimetic violence, for Girard, would be in the emissary Victime become crowned by undergone violence.

Desire and lack

Gilles Deleuze conceives to him a resolutely positive desire. The desire is not centered on a lack but it is construction. Confusion between the lack and the vacuum is the origin of the design of the desire like filling, inevitably negative, of a lack.

Need and desire

All the mystery of human would lie in the fact that there exists in him two dimensions of desire: one animal , continuing objects, situations, pleasures, for survival and of the perpetuation of its physical organization and its genome (procreation), and one another dimension, which does not continue an object but a phantasm resulting from confrontation between the lived intra-uterine one memorized and the lived extra-uterine one after the birth. This dimension, properly human , subverts physical and animal dimension by us, sanctifying it or diabolisant it. One can initially work out a first possible distinction according to which the need can be seen like a need of a natural nature even physiological, i.e that it relates to survival (as to nourish itself) whereas the desire does not have character of natural need, implying by there futility. It is in addition the thesis which one finds at Epicure in his Lettre in Ménécée : it indeed exposes its philosophy like having for aiming a life of pleasure through the selection of the desires according to their finality. It is a question for him of distinguishing the capacity of the desires to get happiness without compromising it; it distinguishes for that the desires natural and necessary (to eat, to sleep…) desires nonnatural and thus vain (desire of richness, immortality, glory, love…). It is thus necessary to preserve the nature's needs because all the others are vain and futile. By there it takes again the stoical sentence “is limited to the desires which you can satisfy” who rest on the morals of Greece Antique according to which the man should continue only the satisfaction of his needs and not that of his desires. The only acceptable desire would be consequently the desire not to wish, but such a design would then reduce the man to the state of animal.

The major objection with such a distinction would be thus to show in what the rejection of the desire as such would be to reduce the man to an unquestionable animality. For that, there is consequently a question of showing that so in the desire there is no natural need, it can however be a imperativity (if I have a desire in love for Miss Dupont and that it rejects me, then depression). In the same way, one sees well that the need is not simply natural (one can also need a car or a pen) because the object of the need is defined by its functionality , i.e his adequacy with a finality. It is necessary need only to fulfill a function, therefore the object of the need is into clean substitutable , it is thus not given in its singularity. Whereas the desire, relates to him to a precise and nonsubstitutable object (I want Miss Dupont and anybody other).

The object of a need proceeds thus of a function which I aim through him , whereas the object of the desire represents something of other that itself (if I wish glass of Riesling, it is because I am small Alsatian and that points out my youth to me). There is thus in the desire a dimension symbolic system of representativeness of the object concerned, it is in that it is thus properly human. Whereas in the need, it is a question of having the object for its functionality, in the desire, the object is aimed because it is necessary to be this object. It is this distinction which can be made between the advertisement and publicity: whereas the advertisements were supposed to cause the need to have such or such object for its functionality (the merits of a car are praised because it is more powerful), publicity shows ideal people to which it is a question of being identified through consumption (it is a question of buying a beautiful motor to be a rich person and beautiful man who incarnates the social success).

It is thus seen well, a dichotomy between need and desire is thus not so obvious and raises well of a reflection on the significance only one lends to them. Remain that the desire is well the gasoline of the man in that which it represents an order strictly speaking symbolic system. It is what Freud will show, for which the desire is always constituted such as desire of an object but object aimed on a symbolic system mode. In other words, the desired object is desirable as it represents another thing unconsciously that itself lived before. The pleasure principle (the most direct satisfaction of the desires) is thus differed by the principle of reality through a diversion symbolic system. The desire is consequently, at Freud, always desire to find a former satisfaction and it occurs that the first of these satisfactions is that of the fusional experiment with the mother.

Is the desire however a need since the man is a being of desire, and that Ci is the engine of the human life!?

The desire like interdict

It is thus seen well, which is aimed in the desire it is thus the pleasure, i.e an immediate presence, a complétude that Lacan names the Thing , in other words that which cannot be named. The man being speaking, his desire can be done only on the symbolic system mode of the language, consequently, it cannot never reach the object of his pleasure; in other words, because its pleasure goes on phenomenal objects which are not strictly speaking the object of the desire, it can only be confronted with the dissatisfaction. But this dissatisfaction then makes it possible to start again the desire in the man, i.e. if the Thing were something which one could enjoy, it would have there no more desire . The pleasure thus is well aimed in the desire, but it remains unattainable, better, prohibited.

the Thing is en effet' a béance' which makes that each object is unsatisfactory. Thus after the pleasure of each object, the desire is thus started again towards another by the dynamics whose the Thing proceeds, it is thus between two objects of the desire, these two objects which can be only “known as”: it is prohibited. This impenetrable vacuum of the Thing, this perpetual lack is thus constitutive of the desire.

It is in addition in place of this unsatisfactory vacuum that Plato place the illusion of the Sovereign Well , losing by there sight the stake aporetic of the dialogs socratic whose conclusion is always the to know of the not-knowledge (in other words the vacuum). For Plato the dialogs are indeed not pure negation, they are certainly a means of demolishing false opinions but only to aim at knowledge. The dialog is conceived according to a linear diagram which must finally lead to the knowledge of the Sovereign Well.

“the Schwärmerei of Plato it is to have projected on what I call the idea the impenetrable vacuum of Sovereign Well. ”

In other words Plato is that which took for reality what is only illusion, an illusion that Freud started to dissipate.

Desire and being

The desire is often regarded as the " ce" of what the subject perceives and feels. Thus, the desire is synonymous, is function to be. Indeed, one donot can exist without the different one. a true harmony, symbiosis settles between these two terms, which at the base, are more than very distant one towards the other. Lastly, the being, being or cannot be is easy of insertion in the field of definition of the concept: desire.

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