Desire

Desire may refer to:

• Interpersonal attraction
• Preference, on which microeconomic theory is based
• Motivation, thought that leads to an action
• Tanha in Buddhist psychology, as described in the Four Noble Truths
• A concept in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory related to the Oedipus complex
• Mimetic Desire

Eastern tradition

Tahna

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Taṇhā (Pāli: तण्हा) or Tṛṣṇā (Sanskrit: तृष्णा) means "thirst, desire, craving, wanting, longing, yearning".

Synonyms:

• 愛 Cn: ài; Jp: ai; Vi: ái
• Tibetan: sred.pa

The most basic of these meanings (the literal meaning) is "thirst"; however, in Buddhism it has a technical meaning that is much broader. In part due to the variety of possible translations, taṇhā is sometimes used as an untranslated technical term by authors writing about Buddhism.

The 12 Nidānas:   Ignorance ↓ Formations ↓ Consciousness ↓ Mind & Body ↓ Six Sense Bases ↓ Contact ↓ Feeling ↓ Craving ↓ Clinging ↓ Becoming ↓ Birth ↓ Old Age & Death

Taṇhā is the eighth link in the Twelve Nidanas of Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda/Paṭiccasamuppāda). Taṇhā is also the fundamental constituent of Samudaya–the Noble Truth of the Origination of Suffering, the second of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhist teachings describe the craving for sense objects which provide pleasant feeling, or craving for sensory pleasures. Taṇhā is a term for wanting to have or wanting to obtain. It also encompasses the negative as in wanting not to have. We can crave for pleasant feelings to be present, and for unpleasant feelings not to be present (i.e., to get rid of unpleasant feelings).

According to Buddhist teachings, craving, or desire, springs from the notion that if one's desires are fulfilled it will, of itself, lead to one's lasting happiness or well-being. Such beliefs normally result in further craving/desire and the repeated enactment of activities to bring about the desired results. This is graphically depicted in the Bhavacakra. The repeated cycling through states driven by craving and its concomitant clinging Upadana.

The meaning of Taṇhā (craving, desire, want, thirst), extends beyond the desire for material objects or sense pleasures. It also includes the desire for life (or death, in the case of someone wishing to commit suicide), the desire for fame (or infamy, its opposite), the desire for sleep, the desire for mental or emotional states (e.g., happiness, joy, rapture, love) if they are not present and one would like them to be. If we have an experience, like depression or sorrow, we can desire its opposite. The meaning of Taṇhā is far-reaching and covers all desire, all wanting, all craving, irrespective of its intensity.

Taṇhā is sometimes taken as interchangeable with the term addiction, except that that would be too narrow a view. Taṇhā tends to include a far broader range of human experience and feeling than medical discussions of addiction tend to include.

Further analysis of Taṇhā reveals that desire for conditioned things cannot be fully satiated or satisfied, due to their impermanent nature. This is expounded in the Buddhist teaching of Anitya impermanence, change (Pali: Anicca).

The Buddhist solution to the problem of Taṇhā (craving, wanting) is the next of the four noble truths, Nirodha, the cessation of suffering which is Noble Eightfold Path and the Six Paramita. The cessation of suffering comes from the quenching (nibbuta) of tanha, which is not the destruction of tanha as much as the natural cessation of it that follows its true and real satisfaction. The problem is not that we desire, but rather that we desire unsatisfactory (dukkha) things, namely sensual pleasures, existence and non-existence. When we have Right Effort, when we desire that which yields satisfaction, then tanha is not the obstacle to enlightenment but the vehicle for its realization.

Preceded by: Vedanā

Twelve Nidānas Tṛṣṇā

Succeeded by: Upādāna

Western tradition

Desire in Western Philosophy

Plato

Desire is identified as a philosophical problem in The Republic, a dialogue by Plato. Plato observes that people in the city should follow its leaders rather their their own interests and that therefore they must exhibit moderation. Personal desires must be postponed in the name of the higher ideal.

In Plato's Phaedrus the soul is guided by two horses, a dark horse of passion and a white horse of reason. Here passion and reason operate together. Socrates does not suggest the dark horse be done away with, since its passions make possible a movement towards the objects of desire, but he qualifies desire and places it in a relation to reason so that the object of desire can be discerned correctly, so that we may have the right desire.

Aristotle

In Aristotle's De Anima the soul is also seen to be involved in motion. Animals desire things and in their desire acquire locomotion. Thus, desire is implicated in animal interactions and the propensity of animals to motion. But Aristotle acknowledges that desire cannot account for all purposive movement towards a goal. He brackets the problem by positing that perhaps reason, in conjunction with desire and by way of the imagination, makes it possible for one to apprehend an object of desire, to see it as desirable. In this way reason and desire work together to determine what is a 'good' object of desire.

Modern philosophy

In Passions of the Soul Rene Descartes writes of the passion of desire as an agitation of the soul that projects desire, for what it represents as agreeable, into the future. Desire in Kant can represent things that are absent and not only objects at hand. Desire is also the preservation of objects already present, as well as the desire that certain effects not appear, that what affects one adversely be curtailed and prevented in the future. Moral and temporal values attach to desire in that objects which enhance one's future are considered more desirable than those that do not, and it introduces the possibility, or even necessity, of postponing desire in anticipation of some future event. (In some ways Descartes anticipates Freud's Beyond The Pleasure Principle.

In A Treatise on Human Nature David Hume suggests that reason is subject to passion. Motion is put into effect by desire, passions, and inclinations. It is desire, along with belief, that motivates action.

Immanuel Kant establishes a relation between the beautiful and pleasure in Critique of Judgment. He says "I can say of every representation that it is at least possible (as a cognition) it should be bound up with a pleasure. Of representation that I call pleasant I say that it actually excites pleasure in me. But the beautiful we think as having a necessary reference to satisfaction." Desire is found in the representation of the object.

Hegelian desire

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel begins his exposition of desire in Phenomenology of Spirit with the assertion that "self-consciousness is desire." It is in the restless movement of the negative that desire removes the antithesis between itself and its object, "...and the object of immediate desire is a living thing...", and object that forever remains an independent existence, something other. Hegel's inflection of desire via stoicism becomes important in understanding desire as it appears in de Sade. Stoicism in this view has a negative attitude towards "...otherness, to desire, and work." Reading Blanchot in this regard, in his essay Sade's Reason, the libertine is one, of a type that sometimes intersects with a Sadean man, who finds in stoicism, solitude, and apathy the proper conditions. Blanchot writes, "...the libertine is thoughtful, self-contained, incapable of being moved by just anything." Apathy in de Sade is opposition not to desire but to its spontaneity. Blanchot writes that in Sade, "for passion to become energy, it is necessary that it be constricted, that it be mediated by passing through a necessary moment of insensibility, then it will be the greatest passion possible." Here is stoicism, as a form of discipline, through which the passions pass. Blanchot says, "Apathy is the spirit of negation, applied to the man who has chosen to be sovereign." Dispersed, uncontrolled passion does not augment one's creative force but diminishes it.

Mimetic desire

René Girard was a professor of French literature in the United States at the end of the 1950s and sought a new way of speaking about literature. Beyond the "uniqueness" of individual works, he tried to discover what they have in common and he noticed that the characters created by the great writers evolved in a system of relationships that was common to the works of many authors: "Only the great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically at all, has less variability the greater a writer is." So there did indeed exist "psychological laws" as Proust calls them. These laws and this system are the consequences of a fundamental reality grasped by the novelists, which Girard called the mimetic character of desire. This is the content of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961). We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person — the model — for this same object. This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator: it is in fact the model who is sought. René Girard calls desire "metaphysical" in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, "all desire is a desire to be" , it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.

Mediation is external when the mediator of the desire is socially beyond the reach of the subject or, for example, a fictional character, as in the case of Amadis de Gaula and Don Quixote. The hero lives a kind of folly that nonetheless remains optimistic. Mediation is internal when the mediator is at the same level as the subject. The mediator then transforms into a rival and an obstacle to the acquisition of the object, whose value increases as the rivalry grows. This is the universe of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, which are particularly studied in this book.

Through their characters, our own behavior is displayed. Everyone holds firmly to the illusion of the authenticity of one's own desires; the novelists implacably expose all the diversity of lies, dissimulations, maneuvers, and the snobbery of the Proustian heroes; these are all but "tricks of desire", which prevent one from facing the truth: envy and jealousy. These characters, desiring the being of the mediator, project upon him superhuman virtues while at the same time depreciating themselves, making him a god while making themselves slaves, in the measure that the mediator is an obstacle to them. Some, pursuing this logic, come to seek the failures that are the signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. This is masochism, which can turn into sadism.

This fundamental discovery of mimetic desire would be pursued by René Girard throughout the rest of his career. It is interesting to note that the stress on imitation in humans was not a popular subject when Girard developed his theories, but today there is an amazing amount of convergent support for his claims coming from empirical research. As Scott Garrels (Fuller’s School of Psychology) wrote:

The parallels between Girard's insights and the only recent conclusions made by empirical researchers concerning imitation (in both development and the evolution of species) are extraordinary. What makes Girard's insights so remarkable is that he not only discovered and developed the primordial role of psychological mimesis during a time when imitation was quite out of fashion, but he did so through investigation in literature, cultural anthropology, history,… (Garrels, 2004, p. 29) .

Lacanian Desire

Lacan's désir follows Freud's wunsch and its concept is central to his thought. For the aim of the talking cure—psychoanalysis—is precisely to lead the analysand to recognize the truth about his/her desire, yet this is only possible when it is articulated in discourse. Thus, "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term" ; "...what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence", and "That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world." . Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.

In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied and this leftover is desire. For Lacan "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second" (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand (Dylan Evans). Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need" (article cited). Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Zizek puts it "desire's raison d'etre is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."

It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. If they belong to the field of the Other (as opposed to love), desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire (see "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis"). If one can surmise that objet petit a is the object of desire, it is not the object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire. For desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque). Then desire appears as a social construct since it is always constituted in a dialectical relationship.

Further reading

• Philosophy of the Buddha by Archie J. Bahm. Asian Humanities Press. Berkeley, CA: 1993. ISBN 0-87573-025-6.
  • Chapter 5 is about craving, and discusses the difference between taṇhā and chanda.
• "Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities" by Robert Morrison. Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Chapter 10 is a comparison between Nietzsche's Will to Power and Tanha, which gives a very nuanced and positive explanation of the central role tanha plays in the Buddhist path.

External links

• The Buddhist View of Human Nature
• Buddhism, Desire and Addiction; Anthony Flanagan
• Why We Are All Addicted; Andrew Weil, MD
• A Buddhist View of Addiction

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