Desire

Desire may refer to:

Feelings

• 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

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 experience, say 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

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) .

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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