Searching for the Roots of Desire
Part 1: Or Wanting to Know Why We Want to Want Things 🦠
I’m utterly perplexed by my desires. Ceaselessly wanting something.
Never satisfied for long. Moving moving moving.
Is it possible to ever stop wanting? How do we know if our desires truly come from us? Even if they don’t is that even desirable?
Far as I know, being means to act in relationship to others. The evolution of our bodies made us reliant on the external processes of our environment in order to achieve homeostasis. The cells in our body compel us to eat, sleep, mate etc.
It seems that every step we take in technological and cultural progress is an attempt to satisfy a set of desires which end up birthing more.
What’s so bad about that you ask? Well… what’s the point? Do we assume that with enough political and scientific progress our desires will be fulfilled? Even if we make it our goal to at least get the basic desires/needs checked off the list like clean water, shelter, food etc.
I think it was Schopenhauer who assumed that in a world where we got everything we wanted, we would still suffer. To desire is to suffer.
I heard a reading of Lacan that says: Human beings have a fundamental lack the moment they are born. To be is to lack. Lack helps constitute the Self. Without it there is no Self.
Desires are co-emergent. Every new relation sets up new rules and new longings. It reminds me of that story from the series Love Death + Robots entitled Zima Blue — a famous intergalactic artist android discovers how his bodily consciousness evolved, but chose to revert back to his simple form because of its simplicity. No complications, no real suffering it seems.
Although we can find reasons to trace desire back to our biology, desire is also very much a human thing in terms of how we come to understand it through language. Desire is in the realm of fantasy and expectation. Desire is a story we tell to ourselves and each other. Desire can directly refer to some directly perceivable outcome, as well as connoting something more than that.
It also seems that desire is always an approach that has its eyes set on some future state or outcome.
I think the discussions surrounding addiction spurred by Marc Lewis and his developmental-learning model of addiction are very interesting. It made me reevaluate my conceptions of addiction as a disease of the brain.
I’m biased towards his view that addictions are reinforced habits that still have a neurobiological basis. That the way to get past addiction is through personal growth or developmental progress.
Although as Jerome C. Wakefield rightly points out, “growth” or “developmental progress” may still refer to some ideal social or moral standards which can place blame on the addict. Rather than focus on how our society has enabled us all to become addicted to all sorts of things, which inhibit our natural agency.
But I also partly agree with Lewis’ response that what we deem to be “natural” has changed overtime. Whether a certain behavior or habit had a clear negative impact on physical or mental function doesn’t necessarily mean we deem it to be pathological or dysfunctional.
Desire also implicitly makes distinctions between Self and Other(s). It is part of an acknowledgment of difference — the anxiety of separation. To desire means to live in the passage of time. Every desire sets up a new expectation and longing, which creates a notion of the future and the past.
Difference = Time = Desire = Anxiety
In one of Oliver Sacks cases, The Last Hippie, a patient named Greg loses their normal sense of time due to damage in the frontal lobe of his brain. Greg remembers some of his past but his consciousness mostly stays in the present moment. Sacks talked about how he seemed to be peaceful and blissful. He is unable to form new memories and often (as Sacks observed) unable to distinguish himself from the external phenomena he experiences.
It seems that to be in relationship to the world, it is inevitable that one desires. Even to desire the cessation of desire, one must desire first before wanting to extinguish all desire.
Does this not mean that our desires are not our own? On top of our biological constitution, desires are further developed in us by language and time (interaction with difference), creating more separations and distinctions.
I think it is possible to still be and not desire. Long time meditation practitioners seem to be able to enter into a state wherein they only observe and let their thoughts and desires pass over them.
But to be without desire would mean also mean to be without the world. For to be in the world would mean to desire in it.
Sources (Research Papers):
Fisher, H. E., Xu, X., Aron, A., & Brown, L. L. (2016). Intense, passionate, romantic love: A natural addiction? how the fields that investigate romance and substance abuse can inform each other. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00687
Hendlin, Y. H. (2021). Biochemistry of desire: The biosemiotics of advertising to bacteria. Biosemiotics, 15–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67115-0_2
Lewis, M. (2017a). Addiction and the brain: Development, not disease. Neuroethics, 10(1), 7–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9293-4
Lewis, M. (2017b). What evolution intended? reply to Wakefield. Neuroethics, 10(1), 69–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-017-9327-6
Wakefield, J. C. (2016). Addiction and the concept of disorder, part 2: Is every mental disorder a brain disorder? Neuroethics, 10(1), 55–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9301-8
