Does desire lead us to fulfillment or permanent dissatisfaction?

“Desire is the essence of man,” wrote 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Due to its infinite nature, it is perhaps what best characterizes us, but above all it is what moves our lives. What value would a life without desires have? It is the variety and intensity of this that gives us the drive to act and the feeling of being fully alive. The absence of desire—of which depression is a modern symptom—signals the collapse of our life force. At the same time, desire can lead us to destructive or illusory passion, to permanent dissatisfaction, to hatred or frustration caused by envy and greed, or to all kinds of addictions that deprive us of our inner freedom. (…) What distinguishes desire from necessity? What is the nature of desire? How do you know if a wish is good or not? How can we embrace our most personal desires and stop imitating those of others? How can we escape dissatisfaction to express desires appropriately and experience deep joy? (…)

Exhausted by three years of pandemic, anguished by the consequences of climate imbalance, the war in Ukraine or the loss of purchasing power, disappointed by politics and skeptical of all institutions, many of our contemporaries feel fragile and affected from the beginning. moral and psychological point of view. The result is a decline in what the philosopher Henri Bergson called the “élan vital” and a decrease in our desiring force that can affect all areas of life: professional, love, sexual, intellectual, etc. We feel less alive, we enjoy life less intensely, sadness often prevails over joy. This leads some people to ask themselves questions and try to reorient their lives towards values ​​other than consumerism and social recognition, to give it more meaning, to live more soberly. Thus, many young people seek to circumvent the dominant model, for example, in the professional sphere, but also in the sexual sphere, which does not correspond to their deepest desires, more oriented towards being and quality of life than towards having and performance. . But, paradoxically – and this is valid for all vital crises and is not something new – this exhaustion of the élan vital and desire also translates into an exacerbation of the most material desires, we could say cravings, which appear as compensations for this type of depression: we consume to provide ourselves with mini-doses of pleasure. This consumerism can take different forms: compulsive shopping, addiction to sex, games, social networks, exacerbated need for social recognition, etc. Our powerful desires and great joys are thus transformed into small cravings and vain pleasures. And sometimes we become slaves to these desires and pleasures, without them truly satisfying our deepest thirst. I am convinced that we will only find our freedom and our true joy by cultivating the élan vital, awakening our most personal desires and directing them towards objects that make us grow, that give meaning to our lives, that allow us to fully realize ourselves according to our uniqueness.

Ancient philosophers agree, on the one hand, in defining desire as “the aspiration for a good” (that is, something that we perceive as good for us). In the words of Cicero, “desire goes, fascinated and inflamed, towards what seems to be good.” On the other hand, they identify it with “appetite” (in the broadest sense of the word), the movement that consists of an effort to get closer to a good that attracts us. Aversion, on the other hand, refers to the movement that makes us move away from what we perceive as bad. Although it sometimes seems to be confused with instinct or need, human desire includes both an imaginary part and a conscious part that make it much more complex. Feeling the need to feed ourselves (the feeling of hunger) is not the same as the desire to eat a certain dish, which awakens happy memories, in an environment that we like and with good friends. We also observe this in sexual desire, which cannot be reduced to the survival instinct of the species or to the simple satisfaction of a physiological need. Psychoanalysis has thoroughly demonstrated that, before fixating on an object, desire is involved in a complex and creative dynamic (emotions, fantasies, projections, transferences…). That is why Gaston Bachelard wrote that “man is a creation of desire, not of necessity.”

The word desire comes from the Latin verb I will desireformed from sidus, sideris, which means star or constellation. There are two radically opposite interpretations of this etymology. can be interpreted I will desire like “stop contemplating the stars”, which refers to the idea of ​​a loss, a “disorientation”. The sailor who stops looking at the stars can get lost at sea. The human being who stops contemplating heavenly things can lose himself before the seduction of earthly things. Conversely, we can understand I will desire as that which frees us from getting lost in considerations (siderare), since the ancient Romans used to understand the sideratio like the fact of suffering the fatal action of the stars. We have retained this distant meaning when we say that we are “stunned” after a shock or adversity: we remain motionless, unable to react, deprived of the ability to act freely. What will get us moving again is-sideredesire, understood as the motor of action, as the vital power that frees us from losing ourselves, whatever the cause.

We will only find freedom and true joy by cultivating the vital 'élan', awakening our most personal desires

What is fascinating is that this double meaning reappears throughout the Western philosophical tradition. On the one hand, desire is perceived as a lack and its negative character is essentially emphasized. On the other hand, it is perceived as a power and as the main driving force of our lives. Most ancient philosophers saw desire as a lack and considered it not so much as a question but as a problem: the search for a satisfaction that, once satisfied, is immediately reborn in the same form or in the form of another. object, thus condemning us to be dissatisfied for life. It was Plato, the best known among the disciples of Socrates, who best theorized this insatiable dimension of human desire in the form of lack: “What we do not have, what we are not, what we miss: these are the objects of desire and of love
.” Aristotle relativizes this identification of desire with lack and sees in it our only driving force: “There is only one driving principle: the desiderative faculty.” In the 17th century, Spinoza took up this idea and placed it at the center of his entire ethical philosophy: desire is the vital power that sets all our energies in motion and, well directed by reason, it is the only thing that can lead us to joy and supreme happiness (beatitude).

Desire-lack that leads to dissatisfaction and misery and which should be limited or eliminated… or desire-power that leads to fulfillment and happiness and which should be cultivated: who is right? If we look closely at ourselves and human nature, both theories seem relevant and are not mutually exclusive. In our lives we can experience desire-lack and desire-power. When we fall into the trap of permanent dissatisfaction, social comparison, envy, lust, passionate love, we agree with Plato. But when we let ourselves be carried away by the joy of creating, growing, advancing, loving, developing our talents, fulfilling ourselves through what we do, knowing, we agree with Spinoza. And things are even a little more complex, since the desire-lack can also be the engine of a spiritual search that leads to the contemplation of divine beauty, while the desire-power can lead us to excesses and a form of hubris denounced by the Greeks.

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