Affective forecasting: the predicted reaction and the measured one, at two very different heights.
Desire
Orientation toward something not yet had - and whether wanting is a state that represents the world or one that pushes at it.
- Theme
- Mind, self and consciousness
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- c. 380 BC
In plain terms
A desire points at something that is not the case. That makes it the mirror image of a belief: a belief tries to match the world, and a desire tries to make the world match it.
That asymmetry is the standard analysis and it is neat. It also leaves out most of what is strange about wanting. People want things they do not enjoy getting. People stop wanting things at the moment they arrive. People are systematically bad at predicting what they will want, and worse at predicting how much having it will help.
So desire is not simply a reliable signal about what is good for you, which is inconvenient, because a great deal of ethics and almost all of economics assumes it is.
As a philosopher would put it
The standard account gives desire a world-to-mind direction of fit, against belief's mind-to-world, and Humean theories of motivation make it indispensable: reason alone moves nobody, and every action requires a desire in its explanation. Anti-Humeans argue that recognising a reason can motivate directly, and that treating all motivation as appetitive misdescribes acting from principle.
The traditions divide sharply on what to do about it. Plato subordinates appetite to reason; the Stoics aim to extinguish desires that depend on what is not up to us; Buddhism identifies taṇhā as the origin of suffering and makes its cessation the whole point. Spinoza runs the other way, making conatus - the striving to persist - the essence of each thing, so desire is not a defect to be managed but what a being is.
Hegel and Lacan add that desire is not simply given: it is mediated by others, and much of what one wants is wanted because it is wanted. That makes the object secondary and the structure primary, which is a different subject from appetite.
Where you meet it
People are poor forecasters of their own future feelings, and the effect is measurable. Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson's work on affective forecasting found a consistent pattern: subjects overestimate both the intensity and the duration of their reactions to future events.
Candidates predicted that failing to get a job would leave them substantially less happy months later; assistant professors predicted the same about being denied tenure. In follow-up, the difference between those who got what they wanted and those who did not was far smaller than either group had expected, and shrank quickly with time.
The explanation offered is focalism - when imagining an outcome you attend to it and not to the hundred other things that will also be happening - together with the ordinary work of adaptation. What matters philosophically is that the error runs in one direction and is not corrected by experience. Wanting something is a poor guide to how much it will help, and the people making the prediction are the same people who will live the result.
What is actually disputed
Whether desire is a good thing to have less of.
The Buddhist and Stoic answer is that a great deal of suffering is manufactured by wanting, and that reducing attachment is the most reliable improvement available to anyone. The counter-argument, made in the European tradition from Spinoza to Nietzsche, is that this proposes to cure life by ending it: striving is what a living thing is, and the tranquillity on offer is indistinguishable from a well-managed absence.
Separately, philosophers of mind dispute whether desire is one thing. The dissociation between wanting and liking in the psychological literature suggests two systems rather than one, which would mean that a person can want intensely what gives them nothing - and that no account treating desire as a signal of expected value can be right about all cases.
Commonly confused with
- Pleasure c. 300 BC Wanting and liking are separable, and there is experimental evidence that they run on different systems. Something can be wanted intensely and enjoyed not at all.
Defined against
- Reason The oldest contest in the analysis of a person, and every tradition takes a position on which governs which
Philosophers
- Plato Appetite as one part of a divided soul
- Baruch Spinoza Conatus as the essence of each thing, not a defect in it
- David Hume Reason as the slave of the passions
- Arthur Schopenhauer Willing as insatiable, and the source of suffering
- Buddha Craving as the origin of suffering, and its cessation as the aim
Works
- Republic The divided soul
- Ethics Desire as the essence of a thing
- A Treatise of Human Nature Reason cannot originate action
- The World as Will and Representation Endless striving and its cost
- Discourses and Enchiridion Desire restricted to what is up to us
Schools
- Old Academy Where appetite is subordinated
- Early Stoicism Where it is disciplined
- Roman Stoicism Where the discipline becomes practical training
- Early Theravada Buddhism Where its cessation is the goal
- Spinozism Where it is the essence of being at all
- Lacanian Psychoanalysis Where it is structured by others
Related concepts
Emotion c. 340 BC · Will c. 397 · Agency c. 340 BC · Pleasure c. 300 BC · Suffering c. 450 BC
Plato's tripartite soul separates appetite from spirit and reason; the Buddhist analysis of taṇhā as the origin of suffering is roughly contemporaneous and reaches the opposite practical conclusion.