Desire indicates and is therefore only comprehensible by the positing of some concept. We know by experience, however, that the specific concept that the mind associates with the desire is not always accurate, insofar as the desire is not fulfilled when the idea (towards which the concept points) becomes actual. I am going to walk into the kitchen and get some Orange Milano Cookies. I’ll be right back.
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Man, those are good — satisfying. But if I were to have an addiction, to alcohol, say, then I would have gone to get some beer, maybe. I’d be drinking the beer, and I might be able to convince myself that it satisfied my initial desire, but recurrence of the same desire would disprove this. That’s all the more true if alcohol made me depressed, since the fulfillment of desire cannot also at the same time be the cause of depression. A healthy desire for food is fulfilled with a healthy meal, and, although one will again experience hunger (since, after all, we humans usually need to eat every day), there is a sense in which every healthy hunger is new — not the same hunger, as though the satisfaction of the old hunger had failed, and the desire had simply returned with a vengeance.
What is most interesting is when a desire for one thing is interpreted as a desire for something else entirely. This might occur when a person is lonely and responds with online shopping, or if someone is angry with a friend and responds by excessive cleaning. Neither can truly satisfy the desire — in the first case, for good company and in the second, for reconciliation. They might distract from it. Shopping online for an hour or two may be all the time that is needed before lonliness either fades or is actually satisfied with a phone call. Cleaning might do the same, or even offer one an opportunity to organize one’s thoughts to prepare for reconciliation with a friend. But no one would say that the cleaning itself — as productive as it may be — actually fulfills the desire of which the anger is a sign, assuming, of course, that the original dispute had nothing to do with tidiness. What is clear in these cases, that is not clear in the cases of addiction, is that a the actualization of a certain idea would fulfill both of these desires. But one can actually misunderstand the meaning completely, and even fail to identify the feeling for what it is.
So we cannot make a desire comprehensible to us without some end toward which it is directed, but we may misrespresent the end to ourselves. That end is a kind of cause of the desire (a different kind of cause than the initial punch in the face that made us angry with our friend or the move to Boston which resulted in our present lonliness), but without it, we could say that, in some sense, the desire isn’t even real.
What are the dimensions of the need for humans to accurately represent desire? Is it possible for biological research to inform this judgment, or would an appeal to biology be mischaracterize the nature of the final cause we seek by returning to the realm of the efficient cause (ala the punch in the face). Would an appeal to psychology be any better or would it run the same risk? Is there a moral dimension — a duty to oneself to get it right? Is there an ontological dimension, concerning the reality of ideas, or the degree of reality in a thing (like a desire)? |
