According to one poster, desire is a derivative of need. This was disputed by another one.
My question to the second power would be; what is it that claims for desire a different essence than that of need? And the first one I would ask; is need a sufficiently powerful drive to sustain life?
Need. How can it be qualified? . Need = that which one cannot live without. Yes, but why does one need to live?
The second poster could answer: to fulfill desires. Need, then, becomes equal to desire. We need to fulfill our desires.
Sophistry... bah, I've not evolved much since I rejected absolutism.
But the question continues to puzzle me - the subject of this need is elusive.
One may say 'life', the other 'that is different for everyone'. A third might say 'power'.
That is interesting. Why do we need power? Someone might smile a grin, and quote Nietzsche:
"What is good? — All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases"
I would scratch my head and try to figure out if progress has been made with the search.
Good leads to happiness, through the will to power. Happiness is the feeling of increased power.
I'd want to ask the first poster how need plays into this. Do we need to be happy? If not, why do we pursue it? If so, how different is need from desire? What is more important, something that we need, or something we have desire for?
We need food. We have desire for sex. Without food, we die. Without sex, our race dies.
In this light desire appears more altruistic than need.
Do we not favor those with the greatest desire over those with the greatest needs?
If so, it is important for humans to have desire. We need desire. It is what makes our needs worth satisfying.
2 comments:
So far these have been identified:
need, want, desire, necessity.
That which is necessary is not the same to all - again the example of dying with honor as being of a higher necessity than living with humiliation. Also, to a heroin addict, extreme pleasure is of a higher necessity than the prospect of a long life.
Both of these priorities, which are somewhat unnatural if we go by the common understanding of what drives an organism, I attribute to desire. Desire for honor and desire for extreme pleasure versus need to stay alive.
A good number of old fables deal with the boy who was living blissful ignorance in his parents hut in a scarcely populated land, until a strange traveller came by one day and asked for hospitality. The guest then tells the boy a story of a far and wondrous land with houses on top of each other and many kinds of food and people. In the boy a desire is ignited. From then on, it is necessary for him to go and see this strange place.
As there is no physical need for the boy to leave his simple life, I seem desire and need as of a very different nature, originating from different sources and leading to different experiences. I would, for myself, go so far as to suggest that desire is our link to metaphysics. But that is a bridge too far now, and it is not a thought I had when I started this thread.
What I dare to suggest now that need is rooted in negative feelings, `if I don´t eat, I feel pain´ and desire in positive feelings, ´if I see this new place, Ill feel fantastic´. It is clear that the border isn´t a firm line, shoot heroin long enough and you´ll cultivate a need for it. Be in a city for long enough and you´ll suffer in your hut in the middel of nowhere. Likewise, a great meal can be a positive trigger. But it is the original motivation wherein the difference lies, I suspect.
I wonder about the Samurai, who have cultivated a need for honor. Following my own reasoning, this need must stem from a desire held by the first Samurai, or whoever it were that started the tradition of honor above life. I am interested in this desire. Honor is so different from the pleasurable sensations of sex, a drug induced high or the first visit to an awe inspiring place. Honor seems farther removed from need than pleasure. It is more akin to awe and wonder, and to name another object of desire: romantic love.
RUSSIANTANK:
Some people will suffer pain, starvation, deprivation of sex for some of the simplest things, such as aesthetic pleasures. People jump out of airplanes in spite of overwhelming, evolutionarily induced fear, just to say they did, or to achieve the adrenaline rush associated with the stressful situation.
JAKOB:
Now you're getting somewhere.
I suggested earlier that desire, which I still see as fundamentally different from survival-need, yet even so as an agent of evolution, is the key to metaphysics. You mention aesthetic pleasures, and such things as celibacy.
You and wonderer differ from my thinking in that I do not believe that ascribing motivations to chemical processes is in any way an explanation. For starters, our observation of these chemical processes is also a chemical process. I prefer to think about motivations in terms of the way they present themselves to us - in consciousness.
So I distinguish such aesthetics motivations from those that are strictly needs - I do not have to be consciously involved for the latter to exist, such as hunger. If I am in a coma, I will still need to be fed.
Celibacy, on the other hand, is, when it is not rooted in a lack of power to acquire a mate, is the result of a thought, an idea. So is honor.
I might have made it a bit complicated or confusing by attributing the latter type of motivations to the word 'desire' - true. Perhaps I need to find a different word. But do you see what I'm getting at? This is a question for wonderer as well.
RUSSIANTANK:
The how is complicated. There can be a billion different reasons that a simple desire overpowers an evolutionarily induced feeling of need. It may help to realize that evolution is not perfect.
JAKOB:
Again, I try to avoid thinking in terms of unnamed generalities. I'd prefer five specific examples over billions of unspecified.
Regarding evolution, I would like to suggest hat it is exactly those 'desire' motivations, instead of the ones I call 'needs', that are often an agent in furthering the transformation of a species. For starters, sex. It is not a need (I know plenty of celibates from freethinking and atheist families), it is a specific desire that is strong enough for people to put their needs aside for it.
I still consider the prolongation of life to be the most general need we can identify. There are many exceptions to this rule, but these aren't, as far as we know, innate. Something has to change or go wrong in the psychology or biology of an organism for the need to live is canceled out. I see this consideration might have no value if we desire for the argument to be perfect. But that is not my intention - I want it to be practical. Suicide seems common, but there is an overwhelmingly great majority of non-suicidal organisms. I want to recognize it's place in the margin, not let exceptions undermine the rule.
'Why are things important to us?' is not answered, not in a way that clarifies, by attributing motivations to neuro-chemical processes. Neurobiology is only one layer of the total description - and not a layer any of us seems to be exhaustively familiar with. Neither is that layer understood to an exhaustive extent by biologists - the phenomenon thought, which is quite elemental to this distinction between need and desire, or, for example, survival- and aesthetic motivations, has not been identified. So in terms of acquiring the greatest clarity, it is advisable to stick to what we do know - our own experience of the motivations.
[quote]When it happens, it serves no purpose. Evolution serves no purpose. Its just a curious consequence of natural forces.[/quote]
In order to respond to that, I would have to understand what you mean by 'purpose'.
As far as we've examined it now, evolution (of a species - it is not a thing in itself) at least serves the purpose of fulfilling needs and desires (of members of that species) on more and more effective ways.
Note that I'm not referring to a metaphysical purpose, I do not propagate a 'plan' - I identify, with as much precision as is possible for me at this point, the immediate consequences of the existence of lifeforms, i.e. a set of experiences. These consequences are in turn motivations.
In other words, Need as always the result of fulfilling another need. If I do not act on my motivation to eat, I will not be motivated to do it again. Evolution of the species has as it's purpose to prolong the existence of that species. That is the only value of the idea of evolution - that it does have a purpose. But that purpose is not metaphysical.
Why then, do metaphysical purposes exist? You suggest it is because of an excess of pleasure, such as the adrenaline rush. Adrenaline serves to protect us, to keep us alive, when we are threatened by external circumstances. I agree many desires are based on the out-of-context use of of biological functions. But not, as far as I can see now, honor, nor celibacy, or, for example, poetry. Why are these things important to us?
Post a Comment