Why we want what we want by William B. Irvine

Book Review Desk; SECT7
I Am, Therefore I Want
By Kathryn Harrison
1238 words
6 November 2005
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
22
English
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

ON DESIRE
Why We Want What We Want. By William B. Irvine.
322 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.

''There are two tragedies in life,'' George Bernard Shaw wrote. ''One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.''

''Why We Want What We Want,'' the subtitle of William B. Irvine's book, dangles the possibility that it is his ambition to let readers glimpse the hidden workings of their hearts. But ''On Desire'' is a far less romantic exploration than its jacket implies, with its flowers and tormented, downcast faces. In fact, an accurate description of the book's contents would be ''How Not to Want What We Want,'' but of course that could scare off all but the determined ascetic.

As every sentient being knows, desire can cause problems. Enslaved to our wants, for food, shelter, love, comfort, community, status -- the list is endless -- so are we saved by having them. Anyone who has suffered a serious depression can attest that desire is as vital a sign of life as a heartbeat. Lacking desire we are psychically dead, our bodies in imminent danger of following our souls.

A professor of philosophy at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, Irvine has taught courses on the nature of desire and here presents the topic as if to a reasonably intelligent undergraduate, presuming the reader's ignorance as well as his literacy. He organizes ''On Desire'' into three parts, a program of illumination whose goal is to help the reader ''master desire.'' That human life depends on desire, or is at the least inseparable from it, Irvine does not dispute, but his purpose is not to glorify this essence that artists celebrate.

Part 1 exposes ''the secret life of desire'': how we experience our wants, from those for basic animal requirements, like food, to abstract goals -- the esteem of our fellows, for example -- that may feel as necessary as food to complicated creatures who cannot live by bread alone. Desire cannot by definition be satisfied. To answer one desire only allows us to pay attention to the next, and beyond gaining what our bodies strictly need, what we want is usually based on our assessment of how others perceive what we already have. Because we are social animals, we depend on constant confirmation of self, whether in terms of admiration or of envy, fear, even hatred.

For this reason, every object of desire has a ''positional'' as well as an absolute value. The car you loved as you pulled into the parking lot at work loses its charm when you see the more expensive machine driven by a rival. And yet you're lucky if what you want, you can, with effort, get. Failures of desire, rightly called crises by Irvine, are not only painful but also potentially dangerous. Losing the ability to desire is the sine qua non of serious depression. But to retain desire without finding meaning in satisfying it -- what Tolstoy called an ''arrest of life'' -- portends a profound existential collapse that can also presage suicide. Still painful, if not as dire, is to feel disgust with the desires you have, as did Siddhartha Gautama when he understood the limitless suffering of man and began his journey toward enlightenment.

But before we can ''defeat the enemy,'' Irvine declares, ''we need to understand the enemy.'' Advances in evolutionary psychology and neurochemistry require the student of philosophy to reconcile classical views on desire with what Irvine calls the ''science of desire.'' In order to desire, a creature must be able to experience good and bad feelings and then remember these feelings and what inspired them. Evolutionary psychologists assume that these capacities -- to feel, to recall feeling and to desire -- developed in concert because desire depends on the consciousness that one thing is more, well, desirable than another.

There are two basic kinds of desire. A ''terminal'' desire is an end in itself; an ''instrumental'' desire is one conceived in service to another desire. Often produced in long sequences intended to further a vague or unattainable goal, instrumental desires represent a ''vast majority'' of those we entertain. Imagine how many instrumental desires might be engendered by having fame as a terminal desire. The person seeking fame as, say, a vocalist, would desire to sing well, which would cause him to desire to take voice lessons, to find the best teacher, to get a better-paying job so he could afford to pay the best teacher's fee, to rewrite his resume to get that job, to buy a new suit for a job interview and so forth. Beyond this, chains of desire often interlock, as when the desire for fame is connected with the desire to seduce beautiful women, another terminal desire that may inspire its own chains of instrumental ones.

To complicate our insatiability further, our brains have ''desire-generating systems,'' a dominant verbal system that produces ''rational'' (instrumental) desires and -- perhaps more important -- rationalizes those desires that arise from other, unconscious systems. These systems represent what we used to think of, quaintly, as the id, that neurochemical ghost insistently demanding steak au poivre, shopping sprees, shoplifting sprees, adulterous liaisons, any and all of which hankerings are nimbly enabled by an articulate mechanism that evolved to protect our species from the kind of internal conflict that would trip up a thriving, procreating and surviving fittest.

In fact, our adaptive nature, which has ensured our survival, may help explain our eternal dissatisfaction. Soon used to the very things we once craved, we take them for granted, and their desirability wears off.

How can we bear up under the relentlessness of our desire? On to the quixotic subject of ''dealing with our desires.'' In order to satisfy a desire, we must make it our goal and then work to achieve it -- but if the goal is transcending desire entirely, this strategy is of no use. Desiring to not desire, after all, is itself a new form of desire. Further, tampering with our ''B.I.S.,'' or biological incentive system -- the tangle of dendrites and neurochemicals that rewards us with good feelings when we gratify our desires -- is worse than useless. One after another experiment has shown that the exclusively rational man is incapable of any action whatsoever. Emotions, which might seem to inhibit our ability to use reason, are necessary to make decisions. Without them, we remove motivation, even so basic a one as to get out of the way of oncoming traffic.

Really, the only hope of managing -- not conquering -- desire is consciousness. A compressed survey of the various religious and philosophical mechanisms humans have created in their attempt to master desire shows that they all come down to our painstakingly achieving greater levels of consciousness. The ''middle path'' between hedonism and asceticism that Buddha advised, the prayers of the Jew or Christian, the temperance of the Muslim, the reasoning that underpins all philosophies: these aim not to extinguish desire but to arrive at a state of mindfulness that allows us to alter our relationship to our desires, and thus achieve tranquillity. Fortunately for all the writers whose greatest desire is to comment on desire, there's not much chance of our succeeding.