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The primacy of desire

I'm thinking about a post I made earlier, where I said, "There is something important about the primacy of desire.  Important even for human ethics.  Desire is forward-looking.  Explaining motivation by pointing to past utility can leave out desire."


A lot of evolutionary talk about the origin of ethics focuses on the useful: but it all starts with desire.  And ends there too.  Somewhere Nietzsche talked about the desire of things in nature to discharge themselves... Now Nietzsche's no metaphysician, but remembering what he said further reminds me of the neo-Platonic expression, "The good is self-diffusive."


Another thought about another quote from that earlier post:  


"It may be that evolutionary utilitarianism inasmuch as it treats the useful as prior to the intrinsically desirable, is likewise an unwitting anthropomorphism inasmuch as it treats nature as a whole as if it were a either person engaged in instrumental reasoning..."


Now evolutionary psychology doesn't HAVE to talk that way, but if it ignores the primacy of desire, then it can't help but treat nature in purely instrumental terms.


On the other hand, is the desire to survive is the only desire it need affirm?  What if animals don't desire that per se?  How does the per se desire relate to survival?  For example, to enjoy food...?


Isn't it true, that by treating the self-ish gene as a kind of primordial life form, Dawkins gives a primacy to a fictional desire, while rendering desire as experienced in animals as merely instrumental?  Dawkins objects to the weirdness of religion: well, what should we say about this? It seems that weirdness is fine when HE comes up with it...


Finally, a third quote from the same old post:  "... looking at the role of desire in motivating animals operation and comparing it to the past utility, etc.  I am reminded of the light/aperture metaphor that I used earlier.  That is, aspects of animal (and other) evolution that can be described in mechanistic terms complement the teleological aspects in a manner analogous to how an aperture lets in light."  


Yes.  One can never describe desire as such using purely quantative terms and obscure variables.  But the truth is that without desire, there is no human agency.  There is no push and pull as exercised by human agents.  Without desire, "push" is a name for tactile pressure... nothing more.  So if the physics of non-living things is saturated with hidden desire, what are we to say about evolution and survival?  If there is something desire-like in nature, then that surely would be compared to the quantitative aspect of our mechanistic descriptions as light is to an aperture.


Let the Light in!
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Leo White said…
I think the point of this passage is that evolutionary psychology, as I have encountered it, tries to become radical by looking at nature in instrumentalist terms. But desire is even more radical than instrumentality.
8:10 AM
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