The Human Question

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..." ...

In Chance or Purpose , Christoph Schoenborn points out that Adolf Portmann thought it significant that animals sometimes engage in playful activity that is useless but beautiful.  Schoenborn seems to think that this fact is an embarrassment to ateleological evolution or "evolutionism" (his term), but to my knowledge, he doesn't spell out exactly how it is so. My first thought upon listening to Schoenborn's point is the likely retort that what is merely play to the individual (and may be useless for that individual's survival) may be useful to the species.  Such a point is like Dawkins' distinction between the way in which an activity may be viewed by the individual who engages in it (his example is of sex for pleasure) and the way in which it serves the species/gene pool (reproduction).  That distinction seems valid, at least to a point, but to let one's mind rest there would be to miss what I believe is Schoenborn's point. I would develop the poin...