Category: Desire
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A Cure for Infatuation
One of the best is marriage. Substack latest.
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Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche
Substack latest. Does causation have a moral dimension? This upload was 'occasioned' (all puns intended) by my meeting with the amazing Steven Nemes yesterday at Joe's Real BBQ in charming old town Gilbert. Among the topics we discussed were idolatry, desire, and Buddhism. He strode up, gave me a hug, and handed me three books…
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Pet Love as Idolatry?
Problems of attachment and grief. Substack latest.
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Countering the Absurd with an Argument from Desire: Preliminaries
Vito Caiati comments: I have been thinking about your intriguing post in which you write: “For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to. To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no…
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The Afterlife of Habit upon the Death of Desire
A Substack short. He of the Scowl of Minerva lends a hand.
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A Cure for Infatuation?
One of the very best is marriage. Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.* But while infatuation lasts, it…
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Master Desire and Aversion
It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires,…
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Buddhism
We are told not to become attached to the usual objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, land and stand. Why not? Because they are impermanent (anicca), insubstantial (anatta), and do not ultimately satisfy (dukkha). So there is something permanent, substantial, and finally satisfying? No! Nothing is! Well then, you have…
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The Afterlife of Habit Upon the Death of Desire
Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification. Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the habit wouldn't exist in the first place. Memories…
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Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Meaning and Desire
To repeat some of what I wrote earlier, According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions. Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live…
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On Desire and Aversion: Two Perspectives
When we master desire and aversion in the present we mortify what will soon be dead in any case. "That may be appropriate wisdom for you, old man, but I'm in the full flood of my youth and vigor. I love, hate, and live passionately. Why should I mortify what will be dead? I should…
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Sadness at the Transience of the World
"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887. (Quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) What is the appropriate measure of grief at impermanence? While we are saddened by the transience of things, that they are transient…
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God, Proof, and Desire
From a reader: . . . I’m confused by some of your epistemic terms. You reject [in the first article referenced below] the view that we can “rigorously prove” the existence of God, and several times say that theistic arguments are not rationally compelling, by which you mean that there are no arguments “that will…
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Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself
A reader from Portugal raised a question I hadn't thought of before: "Can God satisfy our infinite desire if God is a being among beings?" This question presupposes that our desire is in some sense infinite. I will explain and defend this presupposition in a moment. Now if our desire is infinite, then it is…
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The Competency of Desire
Human desires regularly show themselves to be highly competent when it comes to the seduction of reason and the subornation of conscience. A man murders his wife and the mother of his child in order to collect on a life insurance policy. Why? So that he can run off with a floozie who shook her…