Category: Desire
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Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
To repeat some of what I wrote yesterday, 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…
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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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Is Folk Psychology a Theory? The Case of Desire
When one is in the grip of a desire one typically knows it. He who wants a cold beer on a hot day knows what he wants and is likely to deem unhinged anyone with the temerity to deny that there are desires. Anywhere on the scale from velleity to craving, but especially at the…
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Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche
What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown…