From the Buddha's craving and Plato's eros to Spinoza's conatus, Schopenhauer's will and Lacan's lack — what wanting is and what it wants.
Is desire the engine of life or the root of suffering — something to satisfy, discipline, or extinguish?
Nothing moves us more constantly than desire, and nothing is judged more variously. The great renouncing traditions see craving as the very root of suffering, to be extinguished or purified; the naturalists see it as the striving that constitutes life itself, to be understood rather than condemned. Some ask what desire is aimed at — the good, another's recognition, or merely the next object in an endless chain — while others ask whether our desires are even our own or borrowed from those we imitate. Modern thought increasingly locates desire in the unconscious and in social structures, complicating the old dream of simply mastering it. Reading these positions together reveals how much of ethics, psychology and economics turns on what one thinks wanting really is.
Buddhism
Craving (taṇhā) — thirst for pleasure, existence and even non-existence — is the origin of suffering, as taught in the Second Noble Truth. Because attachment to impermanent things guarantees dissatisfaction, liberation comes through the cessation of craving, not its satisfaction. The Eightfold Path is the practical discipline that loosens desire's grip.
The Four Noble Truths (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta).
Ancient Greek (Platonism)
Eros is a desire for what one lacks that, rightly educated, can ascend from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls and finally to Beauty itself. In the soul's tripartite structure the appetites must be ruled by reason with the help of spirit; ungoverned desire is the tyranny within. Desire is thus not to be killed but rightly ordered and elevated.
Symposium; Republic, Book IV and IX.
Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)
Desire (orexis) comes in kinds — appetite, spirit and rational wish (boulēsis) — and action arises from desire combined with deliberation. Virtue is not the absence of desire but its right measure: the temperate person desires the right things in the right way, whereas the akratic knows the good yet is dragged by appetite against it.
Nicomachean Ethics III, VII; De Anima III.
Epicureanism
Desires should be sorted: natural and necessary (food, shelter, friendship), natural but unnecessary (luxuries), and vain and empty (fame, unlimited wealth). Happiness comes from satisfying the first and pruning the rest, so that pleasure is chiefly the absence of pain (ataraxia). Wisdom lies in wanting little and wanting well.
Letter to Menoeceus; Principal Doctrines.
Stoicism
The passions, including appetite (epithumia), are not blind forces but mistaken judgments — assents to the false belief that some indifferent thing is truly good. The sage therefore aims at apatheia, freedom from irrational desire, replacing craving with the calm, rational 'good feelings' that track genuine value. To correct desire is to correct one's judgments.
Stoic theory of the passions (reported by Galen and others).
Early modern materialism
Desire and aversion are just motions toward and away from objects; 'good' is simply the name we give to whatever we desire. There is no final end or summum bonum, only a restless succession of wants — a 'perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death.' Human life is defined by this endless appetite.
Leviathan (1651), chs. 6 and 11.
Rationalism
Each thing strives to persevere in its being; this striving (conatus), when referred to mind and body together, is desire, the very essence of a human being. Crucially, 'we do not desire a thing because we judge it good; rather we judge it good because we desire it.' Freedom comes not from suppressing desire but from understanding its causes.
Ethics (1677), Part III, defs. of the affects.
Empiricism
Desires and passions, not reason, move us to act; reason can only serve them by finding means or correcting factual error. A passion is an 'original existence' and cannot be true or false, so it is not contrary to reason to prefer even one's own lesser good. Motivation belongs to sentiment, and morality itself rests on what we approve and desire.
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Book II.
German idealism
Self-consciousness is essentially desire, and its deepest object is not a thing but another's recognition: 'self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.' The famous master–slave dialectic shows two desires for recognition locked in a struggle to the death. Human desire is social and reciprocal, not merely appetitive.
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), 'Self-Consciousness'.
German idealism / pessimism
The inner reality of everything is a blind, striving Will, and the individual is its most conscious tool. Desire is therefore endless and painful: fulfilled wants only give way to new ones or to boredom, so life swings 'like a pendulum between pain and boredom.' Salvation lies in denying the will through aesthetic contemplation and ascetic renunciation.
The World as Will and Representation (1818/1844).
Psychoanalysis
Desire is largely unconscious: libidinal energy driven by the pleasure principle seeks discharge, is repressed, and returns in disguise through dreams, slips and symptoms. Wishes forbidden in childhood persist and shape adult life; civilization demands that we defer or sublimate them. What we consciously want is only the visible tip of a hidden economy of drives.
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
Psychoanalysis / structuralism
Desire is born of lack and is structured like a language; it is never satisfied by any object, which is only a stand-in (objet petit a) for an impossible fullness. Crucially, 'man's desire is the desire of the Other' — we desire what we suppose others desire and want to be desired by them. Desire is thus interminable and fundamentally relational.
Écrits (1966); Seminar XI (1964).
Mimetic theory / anthropology
Desire is not spontaneous but mimetic: we borrow our desires from models we imitate, wanting objects because others want them. This triangular imitation breeds rivalry and escalating conflict, which archaic societies discharged through the scapegoat mechanism. What looks most personal about wanting is in fact copied from another.
Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961); Violence and the Sacred (1972).
Poststructuralism
With Félix Guattari, Deleuze rejects the idea that desire is lack; desire is productive and positive, a flow of 'desiring-machines' that assembles connections and produces the real. It is not first personal or Oedipal but social, and capitalism both unleashes and captures these flows. To desire is to construct, not to miss what one has not got.
Anti-Oedipus (with Guattari, 1972).