On Desire: Why We Want What We Want William B. Irvine OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS On Desire This page intentionally left blank On Desire Why We Want What We Want William B. Irvine 2006 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2006 by William B. Irvine Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Irvine, William Braxton, 1952– On desire : why we want what we want / William B. Irvine p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-518862-2 ISBN-10: 0-19-518862-4 1. Desire. I. Title. BF575.D4178 2005 128'.3—dc22 2005005938 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Jamie This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PART ONE THE SECRET LIFE OF DESIRE ONE The Ebb and Flow of Desire 11 TWO Other People 31 PART TWO THE SCIENCE OF DESIRE THREE Mapping Our Desires 55 FOUR The Wellsprings of Desire 68 FIVE The Psychology of Desire 91 SIX The Evolution of Desire 120 SEVEN The Biological Incentive System 145 PART THREE DEALING WITH OUR DESIRES EIGHT The Human Condition 175 NINE Religious Advice 182 TEN Religious Advice Continued: Protestant Sects 211 ELEVEN Philosophical Advice 238 TWELVE The Eccentrics 258 THIRTEEN Conclusions 279 Notes 298 Works Cited 309 Index 316 viii Contents Acknowledgments If the hard drive of my computer can be trusted, I first got the idea to write a book on desire—succumbed, one might say, to the desire to write such a book—in September 2000. Between that time and when the final words were being written in the closing days of 2004, many people contributed to the book in a variety of ways. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them. First, thanks to the students who signed up for the desire seminars I taught in the winter of 2001 and the winter of 2003; to Derek Vanhoose and Jason Phillips, who did independent study with me on desire; and especially to Nicholas Barnard, Chris Poteet, and Sarah Kaplan, who read the manuscript out- side of class. These students were the guinea pigs on whom I tested my work in progress. Thanks to my colleagues in Wright State University’s Col- lege of Liberal Arts and Department of Philosophy for allow- ing me to lecture them about desire. Thanks to my colleagues Scott Baird and Don Cipollini in the Biology Department; Scott discussed the evolution of desire with me, and Don arranged for me to give a seminar on the topic. A special thanks to my colleague James McDougal in the Department of Pharmacol- ogy and Toxicology for reading and commenting on chapter [...]... It is only when our desires are intense (like when we fall in love) or when they come into conflict (like when we want a bowl of ice cream but, because we are on a diet, simultaneously want not to want it) that we pay attention to our desires, with a mixture of puzzlement and vexation And because we are oblivious to the workings of desire within us, we are full of misconceptions about it One consequence... discovered about desire about how we form desires and why we form the desires we do I begin with a discussion of the structure of desire and the sources of desire within us I go on to describe some of the research, undertaken by neuroscientists and psychologists, on what takes place in the brain when we desire Then I speculate on how we evolved the ability to desire and on what specific desires came to... enjoy one another.”8 The symptoms of lovesickness are well known to anyone who has been afflicted by it First comes a fixation on a person— a crush (The common use of the word crush, by the way, is syntactically backward: we speak of having a crush on someone, but what really happens is that we feel crushed by them— we feel as if there were a heavy weight on our chest.) With this crush, we lose control... unwanted desires What 8 Introduction I instead offer is insight into how desire works, the role it plays in human life, and the connection between desire formation, desire fulfillment, and human happiness The hope is that readers armed with this insight will achieve a greater level of personal satisfaction than if they were afflicted, as most people are, with misconceptions about the workings of desire. .. human condition we need to acknowledge the 12 The Secret Life of Desire possibility of spontaneous desire Let us, then, examine some cases in which perfectly rational people have had their lives turned upside down by the sudden, inexplicable onset of desire Falling in love is the paradigmatic example of an involuntary life-affecting desire We don’t reason our way into love, and we typically can’t reason... meditation; if we like what the Amish say, we might want to join an Amish community (if they will have us); if we like what the Stoic philosophers say, we might want to spend time studying their writings But having said this, I should add that the time and effort we spend trying to master desire are probably considerably less than the time and effort we will expend if we instead capitulate to our desires... love is only one instance in which we don’t choose our desires, but they choose us The same thing can happen with material desires Consider, for example, the predicament of the consumer who one day detects in himself a desire to own one of those absurdly oversized cars known as sport utility vehicles Although SUV buyers attempt to give rational justifications for their purchase, the justifications rarely... your fondest desires today There should be a difference What has happened is that slowly, The Ebb and Flow of Desire 21 with the passage of time, some of your earlier desires were fulfilled and you went on to form new desires, while other desires seemed impossible to fulfill and you abandoned them in favor of new desires This is the natural state of man: a head full of desires, but with the desires... realizes that his desire for his drug of choice is doing him great harm This is not what I mean by a crisis of desire; it is only a conflict of desire Conflicts of desire are specific: one particular desire or cluster of desires causes us trouble by interfering with our other desires Thus, the drug addict may complain that his desire for drugs keeps him from accomplishing his other desires—say, to be... father We deal with a conflict of desires by dealing with the troubling desire In the case of drug addiction, we might undergo treatment or join a twelve-step program In a crisis of desire, on the other hand, it isn’t some one desire that is giving us trouble, it is our whole set of desires Or perhaps it is our ability to desire, or the loss of this ability, that is giving us trouble Crises of desire, . On Desire: Why We Want What We Want William B. Irvine OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS On Desire This page intentionally left blank On Desire Why We Want What We Want William B. Irvine 2006 Oxford. when we fall in love) or when they come into conflict (like when we want a bowl of ice cream but, because we are on a diet, simultaneously want not to want it) that we pay attention to our desires,. an auspicious time for a reexamination of desire. In the last three decades, evolutionary psychologists have made a number of dis- coveries concerning why we want what we want. During that same period,