According to one poster, desire is a derivative of need. This was disputed by another one.
My question to the second power would be; what is it that claims for desire a different essence than that of need? And the first one I would ask; is need a sufficiently powerful drive to sustain life?
Need. How can it be qualified? . Need = that which one cannot live without. Yes, but why does one need to live?
The second poster could answer: to fulfill desires. Need, then, becomes equal to desire. We need to fulfill our desires.
Sophistry… bah, I’ve not evolved much since I rejected absolutism.
But the question continues to puzzle me - the subject of this need is elusive.
One may say ‘life’, the other ‘that is different for everyone’. A third might say ‘power’.
That is interesting. Why do we need power? Someone might smile a grin, and quote Nietzsche:
“What is good? — All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases”
I would scratch my head and try to figure out if progress has been made with the search.
Good leads to happiness, through the will to power. Happiness is the feeling of increased power.
I’d want to ask the first poster how need plays into this. Do we need to be happy? If not, why do we pursue it? If so, how different is need from desire? What is more important, something that we need, or something we have desire for?
We need food. We have desire for sex. Without food, we die. Without sex, our race dies.
In this light desire appears more altruistic than need.
Do we not favor those with the greatest desire over those with the greatest needs?
If so, it is important for humans to have desire. We need desire. It is what makes our needs worth satisfying.
We can do very well with a simple garden, some breeding barn yard critturs, water, and a plain cave or hut. Those are needs, above that, its all desire.
Hmm, dyslexia strikes a note of boring interest, I just mispelled plain as palin, Interesting no one else has caught that.
Nietzsche once argued that ‘Philosophers’ were not created by a choice of study but driven by need for knowledge. The classic distinction between high and low pleasures also illustrates that, for everyone (I think) life requires more than just just the low needs. Yes I have just conflated ‘need’ and pleasure but the point still stands.
Marx’s idea of humanity was that we a driven by a desire to create, to change the world around us and in so doing, create ourselves as beings of talents. This isn’t a desire, this is a need, a need to be human.
I’m not saying that these goals can’t be achieved in your simple garden, they all can. But I don’t think the aspects of modern life that you dismiss as ‘all desire’ is strictly true. However i don’t know, I’m not sure clear distinctions between needs and desires are possible when examining the world, as concepts, yes, but not as applied ideas…
Perhaps in that example, but there are human desires beyond pheromones.
Equally, not all animals contain the same desires as their needs, and those that hold desires separate from their needs are different from each other species that does.
It is the human, however, that appears unique in desire from individual human to individual human.
desires are needs, needs are desires - they overlap and run together, but you can still have them as seperate things, and then combine them to get something else = at the end of a figurative day you’ve got three distinct, identifiable substances mixed on no your pallet and human nature shining from the canvas.
