What do I want?

What do I want?

There are a number of issues with this question.

  1. Freedom is generally defined as being able to do what one wants. As such, the question, ‘what do I want?’ cuts to the core of one of the biggest questions in philosophy, the question of what freedom really means. But is doing what you want enough? Do I really want what I think I want at any one moment or am I somehow made to want it by all kinds of ‘forces’ beyond my control? Think of peer pressure, my social, and psychological make up, my biological make up, my chemical and physical make up (DNA and stuff). How can I be sure that I really want what I want?
  2. To want something is to desire something. Can we get a description of what desiring something entails? How does the machinery of desiring work? Here we have to be careful that we do not just describe the act of desiring as just another way of describing the act of desiring. How can we describe desiring without falling into all sorts of traps like describing desiring simply by enumerating what things we desire and why or make typologies of the kinds of desire we might be able to differentiate. Nor should we be tempted down the road of saying that if we can model desiring mathematically or in terms of some algorithm we have a description of what desiring is. What we have then is a parallel system that appears to behave in the same way. Mathematical and algorithmic descriptions as such cannot hold any explanatory power even though they can, when accurate, hold great predictive power. But that is not quite the same thing. But why is it helpful to get such a description in the first place? Can it be helpful to us in a practical way?
  3. The last question I can come up with in relation to the main question of this section is: What is it good to want? This question is often equated with the quest for wisdom which, by Philippa Foot, is defined as knowing good means to good ends. But when can you be sure that you know good means to good ends? And how important is the harmonization of ends and means? Can one achieve good ends by bad means? Is it possible to go horribly wrong even though one employs only good means? And is knowing effective means to a desired end the same as wisdom? Or is that just cleverness? And what is the difference?

Ok here we go. Which of the three shall we start with? I think the second. To want something is to desire something. Can we get a description of what desiring something entails? How does the machinery of desiring work?

Hegel in his tortuously worded wisdom describes desire as our active will to compel objects to conform to our conceptions or wishes. Fair enough, but what does that really mean? Self-consciousness, if I understand him rightly (which is not very likely) is in fact the activity of desiring. Self-consciousness is consciousness (i.e. thought) that starts thinking about itself, that makes itself its own object. So far I have in the other texts I have been careful to distinguish the world of thought (what it is we do when we think) from the world we think about. Occasionally I have let drop the curious fact that we are included in the world we think about. Now is the time to make that clearer. In self-consciousness, the world of thought is what we want to think about. I.e. consciousness or thought, when thinking of itself, makes itself a thing to think about. Fair enough. All clear so far (I hope).

One of the things this involves is that self-consciousness has to think its relationship to its environment. After all it is is now busily forming an idea about itself. It has to think what it itself is, (indicative mood) and, perhaps what it itself could be were the world a little different ( the conditional mood). Perhaps it can even think of itself as what it ought to be (the subjunctive mood). But it must do that not in isolation (that is in fact very difficult to picture properly), but as a thinking-being-in-its-environment.

In the indicative mood consciousness thinks of what it itself is. Think of the sentence, “I am cold” or “I am hungry” or “I am poor.”

Now ideas such as ‘I am hungry’ need not be linguistically articulated, it is after all a feeling that is physiologically triggered in the body and need not be communicated. But it is capable of linguistic articulation and even if it hasn’t been, we can still call ‘a feeling of hunger’ an idea, so we shall treat it as such.

With this idea of itself consciousness receives things form its environment given in perception and cognition which thus come to be seen from the perspective of that idea.

At this moment consciousness is emphatically in opposition to the thing perceived. Picture yourself standing in front of something, say a goose, or a coat, so that you are conscious of not being it and it not being yours. Now with this idea of itself and the other (the goose and the coat), consciousness recalibrates what it sees out there. The goose, becomes perhaps ‘a nice fat goose’ full of potential on the basis of your ready experience with cooked goose and the coat holds the promise of warmth.

In other words by making an idea of itself in self-consciousness, the things in consciousness’ environment acquire value, more specifically, a use-value. Use-value just is the eruption of desire within the subjunctive and conditional moods. Desire is the subjunctive or conditional possibility of movement. Self-consciousness ‘presents itself as the movement in which this opposition is removed and the identity of the self with itself is established’ (PG121) Which to my simple mind means: “Let’s cook the goose and put on the warm coat, then we will have a different idea of ourselves!” When the subject transforms objects according to its will it is really being moved by the desire to confront itself as an object and have the idea of itself resolved with regard to this new situation, namely: ‘Ahhhh, I am no longer hungry or cold’.

To summarize then, to know itself consciousness needs a mirror. If the goal of consciousness is self-knowledge. It cannot achieve this by annihilating all objectivity (i.e. by thinking itself and the environment it is part of as one continuous subject. It needs to do this by making objectivity differentiate and reflective, by transforming all objects (including itself as an object for itself in self-consciousness) into a mirror of consciousness, a mirror image of itself as it is (indicative) as it would or could be (conditional) or ought to be (subjunctive).

So all objects in my environment are as it were related to me as objectified subject looking for an improvement in my condition, looking for the good. That is, as a subject that has an idea of itself as what it could be. And in having that idea, all objects I come across in my environment come to be seen as possibly filled with the potential to resolve that idea into its satisfaction, into making objects from my environment part of me in an extended sense. If my idea of myself is “I am poor” and if in the subjunctive tense I can have a conception of my possible self as ‘rich’, all things in my environment are evaluated with regard to their potential to achieve wealth.

Now I may not constantly have that idea in front of me. After all my brain is capable of holding quite a few ideas of itself. Instead I scan my environment with a whole host of ideas about myself, some coming to the fore at certain moments others modestly taking a back seat until perhaps the opportunity presents itself. Thankfully there are quite a few things in my environment I can immediately release from that tension and just perceive as the background for my more pointed scavenging.

Insofar as we desire to make some things our own, that is to create a world for ourselves in which we can accommodate ourselves intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, securely and joyfully, or whatever other desires we have formulated for ourselves, we desire self-reflection: creating things in our image of ourselves. If I am hungry I look for food, If I am happy I look at the world without too much of a predatory stance. The transformed object becomes an extension of myself and therefore no longer truly other. 1The subject will not be satisfied until it has seen its own nature, itself as a conception of itself in the other and that this other has recognized this. The drive for self consciousness can only be satisfied in becoming like the subject (or how it thinks of itself) We strive to overcome otherness. (PG381)

So far for Hegel’s amazing description of desire, which I have freely adapted and made my own, discarding some ideas I cannot as yet find use for. But as my goal is to describe desire and not to critique Hegel, I shall not deal with the adminsitrative side of what what I have held on to and what I have returned.

To me this description of how desiring works is immensely satisfying. It is not even nearly complete. It has not modelled the process in terms of biochemical, molecular, atomic or sub-atomic interactions, but at least it does not need to contradict them and it explains it as only philosophy can. In psychological terms, more popular with many, such processes are explained in terms of dispositions and tendencies. Well to me that is not enough. How can the sentence you have a disposition to desire be explanatory of desire? Hegel’s adapted description can now be elaborated into an evolutionary tale that incorporates the idea of genetic and memetic selection and the brilliant ideas of René Girard about the energy-efficiency of desiring what one’s neighbour desires. But that moves us on to the first question I asked, to which we will now turn:

Freedom is generally defined as being able to do what one wants. As such the question, ‘what do I want?’ cuts to the core of the biggest questions in philosophy. But is doing what you want enough? Do I really want what I think I want at any one moment or am I somehow made to want it by all kinds of ‘forces’ beyond my control? Think of peer pressure, my biological make up, my chemical and physical make upt (DNA and stuff) How can I be sure that I really want what I want?

The biggest discovery about myself what that I was apparently the proud owner of a brain with primitive bits forging simple desires for itself such as the desire for food, warmth, safety and sex and something that the evolutionary biologists told me was a relatively recent addition to the cerebral arsenal, the frontal cortex, the principal function of which, I am told, is to make us take a step back from our immediate “primitive” desires and say, “Ho, wait a minute, is this really a good idea?”

I am going to deal with freedom in a separate section where I shall give an account of how to reconcile the idea of a fully determined universe (which means no more than saying, “the universe does what it does and cannot do other” and how this allows us the freedom to act in a world by learning from our own mistakes and those of others.

I shall also deal with the idea that ‘freedom of choice’ is a dubious kind of freedom created exclusively in our virtual world of thought where possibilities are presented on the basis of our understanding of the world and our position in it. Freedom of choice we experience as delightful when we know what we want and the option is available, in which case the choice has already been made; and as stressful and anxious-making when we do not know what we want or what is for the best or when the option we want is not available. In the first case the choice becomes a gamble and in the second we have to settle for second best. But all that is for later.

Now we have to deal with the idea that freedom is to do what you want. But as described earlier, and as argued by a number of people, most recently Robert Sapolsky, human beings are fully determined at very scale of their being, at the scale of physics, atomic and sub-atomic, atoms and particles behave in a regular way beautifully twinned in mathematical thought so that we are able to make fantastically accurate predictions of their behaviour. The same is true for chemical reactions at the molecular level. As soon as we reach the scale of biology things become more difficult to model as the scale of complexity at this level is phenomenal, but even here we see no reason to falsify the theory that at a biological level behaviour is just as determined as at smaller scales.

At the psychological and sociological scales our interactions are patterned, but we do see exceptions. Psychology and sociology can only make rough predictions best modelled by statistics whereby they are able to say things like: 50 % of people do A, 30 % of people do B and the rest do C under such and such conditions.

In fact even at a biological level there is a measure of diversity, some people react differently to medicines, react differently to allergens and so forth. It is within this diversity of reactions that we can conceive as possibilities that we shall find what we —with some justification— will call freedom. At the same time it is also true that most of our desires are determined through bio-chemical and biological, psychological and sociological coercion or, to put it another way, normation.

I began smoking because I was curious. What was all the fuss about? It was adventure, it was “cool” and, I suppose, it was a way to assert my supposed independence from my parents. LOL. My independence from my parents was just a naive loyalty to friends I was keen to be accepted by. At this level we are not free to do what we want we are coerced by our bodies and their interactions with their environment to do all sort of things. Many of these may well be the effect of evolutionary pressures. My need to separate myself from my parents is an important episode in becoming myself as differentiated from that with which I am intimate.

And this is the point. Our upbringing, our educational journey is a journey on the one hand of acquiring an analytical and critical understanding of the world and so to gradually determine our actions not on the basis of false reasons and norms but increasingly on the basis of reasons that are based on a more critical and analytical understanding of the world. As such, people who have gone through such a process of learning may be said to really want what they want as they are (they hope) in the possession of more rigorously arrived at reasons for wanting this or that and a greater treasure of evidence to reason why. This is why I rather like Harry Frankfurt’s thesis on freedom as the doing what you really want to want to do.2

This brings us to the third question we began with: What is it good to want? This question is often equated with the quest for wisdom which, by Philippa Foot, is defined as knowing good means to good ends.3 But when can you be sure that you know good means to good ends? And how important is the harmonization of ends and means? Can one achieve good ends by bad means? Is it possible to go horribly wrong even though one employs only good means? And is knowing effective means to a desired end the same as wisdom? Or is that just cleverness? And what is the difference?

When I was young I wanted ice-creams and chocolate, liquorice and puddings, toys and cool stuff. Now that I am old I want healthy food and have reduced my desire for puddings to celebrate only the very rare happy occasions. When I was young I wanted to smoke, now I want to breathe fresh air. Things have changed. How did that happen? And am I sure that what I want now is good for me?

I cannot be sure. There is no systematic way to ensure that choices you make in uncertainty (which is the only time when you are forced to make choices) are good ones. We muddle along as best we can. My tastes in almost everything are settling a little with age. I am more confident and thoughtful in my desires and that is the dividend of a life-long learning process that I happened to take very seriously, went through quite conscientiously with the help of a lot of advice from many people better placed and better informed than I was, or am. In my choices, that is when I am not sure of what it is good to want, I use a number of tips to help me along. I won’t argue these too thoroughly. I shall give them to you as more or less self-evident.

  1. be curious about what others want but try to find out why, what is the benefit and does it do what it promises?
  2. find people whom you can respect with respect to the thing your are thinking about wanting and ask their advice.
  3. don’t rubbish traditions and convention simply because they are traditions and conventions. Traditions started somewhere and became selectively successful: why? find out.
  4. don’t go for the new simply because it is new, unless that is your kind of adventure. Be an early adopter only if you have the means to make a mistake now and then or if you have a conviction that you are happy to allow to define and determine you.
  5. explore alternative possibilities creatively, get your inspiration from wherever you get it, but once you choose to adopt something find rigorous reasons to do so and don’t be too easy on yourself in that respect.
  6. be careful of the popular after all it could be an indication of quality, but it could just as easily be an indication of kowtowing to the lowest common denominator.
  7. be just as careful with regard to the so-called exclusive, exclusive things can be an indication of quality, but they can just as easily be trying to stroke your vanity with cheap means.
  8. be careful of the cheap, it is usually just that in all respects: cheap.
  9. be careful of things labelled as sustainable. To be truly sustainable requires a whole economic network of relations and the enforcement of those relations through the well-functioning institutions of society. Some of what is sold as sustainable is just criminalized ware.
  10. 95% (a rough and conservative estimate) of what we own is not what we need, but what we once wanted. You can do with much less. If you enjoy having things, (and scavenging creatures like us are natural collectors) then don’t feel guilty about it, but don’t be a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is ugly.

So what do I want?

I want wisdom in my choices, and a bit of luck. I achieve wisdom in my choices by choosing carefully and having fun in making those choices. If I have been impulsive, I do not blame others. And because the causality of events is of extraordinary complexity, I need luck to cash in on the possibility that unforeseen factors make it possible to achieve good end when I have inadvertently employed bad means. I also need luck to avoid things going horribly wrong even though I have done my best to harmonize means and ends as best as I can. I need hope to know the difference between wisdom and mere amoral cleverness. What more is there to say?

  1. Think here of Richard Dawkins’ The extended phenotype (1982) ↩︎
  2. Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jan. 14, 1971), pp. 5-20 ↩︎
  3. Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices, (1978) and Natural Goodness (2001) ↩︎

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