On Desire

We can belong to ourselves, to the cosmos, and to the ground of being because we have appeared—emerged—in a situation. Bodily I was conceived, bodily I gestated, and bodily came from the womb: timed and placed. I am a physical continuum with the world; and I am a discrete physical unity within it. The world at my birth flowered alive to my senses, light and chill and aromatic; then I received it in liquids and solids. I grew larger.

Being human, I grew also toward and into understanding.

My body from the beginning reached out, in that combination of physical demandingness and curiosity that defines us, a reaching out that was always happening already in relationship: in relationship with the rest of the physical cosmos, but more importantly in relationship with other persons, other subjects. As Heidegger would say, being human is always a “being-with.” As a being-with, from the start—in my suddenly discrete separateness as a body—I longed for my physicality to be touched, seen, and loved, so that I could find myself comfortably adjusted for my human life.

Being human, I grew also toward and into understanding.

Because a human being is bodily and situated, some high thinkers, and low, draw the conclusion that an individual’s behavior is utterly determined. Add up all the impacts of situatedness, they claim, and all behaviors inevitably follow. But the extraordinary truth is that, as we develop, genuine freedom—freedom of attention, of reflection, of choice—comes to play its part in my individual drama. So it dawns on me, somewhere along the way, that it is up to me to set about shaping myself—that my life story is not just established, not just fated, but also self-directed. As Martin Buber writes: fate plus freedom equals destiny.

How does it happen, this freedom? I don’t mean in the sense of its “ground” (the unimaginable freedom from which all situated freedom is derived), but in terms of its onset in me, the freedom that is, one might say, the crucial and utmost “me”?

Here is one way to think about it. Already as an infant, an illumination (unlike that experienced by any animal that is merely animal) is pressing in me toward insights: a desire to understand and to know things. This desire, even in the infant, is already an inchoate notion of reality, of being. From the beginning I want the kind of discovery that the apprehension of meaning is. In the earliest curiosity of the infant, the potency of discovery is already present; the infant is already instinct with knowing. And for a long while, while I’m young, the wonder of understanding rushes me forward. Distressed, dissuaded, and even sometimes punished for discovery I may well be; but the native joy of being a created participation in uncreated light continues to nourish the desire to understand.

What about all the other desires, though, starting with those of bodily and emotional needs, that are so much more easy to discuss than our desire to apprehend meanings? A human being is a highly complex multitude of situated desires—so many of which, fulfilling the trajectory of sensory and emotional aims, bring us into communion with the truly beautiful and the truly sublime! Still, it is the desire to understand—the longing that both leads to understanding and constantly follows from it to seek more understanding—that is the distinctively human desire that unfolds together with our other desires to become personal and human history. Fears and attractions, impulses, feelings of every kind, are human only because they are refracted in the prism of (even if slight) understanding. It is finding and making meanings that is the human métier.

Meanings accumulate for us, they make up our human world, and as everyone knows the more we come to know, the more meanings we recognize to be beyond us. In our purest, most attentive orientation to that which we are situated within, the cosmos, we wish to have everything make sense, we want to understand what being is—what this whole is that we are of. After all, only by knowing the meaning of the whole could I know the meaning of the part of the whole that I am!

Let us ask: as a distinctive way of participating in the whole, what is this wanting to know everything about everything that defines me as a human? It is a potency to become whatever the mind touches with understanding. “Become” here is not a metaphor. The human mind becomes, as a matter of fact, that which it understands. This odd truth of cognition, first systematically articulated by Aristotle, has been obscured for us by the influences of, first, simplistic Cartesianism, second, the dismal fallout from every variety of the Department of Materialist Reductionism, and third, the propensity of everyone everywhere to imagine that the human subject who is inquiring, on the one hand, and whatever objects that the subject might be inquiring about, on the other, are confronting each other just like physical objects in space. The subject is imagined to be “in here” (somewhere in the head), and everything else is imagined as being “out there”—or, with regard to objects that are somehow also “inside” the self, as being “also in here.” All this sort of thinking is based on the supposition that mind and everything else are simply spatial objects that exist side by side, each outside of the other.

But the reality regarding mind and its operations is otherwise—startling, amusing, and thrilling. Aristotle put the issue succinctly: intelligence in act and the intelligible in act are one and the same. Why so? Because an object understood (be it an apple, or a deed, or an emotion), to the degree that it is indeed understood, is a pattern of intelligible meaning; what intelligence possesses through insight is that same pattern of meaning; and this “form” (as Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas called it) is identical in the understanding and in the understood. Thus the potential of the mind to become, say, the apple, is actualized. The material apple exists on the table; but the form of the apple is no less real in my mind than in it, and the one form is identical with the other. None of this is incompatible with the physical apple’s real independence from my conception of it.

So: what, finally, do I want to become through understanding? Everything. Such is every person’s natural desire. And this unrestricted longing is not emotionless. It is a longing, a questioning saturated with yearning, which shows itself most freely in the infant’s eyes and the young child’s untrammeled enthusiasms.

The bodily-based flow of “other desires”—impulses, urges, possessiveness, compulsions, tyrannies of the lust for pleasure and comfort, the recoil of fears and repulsions—all of these surround, contextualize, and interfere with the desire to understand. But these other desires are also found among animals. The desire to understand and know, and then to knowingly love—the highest design of all knowing, the ultimate purpose of knowing—is human only. Its presence is personhood. Its fulfillment, in its incrementality, is the realizing of spirit.

Using the term in this sense, is the “spirit”—always underway as the flowing of unrestricted questioning grounded in my bodily situated being—what is most of all “myself”? Certainly! What am “I”? I am individual situated spirit!

The upsurging of myself as spirit, though, was none of my doing. Human personhood, while being myself, is also the ground of being itself, emergent within the overflow of created being in a conscious seeking of itself.

This seeking, perhaps needless to say, can go astray. Wayward desires can bear me away from personhood. (That is: desires that bear me away from personhood may be said to be “wayward.”) To be more specific: there are desires that I allow to carry me away from understanding, from knowing, from choosing well, and from loving. When I succumb to such desires, is that “my” choice? Am I through them becoming “me” as well?

The answer is complicated. Let’s just say: spirit can choose spiritlessness. And does.

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