If, however, we did understand the ground of existence, our understanding might or might not assuage our fear of death. Whether it would or not would depend on our conclusions. There are understandings that might calm our fears: those, for example, that assure us that a friend of ours is in charge of the universe, that he has given us life, and that he will deliver us to death only to endow us with yet higher life but also those that invite us progressively to submerge ourselves in the self-making and the self-perfection of impersonal being. We have many reasons desperately to want one of these views to be true.
A central issue in the history of religion is whether it will remain content to perform the role of providing the consolation that we desire. A subsequent issue is what we are entitled to hope for if we cannot rest assured in the expectations that those consoling beliefs hold out for us. Both issues form major concerns of the argument of this book.
We must die without grasping reasons for our existence other than those fragments of necessity and chance that scientific inquiry suggests to us. It does not seem that the growth of scientific knowledge ever would or could alter this circumstance. If there is one universe or many, if the universe is eternal or time-bound, if it had a beginning in time or began together with time, we would simply have different ways of expressing a riddle that we would remain powerless to solve.
Insatiability
Our desires are insatiable. We seek from the limited the unlimited. We must fail. Our insatiability is a third incurable defect in human life.
Our insatiability is rooted in our natural constitution. Human desires are indeterminate. They fail to exhibit the targeted and scripted quality of desire among other animals. Even when, as in addiction and obsession, they fix on particular objects, we make those particular objects serve as proxies for longings to which they have a loose or arbitrary relation. We force the limited to serve as a surrogate for the unlimited. This misalliance, revealed most starkly in our obsessional and addictive behavior, carries over to our entire experience of wanting and seeking.
The retreat or vagueness of biological determination in the shaping of our desires opens space for the working of four forces that, together, make our desires insatiable.
A first root of insatiability is the imprinting of the dialectic of embodiment and transcendence on the life of desire. We suffer when desire goes unsatisfied and, when it is satisfied, we are briefly relieved of pain. Our desires, however, are unlimited in both their number and their reach. The moment of dissatisfaction is soon followed by other unrequited wants. Contentment remains a momentary interlude in an experience of privation and longing that has no end.
How could it be different? No narrowly directed set of desires defines our natures. Hence no particular satisfactions can leave us lastingly at ease. The problem with the particular desires and the particular satisfactions is that they are particular and that we, in a sense (the sense of our excess over all the social and conceptual regimes that we engage), are not.
A second root of insatiability is the social construction of desire. Our desires lack a predetermined content. To a large extent, we get the content from one another; our desires represent a kidnapping of the self by society. This commandeering of desire by other people makes the content of desire seem empty, as if it always remained on the periphery of the self, as if it never penetrated the inner and empty core of the personality. We stand forever ready to exchange one invasion of the self by society for another.
A third root of insatiability is the prominence among our desires of those that by their very nature can never be satisfied by most people most of the time. We want from one another acceptance, recognition, and admiration as well as things and power. In particular, we want from one another what every child wants from every parent: an assurance that there is an unconditional place for him the world. No such assurance is ever enough, because every assurance is both ambiguous and revocable. Even if we can accumulate enough of scarce material resources, we can never get enough of the even scarcer immaterial ones. What is given to one man is taken from another, so that we find ourselves in a circumstance of perpetual dissatisfaction. Only love, freely given but easily destroyed, could free us for a while from this endless yearning.
A fourth root of the insatiability of desire is that we seek, in the satisfaction of our desires, not just to rid ourselves of the pains and privations to which they refer but also to supply a response to both death and groundlessness. A man may seek to become rich because he cannot become immortal or because he cannot find any more reliable grounding for his existence. This ceaseless metonymy, this trading of the ultimate for the homely, is bound to disappoint him.
There is a common element in these sources of insatiability. We cannot access the absolute, the unconditional, the unlimited. Therefore, we try to get it from the limited. We are unable to convince ourselves that, despite our mortality and our groundlessness, everything is all right. Therefore, we use whatever material and immaterial resources we are able to obtain to compensate for the fundamental defects in life that we are powerless to redress. We can never achieve enough acceptance from one another. Therefore, each of us continues the hunt for more tokens of assurance that there is an unconditional place for him in the world. We cannot restrict our strivings to a limited set of objects and goals. Therefore, we walk a treadmill of desire, satisfaction, boredom, and new desire, and take from others the cues that we are never adequately able to give ourselves.
The result is exposure to a free-floating anguish that it has been the aim of much of religion, philosophy, and art to quiet. Speculative thought and religious practice, enlisted in the cause of self-help, have often served as devices by which we cast a spell on ourselves the better to free ourselves from the sufferings of insatiability. From them we garner the stories about the cosmos and our lives within it that make the spell seem to be a reception of the deepest truths about the world.
At the center of the experience of insatiability lies the emptiness of human desires: their indeterminacy in comparison to the desires of other animals. This negativity influences even those drives—for food and for sex—that most clearly tie us to the rest of the animal world but that, in the human being, have an unfixed, inclusive, and roaming quality.
The emptiness of desire appears under two main aspects: it is mimetic (to use René Girard’s term), and it is projected (to use Karl Rahner’s term). The preceding discussion has already suggested how each of these traits of desire plays a part in the genealogy of insatiable desire. Together, they help clarify the nature of our insatiability.
Because our desires are empty, the void will be filled up by other people. To a large extent, we desire what those around us desire. Their desires contaminate us; they take us over. This takeover establishes a basis for both competition and cooperation, according to both the content of what is desired and the range of social alternatives available for its pursuit.
If we failed to resist the imitative character of desire, even as we surrender to it, we would not be the context-shaped but context-transcending individuals who we are. We would not be the beings whose relations to one another are shadowed by an inescapable ambivalence because they seek connection without subjugation and who understand, however darkly, that “imitation is suicide.” There is no making of selves without connection in every domain of our existence, and there is no connection, in any realm of experience, without the risk of loss of self. “Accept me but make me free” is what every human being says to another.
This conflicted relation both to the others and to the organized contexts of life and of thought takes place in the midst of a struggle for the fulfillment of our desires, desires