It is widely believed that these complications are the result of a historically specific set of developments in society and culture, associated with the ascendancy of democratic, liberal, and romantic ideals in some societies over the last few centuries. The truth, however, is closer to being the opposite: it is the power of these fundamental experiences of the self, which no regime of society and culture can entirely override or suppress, that accounts for the irresistible seductions of these forms of life and consciousness. The prophetic voice in politics and in culture would fall on deaf ears if it failed to find an ally in the innermost recesses of the self.
Desire is projected as well as mimetic. It is projected in a twofold sense. On the one hand, it always yearns for something beyond its immediate and manifest object. This something beyond shares in the quality of the unlimited, the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite. Thus, desire is projected in the sense that it projects forward beyond its visible horizon. On the other hand, however, the something beyond remains remote and obscure. We approach it, almost always, by indirection, mistaking it for something tangible and accessible, the proximate and visible object of our longing. Thus, desire is projected in the sense that we project the hidden absolute onto a manifest, contingent, and all-too-particular object.
In obsession and addiction, the disproportionate and even capricious bond between the hidden horizon of the unlimited and the paltry surrogate for it becomes extreme and paradoxical. It is, however, only the limiting case of a pervasive feature of the life of desire. In boredom, we experience directly the failure of the particular objects of desire, and of the habits and routines surrounding their pursuit, to hold our interest by engaging our capabilities. In every quarter, the phenomenology of desire bears the mark of our insatiability and reveals its connection with our powers of transcendence, with our longing for the infinite.
The projected quality of desire shows, as well, how our insatiability relates to our mortality and our groundlessness. The brevity of life lends urgency to the pursuits of desire: our time will end while we continue to seek one unworthy object after another, each the proxy for the unreachable horizon of that which could satisfy us. The terrors of death grow in the imagination with the expenditure of life on this equivocal chase.
Our uncertainty about the grounding of our existence (or rather the failure of all the available proposals to ground it) leaves us without a route by which to go from the tangible and defective particulars that we can grasp to the intangible and indiscriminate absolute that we voicelessly seek.
We have not understood our insatiability until we have formed a view of whether and under what conditions we might overcome it. In describing insatiability as an incurable defect in the human condition, I mean to claim that we cannot escape it, not at least without prejudice to the attributes that make us human and that might make us more human by making us more godlike.
Consider first the suggestion that in certain societies and cultures men and women cease to experience desire as insatiable. Insatiability would then be a local rather than a universal feature of human experience. Those who study savage societies from the vantage point of the ideas that have been dominant in modern anthropology often represent those societies as marked by a theology of immanence and a pragmatics of sufficiency.
The theology of immanence, in contrast to the spiritual beliefs that have been dominant since the religious revolutions of the first millennium B.C., places the sacred or the divine squarely within the natural as well as the social world. It thus provides no basis for a personal or impersonal divinity transcending what is manifest in this world in which we find ourselves. If our insatiability has theological or cosmological presuppositions, these presuppositions are denied by such a view of the world.
The pragmatics of sufficiency forms men and women who work only to uphold a certain customary form of life. When they have done so, they stop working. They do not allow themselves to be driven by an impulse toward relentless striving and accumulation. The character of their experience of life in society guards them—so the argument goes—against the ordeal of insatiability.
The question can then be presented squarely: Are we the beings who become insatiable only when we depart from the theology of immanence and the pragmatics of sufficiency? It is true that there is a history of desire, as there is a history of ideas informing desire. This history, however, is not aimless or random. It does not converge to a single end. Nevertheless, it has directions. Its directions are not to be mistaken for the scales of divine justice. However, they reveal, in the course of time, who we are and what we can become.
The restraints imposed by the theology of immanence and by the pragmatics of insufficiency inhibit the development of our powers: not just of our powers of production but also of all our powers of invention and innovation. They prevent us from pressing against the limits of the practices, institutions, and assumptions about human association that hold all our interests and ideals ransom. They require us to treat one structure of life and thought—the established one—as our definitive and authoritative home in the world. We cannot do so, however, without pretending to be more like the other animals than like gods.
The falsehood of this pretense is prefigured by the irrepressible element of uncertainty about what the established regime of life and of thought is, and about how this regime is to be understood and upheld as circumstances change and conflicts arise. No real society can fully conform to such a script. No real individual can be made into the passive performer of the lines that the script assigns to the occupant of each social role. If he does not defy the script openly, he will nevertheless rewrite it secretly. The falsehood of the pretense is further confirmed by the irreversibility of any departure from this supposed Arcadia. No people and no individual could ever return to this Eden, once having experienced the advantages as well as the troubles of its disruption.
The revolutionary changes that are associated with the rejection of both the theology of immanence and the pragmatics of sufficiency have aroused, and will continue to inflame, all humanity. Their influence, despite all calamities and reversals, will appear as a force that is irresistible and providential not only because it empowers us but also because it reveals us to ourselves.
If the variations of society and culture cannot save us from our insatiability, can some of our initiatives as individuals nevertheless shield us against it? Can we not have in love and in work experiences that wholly absorb us, modify or even suspend our sense of the passage of time, without depriving us of consciousness, and interrupt the cycle of unrequited desire?
Indeed, we can, if we are both lucky and wise, but only for a while. The work will come to an end, and no longer represent for its creator what it represented in the throes of creation. The love, ever tainted by ambivalence, will cease to waver only if it ceases to live. The work and the love will be seen to be the particular engagement and the particular connection that they are, and we will continue to seek, absurdly and inescapably, something that is not just one more particular. Our reprieves from insatiable desire will be momentary; our insatiability will remain as the lasting undercurrent of our experience, thrown into starker relief by its remissions.
Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as we are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented.
Belittlement
“The true sorrow of humanity consists in this;—not that the mind of man fails; but that the course and the demands of action and of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires; and hence that, which is slow to languish, is too easily turned aside and abused.” So wrote the poet Wordsworth, describing what we may be tempted to mistake for a fourth irreparable flaw in the human condition.
No feature of our humanity is more important than our power to go beyond the particular regimes of society and of thought in