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49 c h a p t e r 3 Desire 1. Objectivity That I desire something normally helps explain why I pursue it.This much is uncontroversial. But as soon as we try to say anything more, controversies abound. I am going to argue that it is possible not to understand one’s own desires—not to know what it is that one desires. Once we have reached this conclusion, we will be able to make some progress in analyzing the concept of a desire. At the same time, it is not my purpose to provide any thorough analysis of desire. I will say just the amount required for my analysis of the morality of sexuality. It is tempting to say desire is something felt. Yet the concept of a subconscious desire seems useful and coherent. Upon looking back at a period in my life I may observe that all my actions were organized around the pursuit of some value, and I may conclude that I did indeed desire to further that value. There seems to have been something in me that explains the multifarious pursuits, and it seems to have played the same explanatory role that a desire would have. Moreover, if one accepts the popular, though I think questionable, thesis that we always act out of a desire, then one must agree that desire surely 49 one body 50­ cannot always be something felt. For, clearly, we often act without any consciously preceding desire for something. And if some desires are unconscious, then it is no surprise that we can be wrong about the content of some of our desires. But even if all desires did involve something felt, we could still argue that misunderstanding is possible. We fully understand a sentiment like: “I thought I wanted to be a scientist, but it turns out that I just enjoyed fiddling with equipment, and I was an engineer at heart.” The phrase “I thought I wanted to . . .” is very common in English.1 There would be little point to the phrase if there were no distinction between what one actually wants and what one thinks one wants. Socrates thought that one of the great challenges for us was to know ourselves. We grow in self-understanding, and it seems clear that a part of what we grow in is our understanding of our desires. Plausibly, for instance, we sometimes confuse what we desire to desire with what we actually desire. Or we simply may not know what the object of our desire is. These possibilities exist even in the case of a felt desire. Quite likely, a baby can feel hunger or thirst without realizing that the desire would be satisfied by nutrition or hydration. If so, then a desire’s proper object, the thing or state of affairs that the desire is for, will be an objective feature of the desire, a feature about which we could be right or wrong. We may mistakenly pursue something else, while thinking that we are pursuing the object of our desire; this is the first way in which we might err in respect of a desire. We may even succeed in making ourselves think that we have achieved the object and thus fulfilled the desire; the desire may go away then, though it will likely return. This happens even in prosaic cases. I may erroneously think that I want a drink when in fact I want to eat. Drinking some water will fill my stomach and for a short while make the hunger go away. But my blood sugar will remain low and so the hunger will return increased. Or imagine that I make a more general mistake: I erroneously think that each desire’s object is the cessation of that desire. Thus, instead of satisfying my appetite with food, I take a hunger suppressant pill. Imaginably—though most improbably— due to this faulty philosophical view of desire, I could think that I have satisfied my hunger and die of starvation. desire 51 Second, we might fully understand the object of our desire, but mistake something else for that object. I may feel hungry, understand that what I want is food, and take a bite of the ceramic bagel that my colleague brought in to make a philosophical point. In the case of the ceramic bagel, I will not think I have satisfied my desire by taking a bite. But in other cases, one might even think the desire has been...

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