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SECTION VI Psychological and Ethical Aspects of the Desire Process 1. Desire as Projective and Evolving Lecture XVI. February 19, 1901 ALTHOUGH DESIRE IS discussed in connection with the emotional or affective aspects, yet desire is not really to be classified as an emotion. Desire represents rather the projective, impulsive tendencies, with a strong emotional coloring, and clarified and defined somewhat through the presence of the image. If we were to discuss particularly the genesis and development ofthe image as such, our discussion would go over to the reflective side and become a discussion ofthe deliberative processes. In this discussion it is simply taken for granted that the image is there, and inquiry is made into its function. Assuming its existence we ask what part it plays in the entire process and how it does that work. The first point in the discussion of desire, as in the discussion of all these matters, is to get back to its connection with some original instinct or impulse. Desire never grows up out of itselfmerely. There is always something back ofthe desire: a want, using this term in a more biological and less conscious sense than is usually given it. We could have a classification of fundamental wants: hunger, sex, demand for exercise, for the manifestation ofenergy. These wants are rooted in the needs of life. The impulse, as the want, has no conscious end or aim of any kind in view. It simply expresses one of the needs of the organism in order to maintain itself. The want is any function interrupted and endeavoring to maintain itself against that interruption. Hunger is the food process, the assimilation and digestion in so far as that process is interrupted but yet striving to maintain itself. 168 Psychology of Ethics 169 This fact alone makes impossible the strict hedonistic theories. Green has called attention to the fact that the hedonistic theories fall into the fallacy of virtually supposing that a desire is excited by the thought of its own satisfaction, which is a clear case of reasoning in a circle. Pleasure is the object ofdesire and then the same pleasure arouses the desire for that pleasure. The thought ofpleasure arises in turn only as it grows up as the contemplation of the satisfied desire!l Aside from the logical circle there is the impossible attempt to try to get desire to originate somehow on its own grounds. The fallacy consists in not looking back of conscious desire. The desires of a civilized being under complex social conditions become so complex and varied that it is not practicable in many, possibly in most cases, to make the explicit connections between the act and the original fundamental wants ofthe life process. But it is the business of history on its industrial side to point out exactly the process by which the originally comparatively few immediate and so-called physical wants have multiplied and diversified themselves.2 Anyone who believes in the continuity of history at all must recognize that even from a scientific point of view our varied wants oftoday are variations ofa comparatively few, simply fundamental , types ofwants. The want for food is expressed today in a multitude ofdesires which have no very direct connection with the food at all. The desire for shelter in the same way becomes complicated with aesthetic tendencies and wants, with social wants, with instincts of friendship or rivalry, competition and luxury. Just as there is an evolutionary connection on the historical side, so there is an evolutionary connection on the psychological side. I was not saying this for the sake of suggesting that our present idealized and spiritualized, refined, wants and desires have a merely physical origin. Quite the contrary. The point is that the original physical expression is an inadequate expression ofthe life process. The wants and needs are those oflife to maintain and express itself. In the earlier forms those expressions take the more immediate direction, therefore the more crude. In the more developed forms they take the more refined, spiritualized, adequate modes of expression. But they are all expressions ofthe life process and as wants they are all ofthem wants of life. What a man fundamentally wants is to live-not pleasures, objects, 1. Dewey often repeated Green's criticism of the hedonistic theory of desire. See Thomas Hill Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1884), Sees. 158-62. See also Dewey, Lectures on the Logic ofEthics, pp. 19-20; Outlines ofa...

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