The Desire of Our Needs

The magnificent Latin of St Augustine (354 - 430 AD) rolls down the corridors of time : Da amantem, et sentit quod dico. Da desiderantem, da esurientem, da in ista solitudine peregrinantem atque sitientem, et fontem aeternae patriae suspirantem : da talem, et scit quid dicam. Si autem frigido loquor, nescit quod loquor. Which in my poor translation roughly goes as : 'If you give me someone who loves, someone who desires, someone who has a raging thirst in this land of exile for the eternal fountains of the Fatherland, that someone shall know just what it is that I am speaking of. But if you instead give me someone who is cold-hearted and apathetic, he shall not understand me.'

Much human activity, historically speaking, has been concerned with the control, the governance, the regulation, the supervision, and, often, the repression of Desire. What is it about desire that (many) people find threatening to social existence? Perhaps we may start by making a conceptual distinction here between 'need' and 'desire' : desire provides the horizon within which our needs operate. To carry on with this metaphor of the horizon, what we need or recognise as a (horizontal) need is governed and influenced by what type of (vertical) skies we walk under. That is, desire has the capacity to orient us in a certain direction, by drawing out of ourselves and making us look at the world in a certain manner, and our needs are what we subsequently realise we are lacking in ourselves when we view the world through those perspectives.

So, for example, a person might have the desire to manifest through herself the beauty that she perceives in the world. Because of having this specific desire, she begins to experience the need for some media through which this desire can be expressed. She may turn to painting, in which case she shall need not only pastels, paints and canvases, but also probably some minimal acquaintance with various 'movements' in art history. (Similar needs would arise if she were to turn instead to composing music, writing novels, or practising a dance form, propelled by this desire.) Therefore, if she were living with a friend who has never experiened such a desire, her friend might be quite unable to understand why she needs to keep on buying more and more paints, reading books on painting, and making frequent visits to art museums.

Again, a person might have the desire to know what reality is like. This desire will immediately open up a wide conceptual space where various kinds of needs will come into play. First, she will have the need to find out what other people, down the ages and around her in the present time, think and believe about the nature of reality, and how they try to justify these beliefs. Second, she will need to know what kind of (methodological) tools people have devised and continue to use in their mutual investigations. Consequently, she will need to read through various kinds of books, and discuss the notions therein and those of her own with people around her. Once again, a friend of hers who has never experienced this desire (that is, the desire to know the structure of reality) will frankly be incapable of making sense of her never-satisfied need to discuss such matters on every possible occasion.

To condense all of this into the form of a dictum : As is a person's desire, so are her needs. Or to frame another one : First know what to desire, and your needs will follow from this desire. This implies that if you alter the nature of a person's desire, modify or restructure it, her needs will undergo a parallel change. Let us say that a person has a desire to seek power or control over other people, and let us also postulate that some implicit or explicit form of this desire leads her to try to join the Indian Administrative Service. This desire will create various needs in her, such as the need to keep abreast with all current political issues, the need to know about crucial historical events, and so on. On the other hand, there could be a person who has a desire to completely eradicate the human seeking for some kind of authority over others, and let us say that she comes to the conclusion (for whatever reasons) that this uprooting is possible only by becoming a Buddhist nun. With this desire, she shall now experience an inter-connected set of needs : the need to understand the fundamentals of Buddhist philosophy, the need to become adept in practising various types of meditation, and the need to control her thoughts at all times.

One final example. What about a woman in the street who has no roof over her head, and barely manages to eat one (in)complete meal a day? What are her needs and what are her desires? To begin with, whether or not she realises this fact, even she has at least one desire --- the desire to live, and it is this desire that makes her experience the lack of food and shelter as a need. (That is, someone who was on the verge of committing suicide would not experience such lacks as needs.) It could very well be possible that if these latter needs remain unsatisfied for a sufficiently long period of time, she might eventually lose this desire, the desire to live. Somewhat paradoxically, this also applies to some members of the 'affluent society'. It may so happen that a certain woman in a city may be blessed with sufficient quantities of food and drink, and in short with everything else that the beggar-woman recognises as needs, and yet she might lack precisely what the beggar-woman does not : the desire to live. It could even be the case that people who barely subsist on a dole of 'minimum needs' have a much stronger desire to live than people who are overburdened on all sides with such needs but have lost all desire to go on living. Note, however, that this only a descriptive and a rather speculative comment at that : it is not meant to imply that this is sufficient reason for not improving the 'living conditions' of people of the former category. (To make matters even more complicated, we may point out that a Buddhist nun in a forest in Thailand might claim that this desire to go on living is precisely one of the desires that must be extinguished through meditative practice, and she could not care much for the lack of a roof over her head and the lack of food and water for days on end. These lacks, in other words, would be experienced by her as 'needs' not in an active but in a very muted passive sense.)

Desire is, therefore, something that has unsettling and anarchic potentialities, for it opens out for us a strange world which we do not know, and into which we hesitatingly take our steps guided by the walking-stick of our needs. Desire clears a space which points towards the future, and it is this space that we (try to) inhabit in the process of satisfying the needs that are located within it. It could even be said that, ideally speaking, the direction of the arrow of time is the same as the direction of the greater fulfillment of our needs (though given the nature of human finitude, this is rarely the case).