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The Quest for God: Rethinking Desire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2019

Fiona Ellis
Fiona Ellis*
Affiliation:
University of Roehampton
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

How are we to view the nature of desire and its relation to value, humanity, and God? Sartre, Nietzsche, and Levinas have interesting things to say in this context, and they can be understood to be responding in their different ways to two seemingly opposed ways of conceiving of desire, namely, as lack or deficiency (option 1) or as plenitude or creativity (option 2). I clarify, link, and distinguish the relevant conceptions of desire, and give a sense of what it could mean to comprehend desire in either or both of these ways. I question Sartre's insistence that man is a ‘useless passion’, trace it back to his commitment to a ‘lack’ model of desire, and argue that this model, as he understands it, stands in the way of the more creative conception which is lurking in the background of his account. There will be a question of whether the atheist is entitled to this creative conception, and I shall challenge his assumption that it becomes available only when theism is overthrown. I shall suggest also that there is something important to be salvaged from the lack model.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 85: Passions and the Emotions , July 2019 , pp. 157 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019 

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References

1 See my ‘Religious Experience and Religious Desire’, forthcoming in Religious Studies, 2019; ‘Levinas and Nietzsche on Desire and Love’, in Love: The History of a Concept (ed.) Hanley, Ryan (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019)Google Scholar; ‘Insatiable Desire’, Philosophy, vol. 88, April 2013, 243–265CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Being and Nothingness (Henceforth BN), trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956)Google Scholar.

3 See Symposium 206c where Plato takes us from a conception of desire as lack to desire as ‘creating out of abundance’ or ‘giving birth in beauty’. As R.L. Markus puts it: ‘this “desire” is now of a being already complete or “perfect”…indeed, complete to overflowing, no longer is it thought of as a lack. This desire is not for something to be obtained – the beloved – but for giving something of itself’, ‘The Dialectic of Eros in Plato's Symposium’, Downside Review, no. 233, 1955Google Scholar.

4 Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire, Dialogues, trans. Tomlinson, Hugh and Habberjam, Barbara (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 91Google Scholar.

5 BN, 566.

6 Hazel Barnes draws the parallel with Plato's eros in her Introduction to BN, xxvii.

7 Freud implies that the parallel between his own position and Plato's exists at the level of content as well as structure. Hence: ‘In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, the ‘Eros’ of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psychoanalysis’, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Freud_Group_Psychology.pdf, 90.

8 I discuss some tensions in Schopenhauer's conception of desire in my ‘Schopenhauer on love’, Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love, eds. Grau, Christopher and Smuts, Aaron (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

9 ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Lovitt, William (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 134Google Scholar.

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11 Existentialism is a Humanism, 29.

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13 BN, 87.

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17 Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 209Google Scholar.

18 BN, 101.

19 ‘Human Incompletion, Happiness, and the Desire for God in Sartre's Being and Nothingness’, Sartre Studies International, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2006, 8–9Google Scholar.

20 BN, 440–441.

21 BN 627.

22 ‘The Erotic Nietzsche’, 187. Pippin has done some brilliant work in this context, and he has been a great source of inspiration for my own thinking.

23 Totality and Infinity, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 117Google Scholar.

24 Totality and Infinity, 34.

25 Nietzsche, , The Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 643Google Scholar.

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27 See, for example, On the Genealogy of Morality (ed.) Ansell-Pearson, Keith, trans. Diethe, Carol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, Preface, §1: ‘“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”; our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are, As born winged-insects and intellectual honey gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing – to “bring something home”’. See also the opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (eds) Caro, Adrian Del and Pippin, Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3Google Scholar: ‘I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey…I want to bestow and distribute…Bless the cup that wants to flow over, such that water flows golden from it and everything carries the reflection of your bliss’.

28 ‘The Erotic Nietzsche’, 177.

29 See Ressentiment, trans. Coser, Lewis B. and Holdheim, William W. (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press, 2003), ch. 3, 64Google Scholar.

30 Matthew 12.34. Scheler, 67.

31 See footnote 27.

32 This is the passage in full: ‘Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference perhaps, indeed, we too are unrequited lovers!’, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, 429 (eds) Clark, Maudemarie and Leiter, Brian; trans. Hollingdale, R.J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

33 ‘The Erotic Nietzsche’, 187.

34 Totality and Infinity, 34.

35 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 63Google Scholar.

36 Totality and Infinity, 34.

37 Hence: ‘A being receiving the idea of Infinity, receiving since it cannot derive it from itself, is a being taught in a non-maieutic fashion’, Totality and Infinity, 204.

38 Totality and Infinity, 62.

39 Totality and Infinity, 35.

40 Totality and Infinity, 35.

41 Totality and Infinity, 35.

42 Totality and Infinity, 35.

43 Totality and Infinity, 78.

44 Totality and Infinity, 78.

45 See Totality and Infinity, 34, 38, 218.

46 Totality and Infinity, 62.

47 ‘Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite’, 114.

48 ‘A Religion for Adults’, in Difficult Freedom, trans. Hand, Seán (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 17Google Scholar.

49 ‘Loving the Torah More Than God’, in Difficult Freedom, 145.

50 ‘A Religion for Adults’, 20–22.

51 ‘Loving the Torah More Than God’, 145.

52 ‘Loving the Torah More Than God’, 145.

53 Hence: ‘The infinite is not “in front of me”; it is I who express it, but I do so precisely in giving a sign of the giving of signs, of the ” for the other” in which I am disinterested: here I am [me voici]’, ‘God and Philosophy, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bergo, Bettina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 75Google Scholar. Compare Simone Weil: ‘God must be on the side of the subject and not on that of the object during all those intervals of time when, forsaking the contemplation of the light, we imitate the descending movement of God so as to turn ourselves towards the world’, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 2, trans. Wills, Arthur (London: Routledge, 1976), 358Google Scholar.

54 For more on this see my God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

55 Mark Platts has argued that once we move beyond the animal desires which rear up inside us in response to our bodily needs, there is a question of how desire's motivating force is to be explained. He argues that the most significant category of human desire concerns those which are motivated by the desiring subject's conception of their independently desirable object, and that the price of abandoning such realism can be the death of desire. See his ‘Moral Reality and the End of Desire’, in Reference, Truth, and Reality (ed.) Platts, Mark (London: Routledge, 1980)Google Scholar. If Platts is right then this has huge implications for the Nietzschean position, assuming that it involves a commitment to radical subjectivism.

56 See Golomb's, Jacob ‘Will to Power: Does it Lead to the “Coldest of all Cold Monsters”?’, The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (eds) Richardson, John and Gemes, Ken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 526Google Scholar.

57 For a brilliant exploration along these lines see Morgan's, Seiriol ‘Dark Desires’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (4), 2003, 377–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Levinas notes and rejects Plato's idea that love is ‘the offspring of abundance and poverty’ (Totality and Infinity, 63), and in doing so can be understood to be rejecting any such concession to the notion of lack.

59 This concession can be related to the idea – so important to early Christianity and Plato – that eros and agape can be fruitfully intertwined. See Coakley's, Sarah God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a defence of this conception of the relation between eros and agape.