Invisible Appetites

To fully understand what René Girard meant by human 'desire', we need a more comprehensive framework.

Intellectual Appetite

Yesterday, during a solo dinner at my favorite restaurant in Saugatuck, I read this piece by Benjamin Wallace in NY Mag’s Intelligencer profiling Mark Manson, author of the “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” book, which has sold more than 12 million copies. The essay, titled “How Mark Manson Learned The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck”, tells the story of Manson’s burn-out.

“Throughout his career, he had wanted to write about what he wanted to write about. When he’d lost interest in something — first Practical Pickup, then PostMasculine — he’d moved on,” Wallace writes. The most striking section comes one paragraph later (emphasis mine):

And I suddenly started being okay with losing it. And as soon I was okay with losing it, I felt great. I’d say the last six months, I’ve probably worked the least of my adult life.” Instead, he played a lot of Elden Ring and became a crypto degen. “The difference between myself now and, say, seven, eight years ago is I don’t feel like I’m seeking anymore,” Manson told me.

Manson’s "being okay with losing it” is the kind of death that Girard (and every spiritual writer who has come before him) has described as a type of conversion experience—if not a spiritual one, then perhaps a literary or intellectual one.

Though in Manson’s case, it seems like the conversion may have simply been to nihilism. (The next sentence: “Especially the last year or two, it feels like that craving for a philosophical foundation to base my worldview on is kind of gone,” Manson says.)

How did craving a philosophical foundation—a basic metaphysical stance in the world—become a bad thing?

Pour me another glass of that blaufrankisch, please. Thanks.

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My encounter with the man behind the (very Stoic) “Art of Not Giving a F*ck”, got me thinking about how little we understand craving, or desire in general. Let me be clear: This is a newsletter for people who want to give more fucks. More fucks about the right things. The things worthy of lots of fucks. Thick desires.

(Ever wondered what thin desires look like when they come face-to-face with a thick desire? Watch this.)

Hearing the way Manson speaks about his past year, it seems that he’s getting some much needed rest. I could use some too. The question becomes: What kind of rest? Nihilistic rest? Or joyful rest?

The haunting message of the piece is that Manson believes that losing the desire to seek is a good thing. (At least Nietzsche believed in the power of the will!)

When I stop seeking, I’m dead. The difference—the hinge between fulfillment and misery—is between good seeking and bad seeking.

I want to seek truth. I believe the truth exists, and that the truth is worth pursuing—that it is worth seeking. And I want to surround myself with other people who seek it passionately.

They increase the desire to seek it in me, and I in them. This is the kind of community I want to be a part of. It seems to me to be one of the most important positive mimetic desires: truth-seekers positively infect others to seek truth. You hang around nihilists, and you eventually become one.

Having “a philosophical foundation to base my worldview on”, then, is good. No doubt: it’s also good for any false philosophical foundations to be destroyed, to the extent that we have one. I, too, have had my entire philosophical edifice ripped out from under me—more than once, actually. But the desire to seek only grew stronger. When the seeking stops, that’s when we know we’re in trouble.

What foundation do we have to stand on—a place from which to even begin exploring these questions? As any regular reader will know by now, I am standing somewhere. We have to stand (somewhere) in order to understand anything. And I think the perennial philosophical tradition is a pretty damn good place to stand.

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That tradition has, for thousands of years, reflected on the phenomenon of desire.

‘Appetite’ is the scholastic name for what modern psychology often calls ‘motivation,’ with its distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ motivation—a distinction that I don’t find very helpful.

Why not? To start with: intrinsic motivation (engaging in an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for a separate reward) and extrinsic motivation are abstract categories that give the impression that we do things because we are motivated solely by one or the other. In reality, it’s normal to be motivated by both. I am inherently motivated to write this newsletter—but if I wasn’t also motivated by something else then I’d just keep a private journal of my thoughts. I am motivated by the desire to interact.

What the scholastics called the ‘appetite’ has a much broader meaning than the modern ‘motivation’ language, and it provides a helpful framework for understanding what Girard means when he speaks about human desire.

In the broadest sense, appetite is “any tendency of a thing to an object.”¹ We could even say that planets have an appetite for certain stars due the force of gravity which moves them in their orbit.

Some type of ‘inclination’ follows every material form, according to Aquinas. In the case of a planet and its motion, this is a natural appetite.

There are, however, also elicited appetites. These are appetites that humans—a creature that participates in “knowledge”—may call forth in the intellect through an act of cognition.

Therefore, as forms exist in those things that have knowledge in a higher manner and above the manner of natural forms; so must there be an inclination surpassing the natural inclination, which is called the natural appetite. And this superior inclination belongs to the appetitive power of the soul, through which the animal is able to desire what it apprehends, and not only that to which it is inclined by its natural form. And so it is necessary to assign an appetitive power to the soul.

ST I, 80, 1.

This ‘appetite power’ of the soul seems very close to what Girard is speaking about when he writes about the nature of human desire. We can desire anything that we can think, or any abstract concept that may be conjured up for us in our interactions with other people.

Humans gain knowledge about objects in various ways—and when they perceive an object to be good (whether it is truly good or not, or whether a model of desire merely makes it shine with the brilliance of a great good when in fact it’s empty), the will becomes inclined toward it.

The problem is that the intellect is not perfect; it’s imperfect, and it can easily be led astray—whether by hyper-pedantic podcast exchanges from confident-sounding speakers, or by journalists that claim to report just “the facts,” or whatever else.

Many of us pursue goods which we perceive as good but which later turn out to disappoint us. It happens to everyone. This forces us to make a decision.

We can throw in the towel and stop trusting ourselves (or other people) altogether. Sometimes, this leads to extreme passivity—or we become more susceptible to following the first strong model that comes along, thinking that perhaps this is finally the one who knows what to want.

Or, a more positive approach: it can result in a continual refining of our desires as we learn more and more about ourselves and the world through a process of honest seeking.

Hopefully this leads to a greater recognition that we do indeed have agency—something traditionally called “the will.”

What follows is an excerpt from a piece that I wrote on the topic for Aeon Magazine which connects Aquinas’s concept of the appetites to the “will” and describes the difference between striving and resting:

Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

Your intellectual appetites might include knowing the answer to a mathematics problem; the satisfaction of receiving a text from someone you have a crush on; or getting a coveted job offer. These things won’t necessarily cause physical pleasure. They might spill over into physical enjoyment, but they are not dependent on it. Rather, the pleasure is primarily intellectual.

The 13th-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that these intellectual appetites are part of what has traditionally been called the ‘will’. When a person wills something, they strive toward it. If they come to possess the object of their desire, their will finds rest in it – and they are able to experience joy, so long as they are able to rest in the object of their desire.

But, for most people, such joy is fleeting. There is always something else to strive for – and this keeps most of us in a constant, sometimes painful, state of never-satisfied striving. And that striving for something that we do not yet possess is called desire. Desire doesn’t bring us joy because it is, by definition, always for something we feel we lack. Understanding the mechanism by which desires take shape, though, can help us avoid living our lives in an endless merry-go-round of desire.

Joy comes from the will resting in the object of its desire. Resting in it.

This weekend seems like a good opportunity to rest. A time for joy.

What, or who, will you rest in?

A picture I took on our post-dinner passeggiata this week at Laketown Beach, Holland, MI.

1. https://aquinasonline.com/appetites-in-general/