The Philosophy of Desire: Schopenhauer, Nozick, and Meaningful Existence

Philosophical Perspectives on Desire and the Meaning of Life

In Ellis’s paper “Desire, Infinity, and the Meaning of Life,” she and Schopenhauer both agree that a meaningless life has what she calls an “on and on” structure.

Schopenhauer's View: Desire, Suffering, and Meaninglessness

Schopenhauer states that we are, by nature, desire-driven individuals, and that it belongs to our essence to be motivated by desires. However, he denies that this is sufficient to endow our lives with meaning since he believes that desires themselves exemplify this “on and on” structure, thus leading to meaninglessness.

Desires for Schopenhauer always involve suffering in the person who desires, due to the simple reason that the relief felt once they are satisfied is temporary. Desires:

• “rear up again, giving rise to more suffering,”
• “demanding similar satisfaction, and so on ad infinitum,”

This cycle leads to more desire, more temporary satisfaction, but eventually to more suffering. In this sense, it is hard to see how life could have any meaning at all.

Ellis's Critique and Non-Egoistic Desires

According to Ellis, Schopenhauer conceives only egoistic desires (those that involve one’s self) that have the ‘on and on’ structure. That is the reason that he doesn’t think that we can find meaningfulness by adding desires to an otherwise meaningless life. However, not all of our desires need to include the self in the object of the desire (e.g., I can be interested in good things happening to other people).

For example, consider Levinas’s “metaphysical desire”: a desire that “tends towards something else entirely…” It is a desire for something that we cannot appropriate, cannot make a part of ourselves, and so in this sense can never be satisfied.

Nozick's Challenge to Psychological Hedonism

Nozick assumes pleasure as a purely subjective state. In his paper The Experience Machine, he tries to disprove psychological hedonism, which states that the only thing that ultimately motivates us is either pleasure or displeasure. In order to do so, he uses an experience machine which is a pre-programmed perfect virtual reality that guarantees the most pleasurable experiences possible.

The Experience Machine Argument

Nozick’s argument states that if psychological hedonism were true, then everyone would enter into the experience machine if given the chance; but not everyone would, and therefore psychological hedonism is false.

All in all, he believes that pleasurable experiences aren’t the only things that motivate us. We actually want to do things, not just experience doing them. We want:

• to have the possibility of being in contact with a reality that transcends the merely human,
• to be a certain kind of person, and
• to live our own lives.

We want these things for themselves, not because they give us pleasure or take away pain.

Meaningful Desires Transcend the "On and On" Structure

These desires (non-egoistic, metaphysical, reality-focused) do not follow the “on and on” structure presented earlier. Although they can be fulfilled, the satisfaction felt afterward is not temporary because they involve more than just satisfying our own necessities; they include other people, so they do not lead us nowhere; instead, they enrich us, giving meaning to our lives.