Living Without Desire

The concept of desire, with its blurred contours, is rather overburdened. Given the many facets of desire, some philosophers have been inclined to give somewhat stipulative analyses of desire, which inevitably omit many of the natural uses of the word, as well as many of the intuitive aspects of the concept. This push for simplicity and manageability results in a sort of ersatz clarity, where we have a seemingly straightforward account of desire, but such an account does not actually do justice to the complexity of the concept, and more significantly, leads to a flattened and sterile view of ethics and human living. In this dissertation, I attempt to return a more appropriate level of complexity to discussion surrounding desire, and I ultimately suggest that philosophers might do better to construct their theories in ways that lean less on the claim that they are working from the “true” account of desire.