Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions (Ataraxia Book 3) by Neel Burton

Author:Neel Burton [Burton, Neel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Acheron Press
Published: 2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 7. Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, by Nicolas Poussin (1658). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Schopenhauer compared the intellect to a lame man who can see, riding on the shoulders of a blind giant.

Indeed, our desires are hardly ‘ours’. We only figure them out, if at all, once they are fully formed. To figure out my friend’s desires, I observe my friend and infer her desires from her behaviour—and so it is also with my own desires. If I am a shrewd observer, I may well known more about my friend’s desires than she does herself, not least because she may be defending against those desires that she finds unacceptable. Should these unacceptable desires nonetheless escape into her conscious mind, she could yet distort or disguise them, for example, by reinventing lust as love. Advertisers exploit these notions by sowing the seeds of a desire into our unconscious, and then supplying our conscious mind with some rationalization by which to ‘legitimize’ the desire.

Few of our desires make it into our conscious mind. Those that do, we adopt as our own. But before a desire can surface, it has to compete with other conflicting desires that are also in some sense our own—and the desire that prevails is often the one that is at the limit of our understanding. This competitive process of desire formation is most evident in people with psychosis, who hear voices that seem alien to them but are in fact their own.

In the words of Schopenhauer:

We often don’t know what we desire or fear. For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired.

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