A Solution to the Desire-Action Conundrum
Note: This post will contain a good amount of philosophical ideas. It has been sectioned for ease.
What is the desire-action conundrum? Let’s begin by looking at Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths:
The truth of suffering. Life will almost always contain suffering
The truth of the origin of suffering. Desire, attachment and cravings cause suffering
The truth of the cessation of suffering. Removing desire, attachment and cravings will get rid our suffering
The truth of the path to the cessation of suffering. This includes acts of meditation, living ethically and the deepening of wisdom to achieve enlightenment.
2. Let’s look at a Stoic point of view for desires. A rudimentary understanding of Stoicism is that it is all about focusing on what you can control in life (for example, for an exam you can’t control the exam questions that you receive, but you can control how you study for it), and it states that your feelings should be based on how well you are focused on things you can control in life. An ideal Stoic is always only focused on what they can control, so by that logic, they will always feel content. A focus on things you can’t control, such as the satisfaction of a desire (for example, a farmer desires great crop yield, but the weather is out of his control) then you will feel angry, annoyed, unhappy and unsatisfied when your desire can’t get fulfilled. One of the founders of Stoicism wrote:
The faculty of desire purports to aim at securing what you want…If you fail in your desire, you are unfortunate, if you experience what you would rather avoid you are unhappy…For desire, suspend it completely for now
-Epictetus, Enchiridion, 2.1-2
3. Taoism has many interesting ideas, and one is Wu Wei. Wu Wei means non-action. It refers more towards the desires underlying our action/improvement. But at many times in it’s book called the Tao Te Ching, it also hints at literal non-action; you don’t need to improve. After understanding the concept of desires under Buddhism, Stoicism, and Taoism, it makes sense that desires are flawed. They may work for now, but in the long run, they can be mentally damaging.
The general model of desire that these three philosophies try to explain is shown below:
4. However, improvement and action are inherent parts of human nature, and to be motivated for that, we need a desire. Therefore on the other end of the spectrum we have other philosophies such as Nietzsche’s Übermensch or ‘Overmen’ who use desires as motivation for improvement. Both the need for improvement and desires seems necessary, yet it seems logical that holding desires can be harmful. This is the desire-action conundrum that we face.
5. If improvement and action is important, and desire is required as motivation, then we have to find a desire which escapes the model for desires shown in Figure 1. I believe that a well cultivated, genuine curiosity as a drive, excels for finding answers (obviously), finding ways to optimally help people, and a way to uncover the truth—improvement—escapes that model. There’s no bad event for someone running under curiosity.
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
What we find to be true helps. If we don’t find something to be true, it brings us a step further. If we can’t find the answer to something, we can always move onto something else or try again later, because we have a limit on how many things we can care for.
6. A 2018 study was conducted and it was ascertained that higher levels of curiosity correlate with better mental well being. A 2019 study was conducted which showed that curiosity was bi-directional, where people show more curiosity when happy. There’s also other countless anecdotal pieces supporting this, such as this one by user jasoncrawford.
Many of the world’s geniuses such as Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci etc. would have many famous quotes about living a meaningful life, but alongside them they would always reiterate the importance of imagination and curiosity. I suspect that this is not a coincidence. They believed that curiosity is an essential part of well-being and a great way to attain it. I also personally agree and find this to be the case.
I don’t aim to persuade, but to provide food for thought; to lay a path to different philosophies if you didn’t know them before, and to show a different view of curiosity which you may not have thought of before. Thank you for reading!
I personally find curiosity to be a great motivator for me, and a great way to maintain some detachment from what happens. But I don’t think it solves the underlying problem, that attachment causes suffering AND causes action.
My solution is to go with “acceptance of the past, action for the future”—I acknowledge the tension, and do not consider it a conundrum or a paradox. I think the somewhat trite “Serenity Prayer” is actually a pretty good guide:
I have to admit that I don’t understand causality of personality traits, nor the variety of human experience, enough to call this a recommendation. I don’t know how someone could change themselves to be more like me, or if it’d work for them. So this isn’t really advice, just observation of self.
I notice that you haven’t really presented a solution to this conundrum, despite the headline. Do you ask for one?
Some philosophies claimed that desires are bad because when they are unsatisfied they cause suffering, some philosophies claimed that desires are good because they motivate us to action. Both are right in some regard. But how can we unite these seemingly contradictory perspectives under one view? Is that what troubles you?
If so, the answer seem pretty obvious for me.
Omg I didn’t realize that saved drafts were public. This is only my 3rd writing piece so I didn’t know :)
Yes I plan to show a possible solution
I’m going to finish it today
Edit: I’ve finished it. I see you’re saying the answer seems obvious. Can you explain that? It’s not obvious to me at all, so I’m curious about what you think :)
As with most philosophical problems, this conundrum originates from poor definitions. Lets taboo “good” and “bad” in the phrases “desires are good because they motivate us to action” and “desires are bad because when they are unsatisfied they cause suffering” and see what we really mean and where all this comes from.
Humans have complex values. Among other things we value having things done and we value not suffering. There is no contradiction in that. Our psyche was trained by evolution to execute fitness adaptations with negative and positive stimuli. Now when we are aware of that as well as causal mechanisms behind desires and their satisfaction we can decide what to do.
There are lots of possible tradeoffs. If you value getting things done more than not experiencing stress then reducing your desires may not be the correct path to optimize your values. Unless, your desires are so strong and suffering of their unsatisfaction is so disturbing that it actually harms your ability to act productively. On the other hand if you value comfort and calmness more than being productive, you may want to make your desires less intense, unless they are already very weak. And of course it can vary from desire to desire.
So there is no conundrum on objective level. But there is a difficulty in figuring out your personal utility function and understanding which desires you require to be stronger or weaker in order to optimize it.
That’s true, but only to the individual level. The problem lies in finding an optimal solution for the individual which still sufficiently benefits the collective.
Fair enough. You see, Buddhism has no flaw, except assuming that we live in paradise. If that were so, than yes, desires would cause nothing but suffering. I mean, maybe there are some desires that are always bad, like futile ones (new cars, clothes, prestige, honor, fame, etc etc) but that’s not exclusive to Buddhism.) But other than that, you should have the desire to help others
So, there’s no contradiction, just good and bad desires. Bad ones are selfish and meaningless, good ones are needed, in fact urgently so. A view much closer to Christianity.
I’d say it’s the other way around. If we were indeed in paradise desires won’t be causing us any suffering. What Buddhism implicitly assumes is that the suffering from our desires is so terrible and their satisfaction is so unlikely that it’s worth abolising them all together. It’s the hell, where Buddhism is most reasonable. Which makes a lot of sense, considering that it was invented in much less pleasant times.
Buddhism indeed encorages less proactive approach than Abrahamic religions. It has its pros and its cons. It’s harder to do something when the world is burning but also harder to be the one who is holding the torch. Historically, I’d say, not actively acting on your religious beliefs and just quitely meditating, showed to be more of a virtue than a vice. But, as a person who at some moment of my life actively tried to become less enlightened, I empathize with your worries about apathetic ideologies.
To each paragraph:
That kind of thinking is a consequence of the rare modern oasis that we’re living in. Only a being of such times would think that the sufferings from our desires are that terrible. There are things way more terrible. I’d rather have a lifetime of suffering from my desires than 5 minutes of burning to death. Not to mention that there’s distractions from the former, but never from the latter.
So I might be have better said: Buddhism would be right if we lived in an acceptable world, not perfect. Acceptable, as in, the worst sufferings were bearable. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
The difference is that the horrors and the wars of the past motivated by Abrahamic religions were irrational, based on the original, unfounded belief on a few. Whereas the modern altruist crusade is based on reason and takes, on average, way more moderate approaches.
One can also say that Buddhism would work if everyone efficiently adhered to it. No doubt that meditation can make you more compassionate through seeing the futility and the horror of agression (but so can just basic reasoning). But then that’s like Communism, it only works if all the world adopts it, which is extremely unfeasible.
Or even if everyone adopted it, even if it would effectively makes us see that we can’t go on with some technologies, that we can’t go on with nationalism, etc etc, what if some peril beyond our control, say aliens, appeared? Or even just a small group of wicked humans. ,”Just don’t worry bro”? Buddhism is suicide. I’d keep my sufferings from my desires, even to the point of paranoia, if that helps keep my alive and away from way bigger sufferings, which it does. And I can always take half a valium, or take a walk, or decide to forget about it for one leasure day.
Buddhism annoys me. The world is burning while you meditate. Then some will say “oh, but detachment, detachment is the way”. Yeah, sure, while you’re so focused on getting detached, other people will start to burn, and soon will you. The world doesn’t need any inherent meaning when you’re focused on alleviating suffering, on helping others. That’s why I’ve come to respect Christianity way more, despite all its flaws. There’s way worst stuff out there than our rare-comfort-oasis-induced existential crisis. Way, way worse. When that gets greatly reduced I’ll care about getting in tune with existence then.
Nietzsche was super right about this. “Anyone who claims that “everything is fake!”, let him swallow up a frog and watch it all go away in a second”.
That’s true. I’ve always thought that Buddhism’s concepts were great but then the ideal Buddhist would be someone who spends his entire life meditating. I saw a documentary on it, and the monks would receive all of their food from donations. If everyone was a Buddhist, no one would have anything to receive as donations. There would be no donations because there’s no one there to do any work. Therefore I believe Buddhism is flawed, but it’s ideas are still useful and so they should be practiced to a certain degree.
I take back this comment