It’s not absurd to desire the impossible

That sounds broadly reasonable.

(Another quite different way to come to the same conclusion (in fact, the one I expected you to take) is to start from the position that mere desires as such are arational—you don’t have rational control over them, so although unfulfillable desires may be annoying, they can can’t, in the nature of things, be absurd, at least not by virtue of unattainability. But that argument seems to be incompatible with yours, since a utilitarian argument presupposes not merely rationality but also rational control.)

On the other hand, it seems to me that we need to separate different forms of impossibility. I’m pretty sure that it’s absurd to desire the logically impossible (I’m not sure it’s even meaningful to desire the inconceiveable). It seems clear to me that it’s not absurd to desire the contingently impossible when you don’t know whether it’s impossible or not. It also doesn’t seem absurd to desire what you know to be strictly impossible, but which is an obvious extension of the possible (“a man’s reach should exceed his grasp”). But somewhere between the mere insurmountably difficult and the obviously ludicrous, some taint of absurdity seems to me to creep in. After all, people’s desires are, to some extent, conditioned by their beliefs.

But at that point, I think we have to start being more careful about what we mean by “absurd” and “desire”.

And it’s not any old life:

In Novermber [sic] 2004, Eunice was appointed as a Nominated Member of Parliament in Singapore, making her the youngest member of parliament at the age of 27. She was also winner of the Miss Singapore Universe contest in 2000. In 2008, Olsen was the proud recipient of the prestigious ASEAN Youth Award and was recently nominated as a Young Global Leader representing Singapore at the World Economic Forum.

In addition to her parliamentary and entertainment work, she champions causes for the environment, youth at risks, awareness on cervical cancer and AIDS to name a few.

Nothing about world peace though.

I’m in sympathy with Henri @ 1; still, Kierkegaard’s standards for coffee were ridiculous.

If French philosophy students understand “absurd” in Camus’ technical sense–which I’d guess they do–then it follows pretty much by definition that it’s absurd to desire the impossible. In this context, “absurd” doesn’t mean “logically contradictory” or anything like that. It’s Camus’ term for the mismatch precisely between what we desire and the way the world really is, totally indifferent to our desires.

“Marketing: Where the rubber meets the sky.”

It is well known that a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness (Nothing is better than eternal happiness; a ham sandwich is better than nothing; therefore Q.E.D.), so why not a cup of coffee?

Is wishing the same thing as imagining? If so, was John Lennon right or wrong?

Ernst Bloch, at least the Bloch of The Principle of Hope (1986 English tr.), is smiling.

But she expects more than the most! She expects the mostest!

>>I don’t think it is absurd to want coffee that would be better than life itself could possibly be.

What does that even mean? It might not be meaningless the same way that colorless green ideas sleeping furiously are meaningless, but isn’t it close?

I’m not sure it’s even meaningful to desire the inconceiveable

But can’t you desire ‘something that isn’t this’, where ‘this’ is the current situation you live in, without any real idea of what positively it is you’re looking for? Longing for the unknown unknowns?

Tim-

How are you defining rational? By one not having control over them? Because it would depend on how you are utilizing the term in this context when you dub desire “a-rational”. I have tended to take a view (coming from Sartre and Solomon) that such desires are indeed rational as a result of them performing a function or manifesting ones’ attitudes towards their state in-the-world. So, again, they are rational in a contextual sense, by displaying ones’ predispositions towards “reality”, rather than things that “happen” to us, having no correlation with anything at all.

—-
It wouldn’t be Kierkegaardian if we were talking about “wishing” either, because the true Knight of Faith gives up hope of ever attaining that coffee in this world. Instead they are to simply exist in this world, yet put no stock in its existence. Of course, like Matt pointed out, this could potentially be a problem.

Either way, I think that everyone expects their coffee to be a little better than their life is at least some of the time. I do.

Keith-

I think Matt’s point is that, like William Clifford pointed out in terms of religious belief, these things are going to, for all practical purposes, affect one another regardless of the distinction that can be made between the concepts.

I don’t know though where I stand on that being the case. I guess let us hope not, for the sake of the ponies in the rest of the world!

Life itself can only be the sum of all experiences of any one individual. Now maybe for some people life is a continuous string of utterly pleasant experiences, but I don’t think I’m being presumptuous when I claim that for most of us life tends to be rather bland and boring most of the time, interspersed with occasional moments of bliss. Since a good good cup of coffee represents such a moment (at least to me, but I’m sure there are at least about a billion other people who feel the same way, and those who don’t are not targeted here) the ad makes perfect sense to me and the irony rather lies in the fact that Nescafe is a total abomination.

Our eros may be for the impossible, and therefore may be absurd in the sense of unreasonable. That does not make it any less true or good. All kinds of true and good things are desired that may nonetheless be impossible. Things like wisdom or justice–or the possibility of philosophy. So not all things are accountable in terms of logos, but then logos while necessary is not sufficient to human being. So what if it is true that human life is in some regard absurd.

@1 I think that’s what is at issue. Can one desire that it be raining and not raining?

Some of this depends on how your prioritize happiness vs. achievement. Happiness, to put it very simply, comes from the realization of things we desire (or wish for). True, you can wish to make a new friend, and to discover buried treasure in your backyard, with one goal being reasonable, and the other being “just for fun”. But if you wish for something, while knowing that it is actually impossible, are you really wishing for it, or are you playing make-believe?

Similarly, you could wish to become the greatest fencer in the history of the world. Practically speaking, this is impossible, as there’s no way to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are better at fencing than someone who died before you were born. However, goals like these are the types that drive the world’s greatest athletes, inventors, writers, and in general achievers. A quick review of this group would suggest, however, that they were hardly long on happiness.

I guess the question at the center of this whole comment is, if you wish for something that you know will never come true, can you call it wishing?

I’d like to read more on Kierkegaard’s love of coffee, could someone point to where I can find some of that?

“We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.”
Vaclav Havel from _The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice_

I think Gandhi, ML King Jr, and any other great organizer would agree.

“Wishing is free”

Indeed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HdXwCIJgow
(that’s always the first thing I think of when anybody brings up this pony business)
(and btw, wishing is not free – it’s constrained, like all other choices. Constrained by the feebleness of one’s imagination. I mean, who’d want to wish for a pony anyway?)

how did the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans manage to found civiliztions without coffee?
See von Daniken’s next book, ‘Coffee-pots of the Gods’.

Hypnotist: You will give one hundred and ten percent…
Team: That’s impossible. No one can give more than one hundred percent.
By definition that is the most anyone can give…
— “Homer at the Bat”

I butchered the above joke. It should begin with the following preface:

A Priest and a Rabbi were, by coincidence, sitting next to each other on a long flight.

About an hour passes and not a single word was exchanged by the two men. Finally, the Priest turns to the Rabbi and says, “Rabbi, do you mind if I ask you a personal question”? The Rabbi said, “Of course, you may.”

#44: That reminds of something random about one of the UK The Apprentices I happened to catch flipping channels. Apparently effort is inflationary, because one of the contestants was claiming he would get it “1,000%”. Personally if I was managing someone like that I would send him off to the do the task, and when he came back I would sack him for giving at least 900% less effort than promised, which is a pretty massive failure.

I don’t know if you are right.

But you’re funny as hell.

But, John, it’s Nescafe GOLD.

This all makes perfect sense to me.

“I want the most out of my life” = I want to live a long long time.

“I expect even more from my coffee” = I expect my coffee to come from coffee beans that are older than I’ll ever live to be.

This explains why she drinks Nescafe. :-)

“Rabbi, why can’t we eat pork?”

“We can’t? Uh-oh.”

And, uh, Ms. Olsen’s expectations for “the most” from her life are informed by her awareness of how joy is inevitably tempered by sadness, in the aggregate. However, a good cup of coffee, viewed in isolation, can be a completely unadulterated pleasure.

This still founders on the whole “Nescafé” thing, though. Perhaps it is an unadulterated pleasure for Ms. Olsen to be reminded of the word “portmanteau.”

A Y Mous @ 51 – I thought advertising was all about “Don’t make them think.” Better still – force them not to think by shutting down the critical faculty with absurd or contradictory content – leaving only the nice sounding buzzwords and the big graphic. Also helps to avoid pesky trading standards – your claims are so grandiose that they are impossible or even meaningless – and you couldn’t really have made them. One step beyond Goebbels’s Big Lie. You could – not implausibly – draw a comparison with the kind of disorientation used in brainwashing. Trouble is trying to expose such things tends to sound over-analytical or mildly hysterical, and at the least a bit spoilsporty. Like Bernard Manning’s ‘can’t you take a joke?’

To the post:
I assume we are talking about the intersting case of desiring something known to be impossible but not (known to be?) absurd or contradictory.

That might be a bad strategy on scarce-cognitive-resources grounds a la Harman, Bratman – wasting the finite supply of desires, adding pointless extra processing to a decision-making process etc.

The pragmatic advisability of choosing to adopt such desires might depend on what the criterion for practical rationality is – minimising the number of unsatisfied desires, maximising the proportion of desires that are satisfied, maximising total desire-satisfaction. In the first two cases, desiring the impossible would always, cet par, frustrate the goal.

It would plausibly be absurd to desire only the impossible.

Various not very plausible postulates of practical reason such as ‘never take a course of action which will result in a situation in which one of your desires is impossible to attain’, or ‘maximise the probability of achieving all your desires’ could render a desire for the impossible irrational.

But otherwise, on a Humean desire-belief-intention model, it’s probably not in itself irrational (helping myself to irrational as a proxy for absurdity here) to desire the impossible, since presumably your beliefs would never function so as translate the desire into an (absurdly quixotic) intention.

But the propositional content of ‘coffee better than life could ever be’, might count as absurd in itself, if conceived in some way along the lines of ‘having coffee that contributes more value to life than life could ever have’. If so it’s plausible that the absurdity would remain whatever the modality/mood (desire, belief, wish, question etc).

btw, wishing is not free – it’s constrained, like all other choices.

Wishing is free as in beer, not free as in speech.

“Wishing is Free”

This is true only if the failure of your desire to be satisfied doesn’t come with any cost. If it does – as regret, remorse or whatever – then desires for the impossible are desires that are never satisfied, and so are desires that may necessarily come with those costs.

And this doesn’t presume anything about expectations. For every year of their existence I’ve wished for the Texans to win the superbowl. For each of those years, I have never expected them to do any such thing. And yet I am always disappointed when they are inevitably eliminated from playoff contention each year.

It may be fun to wish, but not so fun when those wishes are crushed…

I don’t think the coffee example is on-point. A person could have a really shit life with no significant prospects for improvement, and yet have really good coffee on hand. That person would want the most out of her life (which, as it turns out, won’t amount to much), and yet could (and should) expect more from her coffee.

Alternatively, maybe that person just likes coffee more than anything else in life. (I think I’ve known one or two.)