Wanting not to get what you want

I imagine it has to do with the perception of moral desert: Among the desires you want fulfilled is to deserve the success you enjoy. The only way you can win 100% of the time is if the system is rigged (not only an assumption you probably hold, but inevitably the perception of everyone who witnesses your incredible unbroken streak of good luck); this would thwart your desire for moral legitimacy. You need to sacrifice some of your desires to make the rest valid. As far as my philosophically uncredentialed self can make out, anyway.

No info on work in this area to contribute, but I find the topic interesting and there are many fun philosophical issues. Things get a bit unsafe (i.e. even more interesting) when extending the point from personal desires to lets say principles of justice.

One of the most widely accepted principles of justice across the political spectrum is equality of opportunity. However if we were ever to actually approach genuine equality of opportunity I suspect we would destroy some central features of what makes for a good life at the individual level and create some nasty side effects as well (surely there is some science fiction books with this theme). For example, the quality of my sense of individual self worth is tied tightly with achieving certain goals within the context of a life like mine , and if we all had nearly the same kind of conditions from which to act we might end up with exaggerated or even extreme feelings of guilt or pride about our lives. So the idea (which I know is not original in any way) is that equality of character V extended to realms W,X,Y to degree Z is essential for giving individuals access to a good life and high levels of self-worth, but beyond some threshold equality can also deteriorate or pervert these values.

ps. I am not of course in any way arguing against equal access to education, health care or even inheritance taxes (etc…). At the aggregate level there is a long way to go towards equal opportunity before the issue I introduce above could be relevant.

I’m not sure if this is relevant?

Fred Hoyle’s book, October the First is Too Late tells of a time-travelling scientist who passes up the chance to study the textbooks of the future because they contain the answers he has been seeking all his life. Surely John Holbo has written a lengthy post about this?

I always thought this about elections. You want your party to win, but you wouldn’t want them to win 100% of the vote/seats.

I think the Talking Heads song ‘Heaven’ is relevant here.

There’s an old article by Anthony Kenny on happiness in a moral philosophy collection edited by Joel Feinberg. He describes the situation as a kind of omega inconsistency: for all our desires we want them satisfied (because that is the nature of desire), but we do not want that all our desires be satisfied (because of the boredom argument). It has the same structure as the paradox of the preface.

Aren’t you stumbling towards the elephant in the room (of Philosophy) called Jumbo Freud, here? This is for instance pretty much the whole of Zizek’s schtick, start to finish: we don’t know what we desire; we desire what we don’t desire; there’s a perversity to our desires that goes all the way down.

We seem to have lots of “substantive” ideas about what makes a life go well—struggling, working hard, achieving.

Such ideas are easily ridiculed, however. Maybe they’re just devious propaganda by the rich and powerful to keep the rest of us more or less content with our lot in life ;) .

This is quite simple to me. I have desires, but I also know that men are fallible, including me, so I know that some of the things I desire would actually be toxic to me even though I don’t discern how with the best of my reason. Politics is a great example. I am absolutely convinced that some of my policies proposal are good and just, yet I know that in fact I am wrong. So I desire the victories of those defending these policies but I know that they should be defeated from times to times.

Parenting seems also a great example. I want certain things for my children but I really hope that they will not all come to pass, if only because I want my children to live autonomous lives. If they independently turn out to be exactly how I wished them to be, then I would rationally conclude that I have in fact manipulated them, and that would be painful to me.

In both cases, fallibility is the real key issue for me.

It looks to me that the examples above aren’t really about higher-order desires, so much as merely conflicting or inconsistent desires. So, for example, you have a desire for your team to win, and another desire that pulls in a different direction. But the content of the latter antagonistic desire isn’t just that your former desire be unfulfilled; rather, it’s that watching football remain unpredictable (or something like that), and this of course is incompatible with the former desire. Why does that make it higher-order?

Similarly, Feynman has desires for (a) a high salary but (b) a happy home life; Hoyle’s time-traveller wants (a) to know the answers to various questions but also (b) the pleasure of finding things out; the addict wants (a) another dose of the drug, but also (b) the benefits of a drug-free life; etc. In each case there’s some independent content to each of the two antagonistic desires, which refers only to things in the external world, and not to first-order desires themselves. Doesn’t that mean we’re just dealing with two conflicting first-order desires, and no second-order desires enter into it?

As I (perhaps mis-)understand it, a second-order desire is something like e.g. “I want to be the kind of person who wants A rather than B” — that is, it should have some first-order desire as part of its content. It’s not enough just to have implications for some first-order desire, otherwise surely any desire with the potential for conflict would count as higher-order. Am I wrong about this?

On this understanding, a conflict of the kind that Chris is talking about, that genuinely involves second-order desires, would be something like wanting that some of one’s wishes remain unfulfilled, where this is wanted primarily for its own sake (perhaps because having unfulfilled desires is perceived as being character building, or morally improving, or some such). But that’s distinct from wanting some of your desires to be unfulfilled as a consequence of having other conflicting first-order desires. So far, I think we’ve only seen examples of the latter, not the former.

Sk,

It’s Season 1, Episode 28 of The Twilight Zone, “A Nice Place to Visit.”

The full video is available here.

The worst thing that can happen to someone is to get what they truly desire. The film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky lays out the territory of desire. In the film there is a rumored “zone”, supposed to have been the result of a UFO crash, where your inner most desires come true. The stalker, a local, contracts with two others to lead them into the zone. They don’t travel directly to the zone but take a highly circuitous route. The area surrounding the zone is filled with deadly traps and snares. When the UFO crashed the military sent in troops but they never returned. When they do finally come to the entrance of the zone, a small empty room, they decide not to enter it because in the course of getting there and talking about it they decided that it is not a good thing to get what your heart most desires.

Another good movie to see would be Slavoj Žižek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”. I’d recommend it as an introduction to Žižek but it also goes into the function of desire especially as it relates to cinema.

Jacques Lacan on desire
Lacan’s désir follows Freud’s concept of Wunsch and it is central to Lacanian theories. For the aim of the talking cure – psychoanalysis – is precisely to lead the analysand to uncover the truth about their desire, but this is only possible if that desire is articulated, or spoken. Lacan said that “it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.”

I think this works out in the same manner in society as well. Take a look at the gay community. What was Stonehenge but being “named in the presence of the other”? We, I’m GLBT myself, didn’t even know we existed and had no real identity before Stonehenge where we proclaimed our selves before the presence of the larger society. And so now “gay” is a community with internal cohesion and an identity that advertisers market to.

But Desire should never be fully satisfied for if it were what would you be left with? Nothing.

I always thought this about elections. You want your party to win, but you wouldn’t want them to win 100% of the vote/seats.

Unless you are among the leaders of Singapore’s People’s Action Party in the heyday of Lee Kuan Yew. Then when you win all but two seats in an election, you harass the winners of those seats in the courts on various trumped-up charges, in lieu of the genuine crime of having the effrontery not just to oppose the PAP, but actually to defeat them.

Shorter Chris Bertram: DO WANT; do not want to want.

I feel like Jon Elster must have touched on this somewhere, like in one of his Ulysses books, though I can’t remember a specific ref.

Distinguish between these two:
* what you want now (you want your football team to win)
* what you would want if you always got what you wanted (you would want your football team to win, but with some number of entertaining and unpredictable close games or losses).

Distinguish between these two:
* You always want your football team to win.
* You want your football team to always win.

The idea of probabilities that are themselves uncertain raises plenty of difficulties, which I’ve been working on for some years with only limited progress. The problem is that if your uncertainty about probabilities can itself be expressed in probabilistic terms, then you have a compound lottery that can easily be reduced to an ordinary set of probabilities. There are various ways around this, but none of them are entirely satisfactory (to me at any rate).

“And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.”

Must we dismiss the conventional answer? When we have it all our own way, we find we’re not very good company, even to ourselves — nor would we be, even with all the parts and virtues of Milton’s antihero. By contrast, Rabbi Tarfon (Akiva’s generation, fl. 100 CE) had a formula for joy that reminds me how little time I spend wanting when I’m doing.

It is not upon you to finish the task;
Neither are you free to desist from it.
The day is short, the job is enormous,
The workers indolent, the reward bountiful,
And the Master insistent!

I don’t know about the general issue/puzzle, but the football example seems to me not so puzzling. You just need to ask about the reason that you desire your team to win. If a big part of the answer is that you get satisfaction out of seeing them struggle against adversity and manage to overcome it, then you simply can’t have this without the possibility that they will be defeated. And this is different from wanting them to win with a certain probability chosen, say, by a random device, since that would not entail any struggle or effort or outcome conditional on performance. No?

Here is a thing I have been thinking.

It is my impression that one cannot judge the world as a thing. It is an experience. It is inextricably entangled with its valence.

Nor can one disentangle valence from the situation, or even cleanly isolate it into the experience of self and the experience of the world.

If we try to model the “thing” that makes us happy in a fashion that is distinct from our experience of self and the situation at the time, then inevitably we shall run into difficulty. We shall begin to hem and haw, interjecting elements of the recent past and/or the self to fix the context of this thing.

I would argue that the experience of happiness is produced by a certain situational congruence and harmony between the self, the world, and, lacking the knowledge of some appropriate Greek or Latin word to make the distinction I’d like to make, the self again—the self as actor, the self as witness, and the world as the medium between them, could be close.

There is a certain happiness that comes from a dammed-up desire being granted; oh, absolutely. To go from poor to able to buy groceries—that’s happiness! But it strikes me as kin, not to the experience of buying groceries the next time (if money sustains) but to the experience of looking at the ocean when Maslow’s pyramid permits; or to the joy of loving, or writing. That is, it is the joy of seeing the numinous beauty of existence close at hand, of having the marvelous and amazing interwoven with your flesh and blood and mind, the cloud of Heaven’s grace lowering to filter through your pores. We do not see it in such fine terms when we are winning a hard-fought tennis match or whatever because such fine terms are not necessary: there we look upon a sweaty and physical Heaven, so we rhapsodize with muscles and adrenaline instead of thinking about the numinous. But it’s the same—I think. And that’s why no amount of analysis of the actual thing that is giving happiness suffices: because it’s not the tennis match, or the groceries, or the sunset, or the sports victory, or the words on the page that are Heaven, but rather the alignment between who we are and what we feel and what we are doing—that the world is giving exactly the amount of grit in the experience between witness and actor to suit us as we are.

That’s sort of it, anyway. I’m not a philosopher so the boundaries of my rigorous thought and my emotional exuberance may be more permeable than they ought.

Best wishes,

Jenna

Also, consider the case of Ulysses and the sirens, though I guess that’s the same description of a very different phenomenon.

In other words, according to my interpretation, much of our judgement is based on comparisons of relative worth. If you get everything that you want, you lack a basis for comparison with the experience of not having something, and the value of what you have decreases.

Since so many of our mental heuristics are based on comparison, this explanation seems like a good, simple starting point to me.

How much is this *really* about preference-satisfaction, and how much about the feeling of satisfaction or pleasure you can get when something you want comes about?

Imagine that I have a set of desires for after my death: that global warming be avoided, that there be no large-scale wars, that my son live a happy and prosperous life. Do I have Chris’s higher-order desire that some of those desires not be fulfilled? Not at all. My ideal pattern is that they all be fulfilled. Likewise for my desires about the present whose fulfilment I can’t know about, e.g. that people don’t laugh at me behind my back, etc. I want all of those fulfilled.

The only case where I want a desire not to be satisfied is when my knowing that is a condition of my getting a greater feeling of satisfaction from the fulfilment of some other desire. Which suggests that the underlying value is really pleasure, not preference-fulfilment, and that sometimes (not always, contra Mark Twain and thousands of first-year undergrads) you need some minor frustration to get major enjoyment. But that’s primarily a fact about the causes of pleasure rather than one about higher-level desires., i.e. it only applies to desires when pleasure is at stake.

Another example, probably different from the original one: I do not want to get food poisoning. Regardless, I choose to live my life such that I probably have, say, a 0.01% chance of getting food poisoning. You could say I do actually want to get food poisoning 0.01% of the time, but this would be wrong, and I think it should be possible to distinguish the two cases. (Certainly it would be wrong to conclude that I think the best possible world is one in which in the total population there is a 0.01% overall incidence of food poisoning.)

One way to generalize this might be to say that I have a desire not to get food poisoning, but that I also want the freedom to have other desires that might contradict that one. However, I don’t think this quite gets at what I mean.

Perhaps the only real way for someone who has a central desire to experience the (partial but substantial) frustration of his desires to really experience frustration is for most of his other desires to be satisfied…

noen,
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say or how it has anything to do with my comment.

bianca – I read you as saying that people do not want to get food poisoning. But people do, by consuming alcohol or Fugu or other things. They know it’s poison and that it’s harmful, that’s the whole point. Like jumping out of airplanes, bungie jumping, mountain climbing, the whole idea is to walk up to the edge.

Wouldn’t risky behavior fall under “wanting not to get what you want”? Or perhaps one could say there is a dynamic tension between what I really want and what I say I want. Our conscious desires are not the whole story.

You have a set of central desires, for health, happiness, etc, c1, …, cn. In addition you have a central desire c* that none of your central desires should be completely satisfied. Taken together these are all your central desires. Suppose that none of c1, …, cn are completely satisfied. Is c* completely satisified? If c* is not completely satisified, then one of your central desires must be completely satisfied, but since none of c1, …, cn are it follows that c* must be completley satisified. If, on the other hand, c* is completely satisified, then none of your central desires are completely satisfied and in particular c* is not completely satisfied.

(I didn’t read quite all of the comments, so sorry if somebody has already raised this.)

Jacques Lacan has a word for what you’re talking about; it’s called ‘jouissance,’ by which he means a special kind of self-impeding enjoyment. It’s supposed to sound a bit raunchy in French, as ‘jouir’ would be a slangy way to speak of having an orgasm. The term names an excessive enjoyment ‘beyond’ what Freud called the pleasure principle, that quasi-utilitarian logic according to which people economize and maximize pleasure. Lacan would say that the pleasure principle is operated by the law (and is therefore an Oedipalized enjoyment), which enjoins the subject to “enjoy, but only as little as possible.” He’s interested in the (radical?) possibilities of more extreme kinds of pleasure, unregulated by this kind of economizing tendency.

It’s a nice way to think about obsessive behavior or the enjoyment of “unpleasant” activities or cultural forms like tragic drama or sado-masochism or Igor Stravinsky, etc.

A famous anecdote which I tell my students when I teach this stuff: Lacan is in Baltimore in 1966 to attend the famous structuralism conference at Johns Hopkins. An American academic has picked him up at the airport, as one does, and as they are driving into the city, Lacan asks him about a Coca-Cola billboard. What does that mean, ‘Enjoy Coke?’ The American explains, briefly, in French. Lacan is quiet for a moment and then says: “this ‘enjoy’ is not my ‘jouir’.”

More seriously, I’d be interested to know, Chris, what it is about not getting everything you want in a given aspect of your life-plan that you judge to be valuable. Is it just, as Hurka is suggesting iirc, that you believe you get more pleasure this way? Or do you think there is something inherently valuable about not getting everything you want in any given domain? If it is the latter, then I can’t see why you wouldn’t think it was true of absolutely all aspects of your life-plan, including this second-order aspect, and I do think this leads to a paradox…