>We will always want something more than or other
>than what we have.
Perhaps, but _compulsively_ so? Like now? I'd say no.
>Need and desire are a long way from each other. No desire matters a jot
>until needs are met.
<snip>
>Whatever. First things first, I reckon. When you got kiddies dying for
>want of a few oats or a pint of clean water, you got the most basic
>obscenity happening - worthy of as radical a response as it takes.
However, a radical response that reality demands does not come from attempts to construct a hierarchy of needs, to distinguish true from false pleasures theoretically, to separate needs from desires, to become morally free from desires, etc. Moreover, such attempts may unwittingly either prepare the ideological ground for Thermidor or give aid & comfort to neoliberal imperialism or both (both Thermidor & neoliberal imperialism counsel "small is beautiful" -- farewell to maximalist demands).
***** The role of will in the desires of an individual
Whether a desire becomes fixed or not, i.e., whether it obtains exclusive [power over us] - which, however, does [not] exclude [further progress] - depends on whether material circumstances, "bad" mundane conditions permit the normal satisfaction of this desire and, on the other hand, the development of a totality of desires. This latter depends, in turn, on whether we live in circumstances that allow all-round activity and thereby the full development of all our potentialities. On the actual conditions, and the possibility of development they give each individual, depends also whether thoughts become fixed or not - just as, for example, the fixed ideas of the German philosophers, these "victims of society", qui nous font pitie [for whom we feel pity], are inseparable from the German conditions.
"An avaricious person is not an owner, but a servant, and he can do nothing for his own sake without at the same time doing it for the sake of his master."
No one can do anything without at the same time doing it for the sake of one or other of his needs and for the sake of the organ of this need - for Stirner this means that this need and its organ are made into a master over him, just as earlier he made the means for satisfying a need into a master over him. Stirner cannot eat without at the same time eating for the sake of his stomach. If the worldly conditions prevent him from satisfying his stomach, then his stomach becomes a master over him, the desire to eat becomes a fixed desire, and the thought of eating becomes a fixed idea - which at the same time gives him an example of the influence of world conditions and fixing his desires and ideas. Sancho's "revolt" against the fixation of desires and thoughts is thus reduced to an impotent moral injunction about self-control and provides new evidence that he merely gives an ideologically high sounding expression to the most trivial sentiments of the petty-bourgeois.
[The following two paragraphs are crossed out in the manuscript, likely because the authors did not feel they fit into context and not because of their content (brackets are used for words that were illegible)]:
Since they attack the material basis on which the hitherto inevitable fixedness of desires and ideas depended, the Communists are the only people through whose historical activity the liquefaction of the fixed desires and ideas is in fact brought about and ceases to be an impotent moral injunction, as it was up to now with all moralists "down to" Stirner. Communist organization has a twofold effect on the desires produced in the individual by present-day relations; some of these desires - namely desires which exist under all relations, and only change their form and direction under different social relations - are merely altered by the Communist social system, for they are given the opportunity to develop normally; but others - namely those originating solely in a particular society, under particular conditions of [production] and intercourse - are totally deprived of their conditions of existence. Which [of the desires] will be merely changed and [which eliminated] in a Communist [society] can [only occur in a practical] way, by [changing the real], actual [conditions of production and intercourse.]
<http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845-gi/ch03.htm> *****
>Romantic love does not equal bulimia (it takes a very particular complex of
>relations and meanings to get from a to b)
Three aspects of Courtly Love: (a) the ennobling force of love; (b) the elevation of the beloved above the lover; & (c) love as ever unsatisfied, ever increasing desire (Denomy, _The Heresy of Courtly Love_ [1947], pp. 20-21).
This pre-capitalist ideology was then subsumed under & modernized by the logic of M-C-M': (a') the ennobling force of free labor; (b') the elevation of dead labor above living labor; & (c') love as ever unsatisfied, ever increasing desire (Scarcity & Unlimited Wants of neoclassical economics). Part of the ideological Reformation broadly defined, beyond the religious Reformation that Max Weber studied.
Both bulimia & anorexia are responses to M-C-M', just as other compulsive behaviors labeled "addictions" are. I think of the eating disorders as the best emblem of M-C-M' manifest in human habits, because when we consider the eating disorders, no one can seriously propose the eradication of "addictive substances" as the solution, as has been tragically the case with the war on drugs.
Yoshie