>How about our old friend Schopenhauer, who captured the energy and drive
>behind greed, elevating it to the most seminal and elemental force in
>civilization.
>
>" All willing springs from lack, from defiency, and thus from suffering.
>Fulfillment brings this to an end; yet for one to wish that is fulfilled
>there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a
>long time, demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfillment is short
>and meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only
>apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one; the foremr
>is a known delusion, the latter a delusion not as yet known. No attained
>object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts and no longer
>declines; but it is always like the alms thrown to a beggar, which
>reprieves him today so that his misery may prolonged to tomorrow.
>Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long,
>as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and
>fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting
>happiness or peace. Essentially, it is all the same whether we pursue or
>flee, fear harm or aspire to enjoyment; care for the constantly
>demanding will, no matter in what form, continually fills and moves
>consciousness; but without peace and calm, true well-being is absolutely
>impossible. Thus the subject of willing is constantly lying on the
>revolving wheel of Ixion, is always drawing water in the sieve of the
>Danaids, and is the eternally thirsting Tantalus." WWR I 196.
A wonderful quote, Sam. Allow me to add Terry Eagleton's comments on Schopenhauer's investment in "the abstract category of _desire itself_":
***** Schopenhauer is perhaps the first major modern thinker to place at the centre of his work the abstract category of _desire itself_, irrespective of this or that particular hankering. It is this powerful abstraction which psychoanalysis will later inherit....Just as capitalist society is in this period evolving to the point where it will be possible for Marx to extract from it the key concept of abstract labour, a conceptual operation only possible on the basis of certain material conditions, so the determinant role and regular repetition of appetite in bourgeois society now permits a dramatic theoretical shift: the construction of desire as a thing in itself, a momentous metaphysical event or self-identical force, as against some earlier social order in which desire is still too narrowly particularistic, too intimately bound up with local or traditional obligation, to be reified in quite this way. With Schopenhauer, desire has become the protagonist of the human theatre, and human subjects themselves its mere obedient bearers or underlings. This is not only because of the emergence of a social order in which, in the form of commonplace possessive individualism, appetite is now becoming the order of the day, the ruling ideology and dominant social practice; it is more specifically because of the perceived _infinity_ of desire in a social order where the only end of accumulation is to accumulate afresh. In a traumatic collapse of teleology, desire comes to seem independent of any particular ends, or at least as grotesquely disproportionate to them; and once it thus ceases to be (in the phenomenological sense) intentional, it begins monstrously to obtrude itself as a _Ding-an-sich_, an opaque, unfathomable, self-propelling power utterly without purpose or reason, like some grisly caricature of the deity....
Once desire is for the first time homogenized as a singular entity, it can become the object of moral judgement as such - a move which would have seemed quite unintelligible to those moralists for whom there is no such phenomenon as 'desire', simply this or that particular [appetite] on which a particular judgement may be passed. If desire becomes hypostasized in this way, then it is possible, in a long Romantic-libertarian lineage from William Blake to Gilles Deleuze, to view it as supremely positive; but the preconditions of such Romantic affirmation are also the precondition of the Schopenhauerian denunciation of desire _tout court_, accepting the categories of Romantic humanism but impudently inverting the valuations. Like Schopenhauer, you can retain the whole totalizing apparatus of bourgeois humanism at its most affirmative - the singular central principle informing the whole of reality, the integrated cosmic whole, the stable relations of phenomena and essence - while mischievously emptying these forms of their idealized content. You can drain off the ideological substance of the system - freedom, justice, reason, progress - and fill that system, still intact, with the actual degraded materials of everyday bourgeois existence. This, precisely, is what Schopenhauer's notion of the will achieves, which structurally speaking serves just the function of the Hegelian Idea or Romantic life-force, but is now nothing more than the uncouth rapacity of the average bourgeois, elevated to cosmic status and transformed to the prime metaphysical mover of the entire universe....
Terry Eagleton, "The Death of Desire," _The Ideology of Aesthetic_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) *****
Yoshie