Desire under the Elms (Was Marx and Equality)

JKSCHW at aol.com JKSCHW at aol.com
Thu Jan 27 20:38:58 PST 2000


In a message dated 00-01-27 23:20:29 EST, you write:

Doug,

Has it occurred to you that the only other bunch of academics other than the pomists to talk about Desire are the neoclassical economists and rational choice theorists? I don't know what's so fun about the concept of Desire. Course the pomists are usually talking, in a turgid sort of way, about sexual desire, or lust, while the NCErs talk about greed, although in a curiously bloodless manner.

Me, if I want to read about sex rather than do it, I'll read Lawrence or Donne or Ovid or someone who can write in a way that captures the randy poetry of the horizontal bop rather than academic bureaucrats who think it's insightful to show, in faux-suggestive prose of impenetrable (see!) obscurity that everybody has a dirty mind, an idea that occurred to Freud (himself a prose stylist of no mean distinction) some time before the pomists rediscovered it. Who possesses the Phallus? Oh, baby, it's too hard for me, don't stop.

Although their prose often has an austere purity I admire, the NCErs don't havea feel for the raw energy of the greed they celebrate--for that you have to go to Balzac or Faulkner, maybe--there's not that much fiction that appreciates this driving Desire of western civilization, though Marx, actually, has a psychological feel for it and the literary talent to express it, even if from the outside rather than the inside.

If, however, we want to discuss the concept of Desire, rather than lust or greed, though I am not sure why we would want to or why someone would think it was fun, we should look to the analytical literature on the belief-desire thesis. Arthur Ripstein has some nice papers demolishing the concept of desire as a useful notion for explaining human behavior. There was a good book, I have it somewhere, on pathologies of rational choice theory, that covers some of the same ground. It was a medium sized splash in the social science literature a few years back. I could dig it up and try to summarize a few of the main points.

--jks

>There is a fine point here of some importance: Do we want to talk about

>"desire" or "desires"? The latter would be an empirical and historical

>investigation of some interest though not great theoretical importance.

>The former should be left to the theologians.

Carrol, I don't think I'd like to live in your utopia. Cue the

Stooges, "No Fun."

Doug >>



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