> We're all following a script to some degree. The fact that you or
> anyone else finds a person, a gesture, or an act exciting has a
> history in the culture and in your personal experience. You're just
> picking up on something that's been done before, maybe with a
> little variation. What is this freedom you're speaking of?
The philosophical issue concerns the "autonomy" of desire. The tradition that includes Marx distinguishes desire determined by "reason" from desire determined by "instinct" or "caprice". Only in the former case is desire "free" in the sense of freely self-determined.
Since, in the form it takes in Marx, the conception of the "good", the ultimate object of desire, is "eudaimonic" in the sense of Aristotle, "reasonable" desire when realized produces the best possible "feeling" (the feeling to which one would say "stay" as Goethe put it).
Psychoanalysis provides an elaboration of the many ways desire fails to be "free" in the above sense, but, in almost all its forms, has no logical space for this idea of "freedom".
This way of evaluating and understanding desire is inconsistent with Bentham (called by Marx "a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity"). Keynes, who foolishly called Marxism the "reductio ab absurdum of Benthamism", described Benthamism as
"the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation and is responsible for its present moral decay. We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus. In truth it was the Benthamite calculus, based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal." (Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. X, pp. 445-6)
Ted