> I find the distinction usually made between worthy "need" and unworthy
> "desire" (or "want") to be pretty ropey. Usually, whoever is making
> the
> distinction assumes that they have a special insight into what people
> "really" need as opposed to the "artificial" desires that
> capitalism has
> persuaded them they want, i.e. that their desires are in the realm
> of false
> consciousness, while their needs are natural.
>
> The problem with this approach is that it supposes the existence of a
> discernible human nature underneath the artificially imposed social
> mores of
> the day. But human need is far form being mere animal existence and
> must
> have an historical and cultural dimension, and, unless we are
> talking about
> some other people than these people here, that means the wants/
> needs they
> have as people in capitalist society.
In the tradition in thought on this question to which Marx belongs, the ideas about "being" and "human being" from which an answer is derived conceive "being" as including an objective basis for intellectual, aesthetic and ethical judgments and "human being" as the being able to substitute "reason" for "instinct" and make perceiving, feeling, thinking, willing and acting "rational." "Freedom" is then elaborated as "universally developed individuals" living a "good" life where the "goods" in question are intellectual, aesthetic and ethical.
All other goods are instrumental to these and so are limited and determined by them. In Marx's conception of an ideal community, the activity devoted to creating them defines the "realm of necessity." The increase in "productivity" made possible by "the all-around development of the individual" enables the time and effort devoted to this activity to be minimized. Time free from instrumental activity is the most important "product" of the increased productivity.
This provides a basis for rational critique of historical and current conceptions of "need." Marx critically characterizes the "need" dominant in capitalism as "avarice." Keynes, who belongs to the same tradition in thought about this question as Marx, adds to this a psychoanalytic understanding of "avarice." For this and other reasons, he was much less hopeful than Marx about the ideal republic of the imagination ever becoming fully practicable. He did, however, look forward to a time when the increased productivity resulting from capitalism would make it possible
”to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/368keynesgrandchildrentable.pdf>
The idea that this tradition logically implies some individuals dictating to others what they "need" overlooks the fact that this would contradict the idea of ideal relations as "relations of mutual recognition."
Ted