Desire Exercises 3
Desire Exercises, Part 3:
Final Ends
Desire Exercises *
Background
In previous exercises, you have listed your desires and then mapped means-ends relationships between them. You’ve also indicated which things you desire for their own sake, as opposed to only to get to some further goal.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, which we’ll discuss in more detail later in this course, Aristotle goes on to pose the question of whether there is something that is desired only for its own sake, and never for some further purpose. If so, he claims, this would be a “final end,” at least if all our other desires were ultimately aimed at it. Aristotle argues that there is such a final end, which he calls eudaimonia — often translated as “happiness,” though he understands the term in a much wider sense than we do today.
Plato develops a similar idea in the Symposium, which we’re not reading in this course, where Socrates narrates how he was questioned by a priestess, Diotima, about the nature of desire and its relation to the final good:
“‘The lover of beautiful things has a desire; what does he desire?’”
“That they become his own,” I said.
“But that answer calls for still another question, that is, ‘What will this
man have, when the beautiful things he wants have become his own?’”I said there was no way I could give a ready answer to that question.
Then she said, “Suppose someone changes the question, putting ‘good’ in place of ‘beautiful,’ and asks you this: ‘Tell me, Socrates, a lover of good things has a desire; what does he desire?’”
“That they become his own,” I said.
“And what will he have, when the good things he wants have become
his own?”“This time it’s easier to come up with the answer,” I said. “He’ll have happiness (eudaimonia).”
– Plato, Symposium 204d–e
Even Callicles in the Gorgias appears to accept the notion of a final end in his extreme hedonism:
[T]he truth of it, Socrates — the thing you claim to pursue — is like this: wantonness, lack of discipline, and freedom, if available in good supply, are excellence and happiness (eudaimonia).
– Plato, Gorgias 492c
Callicles, Plato, and Aristotle each seem to be claiming that there is some one end that everything we do is aimed at: for Callicles, maximal pleasure; for Plato and Aristotle, eudaimonia. This might be taken as an empirical claim, one that we can test against people’s experience.
Exercise
For the last couple of weeks you have been tracing means-ends relationships between your own desires. Now ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your map point to a single “final end” that everything else aims at? Or were there several separate ultimate ends, or even a motley of disconnected wants?
- If your map doesn’t have a single final end, when you look at it now, could you realistically unite it by putting some final end on it (e.g., happiness or pleasure or some other ultimate goal) and linking your desires to it?
* Designed and adapted for this course by Prof. Steven Horst