An Archetype of Desire
I loved him with the immediacy of a summer storm. Our spheres of being merged in an exchange of feeling. In this moment of enigmatic experience, I was forced to reckon with a border of philosophy — or more like the hearth of it. Life unconsciously enables us with a desire to live. The motions of self-understanding teamed with a deeper unknowing. This archetype of desire led me to a particular philosophical lens. Through an almost mythological account of desire, this essay illuminates the human condition to the cliff point where so much is reconciled and uninterpreted.
It takes no more than a breath to recognize what motivates us. Desire: this is the fundament to any living being. One first desires to live; thus, we subconsciously know to breathe.
Gravity: What is Desire?
Desiring this man provoked a strong response in me. I wrote poems, tattooed my skin, and hugged loved ones tighter out of this deep impact of desire for him. Some actions and thoughts stem directly from this desire, while others stemmed indirectly. Desire, for the large part, is an incognito motivator — a motivator which dominates the subconscious. Love often enables the desire of life in this way. Many people find solace to endure life through loving another, or simply seeing their desires actualized. Life is toilsome, yet we desire it so vividly. The power of desire should not be treated as weak or avoidable. It should be further observed.
Just as gravity grounds life on earth in unseeable materialism, desire motivates movement with the same loose force. Both forces feel spiritual and immaterial — intangible to human touch. Though “invisible”, each can be recognized by the human individual. One cannot watch a desire impact a person just as one can’t see the force of gravity itself keep someone down. Though, we can see the physical responses. A rock can be seen falling by gravity, and we can watch a person grab a glass of water when they desire a drink. Desire is irrefutably present for the human being.
Thinking of my lover holding me, it felt as if a soft fire was consuming my body. The experience is notable. This desire for this individual was truly a subjective experience. The way I experience desire is synonymous with my individuality. I am myself because the way desires motivate me are subjective in exact trajectory. No one individual has the exact genetic response as me; no one individual has the exact response to desires. Just as each of us have a DNA code specific to us, each of us experience desires in different shapes or trajectories. We all desire water, food, shelter, human connection even, yet we differ in how those desires drive our thoughts and actions to accomplish said desires. You may not desire to read Nietzsche as I do, but I am sure you experience curiosity in some form. Desire is the motivational fundament of thought, feeling, and action. Much of what makes us aware of ourselves are thoughts, feelings, and actions. Thus, desires influence the formation of an individual in a bottom-up set of mental motions. Different experiences of desire between people thus explain the natural difference of feeling, thought, and action between them. This is where the queerness of my love for this man stuck out — in all its difference and unique purity.
Desires of Others: Christ, Chimpanzees, Chrysanthemums
Desire lays the foundation of both our psyches and subconscious beings. Try to imagine a human without desire — no desire to breathe, no desire for water, no desire for learning, no desire to move the body. Without desire, the human is not a human anymore; it is a corpse. This image is the very notion of mine exemplified. With all thoughts, feelings, and action deriving from perceptions of desire, this puts a lot on the table of that which comes from desire. The cultivation of buildings, books, and food can all be thought of as being made from desire. Buildings result from the desire to be sheltered. Books come from the desire to experience something greater than oneself. Food results from the desire to nutrify the body. Each of these human productions stem from the basic desire of life: the need for the human to survive the tumultuous human experience. So too, morals are creations of the living to survive.
Every religion seen through the age of humanity resulted from the desire to live. The cultivation of morals and explanations for the metaphysical derive from the intuitive nature of our experience with desires. Desire, like gravity, has a profound psychological and physiological impact. Humans have long realized this, though they differ in the literal and figurative language used to interpret this. The Greeks see love as a conjuring of Eros, Christians recognize love as a will of God through the Holy Spirit, and even the Buddhists recognize love as the human desire to connect and procreate (animate or inanimate things).
One may think of this large-scale systemization of morals as a fitness of survival. If a tribe is agreeable on what they consider right and wrong, it is easier for the collective to cohesively operate. The development of religion and spiritual language are to account for a group’s social desires of behavior. These preferred behaviors are relative to the group’s perception of human experience. With the belief that this presumed moral code of a society is objective or absolute, a group becomes more fit to hold their ground, and even conquer others — all in the name of their group’s moral progression. This is a dark reflection of a group’s desire to live. Christianity today is no more than a sea of different ideas and interpretations of people who have survived battles. Christ tried to circumvent the problem of people groups negatively reacting to each other’s believed objective moral codes by turning the idea of an objective God into a subjective motivator. The conception of the Holy Spirit is the replacement of morality into the subjective hands of the individual — meant to shed light on the moral possibility of people. The belief in an objective moral code may strengthen the morale of a group to survive, but the downside is the consistent oppression of anyone considered “other”.
This activity of moral cultivation by a collective is not exclusive to our species. Chimpanzees have adapted a genetic determination towards the moral of equality. Many reports in history show that when giving one chimpanzee more food than another, the animals do not react against each other. Instead, they aggravate against the dealer of food, as seen in the cases of many zookeepers. Chimpanzees react negatively against an exterior force to protect the believed equality of their group. The moral of equality, of the chimpanzees, resulted from the collective desire of mutual survival of its group members. Again, these desires are largely subconscious in the minds of chimpanzees. Humans have developed a very complex set of morals due to their more conscious minds and different experiences across people groups.
The value placement of my homosexual desire stirs the war between the collective perception of objective morality and my individual, subjective scope of morality. Is it right or wrong for me to be so attracted to this man? My evangelical Christian community, which I grew up in, vehemently denies the “correctness” of this desire. Though, my body, intuition, and consciousness tell me otherwise. This battle of correctness in my mind was a manifestation of society’s struggle with objective vs. subjective morality. Did a God create these moral codes or are they simply a biproduct of subjective desires? That is the implicit question here.
The beauty of the chrysanthemum to me lies in its natural queerness. Through years of development, it blooms in fall, not spring or summer like so many other blooming plants. A chrysanthemum explodes in its flowering with no conscious need — it acts in full response to unconscious desire. Its genetic condition enables this different behavior. Fueled by decaying plant matter, it arises. So too, I have come to realize that my desire for this man erupts much. Desires to do many good things come from it. Fostering and enabling this “diverse” love procreates much of my other moral action. My desire of life brings me to have loved him and so many other people. Rejecting this desire would simply stunt my subjective moral growth. Out of whatever hatred or failure I endure in desiring a man, I will still bloom — continually growing and becoming myself. The push of people to hold to an objective moral code is in a sense Nietzsche’s articulation of “anti-nature”. Their refusal of my desires as being different is ultimately a rejection of our nature: our variating desires to live. Thus, religion and objective moral codes, in hopes to sustain life of a collective, deter the desire to live. A chrysanthemum cannot bloom in the spring. I take up my queerness as a proclamation of my own virtue.
The Material Reckoning: How Desire Informs the Ethical
As my desire for men has proven the very subjective nature of morality, much is now understood, yet there is still much terrain to uncover. The nature of our sporadic desires is veiled from our conscious minds. Though I can recognize my love of men, I cannot recognize how much this affects all my other desires, feelings, or actions. There is no way to quantify every desire in its amount and trajectory psychologically. To claim the possibility of quantifiable total understanding of our motivators is just as misguided as saying an objective God handed us all the ultimate rules of life on stone tablets.
So, have we met our road’s end? Not exactly, in short. Though we may never be able to fully comprehend how our desires enable us into certain mental processes or actions, recognizing desires as integral is still important. Claiming one’s desires as motivating all actions, one does not place responsibility on anyone but oneself. My desires dictate my actions but becoming akin to my desires better enables me to make conscious actions. I am free to act as I am by recognizing myself as is. Understanding what drives me helps affirm life and my own process of moral cultivation.
Through the process of uncovering my desire for this man, I uncovered the reality that my personal journey and its “correctness” is in my own hands. This is true for others as well. This is precisely what I mean when I say, “desire informs the ethical.”
Religion has longtime been the source of humanity’s conception of morality. These spiritual formulations have helped others explain what it is they go through when desiring something. Eros and the Holy Spirit tell us much of how past individuals gauge their desires. The power of their implications and motivations are not lost when I “reduce” them to terms of subjective desire. They still accomplish the same meaning. If anything, the “desire of life’ becomes synonymous with “God”. Our natural world functions off unconscious desires. There still is a recognizable force if you will. So, rejecting one’s desires is analogous to rejecting God, or the desire of life. Though, more of my ontological claims shall come in another essay. Our daily lives are functions of our own beings and desires that motivate them. This is no heresy, just more literal language.
Through the recognition of desire and one’s personal inclinations, one is more equipped for moral action. The acceptance of my desire for this man indirectly opened my capacity to love others. I would argue I had the confidence to uplift others as a response to the awareness of my queer desire. This is the ultimate message of the essay: desires are subjective motivators, and accepting my subjective motivators allows me to better recognize moral or immoral actions of myself — which further guides the life path in becoming. Reckoning with the material nature of desires, my God became life around me, not a singular being possessing a code of morals.
I desire him at the core of my being —
The intersection between the body, subconscious, and consciousness.
This is my desire of life —
Purpose, love, belonging, becoming, enduring.
