This volume contains eleven essays on philosophical theories of desire, their applications and rhetorical aspects. They move via analysis towards rhetorical literary and metaphysical case studies on Kafka and Hobbes. The final two chapters deal with kinky sexual desire and its moral and motivational mysteries, first by focusing on bdsm and consensual S/M, and then reading Thomas Nagel’s influential article on perversions and their psychological genesis. In this way, the chapters display the use of several philosophical strategies, such as analysis, criticism, literary interpretation, and rhetorical speculation side by side and one after the other, proceeding from modern logical clarity towards postmodern suggestiveness. This makes the volume multifaceted and, as I hope, polyphonous in a way that is not immediately obvious or trivial. All the papers can be read individually, they are self-contained and hence somewhat repetitious, which I apologise, but they also display a methodological progress from relative triviality towards what looks like an interpretative deep end where the philosophical ladders do not quite reach the bottom or where philosophy ends. Plato thought that philosophy should lead us up and away from the cave, but another way of seeing it is that it leads us to the bottom of the cave where all the fundamental secrets lie in eternal gloom and darkness. Plato dreams of truths in bright sunlight, which is nice but far too optimistic. In the end confusion and mystery prevail and the world, as I see it, covers itself in semantic noise, ambiguity, and metaphors as if to avoid the intolerable truth. In the end, linguistic tropes rule. When I looked at the essays in this volume in toto, I noticed, to my initial surprise, that the key metaphor here is travel. I was not planning it that way but when I think of it now I am inclined to say that it is a perfectly good one.
The papers here are new and previously unpublished. Exceptions are as follows: Chapter 10 “Sadomasochistic Desire” originally appeared under the title “The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of bdsm,” sage Open 8 (2018), 1–9, but I have made some significant modifications. I also moved some material from that essay to the last one, “Sexual Differences,” which is previously unpublished. My third relevant paper on sexuality is “A Philosophical and Rhetorical Theory of bdsm,” The Journal of Mind and Behaviour 38 (2017), 53–74. The two Kafka essays in this volume belong to a series of four papers, of which two are published as “Nowhere to Go, Kafka,” Munich Social Science Review NS 1 (2018), 91–110, and “Conspiracy Theories as Fiction: Kafka and Sade,” Munich Social Science Review NS 2 (2019) (in press). The essay on Hobbes is the original version of the paper first published as a Spanish translation: “Dentro del
What I have written in this volume is loosely based on some of my published essays, namely, “Desire and Happiness,” Homo Oeconomicus 29 (2012), 393–412; “An Introduction to Desire,” Homo Oeconomicus 31 (2014), 447–461; and “Narratives of Desire.” In Desire: The Concept and Its Practical Context. T. Airaksinen and W.W. Gasparski (Eds.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2016, pp. 3–58. See also “Narratives of (Mad) Desire,” Ethics in Progress 4 (2014), 7–17; “Sade, or the Scandal of Desire,” Homo Oeconomicus 30 (2013), 369–384; and “Psychology of Desire and the Pragmatics of Betterment.” In Pragmatism and Objectivity, S. Pihlström (Ed.). London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 223–238.
My long standing interest in desire is an offshoot of my struggles with the notions of happiness. I originally toyed with the argument to the effect that satisfied desires make, or should make, a person happy. This contrasts with the idea that one cannot satisfy a desire de se, like some Buddhists may argue, which is to say that happiness is an ever delusive notion. Also, a crucial moment was when Dr Gerald Doherty (Turku) defined, in personal communication, de dicto desires as narrative idealizations referring at the same time to Jacques Lacan. I do not think he himself ever developed this idea but he seemed to take it as an obvious truth. I connected narrativity to the semantics of possible worlds, and this is how it began. Another key idea is that desire de dicto has a metaphorically and metonymically characterized intentional object. One can say that desire has a metonymic structure, as Lacan says; this is another way of admitting one never gets what one wants. We get an object that is only metonymically connected to what we want.
Acknowledgements: As usual, I am deeply grateful to Professor Heta Gylling (Helsinki) for all the help she gave me in the various stages of the project. Professor Manfred Holler (Hamburg and Munich) has provided valuable support over time. I am grateful to Karri Liikkanen (Helsinki) for his help, now and earlier.
Helsinki 4. July 2018