In Plato's The Republic, Socrates argued that individual desires must be postponed in the name of a higher ideal.
In his Ethics, Baruch Spinoza declares desire to be "the very essence of man," in the "Definitions of the Affects" at the end of Part III.
An early example of desire as an ontological principle, it applies to all things or "modes" in the world, each of which has a particular vital "striving" (sometimes expressed with the Latin "conatus") to persist in existence (Part III, Proposition 7).
Spinoza ends the Ethics by a proposition that both moral virtue and spiritual blessedness are a direct result of essential power to exist, i.e. desire (Part V Prop.
In A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume suggests that reason is subject to passion.
Reading Maurice Blanchot in this regard, in his essay Sade's Reason, the libertine is one of a type that sometimes intersects with a Sadean man, who finds in stoicism, solitude, and apathy the proper conditions.
Blanchot says, "Apathy is the spirit of negation, applied to the man who has chosen to be sovereign."
In his Principia Ethica, British philosopher G. E. Moore argued that two theories of desire should be clearly distinguished.
The hedonistic theory of John Stuart Mill states that pleasure is the sole object of all desire.
If the desire is to take a definite direction, it is absolutely necessary that the idea of the object, from which the pleasure is expected, should also be present and should control my activity.
Within the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddhism), craving is thought to be the cause of all suffering that one experiences in human existence.
Nirvana means "cessation", "extinction" (of suffering) or "extinguished", "quieted", "calmed";[8] it is also known as "Awakening" or "Enlightenment" in the West.
[9] Jacques Lacan's désir follows Freud's concept of Wunsch and it is central to Lacanian theories.
[10] Lacan said that "it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.
"[12] "[W]hat is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence."
[13] For Lacan "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second" (article cited).
Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need."
The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire (see "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis").
French philosophers and critical theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 1972 book Anti-Oedipus has been widely credited as a landmark work tackling philosophical and psychoanalytical conceptions of desire,[14] and proposing a new theory of desire in the form of schizoanalysis.
[15] Deleuze and Guattari regard desire as a productive force, not as originating from lack like Lacan does.