My Desires Are My Judgments

 

My Desires Are My Judgments

---

I desire things. Let us begin there. At any given moment I find myself wanting certain outcomes — that my health continue, that my work succeed, that those I care about flourish, that I not be humiliated or dismissed or forgotten. These desires feel like facts about me, as basic and unchosen as my height. But they are not facts about me in that sense. They are conclusions. They follow from something.

What they follow from is a judgment. Specifically, they follow from the judgment that the thing desired is genuinely good — or, in the case of aversion, that the thing avoided is genuinely evil. You do not desire what you judge to be worthless. You do not fear what you judge to be harmless. The desire and the judgment are not two events; the desire just is the judgment in its motivational form. If I want my health to continue, it is because somewhere — explicitly or, far more often, implicitly — I have accepted the proposition that my health is a genuine good. The desire is the acceptance.

This means that desires are in my control. Not directly, not by an act of pure will in which I simply decide to stop wanting what I want. But indirectly, in exactly the way that impressions are indirectly in my control: through the governance of judgment. If I change what I accept as genuinely good or evil, my desires will follow. They cannot do otherwise, because they have no source other than those judgments.

Now: what actually is genuinely good? The answer the Stoics give is precise and, at first encounter, almost unbelievable in its narrowness. The only genuine good is virtue — that is, the correct use of my rational will. The only genuine evil is vice — the incorrect use of it. Everything else, without exception, falls outside those categories. My health, my reputation, my life, the lives of those I love, my comfort, my success — none of these are genuinely good. Their opposites are not genuinely evil. They are preferred or dispreferred, more or less appropriate to pursue, but they carry no genuine value of the kind that could make me happy if I obtain them or unhappy if I do not.

The consequence for desire is immediate and total. Any desire I have for an external outcome rests on a false judgment. I desire continued health because I have judged health to be genuinely good. That judgment is false. The desire that follows from it is therefore built on nothing — or rather, built on an error. And an error of that kind is not merely intellectually unfortunate. It is the direct cause of every unhappiness I will ever experience, because unhappiness just is the frustration of desire, and I have filled myself with desires for things I cannot control.

What should I desire, then? Virtue. That is the whole answer. I should desire to judge correctly, to will correctly, to act from rational assessment of what is appropriate rather than from appetite for outcomes. And here is the aspect of this that most people miss entirely: this desire can always be satisfied. It can be satisfied right now, regardless of what is happening around me, regardless of what has been taken from me or what has not yet arrived. Whether I am healthy or sick, employed or destitute, loved or alone — none of those circumstances affect whether I can, at this moment, judge correctly and will correctly. The object of the one desire I should have is always within reach.

There is more. Once I have relinquished the false desires — or begun to relinquish them, since this is not done in an afternoon — something opens up that was previously crowded out. I find that I can take genuine pleasure in things I previously only grasped at. The taste of a meal, the quality of light in the late afternoon, the interest of a conversation — these produce positive feeling without requiring that I desire them to continue. I enjoy them while they are present and release them when they are not, because I have not judged them to be genuine goods whose loss would harm me. The grasping was what prevented the enjoyment. The desire was what made the pleasure anxious.

So what I am after is this: to want only what is genuinely mine to achieve, and to hold everything else as it actually is — neither good nor evil, available or not available, present or absent — with the equanimity that follows not from indifference but from correct understanding. This is not a diminished life. It is the only life in which the positive feelings are not perpetually threatened by the possibility of losing what produces them. I cannot lose virtue except by my own choice. Everything else I never truly had.