The Desiderative Dimension of the Soul’s Life. Its Functions. The Right Ordering and the Disordered State of the Desiderative Faculty

The desiring aspect. The active power here is the will, which wills—desires to acquire, to use, or to do what it finds beneficial, necessary, or pleasant—and does not will, does not desire, the contrary. The stirrings of the will demand corresponding action; therefore the will is more directly an active power, whose essential need is to live and act. It holds within its governance all the powers of soul and body, together with all available means, and sets them all in motion when needed. At its foundation lies zeal, or ardor—a thirst for action; and as its stimulants there stand beside it the pleasant, the useful, and the needful, which when absent allow zeal to sleep and the active powers to lose their tension and go slack. These stimulate desire, and desire fans the flame of zeal.

The unfolding of this aspect of the soul proceeds as follows. In the soul and body there are needs, to which the needs of everyday life—domestic and social—have also attached themselves. These needs do not of themselves give rise to a definite desire, but only press for satisfaction. When a need has once been satisfied in one way or another, thereafter the awakening of the need brings with it the desire for that by which the need was satisfied. Desire always has a definite object that satisfies the need. One need may have been satisfied in various ways, so that when it awakens various desires arise: now for one thing, now for another, now for a third object capable of satisfying the need. In a person’s developed life, the underlying needs are no longer visible behind the desires. In the soul there swarm only the latter, demanding satisfaction—as though they existed for their own sake.

What is the soul to do with these desires? It faces a choice: which of the desired objects to give preference to. After the choice comes a decision—to do, or to obtain, or to use the chosen object. After the decision comes the selection of means and the determination of the manner and order of execution. Then, finally, the deed itself takes place at its proper time and place. Every task, even the smallest, proceeds in this order. You can verify this against some task of your own. By force of habit, all these acts are sometimes performed instantaneously, and the deed follows at once upon the desire. Choice, decision, and means are then taken from previous dealings and require no special deliberation.

In a person who has lived for some time, almost everything is done by habit. Rarely does any undertaking or venture arise that falls outside the usual order of affairs and knowledge. It simply happens that a settled life calls for corresponding actions. Since those actions recur frequently, they naturally turn into habits, dispositions, rules of life, and character. From the totality of all such habits, rules, and arrangements, the way of life of a given person is established—just as from the totality of settled conceptions his cast of thought and outlook is formed. Knowing something of a person’s life, one can guess what he thinks at one time or another and how he will act in given circumstances.

The director of the active life is prudence, which is the same reason, only now in the service of the will. In the mental domain, reason decides how things are in their existence; in the domain of desire and activity, it determines how things should be done so that what has been lawfully desired is reliably achieved. When it has formed the habit of determining this correctly, so that a person conducts his affairs always—or for the most part—with success, prudence is rightly attributed to him: the skill of conducting affairs successfully by accurately calculating means in relation to ends and deeds in relation to external circumstances.

From what has been said it will not be difficult for you to draw a conclusion about the naturally lawful activity of the will, which, as you see, is the mistress of all our powers and of all our life. Its task is to determine the manner, the way, and the measure of satisfying the desires arising from needs or taking their place, so that life may flow as it ought, bringing peace and joy to the one who lives it. As was mentioned, we have needs and desires—of the soul, of the body, of daily life, and of society. Not all of them manifest in the same way in everyone, because not everyone’s life is arranged the same—one person’s is one way, another person’s is another. A person’s task is to determine how, in his own situation, he can and should satisfy his needs and desires, to adapt suitable means to that end, and to lead his life accordingly. To lead one’s life, with all its occupations and undertakings, in a sound-minded way according to an established norm—this is the task of the desiring, or active, aspect of our life. That is how it should be. But look closely and see how things actually are.

In the mental aspect we have confusion, distraction, and wandering of thoughts; in the desiring aspect—inconstancy, disorderliness, and willfulness of desires, and of deeds that follow from them. How much time passes in idleness and empty busyness: we wander here and there without knowing why; we do and redo things without being able to give a sound account of it; undertakings and deeds follow one upon another, yet out of all of it comes only commotion—vanity. Desires spring up—and you can do nothing with them: give, and give again. And it would be well if this happened only once; but it happens almost every hour. Why is this so? Our mistress—the will—has gone slack. Look further at how many foreign instigators of desire we have: anger, hatred, envy, miserliness, vainglory, pride, and the like. The source of our desires ought to be the natural needs of a settled domestic and social life—but what is there that is natural in all of these? They only disorder nature and all the arrangements of life. Whence this barbarian invasion? I will leave this to your reflection, and hasten on toward a conclusion.