Product Description

A married person falls deeply in love with someone else. A man of average income feels he cannot be truly happy unless he owns an expensive luxury car. A dieter has an irresistible craving for ice cream. Desires often come to us unbidden and unwanted, and they can have a dramatic impact, sometimes changing the course of our lives.
In On Desire, William B. Irvine takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our impulses, wants, and needs, showing us where these feelings come from and how we can try to rein them in. Spicing his account with engaging observations by writers like Seneca, Tolstoy, and Freud, Irvine considers the teachings of Buddhists, Hindus, the Amish, Shakers, and Catholic saints, as well as those of ancient Greek and Roman and modern European philosophers. Irvine also looks at what modern science can tell us about desire--what happens in the brain when we desire something and how animals evolved particular desires--and he advances a new theory about how desire itself evolved. Irvine also suggests that at the same time that we gained the ability to desire, we were "programmed" to find some things more desirable than others. Irvine concludes that the best way to attain lasting happiness is not to change the world around us or our place in it, but to change ourselves. If we can convince ourselves to want what we already have, we can dramatically enhance our happiness.
Brimming with wisdom and practical advice, On Desire offers a thoughtful approach to controlling unwanted passions and attaining a more meaningful life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #654273 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
While most contemporary philosophers mull over theoretical matters and shy away from giving advice on how to live, Irvine plumbs the age-old question: how do we master our desires? When it comes to desire, he says, "we are like a vacation home owner who, regardless of who shows up at the door... welcomes the visitor and convinces himself that he must have invited the visitor." Our evolutionary past, Irvine claims, has wired us for endless dissatisfaction since, from an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn't matter if we're miserable as long as we survive and reproduce. Early humans who basked in contentment, he argues, were less likely to survive than ones with a nagging itch to better their lot. Given this treadmill, how can we lead happy, meaningful lives? Irvine shares the advice of those who claim that "undesirable desires arise because we care what other people think of us." Examining teachings of Zen Buddhists, the Amish, the Hutterites, Hellenistic philosophers (the Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics) and others, he concludes, "the best way to gain... lasting satisfaction... is to change not the world and our position in it but ourselves... we should work at wanting what we already have." This is no easy task, and Irvine admits that readers seeking further instruction had best look elsewhere. (Oct.)
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From Booklist
In a ruminative volume that falls, thankfully, between mass-market, silver-bullet self-help guide and unreadable thesis, Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University, carefully, with intelligence and good humor, walks readers through the nature of desire in human beings. He explains how desire--really a multitude of desires, uninvited and unannounced--manifests itself, how it can be identified and parsed, and how it can be mastered in a way that offers the best chance at self-fulfillment. He uses modern psychology to delineate desire but then shows how the world's great religions--here mainly Christianity and Buddhism, but also Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism--address this phenomenon. He advocates no particular approach, admitting instead that different tacks probably work for different people. And he never lets the reader think that mastering desire will be easy. This is that rare book that should appeal to a wide range of readers without necessarily trying to do so. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"A sprightly and entertaining book.... Those who would like to understand and control some of their desires will be glad to find this book on the library shelf."--Library Journal
"What is delightful about this book is that the usual suspects are not as conspicuous. Instead, the Shakers are discussed alongside Buddha, and Diogenes adjacent to Thoreau.... With clear writing, backed up by careful exegesis and a unique twist to a common thesis, this work is necessary for most undergraduate collections, and for students of philosophy and happiness. Summing Up: Highly recommended."--Choice
"William B. Irvine has written a disarmingly seductive and easily readable treatise on the origins, nature, vicissitudes, and 'crises' of desire. He simply and clearly discusses biologically instilled incentive systems, the rich psychological research on the peculiarities of our motivation, and the wisdom of various religious and spiritual traditions. It is a well-informed, wise, informal interdisciplinary book that is highly recommended for the general reader."--Robert C. Solomon, author of The Passions, About Love, The Joy of Philosophy, Not Passion's Slave, and In Defense of Sentimentality
"Irvine has given us a very engaging book on what desire is: how central it is to human existence, what science has to tell us about it, and what we can do with it and about it. He combines knowledge, wisdom and wit with a light but sure philosophical touch."--John Perry, Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
"...a sweeping review of philosophical, psychological, evolutionary, and religious concepts of desire. The writing is lucid and economical."--PsycCRITIQUES

Customer Reviews

I want...you to read this book.
More people should. I majored in biology so I already knew the basis for most of his arguments (re: evolutionary programming), but reading it in all the different contexts (religious, philosophical, etc.) was to view the ways we try to adapt and understand our wants in a singular or communal setting (have a new respect for the Amish and Mennonites!).

A portion that really stuck with me though was in discovering that our brain knows what we want before our conscious actually does -- much to chew on in that section.

Live your life by controlling your desires, don't let them control you is essentially what I took away from the vast landscape he manages to cover in this little book. Read it and see what message you come back with.

Worth the Wait
This book was worth the wait. I have searched for a book like this since I was seventeen years old. Back in 1972, when I was a junior in high school, I was disgusted by the BS in the church and went in search of my own truth. In response to my search as a gullible and naive teenager, I joined a non-denominational group, which turned out to be a religious cult.

This book, ON DESIRE, explains to me the why I want what I want and why others do what they do. He strongly urges us to stop, think, explore our own reasons for who we allow in our lives and what we allow ourselves to think about. In my view, we have to be the traffic cop to our souls and this book shows me how. (See pages 118-119).

Thoughtful and easy to read for philosophical novices
A former professor of mine recommended this book to me, and I actually read it twice in a row. It's incredibly lucid for a philosophy text; Irvine's style is gentle and meditative, but sharp, and the book has plenty of relatable, real-world examples of what he's talking about woven through it.

Irvine seems to ultimately side with Buddha, Epictetus, and many other thinkers who concur that mastering desire is the key to lasting happiness. But Irvine's perspective is, of course, that of a 21st century human being, so perhaps this book is easier to take than a canonical text. It's not as heavy as it looks. A thought-provoking but not brain-crushing read.