All Desire is Aversion: Schopenhauer’s Case for Viewing Want as Harm

Abstract

Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism turns on a claim about desire. All desire, Schopenhauer suggests, consists in aversion rather than attraction: we are pushed away from states experienced as bad rather than pulled toward states experienced as good. Despite this claim’s importance, most commentators view it as an unsupported assertion. I argue that this consensus is mistaken: Schopenhauer does not leave his theory of desire without defense. This defense consists in a far-reaching reductive argument. Everyone grants that some desires are aversive: the hungry person seeks to eliminate their distressing hunger, the sexually frustrated person seeks to eliminate their distressing frustration, and the bored person seeks to eliminate their distressing boredom. In order to establish that all desires are aversive, Schopenhauer argues that their apparent diversity is an illusion: at bottom, there are only many different ways of expressing the same small set of aversive desires listed in the previous sentence.