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Ratio Desiderii

Ratio Desiderii

Ratio desiderii — the reason of desire — is the first of four ratios in the Seba Method, a Peterson-formulated procedure for reading the soul through the rational structure of its own longing. The phrase asserts that desire has a ratio: a measure, a proportion, an account that can be given of it. The work of the ratio is to find that account.

The procedure is classical in substrate. Diotima’s teaching in the plato-symposium establishes the structural claim: a desire for beauty implies that one does not possess beauty (Plato, Symposium, cited by Jung in jung-symbols-transformation and re-read by Lacan, Seminar VIII). To reason from a desire is therefore to read the lack the desire announces. james-hillman gives the operative description: “Eros, as intermediary, creates his own psychic space… which interrupts, redirects, symbolizes behavior… Time intervenes between impulse and action. Direct action is impeded, becoming indirect and imaginative” (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, p. 73). The ratio is the inserted interval in which desire becomes legible to itself.

The procedure draws on three load-bearing capacities already in the Lineage. From Jung, the feeling-function as a rational function that imparts value to a content (Jung 1921, §724) — the ratio is feeling exercised as judgment. From Hillman, the three-faces-of-eros — himeros, anteros, pothos (Hillman, A Blue Fire, p. 286) — as the anatomy the ratio reads to identify which mode of longing is moving. From the Homeric record, the thumos as the affective seat in which the hero already deliberates about what he wants (Sullivan 1995, p. 56). The ratio recovers the Homeric structure: reasoning in the desire, not reasoning about a desire from outside.

In the ego-self-axis frame (edward-edinger), the ratio reads longing as a coded message about what the self requires the ego to become; in typological terms (marie-louise-von-franz), pothos is often the signature of the inferior-function speaking.

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