Appetitive Desire

Appetitive desire — rendered in Greek as epithumia and treated by Aristotle under the broader heading of orexis — stands as one of the most contested and generative concepts in the depth-psychology tradition that runs from Plato and Aristotle through modern affective neuroscience. In Lorenz’s authoritative study, the term designates the non-rational, pleasure-oriented motivational faculty seated in the lowest part of Plato’s tripartite soul and in the corresponding non-rational stratum of Aristotle’s psychology. The central tension in the classical literature concerns the degree to which appetite is genuinely non-rational: Plato insists the appetitive part lacks logos and cannot perform means–end reasoning, yet must somehow account for the oligarch’s attachment to money; Aristotle refines the picture by distinguishing appetite from spirit precisely in that appetite’s evaluative outlook can never be derived from, nor sustained by, reason’s own commitments. A second axis of debate concerns the relationship between appetitive desire and phantasia: Aristotle holds that desire capable of motivating purposive locomotion requires suitable phantasia, yet allows that the capacity for desire may exist without phantasia in animals possessing only touch. Panksepp’s affective neuroscience reopens the terrain by mapping appetitive arousal onto the SEEKING system — a dopaminergically mediated forward-locomotion and incentive-search circuit distinct from consummatory reward — thereby grounding classical distinctions in sub-cortical neurodynamics. The concept thus travels between tripartite soul theory, faculty psychology, and neurobiological motivational systems.

In the library 17 passages

desire comprises appetitive desire, spirited desire, and wish. And all animals have at least one of the senses, touch. For that which has perception, there is both pleasure and pain… for this is desire for the pleasant.

Lorenz cites Aristotle’s De Anima to establish that appetitive desire is the desire for the pleasant and is co-extensive with the capacity for perception in all animals, forming the broadest and most fundamental type within the tripartite taxonomy of orexis.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis

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The virtuous person’s appetitive desires are as they are not because reason has managed to persuade the non-rational part… They are as they are because the virtuous person has learned to take pleasure in those things, and only in those things, that one should take pleasure in.

Lorenz argues that Aristotle distinguishes virtue’s harmony of appetite with reason from rational persuasion: appetitive desire is reshaped through habituation rather than rational argument, preserving its fundamentally non-rational character.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis

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while anger in a mature and ordinarily conditioned human being depends on, and gives expression to, a general evaluative outlook that derives from… correct reason, there is no way at all in which appetite’s general evaluative o[utlook]

Lorenz identifies the decisive Aristotelian contrast between spirit and appetite: spirit’s evaluative outlook can be derived from and sustained by reason, whereas appetitive desire’s orientation is categorically incapable of such rational derivation.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis

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we called it the appetitive part, because of the intensity of its desires for food, drink, sex, and all the things associated with them, but we also called it the money-loving part, because such desires are most of all satisfied through money.

Lorenz quotes Plato’s Republic to show that the appetitive part is named for its primary biological desires and its derivative attachment to money, raising the central interpretive problem of whether such secondary attachment requires covert rational capacity.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis

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it is, much like its other desires, based on, or consists in, some kind of appreciation of, or attachment to, something or other (in this case, money) as a direct source of pleasure.

Lorenz defends Plato against the charge that appetitive desire must reason instrumentally, arguing that even the oligarch’s attachment to money is grounded in direct non-instrumental pleasure-valuation rather than means–end calculation.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis

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the emotive tendencies aroused by this type of brain stimulation most clearly resemble the normal appetitive phase of behavior that precedes consummatory acts… consummatory behavior causes a transient inhibition of appetitive arousal.

Panksepp distinguishes the appetitive phase of motivational behavior — mediated by the SEEKING system — from consummatory reward, arguing that appetitive arousal is constitutively forward-directed and is inhibited rather than fulfilled by consummation.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis

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need states such as energy depletion lead to dramatic increases in motor arousal only when animals are in the presence of incentive stimuli — namely, those stimuli that predict the availability and characteristics of relevant primary rewards such as food.

Panksepp reframes appetitive desire neurobiologically as incentive-driven arousal: bodily need states alone do not generate appetitive behavior; external incentive stimuli that predict reward are the proximate triggers of appetitive mobilization.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis

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he seems to think that he can infer from this that they also experience appetitive desire. So if desire in fact requires phantasia… then it turns out that animals of all kinds must have phantasia.

Lorenz tracks an apparent tension in Aristotle between the universality of appetitive desire among perceiving animals and the thesis that desire requires phantasia, concluding that the latter claim must be restricted to desire that supports purposive locomotion.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

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Forming a desire that can support, and account for, goal-directed locomotion requires having some suitable phantasia.

Lorenz articulates the qualified Aristotelian thesis that phantasia is required not for appetitive desire as such but specifically for the formation of desires that motivate and explain purposive locomotion.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

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The distinct forms of motivation can interact harmoniously, with each one of them fulfilling its proper function. The person whose motivations are disposed in this harmonious way is, according to Plato’s theory, virtuous.

Lorenz frames appetitive desire within Plato’s tripartite motivational theory, where virtue consists in the harmonious collaboration of appetite, spirit, and reason rather than the suppression of appetitive desire.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

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Perhaps the arousal of the system did not activate an internal experience of reward but instead excited the animal into an appetitive search strategy, and the SS was more reflective of an ani[mal’s appetitive state].

Panksepp reinterprets lateral hypothalamic self-stimulation data by proposing that the brain system mediates appetitive search arousal rather than consummatory pleasure, aligning the neuroscientific evidence with a distinct appetitive motivational state.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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when the question arises whether spirit, or anger, belongs to the appetitive part, an idea that in fact seems plausible at least to Glaucon… the fact that spirit can oppose, and conflict with, a desire of appetite

Lorenz uses the possibility of conflict between spirit and appetite as Plato’s principal criterion for their partition into distinct soul-parts, establishing the theoretical ground for the independence and specificity of appetitive desire.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

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pursuit and avoidance are presented as arising from perceptions of something pleasant or painful… Certain forms of perceptual activity either result in, or constitute, certain forms of desiderative activity.

Lorenz identifies Aristotle’s account of the perceptual roots of appetitive desire, noting that in passages on non-locomotor desire, pleasure and pain-mediated perception directly engenders desire without requiring the mediation of phantasia.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

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it helps mediate appetitive learning so that animals will become eager and exhibit expectancies in response to cues that have been previously associated with arousal and disarousal of this system.

Panksepp describes how the SEEKING system mediates appetitive learning by encoding predictive cues as incentive stimuli, situating appetitive desire within a broader architecture of expectancy and forward-looking motivational arousal.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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appetite is in no position to grasp the fact that going to the shop is a means to satisfying its desire to smoke… Appetite may respond to such a representation by giving rise to a motivating condition that impels me to pursue this course of action.

Lorenz argues that while appetite cannot perform genuine means–end reasoning, it may have limited cognitive access to reason’s representations and respond to them motivationally, preserving the non-rationality constraint on appetitive desire.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

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Plato makes it very clear… that the example he is offering concerns a desire for, and an aversion to, a simple, unq[ualified object].

Lorenz clarifies the logical structure of Plato’s argument for soul-partition by emphasizing that the relevant conflict involves simple, unqualified appetitive desire rather than complex or conditioned wanting.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006aside

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