Irrational Desire

The concept of irrational desire occupies a central and contested place across the depth-psychology corpus, drawing on threads that run from Platonic tripartition and Aristotelian faculty psychology through Stoic passion theory to Jungian depth hermeneutics. Plato’s Republic establishes the foundational architecture: the soul contains parts whose motivational drives resist or actively contradict the rational faculty, and the governance of these forces by reason — or its failure — defines the moral character of the individual and the polity. Aristotle inherits this problematic but reframes it: appetite and spirit are non-rational not in the sense of being merely bestial, but in that they lack the deliberative capacity for grasping means-end relations; yet they are susceptible to habituation and reason’s influence over time, permitting genuine virtue rather than mere suppression. The Stoics sharpen the stakes considerably: irrational desire — epithumia conceived as a ‘fresh opinion’ of impending good — is a diseased movement of the rational soul itself, an ‘irrational elevation’ that the sage extirpates rather than moderates. Posidonius dissents, insisting that irrational impulse cannot be explained purely through rational misjudgment, restoring something like Plato’s bipartite conflict. Jung approaches the same territory from below, treating irrational desire as a compensatory eruption from the unconscious that rational consciousness systematically undervalues, a carrier of symbolic energy indispensable to psychological wholeness. The tension between therapeutic suppression, rational education, and depth-psychological valorization of the irrational remains the governing drama of this term’s life in the corpus.

In the library 16 passages

pleasure as an ‘irrational elevation,’ fear as an ‘irrational withdrawing,’ and so forth. Not every affective movement is an irrational movement, for there are also such things as ‘well-reasoned elevation,’ ‘well-reasoned withdrawing,’ and ‘well-reasoned reaching,’ which are affective responses but not emotions.

Graver expounds the Stoic technical definition of irrational desire as an affective movement distinguished from its well-reasoned counterparts, clarifying that irrationality is a specific psychodynamic quality, not a generic feature of all desire.

Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis

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appetite and spirit are non-rational forms of motivation, and a similarly clear and robust sense in which the cognition involved in these forms of motivation can, and to some extent must, be non-rational.

Lorenz, arguing on Aristotle’s behalf, establishes that appetite and spirit constitute structurally non-rational forms of motivation even within a soul whose totality participates in rationality, grounding the philosophical coherence of the distinction.

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

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spirited desires stem from a part of the soul that lacks the capacity for practical thought… it will not, and cannot, generate its distinctive form of response by engaging in a bit of practical thinking.

Lorenz specifies the structural incapacity of appetite and spirit for practical deliberation as the precise criterion distinguishing non-rational desire from rational motivation in Aristotle’s psychology.

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

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something else in her struggles and exerts itself against reason, impelling her to act in a way that reason opposes.

Lorenz identifies the hallmark phenomenology of irrational desire in Aristotle: a motivating force that conflicts with and actively opposes the deliverances of reason, as revealed by self-controlled and uncontrolled action alike.

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

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reason can influence appetite, and no doubt spirit as well, so as to calm, or cause to subside, intense occurrent non-rational desires.

Lorenz delineates the range of reason’s practical authority over non-rational desire in Aristotle, showing that while reason cannot eliminate such desires by fiat, it can moderate their intensity through habituation and direct influence.

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

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there is no way at all in which appetite’s general evaluative outlook derives from, and perhaps is sustained by, correct reason.

Lorenz draws a sharp contrast between spirited desire, which can be shaped by reason’s evaluative outlook, and appetitive desire, whose evaluative character is wholly independent of rational appraisal.

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

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Aristotle’s theory of human psychology not only leaves room for, but in fact requires, a conception of non-rational cognition that is applicable to ordinarily developed, adult human beings.

Lorenz argues that non-rational desire and its attendant cognition are not pathological exceptions but constitutive features of normal adult human psychology in Aristotle’s framework.

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

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reason, the superior, and passion, the inferior, will be harmonized by the influence of music and gymnastic… and keep the desires in proper subjection.

Plato’s Republic articulates the normative ideal of psychic governance in which rational and spirited faculties collaborate to subordinate irrational desires, establishing the political metaphor that anchors subsequent discussions.

Plato, Republic, -380supporting

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impulse is sometimes generated as a result of the judgement of the rational part, but often as a result of the movement of the p[assionate part].

Long and Sedley report Posidonius’s critical dissent from Chrysippean intellectualism, insisting that irrational desire has an independent motivational source irreducible to cognitive misjudgment.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting

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the appetites and passions have an essential motivational role to play in human excellence — both in getting a child to excellence in the first place and in motivating continued action according to excellence in the adult.

Nussbaum presents Aristotle’s constructive rehabilitation of appetite and passion: far from being simply obstacles to be subdued, irrational desires are necessary participants in moral development and the motivational life of the virtuous adult.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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what confronts the desire to drink is not a general desire for health or pleasure, but specifically an aversion to drinking.

Lorenz, parsing Plato against a Humean reading, argues that psychic conflict involves a specifically targeted aversion that cannot be reduced to a competing rational desire, preserving the structural distinctiveness of irrational desire.

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

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the irrational part of the soul, by various forms of education, has arrived at the present condition of civility as a result of the civilizing devices applied to the irrational motion of desire.

Long and Sedley record the Epicurean-influenced view that irrational desire is the raw material of social regulation, its ‘motion’ constituting the problem to which law, custom, and education are historically addressed.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting

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the symbol is irrational. When the rational way proves to be a cul de sac — as it always does after a time — the solution comes from the side it was least expected.

Jung revalues irrationality as the generative source of symbolic solutions unavailable to rational consciousness, implying that irrational desire carries prospective psychological energy that reason alone cannot supply.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting

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There persists a certain confusion about the classification of imagination among the mental faculties… it is sometimes divided into a rational and irrational part.

A commentator on Aristotle’s De Anima flags the unresolved taxonomic difficulty of situating imagination — the cognitive medium of non-rational desire — within or between the rational and irrational divisions of the soul.

Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting

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phantasia is different from thought, and that none of the cognitive achievements of the brute animals counts as an act of thought.

Lorenz situates phantasia — the perceptual-imaginative cognition underwriting non-rational desire in animals and humans alike — as categorically distinct from rational thought, establishing the cognitive basis for the irrational-desire distinction.

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

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Related terms