[À L'ESSENTIEL] 🎯 Le paradoxe du désir

We will see what the desire for Rousseau is at the same time a force, but a force that does not necessarily claim to be satisfied. At Rousseau, the desire does not necessarily have to be satisfied. And it goes even further, that is to say that for Rousseau, it is when the desire is not satisfied that it leads us to happiness. And that is what makes the originality of the Rousseau thesis. Happiness is the non-satisfaction of its desire. Because for Rousseau, what leads to happiness is not the satisfaction of desire, what leads to happiness is the desire itself. What leads to happiness is the fact of desire. So before entering into the detail of this conception, I suggest you read the extract of the New Elohim, in which Rousseau exposes precisely this conception of the relationship between desire and happiness. I quote, "Malheur to whom nothing has desired, he loses, so to speak, all that he possesses; we enjoy less of what we get than of what we hope, and we are happy before being happy. Indeed, the man, avid and stubborn, made for everything he wanted and can obtain, received from heaven a consulant force that brings forth from him all that he desires, that he submits to his imagination, that makes him present and sensible, that he gives it to him in some way, and, to make this imaginary property sweeter, he modifies it to the grace of his passion. But all this prestige disappeared in front of the object itself. Nothing no longer embellishes this object in the eyes of its possessor. We figure out what we see. Imagination is nothing more than what we possess. Illusion ceases or begins joy. The country of the chimeras is in this world the only thing to be lived, and it is the birth of human things, body, being existing by itself, there is nothing beautiful than what is not. What does Rousseau try to say to us through this text? He tries to tell us something extremely simple, it is that when we desire, when we desire something, when we desire someone, we do not desire something, and we do not desire someone. What we desire, it is the representation that we do not do. Rousseau tells us that in all desire, there is a part of imagination, we imagine the object more than we perceive it. In other words, we desire something without necessarily knowing it, as we can desire a flat without necessarily knowing what taste it has. Which means that your perception has generated in you an image of the thing, a representation, representation on which your desire will be born. But your desire will not be born from a real knowledge of the thing. Now let's apply this to desire towards another human being, to the desire that we can prove to a person. Desire someone, desire to have a sexual relationship with this person, desire to pass the time with her, share an intimate relationship, in any case there is the idea of ​​an attraction. Desire for a person is the attraction for this person. Attraction, attraction is what draws us towards the object. And you see that again we use a word from the lexical field of physics. The object acts on us as a magnet, and the magnet is a magnet. But what attracts us towards the person is first what we perceive and what our imagination will build from this perception. That is to say, it is never the only perception that feeds our desire. Our desire is fed by the imagination, that is to say by the extension of the perception by our imagination. Imagination, that is to say literally the fact of forming an image, an image opposite to reality. We find here the Platonic idea of ​​the simulacrum, of the illusion, of the fantasy. We desire in the other the object of our fantasy. We desire in the other the qualities that we preach to him by our imagination. And so what we say to Rousseau is that when we desire someone, we do not desire someone. We desire the projection that we make of this person. We do not desire someone, we desire the representation that we make of it. In his text, Rousseau decrees the imagination as a consoling force. We must understand what that means, a consoling force. A consoling force is the faculty that we have to adapt our perception of reality to what we would like it to be. If you prefer, it is pleasant to represent things as we would like it to be. And it is because it is pleasant that we all have this tendency to see in things what we would like to see, to approach in the other what we would like the other to be. And by doing so, we increase our desire. In reality, it is not the other that makes the desire in us born, it is us who use the other as a way to feed our desire. But the other is only a support of our imaginary desire. The other is only an opportunity that we find to project on him what we want. This is the real desire, the projection of either in the other. We do not desire the other, we desire either in the other. So you see, there is really this idea that all desire is the construction of an illusion. And Rousseau does not denounce it at all, on the contrary, he does not criticize it because for him, it participates in the process of embellishment. This process of embellishment by which we will amplify the qualities of the other, we will sometimes even invent them, because it will make our desire more pleasant, it will make our thoughts more sweet, and so it will make our experience of desire an experience of happiness. By embellishing the object of our desire, we make our desire a happiness. This is the idea of Rousseau, the desire leads us to happiness because through the process of imagination, we attribute it to the thing or to the person of the qualities that she does not have. We will translate it according to our ideal, and so we are happy, we can contemplate it. This is what the desire is looking for, contemplation, contemplation of the ideal being. Through the desire, we idealize. And again, you will find that I insist, but the etymology of idealized, ideal, is transformed into idea. Idealize someone, it is his reality, it is transformed into idea, it is transformed into pure abstraction, it is the whole year as being real. When we desire the other, in reality, we do not care about the other. Because if we are interested in the other, we will be interested in these flaws, we will take them into account. We will not seek to create a veil of illusion between us and this person. We will not project on her what we want her to be, we will seek to know what she is. We will seek to know what she is, but suddenly, we will find her much less beautiful, we will find her much less ideal, much less conformed to the model we like. We approach the other as a model, and if we realize that the other does not correspond to this model, if we realize that the other does not respond to the expectations that we know ourselves built by imagination, we will then prove disappointment. We will consider that the other has stopped responding to our expectations. But is it the other who has stopped responding to our expectations, or is it ourselves who have built expectations that we did not have to build? It is ourselves who make films, it is ourselves who write the story of our desire. The other is only the support of inspiration. It is really very important to understand this idea of ​​the mastery of the conception of the desire for Rousseau, which is that desire is our tendency to apply on the object. And in philosophy, when we talk about objects, we talk about things as well as people. Apply on the object the properties that are not those properties to her, but ours. The one we wish we would find in her. And so when Rousseau writes "All this prestige disappeared before the object itself", it means that when we are confronted with reality, it is at this moment that the desire ceases. And when the desire ceases, happiness evaporates. Because we no longer find in the object what has made us idealize, and what has made us idealize, it is precisely the fact that we do not know it, that we do not really know it. The desire is the cloud of illusion that we form from an object that inspires us. In other words, the desire feeds on emptiness, the desire feeds on ignorance. It is because we ignore what is the thing that we are going to fill this ignorance by imagination. And that we are going to naturally fill this emptiness with beauty and ideal. Desire is the expression of our need for ideals. And that is why Rousseau refuses to condemn the desire, because there is no condemnation the tendency of human beings to want to contemplate beauty. It is beauty that makes the meaning of life, it is beauty that makes the value of life. Badness to those who have nothing to desire, badness to those who no longer seek beauty, badness to those who renounce their ideals, badness to those who are satisfied with reality. Rousseau in his texts sometimes takes up romantic accents. He is someone who highly values the search for the absolute, the taste of the infinite, the permanent detachment of what is. He is someone for whom the human being possesses a quality that distinguishes it from the other beings of nature. This quality is imagination, the imagination whose desire, the desire that makes him access ideal. And so finally, as is the paradox that Rousseau forms at the end of his text by saying that the country of chimeras is in this world the only thing to be inhabited. The country of chimeras is imagination, it is the country of illusions, it is the one where the impossible is at its place. In the country of chimeras, we exclude the impossible, we exclude the ideal. On the contrary, we sit on his table and share the fruits. The country of chimeras is in this world the only thing to be inhabited. Is it the birth of human things, body, being, existing by itself? There is nothing beautiful than what is not. Is it the paradox of existence, when outside of being that we strive to join, when outside of this absolute, which crosses us and which surpasses us? There is finally nothing more beautiful than what exists only in our imagination, nothing more beautiful than what we create by our imagination, than what we create by our desire, our desire being our effort to join the beauty, the force that leads us to the absolute, the force that leads us to the ideal. The only thing that is as beautiful as being is being non-being. This is what we do to be, this is what does not need to exist to be.