Philosophy of desire

In philosophy, desire has been identified as a philosophical problem since Antiquity. In Plato's The Republic, Socrates argues that individual desires must be postponed in the name of the higher ideal.

Within the teachings of Buddhism, craving is thought to be the cause of all suffering. By eliminating craving, a person can attain ultimate happiness, or Nirvana. While on the path to liberation, a practitioner is advised to "generate desire" for skillful ends.

History

Ancient Greece

In Aristotle's De Anima the soul is seen to be involved in motion, because animals desire things and in their desire, they acquire locomotion. Aristotle argued that desire is implicated in animal interactions and the propensity of animals to motion. But Aristotle acknowledges that desire cannot account for all purposive movement towards a goal. He brackets the problem by positing that perhaps reason, in conjunction with desire and by way of the imagination, makes it possible for one to apprehend an object of desire, to see it as desirable. In this way reason and desire work together to determine what is a good object of desire. This resonates with desire in the chariots of Plato's Phaedrus, for in the Phaedrus the soul is guided by two horses, a dark horse of passion and a white horse of reason. Here passion and reason, as in Aristotle, are also together. Socrates does not suggest the dark horse be done away with, since its passions make possible a movement towards the objects of desire, but he qualifies desire and places it in a relation to reason so that the object of desire can be discerned correctly, so that we may have the right desire. Aristotle distinguishes desire into appetition and volition.

Désiré (baritone)

Désiré (29 December 1823 – September 1873) was a French baritone, who is particularly remembered for creating many comic roles in the works of the French operetta composer Jacques Offenbach. Désiré was a stage name; the artist's real name was Amable Courtecuisse, but for most of his life he was generally known as Désiré.

Life and career

He was born in Lille, or a nearby village, and studied bassoon, singing, and declamation at the Lille Conservatory. His first appearances were at small theatres in Belgium and northern France beginning in 1845.

In 1847, he arrived at the Théâtre Montmartre in Paris where he met Hervé. He asked Hervé to provide him with a musical sketch (drawn from Cervantes' novel Don Quixote), in which the tall and thin Hervé as the Don was pitted against the short and plump Désiré as Sancho Pança. The sketch inspired what was later dubbed the first French operetta, Hervé's Don Quichotte et Sancho Pança, which premiered in 1848 at Adolphe Adam's Théâtre National at the Cirque Olympique, but with Joseph Kelm, instead of Désiré, as Sancho Pança.

Desire (disambiguation)

Desire is a sense of longing or hoping. It may also refer to:

Concepts

Music

Albums

Songs

Bliss

Bliss may refer to:

People

Bliss (image)

Bliss is the name of the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. It is an image of a rolling green hill and a blue sky with cumulus and cirrus clouds. The landscape depicted is in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County, California, United States.

Overview

Former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format camera while on his way to visit his girlfriend in 1996. While it was widely believed later that the image was digitally manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O'Rear says it never was. He sold it to Corbis for use as a stock photo. Several years later, Microsoft engineers chose a digitized version of the image and licensed it from O'Rear.

Over the next decade it has been claimed to be the most viewed photograph in the world during that time. Since it was taken, the landscape in it has changed, with grapevines planted on the hill and field in the foreground, making O'Rear's image impossible to duplicate for the time being. That has not stopped other photographers from trying, and some of their attempts have been included in art exhibits.

Bliss (12 Rods album)

Bliss is a 1993 album by 12 Rods.

Track listing