Desire must be its own lack, not a merely physiological state

Evidence

An organism deprived of water presents certain positive phenomena: for example, a certain coagulating thickening of the blood, which provokes in turn certain other phenomena. The ensemble is a positive state of the organism which refers only to itself, exactly as the thickening of a solution from which the water has evaporated can not be considered by itself as the solution’s desire of water. If we suppose an exact correspondence between the mental and the physiological, this correspondence can be established only on the basis of ontological identity, as Spinoza has seen. Consequently the being of psychic thirst will be the being in itself of a state, and we are referred once again to a transcendent witness. But then the thirst will be desire for this transcendence but not for itself; it will be desire in the eyes of another. If desire is to be able to be desire to itself it must necessarily be itself transcendence; that is, it must by nature be an escape from itself toward the desired object. In other words, it must be a lack—but not an object-lack, a lack undergone, created by the surpassing which it is not; it must be its own lack of—. Desire is a lack of being. It is haunted in its inmost being by the being of which it is desire. Thus it bears witness to the existence of lack in the being of human reality. But if human reality is lack, then it is through human reality that the trinity of the existing, the lacking and the lacked comes into being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 355

Categorization

• XREF: The reference to Spinoza’s ontological identity connects to the systematic backdrop Sartre assembles against empiricist/psychophysical accounts of desire. — connects to: Desire proves human reality is constituted as a lack — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 354; Desire is non-reflective and cannot posit its own suppression as end; Desire is doomed to failure because coitus and pleasure are not its essential goal — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 987 (+7 more)
• QUESTION: The trinity of existing-lacking-lacked is announced — worth tracing how it maps onto the for-itself-others structure later in the book.

Broader Connections

• Man is fundamentally the desire to be, a lack of being #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1329
• Desire is non-reflective and cannot posit its own suppression as end #expands (0.88)
• Desire is defined by its transcendent object, not by pursuit of pleasure #expands (0.87) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 972
• Desire is a chosen mode of consciousness, not a passive impingement #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 979
• Desire is a distinctive mode of self-choice, not a mere directed longing #expands (0.85)
• Desire is consciousness troubled by its own inapprehensible facticity #expands (0.82)
• Desire is doomed to failure because coitus and pleasure are not its essential goal #exemplifies (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 987
• Pleasure follows from desire rather than desire being caused by pleasure #expands (0.78) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2231