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Definitions, and Comment:
Being a Description of the World
By Eli Siegel

20. Desire

Desire is a feeling thought of as cause.

Every feeling is a desire, for every feeling can be thought of as doing something; that is, being a cause. Feelings, like things, and as things, have their rest and motion aspect. In so far as feelings are pleasure or pain, they go towards, remain in, or go away from. Every feeling has a tendency or direction; because when feelings are looked on as in motion, they must have direction, for all motion has direction.

Every feeling is about the whole self. Feeling seen as in motion, with the self as cause, is desire. To see a self, as self, being a cause, is to see that self as desire. What a self desires is what it wants; and therefore every feeling seen as desire has to do with what the self is incomplete or discontented without. Feelings show what a self or mind is after. They are mind-things: these mind-things, thought of as having motion, and therefore direction, are desires. We all have an unlimited number of desires, which, like feelings, are in a mighty, intricate aggregate, moving as a whole and moving within itself, always.

© 1945 by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism
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