David R. MacIver's Blog

Recovering desire with care

This post was originally published at notebook.drmaciver.com.

I’ve recently finished reading “The Reasons of Love” by Harry Frankfurt.

It’s… one of those books that I don’t know whether or how to recommend, because I got a huge amount out of reading it, but I don’t know how much of that was actually in the book and how much of it was in the context which I was reading it in. It’s short, well written, and about as engaging as a moderately dry work of analytic philosophy can be. I also cried multiple times while reading it. So, I guess I recommend it, and if you don’t like it then oh well it’s very short.

One of the things it discusses is what it means to care about some outcome, and how this contrasts with desiring it. He says you can desire some outcome without particularly caring about it. e.g. When bored, you might watch a movie to alleviate that. You desire to watch the movie to alleviate the boredom but that doesn’t mean you particularly care about the movie. You can care about your work, but be so burned out that you can’t manage any desire to do good work.

Frankfurt suggests that caring consists, in part, of wanting or thinking that it is important to desire the end. When you care about something, and also desire it, that desire feels harmonious with your intentions. When your desires - either their presence or their absence - conflicts with what you care about, you desire (or perhaps just will) to change your desires. When things are going well, your desires are the same as (or at least compatible with) your cares, and when things are going badly, the two diverge.

In this view, part of what enables the “you gotta” attitude is that you care about the thing that needs doing (you think it’s important) even if you don’t want to do it.

This distinction between desiring and caring is interesting contrasted with some things I’ve thought and written about caring before. Back in ancient days I wrote about burnout as acedia, in which I said:

Acedia (pronounced a-seed-ee-a) is a state of feeling unable to care. It’s not the mere absence of caring about things, but the feeling that caring is difficult or impossible. As a sense of hopelessness is to hoping, a sense of acedia is to caring.

I think that when I wrote this, I was very much conflating desiring and caring. I actually think the post works better with Frankfurt’s notion of caring, but at the time I think I was very much implicitly conflating an inability to want things and an inability to care about things, and I think these are actually pointing at very different experiences.

I have pretty longstanding issues with depression, and I’m not very good at being happy. I’ve often found it’s hard for me to really desire things in any stable way - I’m certainly not unable to have desires, but they tend to be short lasting and not particularly intense, and tends to be oriented much more around comfort and reducing distress than in seeking joy.

I think this difficulty in desiring things would previously have seemed to me like acedia in the sense I outlined, but this clearly conflicts with the idea that what I struggle with is caring. If you look at how I actually behave it’s really obvious that I do care about things. I care a lot, and I care quite stably about them. I care so much it hurts. Whether I manage to act on that caring is highly variable, but a lot of what I do is driven by a burning sense that this is important. Some of the things I care about are clearly in conflict, but I don’t know that they have to be.

Frankfurt says that when you find yourself caring about something but not desiring it, you desire to desire it and will seek to rekindle your desire for it. I think that’s true, but I’m left with a question… how?

I think the answer is that there is no sludge. There is no generalised failure to desire. What there is is a collection of individual desires, all of which I have thorugh one reason or another lost the ability to express.

But I still care about them, and given that I should be able to express them again. Starting from the care, and tracing the pathways out from there and seeing where they are blocked, you should be able to find the ability to want that thing again, or at least acknowledge that you really do no longer care about it and also don’t believe you should and start to let that go.