Schopenhauer, Dawkins, and Lacan on Why Desire Never Ends

When the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer emerged in the nineteenth century, the European world back then was head over heels in love with reason. People believed man was a logical creature, he thinks first, then decides. Philosophers since René Descartes had been saying “I think, therefore I am,” as if thinking were the root of everything.

The Will That Doesn’t Care About Happiness

Schopenhauer flipped the whole table. He said thinking itself is merely an employee working for something older, which he called “the will to live.” Picture it as a blind inner force. It doesn’t speak, has no moral plan, doesn’t care about happiness or justice. All it cares about is continuing. A person imagines he’s choosing, while in reality he’s usually just justifying choices imposed on him by desires deeper than himself. To Schopenhauer, the mind is like the lawyer who steps up to defend a verdict already decided, not the judge who issued the ruling.

Schopenhauer himself didn’t think the will’s grip was total. He carved out one exception: aesthetic contemplation. Standing in front of a painting, or losing yourself inside a piece of music, momentarily quiets the will instead of feeding it, because for those few minutes you’re not wanting anything from the object in front of you, you’re simply perceiving it. That’s a narrow door, and Schopenhauer never pretended it led anywhere permanent. But it matters, because it means his pessimism wasn’t a dead end. It was closer to a diagnosis with one narrow, temporary treatment attached to it.

Genes That Use Us to Survive

More than a century later, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins appeared with a book that flipped many concepts too, called The Selfish Gene. He was talking about the genes themselves. The idea, simply, is that genes are the units trying to persist through time, and we, to them, are just an advanced vehicle for transport. The whole body, with its brain, emotions, and ambition, is a complex machine that evolved to increase the genes’ chances of survival. Love is important because it brings people together to build families. Jealousy preserves the mate. Ambition gives you social standing that boosts your chances of success. Even self-sacrifice sometimes has an evolutionary explanation, when it protects family members who share part of your genes. Of course this doesn’t mean man is just a chemical robot, but it shows that a huge part of our desires has roots older than our own consciousness.

Dawkins would resist being folded too neatly into the same story as the other two, though. The Selfish Gene is a book about the mechanism behind a pattern, not a claim that conscious wanting is a performance staged by DNA. Genes don’t know anything, want anything, or plan anything; the metaphor of selfishness describes what survives across generations, not what’s happening inside any single person’s head on a given afternoon. Read too literally, it collapses into the same fatalism Schopenhauer had already offered a century earlier, which rather defeats the purpose of grounding an argument in modern biology instead of philosophy.

Why Satisfaction Never Lasts

But even if you achieve everything you wanted, why does the feeling of lack come back again? Here enters the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, one of the hardest thinkers of the twentieth century, though his core idea is surprisingly simple. Lacan said man doesn’t chase objects themselves, he chases the feeling that this object will complete him. The child thinks the toy will make him happy forever, the young man thinks the job will solve all his problems, another thinks fame is the end of the journey. He arrives, and shortly after discovers the old feeling is back. The emptiness is still there. So he starts chasing a new goal. Desire here is like a mirage, the closer you get to it, the further it moves ahead. That explains why people with money, fame, and power still live in constant anxiety.

Orson Welles gave this exact idea a face decades before any of these three theories had names attached to broad audiences. Citizen Kane spends two hours on a man who accumulates newspapers, art, and enough wealth to build his own private kingdom, and the film’s closing revelation is that none of it touched the one thing he actually wanted, a sled from a childhood that ended too abruptly for him to process. Kane isn’t really a cautionary tale about greed. He’s an illustration of Lacan’s basic claim: the objects piling up around him were never substitutes for what he’d lost, they were stand-ins his mind kept mistaking for the real target.

What Schopenhauer, Dawkins, and Lacan actually share isn’t a single mechanism, it’s a shared refusal to take the feeling of wanting at face value. One locates the puppeteer in a blind metaphysical will, one in a few billion years of genetic competition, one in a hole language can point at but never fill. None of them think you’re lying when you say you want something. They just don’t think the reason you give yourself is the real one underneath it.