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In ''[[A Treatise on Human Nature]]'', [[David Hume]] suggests that reason is subject to passion. Motion is put into effect by desire, passions, and inclinations. It is desire, along with belief, that motivates action. [[Immanuel Kant]] establishes a relation between the beautiful and pleasure in ''[[Critique of Judgment]]''. He says "I can say of every representation that it is at least possible (as a cognition) it should be bound up with a pleasure. Of representation that I call pleasant I say that it actually excites pleasure in me. But the beautiful we think as having a necessary reference to satisfaction." Desire is found in the representation of the object.
 
[[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]] begins his exposition of desire in ''[[Phenomenology of Spirit]]'' with the assertion that "self-consciousness is the state of desire ({{lang-de|Begierde}}) in general." It is in the restless movement of the negative that desire removes the antithesis between itself and its object, "...and the object of immediate desire is a living thing...,", andan object that forever remains an independent existence, something other. Hegel's inflection of desire via [[stoicism]] becomes important in understanding desire as it appears in [[Marquis de Sade]]. [[Stoicism]] in this view has a negative attitude towards "...otherness, to desire, and work."
 
Reading [[Maurice Blanchot]] in this regard, in his essay ''Sade's Reason'', the libertine is one, of a type that sometimes intersects with a Sadean man, who finds in stoicism, solitude, and apathy the proper conditions. Blanchot writes, "...the libertine is thoughtful, self-contained, incapable of being moved by just anything." [[Apathy]] in de Sade is opposition not to desire but to its spontaneity. Blanchot writes that in Sade, "for passion to become energy, it is necessary that it be constricted, that it be mediated by passing through a necessary moment of insensibility, then it will be the greatest passion possible." Here is stoicism, as a form of discipline, through which the passions pass. Blanchot says, "Apathy is the spirit of negation, applied to the man who has chosen to be sovereign." Dispersed, uncontrolled passion does not augment one's creative force but diminishes it.
 
In his ''[[Principia Ethica]]'', British philosopher [[G. E. Moore]] argued that two theories of desire should be clearly distinguished. The [[hedonistic]] theory of [[John Stuart Mill]] states that pleasure is the sole object of all desire. Mill suggests that a desire for an object is caused by an idea of the possible pleasure that would result from the attainment of the object. The desire is fulfilled when this pleasure is achieved. On this view, the pleasure is the sole motivating factor of the desire. Moore proposes an alternative theory in which an actual pleasure is already present in the desire for the object and that the desire is then for that object and only indirectly for any pleasure that results from attaining it.
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