beyond wishful thinking 21nology of desire bears the mark of our insatiability and reveals its con-
nection with our powers of transcendence, with our longing for the
infi nite.
Th e projected quality of desire shows, as well, how our insatiabil-
ity relates to our mortality and our groundlessness. Th e brevity of life
lends urgency to the pursuits of desire: our time will end while we con-
tinue to seek one unworthy object aft er another, each the proxy for the
unreachable horizon of that which could satisfy us. Th e terrors of death
grow in the imagination with the expenditure of life on this equivocal
chase.
Our uncertainty about the grounding of our existence (or rather the
failure of all the available proposals to ground it) leaves us without a
route by which to go from the tangible and defective particulars that we
can grasp to the intangible and indiscriminate absolute that we voice-
lessly seek.We have not understood our insatiability until we have formed a view
of whether and under what conditions we might overcome it. In de-
scribing insatiability as an incurable defect in the human condition,
I mean to claim that we cannot escape it, not at least without prejudice
to the attributes that make us human and that might make us more hu-
man by making us more godlike.
Consider fi rst the suggestion that in certain societies and cultures
men and women cease to experience desire as insatiable. Insatiability
would then be a local rather than a universal feature of human experi-
ence. Th ose who study savage societies from the vantage point of the
ideas that have been dominant in modern anthropology oft en repre-
sent those societies as marked by a theology of immanence and a prag-
matics of suffi ciency.
Th e theology of immanence, in contrast to the spiritual beliefs that
have been dominant since the religious revolutions of the fi rst millen-
nium b.c., places the sacred or the divine squarely within the natural as
well as the social world. It thus provides no basis for a personal or im-
personal divinity transcending what is manifest in this world in which
we fi nd ourselves. If our insatiability has theological or cosmological
presuppositions, these presuppositions are denied by such a view of the
world.