2008年6月18日 星期三

Why we can't have ‘I think therefore I desire’?

Freudian Psychology could be summarize in one sentence, it is ‘I desire, therefore I think.’ Many see that as a one way street but not the converse. It is natural to some to see that desire/primitive motivation programmed by DNA is the basis of Human Psychology. Since we live in a world which gravity is pulling us downward, therefore every organism must grown from the base. Thus the hierarchy of Human Needs is starting from Biological needs to Psychological needs to Philosophical needs but not the opposite order. My thinking is: Why must it like that? Why can't it be otherwise? What made the opposite less likely than what we are currently thinking?
So if we think otherwise. Human is the unique animal with his/her Higher Needs more important than its lower Needs. Thus, the first thing s/he realize after his/her birth is his/her existence; therefore s/he has the greatest need to understand the nature of his/her existence, the inborn cognitive apparatus has forced s/he to make sense of it before anything else. As Eric Fromm asserts, every man need to reason out his/her existence otherwise s/he will go insane. Sanity is survival of what is essential as human, and the essence of human must before anything else. So, a man first figure out he is hungry therefore he need food, it is the hungry as a primitive drive in itself that direct his/her behavior. Therefore it lay open the possibility that inborn-damage of brain/mind could led to cases which a person is too dumb to understand the need of food and take effective solution to relieve his/her hungry, but nothing wrong with his/her sense of hungry. Believe it or not, psychological researches do document cases like that. Thus, the hypothesis of ‘I think therefore I desire’ does led itself some credentials.
How would such a framework of psychology be formed? We just need to reverse the Hierarchy of Human needs. As for the cases which this framework may not fit, I would like to advance a hypothesis that maybe for some human this perspective is best to understand their behavior, while for other the normal Hierarchy of Human needs is more applicable.

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