_On Desire_ is hardly a dense philosophical tome. Full of insight, wit and wry quotes, it is a book likely to change your life. Just doing the research caused the author to be suspicious of his own desires. Through personal examination and a review of the literature - philosophical, religious, and scientific - Irvine found that while desire formation may on the face of it seem a rational process, it is in fact mostly out of our control.



Even if we've never fallen in love, in our desires we are like those who have. No one chooses or plans to fall in love. It happens without notice and without warning and we end up dancing like puppets, our strings pulled by something mysterious and unfathomable. We fool ourselves by imaging our desires to be products of the intellect, coldly calculated in cost/benefit ratios. While we are indeed capable of forming such desires, they are weak and most always in service to the stronger emotive desires - hunger, pain, fear, sensual pleasure, the need to be loved, to seek social approbation. We are in thrall to the emotions because in the long process of evolution they insured our survival.



Are we trapped? Irvine doesn't see anyone mastering his desires entirely. Such a person would be incapable of feeling good or bad, and thereby of forming any desires whatsoever. He would appear as a deeply drepressed individual. What we should seek, Irvine recommends, is relative mastery of our desires, a state that reaches fruition when we achieve a state of tranquility, "a sense that we are lucky to be living whatever life we happen to be living."



This can be achieved through a number of the "desire-management" strategies outlined in the last section of the book, including Buddhist meditation, Stoic philosophy, belief in a controlling power, or joining religious communities such as those of the Amish or Hutterites. Irvine finds that while the advice these approaches offer is sometimes contradictory, each works in its own way, the evidence for their efficacy being "that those who have adopted [them] have, in many cases, made considerable progress toward mastering their desires."



This is one of the best books I have read in recent years for being so clear in its aims, presentation, and conclusions. I'd like to share _On Desire_ with everyone I know, and look forward to to Irvine's newest volume on Stoic philosophy, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. Those interested in a similarly tranformative text might like to try Matthieu Ricard's Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill.



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