Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"Toivakainen offers a sensitive, original, and rich account of the interplay between reason, ethics, and desire. He draws attention to the problem of desire so often repressed in philosophy to open new possibilities of thinking about 'mind', 'body', and 'soul'." (Maria Balaska, University of Hertfordshire, UK)

"Toivakainen's book Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire is both simple and ambitious in its aim, reviving some of the original idea of what philosophy is all about, and how it is done. Through novel readings of key philosophical texts, the book develops a new and original perspective on the self-other relationship and on the nature of desire. It is a brave philosophical statement which, in its very existential stance, merits our attention--independently of any possible agreements or disagreements." (Alenka Zupancic, Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, European Graduate School)

This is a book about the moral-existential nature of, and the desire inscribed in, the deadlocks generated by our attempts to ground and exhaustively explain the concerns that provoke philosophical reflection.

While the book argues that these deadlocks are symptomatic of an impossibility internal to the very enterprise of grounding and explanation, it does not, however, declare any substantial groundlessness. Rather, the book shows that the choice between secure ground and groundlessness, or between final explanations and the inexplicable, is ultimately arbitrary. Instead, through readings of the so-called hard problem of consciousness, of Descartes' first principle of philosophy, of Plato's dialogue Gorgias, and of Lacan and Wittgenstein, Toivakainen argues that the actual point of significance, the sense of the impossibility or deadlock, must be traced back to the claims of desire that inform the very movement of grounding and explanation, a desire that is inscribed in a constitutive and inescapable address between self and other. In short, the book translates and rewrites points of structural deadlock into their (original) moral-existential landscapes by following traces of desire.

Niklas Toivakainen is a researcher at the University of Helsinki and co-editor of Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, Palgrave Macmillan.