I\u2019ve found it. The perfect expression of modern consumerism, and perhaps of modern life itself. It is rewarding yet empty; meaningless yet philosophically fascinating. It is the purchase of a new smartphone. <\/p>\n
God, I love a new phone. A shiny new luxury, a new toy, perfectly packaged. Onyx screen, gleaming metal. Owning this, you feel, you are one step closer to actually being Steve Jobs, or perhaps living in a penthouse in Dubai. It slips smoothly from the box. You set it up so as to best replicate the experience of your last one. Whereupon, effectively, it disappears.<\/p>\n
What have you got out of this? Why did you bother? Perhaps phones don\u2019t do it for you. Consider, instead, shoes, bags, watches, whatever. Once in a while, sure, you might experience the lasting pleasure of ownership. Usually, though? Much as you may deny it, even to yourself, you don\u2019t really want to own these things. You want to get them; to experience that flashing orgasmic hit of moving between not having and having. But why? Fundamentally, what\u2019s in it for any of us?<\/p>\n
Philosophers aren\u2019t very comfortable with this question. Those rare philosophers who try \u2014 those in the tradition of Adam Smith, say \u2014 tend to make an argument on societal grounds: that your acquisitive-ness represents a broader social good, leading to technological advancement and economic prosperity. Very obviously, though, you don\u2019t buy an iPhone thinking \u201cthis makes me happy because it will help Apple\u2019s profits and make a marginal difference to offering continued employment to downtrodden workers in Xinjiang\u201d. So really, they\u2019re answering a different question altogether.<\/p>\n
Most philosophers, though, approach these questions from the other end. As in, they wish to tell you that even if this process does make you happy, it shouldn\u2019t. Probably it was Plato who got the ball rolling here in his Phaedrus, dividing the soul into three parts, roughly corresponding to reason, emotion and desire. We can quibble whether the last two are really that different. Either way, Plato argues strongly that the best life is one in which reason rules over both. As in, sure, it\u2019s natural to want a phone you don\u2019t need, but Plato is pretty damn sure you shouldn\u2019t give in. Not, of course, that Plato even had a phone. Although if he had one, I\u2019m sensing a Nokia.<\/p>\n
Two thousand years later, not much had changed. For Karl Marx and later Antonio Gramsci, people wanting stuff they didn\u2019t need was likewise a problem. Both, in different ways, dealt with this through the notion of \u201cfalse consciousness\u201d: the idea that we are somehow duped into acting against our best interests. <\/p>\n