Christian von Ehrenfels on Desire as “Promotion of Happiness”

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), a prominent member of the Brentano School, is well known for his subjectivist value theory, whereby being valuable means being the object of a subject’s desire. Accordingly, the literature has interpreted his account of desire as the foundation of his axiology. However, such an interpretation overlooks the intrinsic richness of this account. This paper proposes, in contrast, to understand von Ehrenfels’s approach to desire as an autonomous psychological theory. I first emphasize that, for von Ehrenfels, desires are intentional, emotional experiences, before turning to his original reductionist definition of conative phenomena, according to which we desire an object when its representation as real ‘promotes our happiness’ compared to its representation as unreal. In doing so, I clarify the experiences of happiness and representation, critically review the formulations of this definition, and conclude that the ‘promotion of happiness’ best captures a procedure for knowing our desires.