WHAT I MEAN BY DESIRE

By desire, I mean all intensities and "flavors" of desire; and I even include the negative varsions, such as "repulse" and "hate."

So I include things like:

Well, the genus I can specify, but not the varata.

The genus is emotion. Desire is a type of emotion.

But beyond this, specifying WHAT TYPE of emotion can only be done metaphorically, the metephor being an attempt to guide the listener to an introspective discrimination among emotions, homing in on the one emotion that feels like the phenomenon from which the metaphor is drawn.

The metaphor I use is the force of attraction that we observe and feel in our bodies. We regularly draw upon this metaphor when discussing desire. When we desire, we say we feel "attracted" to the desired object, as if we were a piece of iron being drawn to a magnet. It's not all that hard to imagine what it would be like to a made of iron and feeling this pull, for we already feel a similar force on our bodies by way of gravity. So as we explain our desires to others, we metaphorically bring that same feeling of attraction into the realm of emotions. That seems to be the closest we get to defining desire.