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Onfray is one of those people that needs to construct an enemy in order to say anything. In his case, the enemy is a rather amorphous "establishment", and he has managed to convince himself that this "establishment" has been unfair to the presocratics. I think you are probably right to suspect that he often projects his own opinions upon his lost heroes.
I think that a tradition that identifies the objects of desire as being problematic is closer to the way psychologists look at desire today than is one which sees desire itself as a Bad Thing. Although one may feel that there is an ambient, diffuse condition of longing - for what, one knows not - there are also fairly sharply differentiated kinds of desire. The impulse that makes it difficult to pass the Fnac without rushing in and buying an iPad, or buying more DVDs than one will ever have time to watch, is different from the gay impulsion that takes me home to my wife each evening. Anticipating the pleasure that I may get from an evening in the Baron Rouge is different from the joy I anticipate when meeting an old friend whom I have not seen for some years. And, as both Blake and Sade stand witness to, there are other, less socially acceptable desires, which spring from different cognitive sub-systems.
From this point of view, the admonition to eschew desire as such is wrong-headed. One might argue that the reasonable man or woman should cultivate those impulsions and wants that can be encouraged without causing harm to oneself or to others, and ought to curb those that are harmful.
Blake would disagree: "the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." Although I am a stipended horse, I think I see what he meant.
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