The hunger of the knowing animal

There is perhaps no more poignant, measured and magisterial statement of the ultimate goal of the contemplative life than these opening lines from Spinoza's Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding. “Continual supreme happiness”: could there be a better expression of the profoundest hope of humankind, once basic necessities have been met? I have entitled this chapter “The Fourth Hunger”, but it could (almost) as well have been called “Spiritual Hunger”: a catch-all term for a hunger that still remains when other hungers have been met; when our biological hungers have been addressed; when the hunger for pleasure has passed into a state of sufficiently complex diversity as to be able to keep itself at a distance from the hunger for hunger that is boredom; and when our various forms of our hunger for others – for love, for esteem, for power – have become sufficiently diffused as no longer to have to face their tragic insatiability.