Submissive First

Design Studies 4 Submission 1

Title: The Secularity of Need

Reading: “The World of Goods” (Reading A)
Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood

Question: 2. Discuss human needs as being either physical or spiritual. Discuss the assumption that physical needs are “more justified” as they are based on necessity whereas spiritual needs are considered to be somewhat superfluous and unjustified.

Response:
Humans are animals so it can be suggested that they have certain basic needs. These needs can be seen as the setting necessary to sustain life of a species. Available Food, water and air as well as the appropriate environment and enough of a community to avoid destructive inbreeding embody this requirement. It is often suggested that without these an animal, or for that matter a human, will start by searching to fulfil immediate needs such as a consumable atmosphere, then search for food, following this they will live to find shelter of some description. When personal survival is ensured efforts will be made to find a mate. Of course this model is a vast generalisation and there are known anomalies such as many insects that live with a complex societal structure in large groups. Without there society, these animals cannot live very effectively so for many species evolution has allowed a lone insect to start a colony if it must. However a given element of the community will only do this in dire circumstances, for instance, when the rest of the population has been decimated. Humans also require social interaction, as without it they generally develop to become defined as insane or inhuman. The difference between humans and animals lies here, humans have a mind to break, in a sense that in this day is not treated as physical. Hence the creation of something more than the physical world, which we seem to require to survive as part of our social network.
Given that “spiritual needs” can be extended to include anything that is not immediately required by a creature to sustain life, it is by definition that we can conclude that with physical needs fulfilled, life is liveable, for a while at least. As noted earlier there is some proof behind the suggestion that humans will not survive without fulfilling at least some of these spiritual needs. “Need” is by definition logistically exclusive so we know that to survive in the most complete sense we do in fact need to provide for all the spiritual needs as well as those of the physical world.
Evidently it is possible to show that needs are present and that they can be classed and, as “The World of Goods” states so clearly there is ample misinterpretation of how they are classed. Though a rough definition and an analytical proof for the relevant aspects of need can be generated everything becomes unclear as complexity increases and society is introduced. For the sake of this argument, lets reassert the distinction between physical and spiritual needs as found in the reading. Physical needs are those that directly support the life cycle, spiritual needs are those that seem accessory. An American term describes this well, “creature comforts”; the things that make life better. Based on the earlier argument we can state that these things are not accessory and hence do not make life better, likewise in can be suggested that since we can conceive of more there is no such thing as happiness or one’s needs being fulfilled. This is not completely mad because as we well know need is a function of consumption. When something needs food, it searches for and consumes the food it can find. Hence when we consume things that some would consider accessory, we are proceeding to the next tier of need. This is then labelled spiritual need. In this case it seems best to discern between conventional spiritual need and this new “consumer need”. Consumer need is the modern human need for more and more, the psychological requirement for such goods as televisions and new shoes. This was once known as gluttony however as it is part of our current nature it has become well known and appreciated by economists of the world. People have not always been so bad.
In the context of today’s society we see people in need quite often. This is arguably a necessity in maintaining the western societal paradigm; nevertheless there is visible need of a basic kind on the streets of any city. As mentioned in “The World of Goods” needs are not uniform from place to place, because setting and systems are vary hugely. This, however disheartening, is a prim illustration of the fundamental function of needs and their classification. With our tailored definition we have developed we know that a need is primarily what is required to survive. Hence a need is only existent in the right context, as need is functionally related to context; when there is no food, there is need for food. A solution it so seeks an environment where food is generally available. Then the next level of need becomes important. The important point is that there is no ideal solution, as far as we know. Otherwise, there would be no need for us in the first place. Amoeba would have been good enough except for the concept supply and demand.
The fact that we, the western world, are capable of making judgements of need means little to the actual reality of how people react to their requirements. Where our existence becomes important is with economic systems. Economics and the world scale systems of today are so complex that they have fallen from human control. However, by the nature of their design they are composed of need based relationships with classification and not much more complexity that our own. Human need may be superfluously definable as either physical or spiritual, but like all systems, resolution does not exist and a model is not accurate until all the possible information is gleaned. We are destined to keep going far beyond this illusion of sentience and intelligence. We are alive to survive at the cost of the greater good.