Insatiableness

Use in the book

When Socrates declares the first definition empty, the companion supplies a behavioural picture: the lovers of gain, every time and out of insatiability, crave even very small things and things worth little or nothing prodigiously. The disproportion is between the intensity of the pursuit and the object’s size or worth. Someone who cannot pass up a negligible advantage could fit this description even without believing it a great advantage. The companion is trying to make excess, rather than a straightforwardly false calculation, do the explanatory work.

Socrates answers that such people cannot knowingly pursue things worth nothing, because that has already been found impossible. He then infers ignorance and the belief that worthless things are worth much. This response catches one part of the description, actual worthlessness, but not all of it. Smallness, slight value and zero value are distinct; so are overvaluing an object and caring too much about an object one correctly values. The dialogue does not explicitly disentangle those possibilities.

The next move asks only whether lovers of gain love gain. With that simple predication the adverbial and motivational qualifications largely fall away. If gain is good and everyone loves good things, everyone qualifies. The result is strongest as an exposure of how an ordinary reproach can be widened by unpacking a compound; it does not independently demonstrate that insatiability is a universal human trait.

The third definition’s spoudazein makes a comparable attempt to specify disposition, now by earnest pursuit of forbidden sources. The closing recapitulation says base men love gains small and great, and good men wish for every good thing. The equal extension is obtained without returning to whether they pursue those objects with the same urgency, proportion or restraint. The shift from “prodigiously” to an unqualified “love” is thus indispensable to a careful reading of the ending.

Places to read

1. 226dὑπὸ ἀπληστίας — The cause of the second definition’s pursuit is insatiability.
2. 226eγλίχονται ὑπερφυῶς — The attachment is marked as excessive in intensity.
3. 227dσπουδάζῃ ἐπὶ τούτοις — The third definition adds earnest commitment to particular sources.
4. 232cσμικρὰ καὶ μεγάλα κέρδη φιλοῦσιν — The final summary retains size but omits the earlier intensity.

Translation in this edition

The edition’s “crave prodigiously” is more informative than a smooth “seek profit”, because it preserves the potentially lost qualification. “In earnest” likewise distinguishes spoudazein from the surrounding verbs of thinking and wishing. The word “even” in the translation captures the force of kai before the small objects. These details belong to the argument, not merely its colourful surface.

Use in the book

I.21 first condemns the person who despises present mercies, perpetually reaches for more, and then despises the new acquisition too. Such a habit defeats happiness because no enlargement of supply repairs the damaged power of esteem. Only after this warning does Traherne pronounce insatiableness good.

I.22 explains the paradox through the relation between the soul and its benefactor. Desire need not be shamefully small, because the giver delights to bestow. Yet the meditation immediately sets acquisitive conquest beside that generous possibility. Pyrrhus’s projected victories promise a rest that he could enjoy already; Alexander’s proverbial demand for further worlds dramatizes an appetite greater than accumulated kingdoms. Multiplication alone cannot provide the right fulfilment.

The two meditations therefore do not celebrate every restless urge. They ask the reader to prize the present world while recognizing a capacity for goods exceeding any private stock of possessions. The soul’s nobility consists in its reach, but that reach is misused when it makes existing blessings invisible or turns other people’s lands into the necessary material of satisfaction. Grateful enjoyment can coexist with unexhausted receptivity.

Places to read

1. I.21Separates a good insatiableness from the disease of despising every present gift.
2. I.22Calls the soul insatiable, then uses conquest stories to expose the inadequacy of mere accumulation.

In this edition

The 2026 note explains the favourable sense as capacity for the infinite. Read the compact paradox with its surrounding criticism; detached from that context it could seem to authorize the covetousness the argument is exposing.