man and desire

"What is man before beauty cajoles from him a delight in things for their own sake, or the serenity of form tempers the savagery of life? A monotonous round of ends, a constant vacillation of judgments; self-seeking, and yet without a self; lawless, yet without freedom; a slave, yet to no rule. At this stage the world is for him merely fate, not yet object; nothing exists for him except what furthers his own existence; that which neither gives to him, nor takes from him, is not there for him at all. Each phenomenon stands before him, isolated and cut off from all other things, even as he himself is isolated and unrelated in the great chain of being. All that exists, exists for him only at the behest of the moment; every change seems to him an entirely new creation, since with the lack of necessity within him there is none outside of him either, to connect the changing forms into a universe and, though individual phenomena pass away, to hold fast upon the stage of the world the unvarying law that informs them. In vain does nature let her rich variety pass before his senses; he sees in her splendid profusion nothing but his prey, in all her might and grandeur nothing but his foe. Either he hurls himself upon objects to devour them in an access of desire; or the objects press in upon him to destroy him, and he thrusts them away in horror. In either case his relation to the world of sense is that of immediate contact; and eternally anguished by its pressures, ceaselessly tortured by imperious needs, he finds rest nowhere but in exhaustion, and limits nowhere but in spent desire.

His violent passions and the Titans'
Vigorous marrow are his...
Certain heritage; yet round his brow
Zeus forged a brazen band.
Counsel and Patience, Wisdom, Moderation
He shrouded from his fearful sullen glance.
In him each passion grows to savage furty,
And all uncheck'd his fury rages round.

Iphigenia in Tauris

Unacquainted as yet with his own human dignity, he is far from respecting it in others; and, conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every creature that resembles him. He never sees others in himself, but only himself in others; and communal life, far from enlarging him into a representative of the species, only confines him ever more narrowly within his own individuality. In this state of sullen limitation he gropes his way through the darkness of his life until a kindly nature shifts the burden of matter from his beclouded senses, and he learns through reflection to distinguish himself from things, so that objects reveal themselves at last in the reflected light of consciousness."

(Schiller on the purely sensuous man, AEoM, Twenty-Fourth Letter)

he goes on to say that this state is more of an idea, that man has never been such an animal, but also man has never entirely escaped from this state either.