The intensity of need grows weaker with repeated satisfaction of a given need. As insatiable need, need is infinite in its process, but as vanished need, it ceases in no need. The result is an ever interrupted with no need sequence of finite needs. Every specific need, exactly as a need, has a tendency to persist; yet it runs just a bit of the process of need, and it shell disappear in the next bit of need. So any particular need is possible only under the condition that the preceding need is completely surmounted, and in doing so that foregoing need is satisfied in the following need. At the same time, the last persists in its insatiability for the sake of the real need. Thus, a need leads to the completion of its preceding needs but persists uncompleted in the latest. These opposing tendencies in every concrete need make it a diminishing need. In its course, a need reveals the full extent of the previous need and only marks off itself a bit – in order to be a need in progress, so not completed – since it will disappear as a need proper when completed.
Historical Backdrop
• HERMANN GOSSEN The Development of the Laws of Human Intercourse and the Consequent Rules of Human Action: the theory of pleasure.
• FRIEDRICH WIESER Natural Value: Gossen's first law.
• WILLIAM JEVONS The Theory of Political Economy: final degree of utility.
• GEORG SIMMEL Philosophy of Money: differential sensitivity.