 Moreover, desires as nowadays standardly conceived set a proposition as to be made true at some point in the future.  But the object of dialectical activity does not lie in the future: living your life is a dialectical activity, and you are already living; your life does not wait to be lived until it is over.  If you are somebody’s friend, you are already participating, you hope successfully, in the friendship.  If you are philosophizing in an appropriately philosophical frame of mind (and so, always striving better to understand what philosophy is), you are already philosophizing.  So although the many simpler subsidiary actions that are constantly being spun off by dialectical activities can often be thought of as controlled by this sort of propositional attitude, dialectical activity cannot itself be construed as desire-driven, in this standard sense of ‘desire’.