That the object of desire takes on a transcendental and existential status could be explained by evolutionary psychology, or by psychoanalysis or by the theology of a personal God. As components of, or deductions from, a theory of human nature these are mutually exclusive, but as pointers to a phenomenology they merely indicate different ways in which a space can be opened within the experience of desire and by which it can serve as a pointer away from experience and towards its matrix.