Hegel's Concept of Desire

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Hegel's Concept of Desire Hegel’s Concept of Desire SCOTT JENKINS there is a longstanding tendency in philosophy, and in some pre-theoretical contexts, to regard persons as essentially disembodied points of view on the world. In the thought of figures as diverse as Plato, Descartes, and Thomas Nagel, this tendency results in the division of a person, with features of our conscious lives such as bodily awareness, the feeling of desire, or the relation to other persons relegated to inessential status. In what follows I propose one way of understanding some early developments in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that involves attributing to Hegel a concern with denying that these aspects of human experience may be sorted in this manner. My exposition of Hegel’s position focuses on his concept of desire, which figures most prominently in his assertion at the beginning of the fourth chapter that “self-consciousness is desire in general” (¶167).1 There are almost as many understandings of this assertion as there are interpretations of the Phenomenology, but I believe the reading I offer to be novel. I propose that we understand Hegel’s identification of self-consciousness and desire as the claim that desiring plays an important role in an apperceptive subject’s relation to itself. In arguing for this reading, I demonstrate that there exist deep affinities between Hegel’s remarks on self-consciousness and desire in the Phenomenology and Fichte’s treatment of these topics in his applied philosophy during the Jena period, in particular in his System of Ethics.2 Understood in this way, Hegel’s concept of desire figures in an ambitious attempt to establish relations of interdependence between subjective capacities regarded as essential to consciousness and those often relegated to inessential status. 1Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit [Phenomenology], trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). References to the Phenomenology of Spirit are to Miller’s translation and will be made within the text using the paragraph numbers in Miller, while all other references will be made in notes. I have also made use of Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952). 2Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The System of Ethics, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). References are to this edition and Sämmtliche Werke [SW], ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971). I have also made use of Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre nach den Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995). Scott Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 47, no. 1 (2009) 103–30 [103] 104 journal of the history of philosophy 47:1 january 2009 I begin in the first two sections with an examination of Hegel’s concept of desire itself and understandings of this concept in the work of John McDowell, Robert Pippin, and Terry Pinkard. I argue in section one that one strategy for interpreting Hegel’s remarks on desire, what I term the “contextual” reading, fails as a read- ing of the text. In section two I examine the relations between Hegel’s concepts of desire, life, and self-consciousness, eventually arriving at a more adequate understanding of the concept of desire. In these sections, I aim to abstract from the question of how desire emerges from the dialectic of the first three chapters of the Phenomenology in order to focus on Hegel’s actual use of the concept in “Self-Consciousness.” While this approach to the text certainly violates the spirit of Hegel’s methodological commitment to constructing each stage in the develop- ment of the Phenomenology from those that precede it, I believe that worries about the “necessity” of transitions in the work, as well as obscurities associated with this particular transition, warrant this approach to Hegel’s discussion of desire. In section three, I explain how desire, understood as a determination of a liv- ing being, can play a role in an explanation of self-consciousness that is neither genetic nor foundational. Hegel’s construction of such an explanation of self- consciousness in the Phenomenology, I argue, constitutes one of his most important inheritances from Fichte. Section four places Hegel’s views on the relation of desire to self-consciousness within the broader context of the opening chapters of the Phenomenology. Here I show how Hegel’s employment of the concept of desire can be regarded as part of a larger concern with demonstrating the interrelation between apparently unconnected subjective capacities. In addition, I argue that desire plays a surprising role in Hegel’s account of the reality of objects of cognition. Two preliminary points are worth noting here. First, I will have relatively little to say about the other obviously Fichtean element in Hegel’s account of self- consciousness: the concept of recognition. With the exception of a few remarks in section four, my discussion of desire in Hegel will simply take for granted a rough understanding of recognition that is, I believe, uncontroversial. This is not because I find the notion of recognition to be unimportant in Hegel’s thought. On the contrary, I take recognition and desire to be equally essential to his account of self- consciousness. A more complete account of Hegel’s views on self-consciousness and subjectivity would obviously need to examine the relation between desire, recognition, and intersubjectivity. Second, while the reading of Hegel that I propose here is quite Fichtean, I do not mean to suggest that Hegel intended the early chapters of the Phenomenology as an appraisal of Fichte, or that he had in mind the particular passages from Fichte’s works that I discuss. However, I do believe that reading Hegel through Fichte has the benefit of making certain themes in Hegel clearer than they would otherwise be. It is often the case that Hegel’s concerns in the Phenomenology be- come clear only against the background of his understanding of his predecessors. And while I believe that this is especially so in the case of Hegel’s identification of self-consciousness and desire, the reading of this identification thatI propose also receives considerable support from the text of the Phenomenology itself. hegel’s concept of desire 105 1 . the contextual reading of desire If we read Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is desire as applying to conscious- ness in general, then we must treat this identification as a claim about the kind of things we all are—a claim about rational, sentient beings.3 That is the reading of Hegel that I will pursue beginning in section two, but Hegel’s introduction of desire in ¶167 suggests an alternate reading of this identification, one that does not entail any conclusions concerning consciousness in general. If we take the term ‘self-consciousness’ to refer primarily to a particular stage in the develop- ment of the observed consciousness in the Phenomenology, then the identification of self-consciousness and desire becomes a claim about the observed consciousness at this point in the dialectic, namely, upon its realization that the object of cognition is essentially an object for consciousness, determined by its capacities for cogni- tion.4 Hegel would be telling us that in virtue of having reached the end of the reflection found in the first three chapters of thePhenomenology , the “protagonist” of the work now finds itself as desire. And it would be natural to understand such desire as a desire for some particular state of affairs. Hegel can be read as suggesting such an understanding of this identification in his discussion of the two moments of consciousness, one in which consciousness relates to objects as independent and essentially other (the point of view of the first three chapters of the work), and one in which consciousness sees this difference between itself and its objects as one without being (der an sich kein Sein hat) (¶167). These two moments of consciousness are prima facie incompatible. One and the same subject, it would seem, cannot relate to objects both as independent and as nothing more than appearances for it. But the observed consciousness has by this point in the Phenomenology discovered that these two points of view are essential to it, insofar as the realist standpoint of the first three chapters—the point of view of natural consciousness that no one can abandon for any significant length of time—has as its condition an implicit self-relation in any relation to an object.5 This revelation might be regarded as motivating the task of constructing a self- conception that enables the observed consciousness to see these two moments of consciousness as compatible. If such a self-conception is what consciousness needs at this point, it is tempt- ing to regard Hegel’s identification of self-consciousness and desire as a partial description of the problem that confronts the observed consciousness here. This is 3I n what follows I abstract from Hegel’s use of the term ‘in general’ (überhaupt) to characterize desire in the assertion “self-consciousness is desire in general” (¶167). On my reading of Hegel, the need for this qualification becomes evident only later in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology. I return to this point in section four. 4By ‘the observed consciousness’ I mean the subject of the various experiences in the Phenomenology, such as the experience of discovering that some conception of knowledge or its object is inadequate. This figure is theobserved consciousness insofar as we, the readers of the Phenomenology, are to consider the significance of its experiences and order those experiences in such a way that they constitute a single course of reflection.
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