Download Hegel's Description of Desire and Self-Consciousness: A Phenomenological Analysis and more Essays (university) Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity!
Bruno Cassarà 12.15. Recognition and Intersubjectivity Begierde as Theory and Praxis in Hegel’s Phenomenology Introduction It has long baffled readers and scholars alike that the concept of desire [ Begierde , alternatively translated as “appetite” or even “concupiscence”] makes a rather abrupt appearance toward the end of ¶167 of the Phenomenology , and seemingly without any contextual cue. Much like Hegel’s description of science in his Introduction, and much like observed consciousness itself, desire simply comes on the scene: “self-consciousness is Desire in general.”^1 If the Phenomenology is the itinerary of consciousness’ evolving morphology, then it stands to reason that desire, as that which characterizes self-consciousness in general, should be seen as central to this work’s very progression. Yet despite the importance the author places on desire, some commentators view it as playing a relatively restricted role within the text as a whole: that of one characteristic among many which contribute to self-consciousness’ certainty of itself. The most influential of these readings, namely Robert Pippin’s, and Terry Pinkard’s, also coincide with what has been called a “non-metaphysical” reading which takes the Phenomenology to be mainly an epistemological text. This paper will attempt to show that both Pippin’s and Pinkard’s epistemological interpretations of desire are unsatisfactory in significant ways. Both fail to recognize the crucial practical role that desire plays in the initial dynamic of self-consciousness, subjecting it instead to what the authors see as self-consciousness’ purely cognitive activity. Ultimately, the failure of these authors’ understanding of desire is the failure of a purely epistemological reading of the (^1) G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), ¶167.
Phenomenology. With the help of Judith Butler and Peter Kalkavage, both of whom have rigorously metaphysical readings of the text, I will argue for a conception of desire as a practical activity. Ultimately, desire’s practical nature shows that knowledge, i.e., observed consciousness’ essential activity, its movement toward its object, should no longer be conceived as purely cognitive activity, but rather as both cognitive and practical. The Birth of Desire: Explanation, Infinity, and Self-Consciousness As was stated above, the concept of desire appears rather suddenly at the beginning of the fourth chapter, where self-consciousness is just beginning to come into its own. Self- consciousness itself has arisen as a result of the Understanding’s efforts to give an explanation of the object. I will here attempt to give a reading of the last paragraphs of “Force and the Understanding” so as to situate the development of consciousness into self-consciousness, that is, the movement of observed consciousness that first introduces desire as an explicit concept. In its attempt to establish an intimate relation with Force, which always already dirempts itself into two opposing and opposed forces, Understanding recognizes that there is nothing firm substantial in either side of Force when it is taken by itself. The fixed unity of Force lies rather in the Notion of Force, in the universal which the Understanding recognizes behind the phenomenal activity of Force and which holds the two opposites together. This Notion, the unity of opposites that contain one another, is what makes up the “inner world” that the Understanding posits beyond the phenomenal world of appearances. (Findlay’s commentary likens this inner world to Kant’s noumenal realm because the Understanding cannot know anything positive about it.)^2 But the Notions of the inner world, void of content and unified as they are, are Laws, the purely (^2) J. N. Findlay, “Analysis of the Text,” in Hegel’s Phenomenolgy of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), ¶146.
positive and negative electricity as specified in its Law, is only an external necessity. In other words, there is no necessity to the duality of electricity except in that the Understanding posits it as necessary. The Understanding thus suddenly finds that its positing has inverted the relation between Law and Force: whereas Force was taken to be dyadic in its nature and Law to be its unifying Notion, now Force is a simple unity and Law contains duality in itself.^7 Understanding is now in a position to recognize that “it is, therefore, only its own necessity that is asserted by [it]; the difference, then is posited by the Understanding in such a way that, at the same time, it is expressly stated that the difference is not a difference belonging to the thing itself .”^8 In other words, necessity is only internal to the Understanding, which finds it in the sensible world only because it posits it in the first place. Understandings self-conscious positing of necessity as the principle unifying the inner and outer worlds is called Explanation. Now, Explanation thinks itself capable of discovering the ground and cause of natural phenomena by positing differences as a way of understanding these phenomena. However, the problem is not only that the posited differences do not belong to the thing itself, but even more importantly that this positing activity can only end up in tautology. As Kalkavage puts it, Explanation must reduce to tautology because “force and law have the same logical structure. [...] When we ask the understanding why something is the case, it pretends to show us the underlying ground and reason but in fact only repeats the fact that prompted the question in the first place, now under the cloak of a mysterious force.”^9 But if the principles of Explanation have the same structure as the Wandel und Wechsel of the sensible world, then Explanation’s tautological structure in effect brings about yet another inversion, namely that of the supersensible world itself. (^7) Logic of Desire , 77-9. (^8) Phenomenology of Spirit , ¶154. (^9) Logic of Desire , 79-80.
The supersensible world, what Findlay calls “a tranquil kingdom of laws,”^10 is inverted into a second supersensible world in which the newly revealed difference within the Law is this world’s Law. The Understanding has sought to turn the sensible world into a world of theory, but then tried to bring this theory into the sensible. In the contradiction of its own idealism, the Understanding finds that the truth of the ideal world, which is in turn the truth of the sensible world, is again a world in which difference and flux reign—and thus accomplishes what the first supersensible world could not, i.e., it incorporates motion and change into its structure. However, this world does not only invert mathematical laws, but also human and spiritual ones. This goes to show not only that the inverted world is the truth of the world of theory, but also that, as the double negative of the sensible world, it stands in relation to it as a difference that is nothing. The sensible world’s double inversion ultimately shows that there is only one world.^11 The discovery of the inverted world as the double negative of the sensible world sheds new light on the relation of essential nature and outward manifestation as such. We see at once the clear opposition between the two and the fact that each opposite, as the opposite of its opposite, contains the whole of this opposition in itself. The supersensible world is the inverse of the sensible, and the inverted world is both the opposite of the inverted world and the opposite of the sensible. But the inverted and the sensible stand, as we have seen, in a relation of difference that is no difference, and the inverted is the supersensible in the sense that it is the result of its application. Sensible and supersensible thus contain each other as opposites, Such a distinction within identity Hegel calls Infinity, “since the thing is not bounded by an opposite alien and external to it.”^12 Infinity is not the unending that always goes on, like space or the series of positive integers, but rather “self-sameness within self-differentiation, the positing of a (^10) “Analysis of the Text,” ¶ (^11) Logic of Desire , 81-3; “Analysis of the Text,” ¶157-159. (^12) “Analysis of the Text,” ¶160.
comes into itself, the object as appearance does not yet totally belong to an inner world , to a world that self-consciousness is , but is still perceived as separate from it. Self-consciousness first arises in an ambiguous state, as it is no longer exclusively consciousness of what is other than itself. Self-consciousness recognizes itself in the tautological structure of its “I am I,”^16 but its relation to its object is still not perceived as a relation to itself. To be sure, the object is appearance because self-consciousness perceives it as an object for it , but at the same time the unity of self-consciousness and what appears for it has yet to be internalized. Self-consciousness thus finds itself craving that “this unity…become essential [for it],”^17 and this craving is Desire. In Hegel’s famous turn of phrase, “self-consciousness is Desire [ Begierde ] in general.”^18 Cognitive Interpretations of Desire The origins of Desire lie in a persistent break within self-consciousness itself. The unity of self-consciousness and its object has not yet become essential, and Desire appears as the manifestation of self-consciousness’ need for unity. However, all this can be (and has been) interpreted in several ways. What does it mean to say that the unity of self-consciousness has not yet become essential? In what does this essential unity consist? Or, to put it differently, what kind of appropriation of the object will satisfy self-consciousness’ Desire, and, ultimately, what is Desire and what does it want for itself? At stake in these questions is not only a series of more precise definitions, but a truer understanding of consciousness’ very movement toward its object at the beginning of its turn toward itself. I now turn toward two of the most influential non- metaphysical interpretations of the Phenomenology in order to show that a purely epistemological interpretation of Desire does not do justice to the text. (^16) Phenomenology of Spirit , ¶167. (^17) Ibid. (^18) Ibid.
Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness has been hugely influential since its publication in 1989. It initiated contemporary post-Kantian interpretations of the Phenomenology as well as The Science of Logic and is a crucial reference point for subsequent analytic readings of the Phenomenology. Pippin takes his interpretive cue not from what Sussman calls “the Hegelian aftermath,” but rather from the Kantian and post- Kantian context from which he takes the Phenomenology to have developed. Philosophy in the wake of Hegel was, to be sure, quite at odds with itself when it came to commenting and interpreting Hegel’s system. Pippin reasons that even if the “real” Hegel is the Hegel of the obscure and often grotesque metaphysical interpretations, this is not the historically influential Hegel. In fact, much of post-Hegelian philosophy has interacted with “the more manageable ‘edges’” of the system, without attempting to give a coherent view of the whole. Armed with the weight of this tradition, Pippin feels justified in attempting an interpretation of Hegel’s Idealism that does not imply a commitment to “a philosophically problematic theological metaphysics.”^19 Specifically, he proposes to understand “absolute idealism” starting from and as a direct variation to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and the resulting transcendental unity of apperception. Hegel’s Phenomenology would thus be read as “an extensive replacement of Kant’s deduction of the objectivity of [the Categories]” following “the denial that a firm distinction can ever be usefully drawn between intuitional and conceptual elements in knowledge.”^20 Now, this approach can be criticized, as well as appreciated, from many sides and through myriad methods, but here I merely want to point out that taking Hegel’s rejection of the Kantian limitations on the mind as the sole interpretive key necessarily results in an exclusively (^19) Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. (^20) Hegel’s Idealism , 9.
Pippin points out that there is clearly a problem of skepticism implied in any idealism (presumably external-world skepticism), and although he takes Hegel to be promising a solution —“self-consciousness exhibits itself as the movement in which this antithesis is removed”^24 — this interpretation does not help him understand how Desire could be relevant to this problem. Because the problem of the unity of self-consciousness has been interpreted as a thoroughly epistemological problem, namely that of skepticism, it is now quite difficult to fit the practical category of Desire into an answer to a purely theoretical problem. In fact, Pippin must finally reject the importance that Hegel clearly gives to the concept of Desire in the text: [...] Although Hegel indeed is beginning to suggest that the inherent self-consciousness of experience cannot be understood without attention to the acting, desiring, purposive nature of a self-conscious subject, he clearly introduces “desire” as the general term for such activity in an intentionally provisional way, as the most immediate, and so ultimately untenable, characterization of such activity.^25 Pippin has backed himself into a corner by insisting that the problem of the unity of self- consciousness is fundamentally an epistemological problem. He can only claim that Hegel is not really serious about Desire, that it must be a provisional category that is posited for the sole purpose of being rejected. He continues: If we read even a little further in Hegel’s text, it will become increasingly difficult to understand Hegel as introducing pragmatic or existential resolutions to epistemological problems, since it will soon turn out that which desires a subject determines to pursue, which ends to satisfy, and indeed what counts as true satisfaction, are no more a possible independent ground for account giving than the empirical manifold or the rational beyond.^26 Since the problem of the unity of self-consciousness is the problem of account giving, namely of what makes it possible for observed consciousness to give an account of its relation to the object as well as to itself, Desire and its satisfaction obviously cannot be an adequate ground for account giving. But this is precisely the point. In entering the realm of life, Hegel is no longer (^24) Ibid. (^25) Hegel’s Idealism , 148. (^26) Hegel’s Idealism , 148-9.
concerned with mere account giving, with mere theoretical cognition of the object. This is exactly what the end of “Force and the Understanding” has shown to be an insufficient approach to the object. In other words, the Aufhebung of mere consciousness to self-consciousness also causes a supersession of the problem of knowledge. To be sure, account giving of Explanation was the approach to the object that consciousness proposed as the solution to its own separation from it. However, as consciousness becomes conscious of itself, the problem of the object ceases to be a merely epistemological problem, and the entry into the realm of life, of bodies and of Desire attests to just this point.^27 Already in the introduction to his work Pippin decided that the whole problematic of the Phenomenology , in all its movements and claims, has only to do with epistemological problems inherited from Kant. It is no surprise, then, that Desire, as that which most escapes theory and rational knowledge, should stand out as something that simply has nothing to do with epistemology or with the Critique of Pure Reason. Terry Pinkard’s equally well-known work, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason , has a similarly epistemological interpretation of the work but takes Desire more seriously than Pippin does. Though Pinkard takes himself simply to “pursue Hegel’s arguments and to reconstruct them in a way that is both faithful to the text and that brings out what is at stake in Hegel’s project,”^28 he is explicit about the influence Pippin’s reading had on him, and Paul Redding sees his work as linked to the pragmatist (^27) It could be argued—and both Kalkavage and Findlay hint at this—that Hegel leaves behind Kant’s transcendental idealism in his solution to the appearance of the supersensible and inverted worlds. If the supersensible world is, or at least can be taken to be, the world of the Ding an sich , the vacuous and unknown superstructure that holds up the sensible world, then the collapse of the supersensible into the sensible through the mediation of the inverted world would be the claim that the separation of phenomenon and noumenon is logically dissatisfying and cannot be the ultimate answer to the problem of relation between subject and object. However, this argument will have to be taken up elsewhere. (^28) Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
of consciousness which is aware that any cognition of an object is already mediated by its “social space” and the inferential licenses that this space permits. Like Pippin, Pinkard is now faced with the question of what the emergent practical sphere of Life and Desire has to do with epistemological questions. Rather than outright dismissing Desire as extraneous to the inquiry, as Pippin does, Pinkard takes the cognitive resources afforded by the subject’s position in its social space to be tools for the sake of successfully interacting with the environment, an environment which is pervaded with Life and is thus elicits in us various desires. The relation between self-consciousness’ epistemological resources and its Desire is therefore one of utility: “The objects of the world count for it as having such and such properties only in terms of how they contribute to the satisfaction of the organism’s desires.”^34 Now, this would be a more adequate role for Desire within the context of the fourth chapter. Self-consciousness is Desire in general, and so all of its cognitive activities are found to have the satisfaction of Desire as their end. Desire and its satisfaction would thus be a kind of tēlos , that for the sake of which self-consciousness cognitively interacts with its environment. However, Pinkard effectively inverts this relation when he actually describes these activities. The inversion, as Jenkins convincingly shows, lies in the fact that Desire and its satisfaction are in truth the secondary factor of the relation. In being the end of all cognitive activity, Desire is effectively the means by which beliefs and concepts are refined. As Jenkins points out and as I hope to show, in the first part of “Self-consciousness” “Hegel quite clearly presents an account of the development of desire itself , not an account of desire setting in motion changes in a set of concepts.”^35 Pippin and Pinkard ultimately share the same problem, namely, they take self- (^34) Ibid., 48. (^35) Scott Jenkins, “Hegel’s Concept of Desire,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47, no. 1 (January 2009): 113.
consciousness and its turn to the practical still to be concerned with the objective cognition that occupied naïve consciousness’ efforts in the previous chapters. For both Pippin and Pinkard self- consciousness is a relation to itself in the sense that, since cognition of the object is now a moment of self-consciousness and not a relation to another in-itself, self-consciousness now relates to itself as it continues to be concerned with the cognition of objects. However, if self- consciousness is Desire in general, then its reflection on itself must be, in an essential way, a reflection on its Desire which is guided by Desire. Begierde cannot be taken to be inessential to self-consciousness’ self-relation, not even as an end that hones what is taken to be its exclusively cognitive activity. Desire and The Practical Essence of Self-Consciousness As I hope to have shown in the analysis of Pippin’s and Pinkard’s epistemological accounts, it is not sufficient to construe desire merely according to cognitive categories or practices. With the advent of Life and consciousness’ entrance into its own native realm of truth, the Phenomenology also overtakes the epistemological concerns of its first three chapters. But it does not overtake them in the sense that it leaves them behind. The essential question of self- consciousness remains the same as it is throughout the book, namely the question of knowledge of the object. However, knowledge is for Hegel a union, a synthesis of subject and object that overcomes the separation that persists in the provisional stages of knowledge. That this separation persists even after the Understanding provides an Explanation of its object is the reason for the emergence of Life and self-consciousness. The question of the nature of Desire is thus the question of the kind of knowledge that an object such as Life requires. As Kalkavage states,
notes, Desire repeats the same drama as Explanation, albeit with an added sensuous dimension.^38 Let us highlight those crucial characteristics of Force and of Explanation which most poignantly show the parallelisms with Life and Desire. First, it is important to note that it is the nature of Force always to move beyond itself. In Hegel’s own words, “the ‘matters’ [particular manifestations] posited as independent [things] directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. But this movement is what is called Force .”^39 Force is continuous unification and diremption, integration and disintegration; the Truth of Force is in its unity and its expression is in its diversity. But these opposites must be held together for Force to be adequately grasped. The Understanding must strive to grasp the movement of opposites into each other and not merely the individual moments of Force as static aspects. Thus, the Infinity that is already contained in Force calls the Understanding to overtake itself, goads it into a higher form of consciousness. But Life is also this Infinity, the inner movement of a motionless unity. And just as Force teases the Understanding with a fluidity that the latter cannot account for, so Life provokes self- consciousness to look for a way to comprehend it. However, if there were no difference between Life and Force, then self-consciousness would be able to capture it thanks to the conceptual thinking it developed before the challenge of Force. However, Life is Force turned in on itself just as much as self-consciousness is consciousness turned inward. Conceptual thinking thus cannot be a sufficient approach to Life. In reaching out to grasp Life, self-consciousness must also grasp itself (“self-consciousness…is essentially the return from otherness ”^40 ), it must return to itself as it stretches toward Life. This is (^38) Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 31. (^39) Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 136. (^40) Phenomenology of Spirit , ¶167.
an important difference within the parallel structures of Explanation and Desire, or Understanding and Self-Consciousness. While the Understanding’s method, Explanation, is merely intentional, i.e. an account of its object, self-consciousness’ Desire is at once intentional and reflexive, it is craving of something which craves it for itself. For this reason Butler describes Desire as an ambiguous project^41 and Hegel notes that self-consciousness has a “double object”^42 —Life and itself, or Life, but for itself. Much as Explanation faced the problem of having to grasp a duality, though one contained within a single object, Desire also finds itself before the task of accounting for a duality in a single movement. It is prepared to grasp the Infinity of Life because it is capable of conceptual thinking, but it is not prepared to possess Life, to make it its own. This is where the problem of praxis, which Pippin and Pinkard both underestimated, reveals itself as essential. Life in its expression is a rigorously sensuous phenomenon—it declines itself as life forms, as living things that are not mere concepts or properties, but essentially material. This is why the mere cognitive approaches of consciousness toward things and Forces could never have sufficed: objects present themselves to consciousness also in their materiality, in their particularity, and Explanation simply cannot account for this in its relation to universality. Desire must thus work toward an assimilation of the material in addition to the theoretical: I know what this object before me is and I want it for myself in its totality , i.e., as a universal that I theoretically understand and as a material particular which I attempt to assimilate into my own materiality. Desire’s double aim is further doubled: not only does it look at once for difference and for sameness, or for a difference that is no difference; it also seeks to be both a theoretical and a practical approach. In its confusion before yet another disparity, it does its best to manage this (^41) Subjects of Desire , 33. (^42) Phenomenology of Spirit , ¶167.
that Life asserts itself over it and swallows it as one of its particular determinations. Thus, self- consciousness’ dependence on Life is reinforced in such a way as to make consumption an entirely hopeless method of comprehension: not only must it continue to consume living beings in order to survive, but it must now actively avoid carrying out consumption to its end—for this would mean its own death. Desire as consumption is thus a self-contradictory task. Self- consciousness puts it to use in order to possess Life and annihilate it as a pure negative, but ends up “falling into” Life and depending on it. Here the essentiality of the practical comes into full view. As we have seen, Desire is a turn toward the object that attempts to resolve the old disparity between the sensible and the supersensible, or between the sensuous and the theoretical. It is thus a practical turn toward the object because it tries to eliminate this dichotomy by applying itself practically—Desire does not only attempt to cognize the object, but wants to possess it in its sensuousness as well. In this way, Desire is articulated as consumption, which is in turn an eminently practical act. Though it stands to reason that Desire even in its earliest stages of development should also have a cognitive aspect (the object of Desire must somehow be distinguished from other objects), the culmination of consumption is the material annihilation of the object. The object that is consumed is no longer there as a result of a practical necessity of self-consciousness, i.e. its need to incorporate the sensuous aspect of the object in its comprehension of it. All of this already points to an essential practical dimension of Desire. However, it is the inversion of dependence that occurs as the result of consumption that definitively places self-consciousness and its Desire into the realm of the practical. The result of the application of consumption is self- consciousness’ realization that it is alive, that it is part of the object that is sought to annihilate. But Life understood as a realm, as an essential determination of self-consciousness, implies its
corporeality, its need for nourishment, its capacity to reproduce, and the prospect of death. In short, to be alive is to be concerned with one’s own essential belonging to the domain of the practical, with all that this belonging entails. Conclusion I have attempted to show that, despite Pippin’s and Pinkard’s epistemological readings of the Phenomenology , Begierde arises in the text as a fundamentally practical category. The two epistemological readings are, in the final analysis, unable to do justice to the larger context of self-consciousness and its emergent practical preoccupations—e.g., its corporeality, its need for nourishment, the prospect of death. And yet self-consciousness does not leave behind the cognitive preoccupations it had previously taken up. On the contrary, in that Desire appears at the same time as Life, and in that it characterizes self-consciousness “in general,” Desire should be interpreted as that double movement—at once intentional and reflexive—which unites the theoretical dimension of Explanation and self-consciousness’ newfound practical needs. In this way, self-consciousness in general is revealed as the first form of consciousness to bring together theory and practice. In the spirit of Hegel’s love of the syllogism, I express this conclusion in syllogistic form: (M) Self-consciousness is Desire in general (m) Desire is the unity of theoretical and practical concerns (C) Self-consciousness is the unity of theoretical and practical concerns.
