The sun by day and the gods revealed are familiar sights
Shaping the countenance which, by ancients named “one and all,”
Has filled to the brim with free satisfaction the reticent heart,
And first and alone is the source of gratified desire.
Hölderlin, “Bread and Wine”
A consideration of desire in the Phenomenology of Spirit requires a preliminary turn to the larger problem of how philosophical themes are introduced and “argued” within the terms of this sometimes tortuous text. I place the verb “argue” within quotations, not to dismiss the kind of argumentation that Hegel pursues, but to draw attention to the idiosyncrasy of its form. After all, the Phenomenology of Spirit is a Bildungsroman,1 an optimistic narrative of adventure and edification, a pilgrimage of the spirit, and upon immediate scrutiny, it is unclear how Hegel’s narrative structure argues the metaphysical case he wants to make. Moreover, Hegel’s sentence structure seems to defy the laws of grammar and to test the ontological imagination beyond its usual bounds. His sentences begin with subjects that turn out to be interchangeable with their objects or to pivot on verbs that are swiftly negated or inverted in supporting clauses. When “is” is the verb at the core of any claim, it rarely carries a familiar burden of predication, but becomes transitive in an unfamiliar and foreboding sense, affirming the inherent movement in “being,” disrupting the ontological assumptions that ordinary language usage lulls us into making.
The rhetorical inversion of Hegelian sentences as well as the narrative structure of the text as a whole convey the elusive nature of both the grammatical and human subject. Against the Understanding’s compulsion to fix the grammatical subject into a univocal and static signifier, Hegel’s sentences indicate that the subject can only be understood in its movement. When Hegel states, “Substance is Subject,” the “is” carries the burden of “becomes,” where becoming is not a unilinear but a cyclical process. Hence, we read the sentence wrong if we rely on the ontological assumptions of linear reading, for the “is” is a nodal point of the interpenetration of both “Substance” and “Subject”; each is itself only to the extent that it is the other because, for Hegel, self-identity is only rendered actual to the extent that it is mediated through that which is different. To read the sentence right would mean to read it cyclically, or to bring to bear the variety of partial meanings it permits on any given reading. Hence, it is not just that substance is being clarified, or that the subject is being defined, but the very meaning of the copula is itself being expressed as a locus of movement and plurivocity.
The grammatical subject is, thus, never self-identical, but is always and only itself in its reflexive movement; the sentence does not consist of grammatical elements that reflect or otherwise indicate corresponding ontological entities. The sentence calls to be taken as a whole, and in turn indicates the wider textual context in which it itself is to be taken. But the way in which this context is “indicated” is less referential than rhetorical; Hegel’s sentences enact the meanings that they convey; indeed, they show that what “is” only is to the extent that it is enacted. Hegelian sentences are read with difficulty, for their meaning is not immediately given or known; they call to be reread, read with different intonations and grammatical emphases. Like a line of poetry that stops us and forces us to consider that the way in which it is said is essential to what it is saying, Hegel’s sentences rhetorically call attention to themselves. The discrete and static words on the page deceive us only momentarily into thinking that discrete and static meanings will be released by our reading. If we refuse to give up the expectation that univocal meanings linearly arranged will unfold from the words at hand, we will find Hegel confused, unwieldy, unnecessarily dense. But if we question the presumptions of the Understanding that the prose asks us to, we will experience the incessant movement of the sentence that constitutes its meaning.
Hegel’s sentences are never completed in that they never offer up “what is meant” in some final and digestible form. “Substance is Subject” suggests not only what substance is, what the subject is, and what the meaning of the copula is, but also that no ratiocination of possible meanings could capture all of the meanings that the sentence suggests. All three terms signify indefinitely inasmuch as each calls for continual concretization and revision. To know the meaning of that sentence is to know the meaning of Hegel’s system, and that meaning cannot be known once and for all by any living subject. Hence, Hegel’s sentences send us forth, as it were, into a journey of knowledge; they indicate what is not being expressed, what must be explored for any given expression to acquire meaning. As sentential narratives, they are cyclical and progressive at once, reflecting and enacting the movement of consciousness by which they might be comprehended. Because Hegel’s rhetoric defies our expectations of a linear and definite philosophical presentation, it initially obstructs us (no one reads Hegel quickly), but once we have reflected upon the assumptions that Hegel wants to release us from, the rhetoric initiates us into a consciousness of irreducibly multiple meanings which continuously determine each other. This multiplicity of meanings is not static, according to Hegel, but is the essence of becoming, of movement itself.2 In reading for multiple meanings, for plurivocity, ambiguity, and metaphor in the general sense, we experience concretely the inherent movement of dialectical thinking, the essential alteration of reality. And we also come to understand the role of our own consciousness in constituting this reality inasmuch as the text must be read to have its meaning enacted.
This last point is made especially clear in the Phenomenology, which is specifically concerned with the point of view of the human subject. Like the grammatical subject of Hegel’s metaphysical remarks, the human subject is never simply and immediately there. As soon as we get a grammatical indication of his location, he travels forth and becomes something different from what he was when we first got wind of it.* More than the rhetorical strategy of Hegel’s sentential narratives, the organizing narrative structure of the Phenomenology narrows the distance between philosophical form and content. Hegel’s narrative is designed to seduce the reader, to exploit his need to find himself in the text he is reading. The Phenomenology requires and effects the imaginative identification of the reader with the traveling subject so that reading becomes a philosophically instructive form of travel.
Identifying with Hegel’s protagonist is no easy matter. We begin the Phenomenology with a sense that the main character has not yet arrived. There is action and deliberation, but no recognizable agent. Our immediate impulse is to look more closely to discern this absent subject in the wings; we are poised for his arrival. As the narrative progresses beyond the “this” and the “that,” the various deceptions of immediate truth, we realize slowly that this subject will not arrive all at once, but will offer choice morsels of himself, gestures, shadows, garments strewn along the way, and that this “waiting for the subject,” much like attending Godot, is the comic, even burlesque, dimension of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Moreover, we discover that simply waiting is not what is expected of us, for this narrative does not progress rationally unless we participate in thinking through the logical necessity of every transition. The narrative purports to develop inexorably, so we must test the necessity of its every move.
Although Hegel’s Bildungsroman does not address his reader directly, as does Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste,3 the narrative strategy of the Phenomenology is to implicate the reader indirectly and systematically. We do not merely witness the journey of some other philosophical agent, but we ourselves are invited on stage to perform the crucial scene changes. At the close of the Phenomenology, the philosopher is no longer “Other” to ourselves, for that distinction would announce an “outside” to that ostensibly all-inclusive unity. Indeed, we recognize ourselves as the subjects we have been waiting for inasmuch as we gradually constitute the perspective by which we recognize our history, our mode of becoming, through the Phenomenology itself.
Thus, the Phenomenology is not only a narrative about a journeying counsciousness, but is the journey itself. The narrative discloses and enacts a strategy for appropriating philosophical truth; it sets the ontological stage in a variety of ways, compels our belief in the reality of that staged scene, encourages our identification with the emergent subject that the scene includes, and then asks us to suffer the inevitable failure of that subject’s quest for identity within the confines of that scene. The subject fails—and we, imaginatively, with him—precisely because he took seriously the ontological commitments that the scene required; hence, his demise is revealed again and again as a function of a tragic blindness, although, for Hegel, tragic events are never decisive. There is little time for grief in the Phenomenology because renewal is always so close at hand. What seems like tragic blindness turns out to be more like the comic myopia of Mr. Magoo whose automobile careening through the neighbor’s chicken coop always seems to land on all four wheels. Like such miraculously resilient characters of the Saturday morning cartoon, Hegel’s protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological insights—and fail again. As readers, we have no other narrative option but to join in this bumpy ride, for we cannot anticipate this journey without embarking on it ourselves. Time and again the Phenomenology compels our belief in an ontological scene, a picture of what the world is like and where the Absolute can be found, only to reveal that picture finally as a systematically induced deception.
It makes no more sense for the reader to reject the particular configurations of the world that the Phenomenology offers than it would to refuse to accept a novel as true. Hegel’s provisional scenes, the stage of self-certainty, the struggle for recognition, the dialectic of lord and bondsman, are instructive fictions, ways of organizing the world which prove to be too limited to satisfy the subject’s desire to discover itself as substance. These scenes are thus consistently undermined by that which they unwittingly exclude, and are forced to reassemble as more complicated arrangements, now including that which brought the previous scene to dissolution. As readers who accept each scene as true, we identify imaginatively, but every effort at identification is finally subverted. What initially compels our belief turns out to be a false premise, but this falsehood immediately indicates a truer and more inclusive premise by which it might be replaced. Hegel’s subject does not rest easily with any partial conception of its relationship with the world of substance, and every exclusionary ontological commitment engenders a “return of the repressed.” Hegel’s subject suffers no permanent bout of bad faith or debilitating repression of what is real. Every deception immediately releases a broader conception of truth by which it might be transcended. This subject journeys with compulsive metaphysical honesty toward his ultimate dialectical harmony with the world. No matter how many times his world dissolves, he remains infinitely capable of reassembling another world; he suffers the negative, but is never wholly engulfed by it. Indeed, suffering only enhances his synthetic powers. The negative is always and only useful—never debilitating in any final sense. Hegel’s subject is thus a fiction of infinite capability, a romantic traveler who only learns from what he experiences, who, because infinitely self-replenishing, is never devastated beyond repair.
The dramatic metaphysical hope of Hegel’s subject prompted Kierkegaard to ask whether such a person might really be said to exist. After all, how do we account for the relentless desire not merely to survive but to profit from suffering, illness, loss? For Hegel, this desire is presuppositional, so that a metaphysical finesse obscures the existential and psychological difficulties at work. But how often does suffering prompt the reconstruction of a world on yet firmer ground, and how often does suffering simply erode whatever ground there is, producing anxiety about the very possibility of a coherent world? Clearly, Hegel’s subject has a very fine director working for him, one who monitors those scene changes carefully and makes sure that every transition is survived. But as Kierkegaard once asked about existence, “where is the director? I should like to have a word with him.”4
If we accept Kierkegaard’s existential critique of Hegel’s subject, what becomes of the Phenomenology’s claim to be experiential truth? If Hegel’s subject is fictional, can he perhaps still have a meaning for us? Consider that the narrative of the Phenomenology is a series of deceptions which prove to be the via negativa of philosophical truth, that these successive fictions form the history of a consciousness which, in turn, constitutes its substance, the circle of its being. The deceptive pursuit of the Absolute is not a vain “running around in circles,” but a progressive cycle which reveals every deception as permitting some grander act of synthesis, an insight into yet more regions of interrelated reality. The substance that is known, and which the subject is, is thus an all-encompassing web of interrelations, the dynamism of life itself, and, consequently, the principle that all specific determinations are not what they appear to be. And yet, as beings who must be cultivated to the absolute standpoint, we begin with the determinate, the particular, and the immediate, and treat it as if it were absolute, and then learn through that misplaced certainty that the Absolute is broader and more internally complicated that we originally thought. The history of these deceptions is a progressive one inasmuch as we understand how these deceptions imply each other as necessary consequences, and that together they reveal that the insufficiency of any given relationship to the Absolute is the basis of its interdependence on other relationships, so that the history of deception is, finally, the unity of internal relations which is the Absolute. Absolute truth in the Phenomenology is thus something like the dramatic integrity of a comedy of errors. In Nietzsche’s comparable view, “‘Truth’: this, according to my way of thinking, does not necessarily denote the antithesis of error, but in the most fundamental cases only the posture of various errors in relation to one another.”5
In this sense, the Phenomenology is a study in fiction-making which shows the essential role of fiction and false belief in the quest for philosophical truth. According to such a reading, the fictional status of Hegel’s subject takes on a new set of possible meanings. We might read this subject as a trope for the hyperbolic impulse itself, that frantic and over-determined pursuit of the Absolute which creates that place when it cannot be found, which projects it endlessly and is constantly “foiled” by its own projection. As a being of metaphysical desires, the human subject is prone to fiction, to tell himself the lies that he needs to live.6 Reading Hegel in this Nietzschean fashion, we can take the Phenomenology as a study of desire and deception, the systematic pursuit and misidentification of the Absolute, a constant process of inversion which never reaches ultimate closure. The subject becomes a locus of ever more sophisticated forms of deception, and thus learns about ever more insidious appearances of the Absolute which turn out to be partial, fictional, and false. Hence, if Hegel’s subject cannot be located in existence, perhaps we ought not to be surprised at his fictional reality. Like Don Quixote, Hegel’s subject is an impossible identity who pursues reality in systematically mistaken ways. As readers of his text, accepting time and again the terms of his journey, we indulge in the same exorbitant desires; we become makers of fiction who cannot sustain belief in our creations, who wake to their unreality, but only to dream more shrewdly the next time.
Hegel’s explicit discussion of desire begins in the section, “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” which initiates the transition between consciousness and self-consciousness. The appearance of desire at this juncture is curious, for if the progress of the Phenomenology is impelled by desire, why does desire emerge as an explicit theme only in the fourth chapter of the text? Indeed, what does it mean that desire “appears” at a given stage in the Phenomenology at all?
Desire appears, but the moment of appearance is not necessarily the initial moment of its efficacy. In a sense, nothing comes into existence ex nihilo for Hegel; everything comes into explicit form from a potential or implicit state; indeed, everything has, in a sense, been there all along. “Appearance” is but one explicit or actual moment in the development of a phenomenon. In the Phenomenology, a given phenomenon appears in the context of a given configuration of the world. In the case of desire, we must ask, what kind of world makes desire possible? What must the world be like for desire to exist?
When we ask after the conditions or features of the world that make desire possible, we are not asking a preliminary question which, once answered, will allow us to continue the investigation with ease. Nor is it the Kantian inquiry into the transcendental conditions of desire’s appearance. For Hegel, the preconditions of desire are the object of the inquiry itself, for desire in its articulation always thematizes the conditions of its own existence. When we ask, what is desire “after,” we can give a partial answer: the illumination of its own opacity, the expression of that aspect of the world that brought it into being. This is part of what is meant by the reflexivity that desire is said to embody and enact. Eventually, the reflexivity enacted by desire will be identical with absolute knowledge itself. As Stanley Rosen remarks, “In analytical terms, part of the self is encountered outside oneself; the desire to assimilate the desire of the Other is thus an effort to grasp analytically the preanalytic or indeterminate structure of absolute reflection.”7 Desire is intentional in that it is always desire of or for a given object or Other, but it is also reflexive in the sense that desire is a modality in which the subject is both discovered and enhanced. The conditions that give rise to desire, the metaphysics of internal relations, are at the same time what desire seeks to articulate, render explicit, so that desire is a tacit pursuit of metaphysical knowledge, the human way that such knowledge “speaks.”
At the juncture in the Phenomenology where desire emerges as a central theme, we are in the midst of a quandary. The subject has not arrived, but a predecessor is on the scene: consciousness. Consciousness is marked by its assumption that the sensuous and perceptual world it encounters is fundamentally different from itself. The “world” it encounters is a natural world, spatiotemporally organized, exhibiting discrete empirical objects. Consciousness contemplates this world, convinced that it is the Absolute and that it is external, or ontologically different from, itself. The sensuous and perceptual world is self-generating and self-subsisting; it has no need of consciousness. Consciousness finds itself in exile from the Absolute, believing its own powers of apprehending the world to be unrelated to that world. Consciousness here is pure intentional enthrallment with the world, but is not identified with the world, and in no way determines the truth or objective existence of that world. A paradox arises within this stage of experience because the fact remains that the sensuous and perceptual world is delineated in consciousness, and this delineation suggests that consciousness itself participates in the determination of that world’s truth. This may not seem initially clear, but when we consider that the sensuous and perceptual world only becomes actual or determinate through its mediation in alterity, we recognize that consciousness is this Other which reflects and, thus, actualizes the truth of that world. Seen from this point of view, consciousness all of a sudden returns from its exile and now plays a major ontological role in determining Absolute reality. This sudden reorganization of the world requires a revision of basic concepts: what must consciousness be like if it “mediates” the world, and what meaning can we give to “alterity” and “actualization”? How did the dissolution of this particular world give rise to edifying philosophical insights?
The role of externalization and alterity in the determination of something as true is made clear partially through the introduction of the notion of Force. Appearing in the final section of Part 1 of “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” Force is said to prefigure the Concept (Begriff), a mode of consciousness which, Hegel argues, permits one to “think antithesis within the thesis itself” (¶ 160). Force is essential to the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness because it posits the externality of the world of sensuous and perceptual reality as one that is essentially related to consciousness itself; in effect, Force posits externalization as a necessary moment of thought. In order that consciousness complete its own intentional requirement to think “something,” it must become determinate thought: it must be a thought “of” something external to itself, and, in turn, become determined by that external something. Hence, by thinking a particular thing, thinking itself becomes particularized, becomes a given mode of thought. Thought that remains a purely inner phenomenon is not truly thought at all; it must be related to something outside itself in order to gain an actualized and determinate reality as consciousness. The notion of Force thus distinguishes the inner and outer “moments” of thought inasmuch as Force is a constant movement between an inner reality and a determinate manifestation; in effect, Force is the compulsion that a nascent reality exhibits to find a determinate manifestation for itself—Hegel’s reformulation of Spinoza’s conatus. Force characterizes relations in the physical world as well as within consciousness itself, and thus becomes the ontological basis of consciousness’ bond with the sensuous and perceptual world that it initially encountered as ontologically disparate from itself. This compulsion to externalize prefigures the work of the Concept itself which, in Charles Taylor’s words, “is the Idea of necessity which necessarily posits its own external manifestation.”8
Force is that which impels an inner reality to gain determinate form, but it is also that which frustrates the absorption of that inner reality into determinate form. In other words, Force sustains a tension between that which appears and that which does not appear, and in this sense is different from other principles of teleological development. The notion of “inner difference” or the unity of opposites which is so central to Hegel’s mode of dialectical thinking is enhanced through the notion of Force. It is not the drive toward determinate shape that would bring all nascent reality to explicit potency, but rather the constant process of giving and superseding determinate form. In a brief discussion of gravity, Hegel claims that without the notion of Force, or inner difference, we might have to think of space and time as only contingently related to one another: “But through the Notion of inner difference, these unlike and indifferent moments, space and time, etc. are a difference which is no difference, or only a difference of what is selfsame, and its essence is unity. As positive and negative they stimulate each other into activity, and their being is rather to posit themselves as not-being and to suspend themselves in the unity. The two distinguished moments both subsist; they are implicit and are opposite in themselves, i.e., each is the opposite of itself; each has its ‘other’ within it and they are only one unity”10 (¶ 161).
The “unity” of the phenomenon impelled by Force is not a static unity, but movement, incessant and dialectical. The Absolute cannot be identified with the determinate objects of the spatiotemporal world, the res extensa of sensuous and perceptual reality; there is always something that is beyond the determinate, some operative negativity, that accounts for the genesis of determinate form as well as for its eventual dissolution. The notion of Force confirms that there is something that does not appear, but that is nevertheless crucial to any given appearance; moreover, it indicates that reality is not coextensive with appearance, but always sustains and is sustained by a hidden dimension. In order to think the object of experience that the sensuous and perceptual world offers up to consciousness, we must relinquish faith in the kind of thinking that can take only determinate beings as its objects; conceptual thinking must replace Understanding, for only the former can think the movement between opposites. The Understanding consistently mistakes stasis for truth, and can only understand movement as a series of discrete moments, not as the vital unity of moments that imply each other endlessly and do not appear simultaneously. The Understanding cannot grasp movement itself; it is always prone to fix its object in a present tense which purports to present exhaustively the full reality of the object at hand. Because consciousness reaches its most sophisticated development in the Understanding, it proves incapable of the kind of thinking that the phenomenon of Force calls upon it to make. In the explication of Force, consciousness proves to be interminably partial; it always indicates a negativity that it itself cannot grasp. Self-consciousness arises, then, as the effort to think inner difference, the mutual implication of opposites, as constitutive of the object itself. Self-consciousness thus portends to conceptualize Force, and Life itself, defined as the constitution and dissolution of shape. Self-consciousness is not the momentary act of a discrete consciousness attending an opposing and discrete world, but a cognitive experience taking place in a developing sense of time; it is, in turn, able to grasp the temporal life of the object itself. Consciousness could think determinate being, but could not think the process of determination and indetermination that is Life itself; it could not think change.
Self-consciousness thus emerges as a kind of knowing that is at once a mode of becoming; it is suffered, dramatized, enacted. Consciousness gives rise to self-consciousness in the bungled attempt to explain what it knows: “Appearance, or the play of Forces, already displays infinity… this absolute unrest of pure movement, but it is as an ‘explanation’ that it first freely stands forth; and in being finally an object for consciousness, as that which it is, consciousness is thus self-consciousness” (¶ 163). Force can be explained as a series of isolated phenomena, but the interrelation between them will never satisfactorily be explained. If this explanation is executed from the point of view of consciousness, it will only be a fracturing of the moments of Force; gravity can be analytically separated from positive and negative electricity, and distance and attraction can be similarly scrutinized in isolation, but the phenomenon itself will be lost, or presented as a lifeless series of internally unrelated attributes. The Understanding lacks reflexivity, and so cannot understand how consciousness’ own difference from that which it scrutinizes is itself part of the phenomenon under investigation. Hence, it cannot extrapolate from this experience of “constitutive difference” to the object under investigation in order to know how the play of Forces holds together in the temporalized unity of the phenomenon. And so consciousness fumbles to explain Force, listing the moments of the play of Forces, listing them again, trying to force a synthesis from a series, but lacking the proper cognitive tools. And yet this failed explanation reveals an unexpected clue to the proper formulation of the phenomenon. As an “Explanation,” the Understanding comes to be determinately manifest in material form; there is consciousness itself sprawled on the page, formed in letters and words, existing, materially, outside itself. In recognizing the authorship of that explanation, consciousness becomes aware of itself for the first time. No longer enthralled intentionally with a world that ostensibly monopolized reality, consciousness discovers its own reflexivity; it has become other to itself, and knows itself as such: “The reason why explaining affords so much self-satisfaction is just because in it consciousness is, so to speak, communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself; although it seems to be busy with something else” (¶163).
Consciousness thus relinquishes itself as consciousness in the process of explaining what it knows. By the time the Explanation is over, neither consciousness nor the object it seeks to explain are the same. The process of Explanation transforms the two poles of experience it was meant to mediate. No longer a tool in the hands of a consciousness intact, Explanation becomes a curious kind of agent that turns on its user and shakes his identity. The object of Explanation becomes curiously ambiguous as well; in being explained, the object is revealed as having certain properties that consciousness itself can elucidate. But what the object reveals, and what consciousness contributes, remain indistinguishable, for the only route to the object is through the Explanation itself, so that we cannot appeal to the object what exists outside this explanation in order to see to what extent the Explanation adequately expresses the object itself. Indeed, the object itself is no different from the object-as-explained; it exists in the form of the Explanation which has become its actuality. Consciousness is thus faced with an unanticipated ambiguity, for it finds itself in the terms of an explanation which is “of” the object of experience; it is both itself and the object under investigation. And if it exists in this double sense, then it must be part of the world it investigates. Consciousness thus learns that what exists in itself also exists in its alterity. This principle allows it to grasp the phenomenon of Force, but also, as an inadvertent discovery, to grasp itself as essentially reflexive. Moreover, it comes to understand that its own reflexivity means that it is constitutive of the reality that it investigates:
I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so, I am directly aware that what is distinguished from myself in not different from me. I, the self-same being, repel myself from myself; but what is posited as distinct from me, or as unlike me, is immediately, in being so distinguished, not a distinction for me. It is true that consciousness of an “other,” of an object in general, is itself necessarily self-consciousness, a reflectedness-into-self, consciousness of itself in its otherness. (¶l64)
In distinguishing something as different from consciousness, consciousness makes a determination of something negative. In stating “that is not me,” a positive reality is born. The fact of the statement seems to undermine the content of the statement, for the statement effects a linguistic relationship between the “I” and the reality that is “other.” Clearly, this reality which is ostensibly different from the consciousness that announces itself here is not so different that it eludes linguistic reference altogether. Consciousness knows it well enough to negate it, and this piece of “not me” has a linguistic place within the world of consciousness itself. Hence, the question arises, what does it mean to affirm through language that which one seeks to negate? What kind of curious negation is this that lives on in language as an affirmation?
When Hegel’s emergent subject, here understood as the mode of consciousness, states or explains its fundamental difference from the world, the mode in which that explanation is made contradicts the explicit intention and content of the explanation. As that which must express what it knows in language, i.e., that which must externalize its knowledge in linguistic form, consciousness is “of” the world, in the sense that it appears in the world. Hence, if consciousness seeks to explain its ontological difference from the world, it can only contradict itself in the process. And yet the rhetoric of Explanation does not completely make a fool of the consciousness that seeks to articulate its ontological distinction. Consciousness is different from the sensuous and perceptual world that it encounters, but this difference is not an external one; rather, consciousness is internally related to that which it seeks to know, a necessary moment in the hermeneutical circle in which the investigator is implicated in the object of investigation.
The encounter with ostensible ontological disparity and the discovery that interrelatedness exists after all is, here as elsewhere in the Phenomenology, effected in the transition from reading literally to reading rhetorically. When the Hegelian subject states or enacts or otherwise externalizes its conviction that it is absolutely other to this or that aspect of the world, the very process of externalizing that conviction works to undermine it, and, eventually, proves that the opposite is true. In stating or dramatizing its truth, negation gains a home in the world, and thus is transformed from an indeterminate negation to a determinate one, one that exists as a moment in a web of interrelatedness, one that has a place.
Significantly, Hegel relies on the rhetorical meanings of linguistic explanation in effecting the transition between consciousness and self-consciousness. Inasmuch as self-consciousness is characterized by reflexivity, i.e., the capacity to relate to itself, this is conditioned by the power of articulation. Moreover, it is not that articulation offers forth a “content” which is then reflected upon by a consciousness doggedly watching from an ontological elsewhere, but consciousness reveals itself as an articulated phenomenon, that which only becomes itself as articulation. Once articulated, this consciousness is no longer appropriately called by that name, for it has rhetorically refuted the conditions of ontological disparity which that name denoted. In becoming articulated, consciousness becomes itself, but, in classical Hegelian parlance, it does this only by becoming another. In this instance, that Other, which is, yes, its fullest self, is self-consciousness.
The movement of this transition is a rhetorical movement; the insight that is finally revealed is first enacted without self-awareness, and it is only once that enactment is completed, the Explanation stated and finished, that consciousness takes a look at this product and recognizes itself as its author. The purpose of the Explanation no longer matters, for consciousness has made an unexpected and more significant discovery: it has the capacity to recognize itself, it is a reflexive structure, and it inhabits a place in the world. As external, consciousness is “other” to itself, which means that it is that which is generally understood as “other” to itself, namely, the world; hence, the inverse of this statement of identity is also true: consciousness of the world is always simply consciousness of itself in its alterity. The rhetorical movement of the transition thus reaffirms the principle of identity, the ontological place of difference, the supporting web of internal relations.
As a rhetorical agency, the Hegelian subject always knows more than it thinks it knows, and by reading itself rhetorically, i.e., reading the meanings it unwittingly enacts against those it explicitly intends, it recovers ever greater dimensions of its own identity. Rhetoric is thus the condition of deception and of illumination, the way in which the subject is always beyond itself, meaning what it does not necessarily intend but nevertheless externalizes, then reads, and finally recovers for itself.
The rhetorical drama of Explanation we have been following is recapitulated on a more concrete level in the drama of desire. The problem of consciousness, we will remember, is how to conceptualize its relationship with the sensuous and perceptual world. As the advanced form of Understanding, consciousness could delineate the features or “moments” of this world, but could not effect a unity with that world. In effect, consciousness has only a theoretical experience of its object, a notion of what it must be like, but the sensuous and perceptual world remains remote, conjectured, experientially unknown. In the transition to self-consciousness, we are told to expect the following: “the Notion of the object is superseded in the actual object, or the first, immediate presentation of the object is superseded in experience: certainty gives place to truth” (die Gewissheit ging in der Wahrheit verloren) (¶ 166).
How then does the sensuous and perceptual world become an experience for self-consciousness, or, in even stronger terms, how is this world experienced as self-consciousness? In ¶ 167, the Phenomenology begins to answer this question for us by calling on the experience of desire as the mode in which self-consciousness requires that sensuous and perceptual world. Hegel introduces the notion of desire casually, at the end of a complicated explanation, as if it were something we should already understand. The problem under consideration is how to make the sensuous and perceptual world a difference that is no difference, that is, how to recapitulate this world as a feature of self-consciousness itself. We have seen that “explaining” the world went part of the way in doing the trick, but the solution there seemed too abstract:
With the first moment, self-consciousness is in the form of consciousness, and the whole expanse of the sensuous world is preserved for it, but at the same time only as connected with the second moment, the unity of self-consciousness with itself; and hence the sensuous world is for it an enduring existence which, however, is only appearance, or a difference which, in itself, is no difference. This antithesis of appearance and its truth has, however, for its essence only the truth, viz, the unity must become essential to self-consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness is Desire in general. (¶ 167)
In the “first moment” or primary thesis—roughly Part 1 of the Phenomenology—the sensuous world endures as appearance. But what kind of appearance is this? It is, we learn, ostensibly different from a reality or essence, but then this distinction turns out not to hold: it is “difference which, in itself, is no difference.” Consciousness has learned through its powers of explanation that it appears to hold the truth of the opposing world, yet a new disparity arises, namely, that between the appearance of that world as external and unreachable, and its truth which is evidenced in consciousness’ well-wrought Explanation. In order to overcome this particular distinction between appearance and truth, this sensuous and perceptual world must become “unified” with consciousness in some way; if this unity is to take place, and one of the terms of this unity is the sensuous world, then it makes sense to assume that self-consciousness itself must have a sensuous expression. And that the sensuous articulation of self-consciousness “is Desire in general.”
The German word for desire, Begierde, suggests animal appetite rather than the anthropocentric sense conveyed by the French le désir and the English desire.9 Introduced at this juncture in the text, the term clearly acquires the meaning of animal hunger; the sensuous and perceptual world is desired in the sense that it is required for consumption and is the means for the reproduction of life. As we follow the textual development of desire, we learn that human desire is distinguished from animal desire in virtue of its reflexivity, its tacit philosophical project, and its rhetorical possibilities. At this point, however, we are equipped only with the insights that Force and Explanation have provided us; we understand movement as the play of Forces, and Explanation as the necessary alterity of consciousness itself. Predictably enough, the experience of desire initially appears as a synthesis of movement and alterity.
In desiring some feature of the world, self-consciousness effects the unity with the world that consciousness could only effect theoretically and inadvertently. As an explicit desire for some aspect of the world, self-consciousness not only appropriates the rhetorical accomplishment of consciousness, but follows the syllogism through, as it were, and becomes the sensuous enactment of this unity. Hence, desire becomes the sensuous articulation of a sensuous object which is simultaneously a reflexive pursuit of self-consciousness itself. Immediately following Hegel’s remark that “self-consciousness is Desire in general,” Hegel explains the ambiguity of the project of desire:
Consciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second, viz, itself, which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only as opposed to the first object.(¶ 167)
Desire is here described in terms of its ambiguous intentional aims, but these two aims are also developmental stages of consciousness: the first aim, the object of sense-certainty and perception, is the conventional object of consciousness, a relationship we have already examined; the second aim, consciousness’ reflexive pursuit of itself, is also already known, for that is what we found in the drama of Explanation. Hence, desire is always desire for something other which, in turn, is always a desire for a more expanded version of the subject. The “immediate object… of sense-certainty and perception” appears as “a negative” because it is not consciousness. And yet self-consciousness seeks to articulate or thematize itself, and in this “first instance” or initial phase of desire’s development, the pursuit of alterity and the pursuit of oneself seem in stark opposition. In effect, we have learned the lessons of Force and Explanation, but at this point we can only embody these lessons as an internal paradox. Insofar as we desire, we desire in two mutually exclusive ways; in desiring something else, we lose ourselves, and in desiring ourselves, we lose the world. At this stage in the dramatization of desire, unacceptable impoverishment seems to be its consequence; either as narcissism or as enthrallment with an object, desire is at odds with itself, contradictory and dissatisfied.
Desire has a “double-object,” and, therefore, becomes a source of deception when a single univocal aim becomes the object of “true desire.” And yet there is motivation for overcoming this paradoxical situation, for the confrontation with the object of sense-certainty and perception is intrinsically dissatisfying. That object is “other,” absolutely different, signifying nothing for consciousness except its own ontological limitations. Otherness incites self-consciousness, occasions its articulation as desire, but is also the source of suffering for this emergent subject. Self-consciousness is thus additionally defined by Hegel as “essentially the return from otherness” (¶ 167), in which case desire, as the expression of self-consciousness, is a constant effort to overcome the appearance of ontological disparity between consciousness and its world. This disparity initially appears as insurmountable, and this alleged insurmountability pervades the naive experience of our metaphysical traveler; it is a primary phenomenological given, but one that is gradually dissolved through the efforts of desire. In effect, desire does not alter ontological difference, but provides an alternate mode of conceptualizing this disparity, a conceptualization that permits the revelation of that disparity in its proper, more fully developed, ontological organization. The world of desire, the countervailing world of consciousness, must not be annihilated, but reconceived and rediscovered as constitutive of self-consciousness. This is effected through an enhanced understanding of “difference.” The negative relation that adheres between the emerging subject and its world not only differentiates, but binds. Consciousness is not the object of its desire, but this negation is a determinate negation, for that object is prefigured by desire, and desire is essentially transformed by that object; in effect, this negation is constitutive of desire itself. In seeking its own return from otherness, desire implicitly attempts to recast absolute difference as determinate negation, to reconcile difference within a unity of experience in which negation is revealed as a relation that mediates. Desire can thus be said to reveal negation as constitutive of experience itself.
We can see, then, that the ontological primacy of negation is both enacted and revealed by desire, that the negation can only be understood as essential to experience through a consideration of the reflexivity of self-consciousness. Insofar as all external relations are transformed into internal—or double—relations through the mediated self-reflection of Hegel’s emerging subject, all indeterminate negations or ruptures in the ontology of experience are rediscovered as determinate negations, differences that are contained within the ontological integrity of experience. In that desire always emerges as a confrontation with a difference that appears ontologically disparate, and is, further, an effort to overcome this disparity through disclosing a mode of interrelatedness which has hitherto remained opaque, it seems fair to conclude that desire is always thematizing—and rendering actual—the ontological preconditions of its own emergence. Whereas the initial confrontation with otherness enforces a sense of limitation on consciousness, the satisfaction of desire reveals a more capable self, one that is able to admit its interdependence, and thereby gain a more expanded and expansive identity.
But what is meant by satisfaction? We have learned that Hegel’s subject desires the object of sense-certainty and perception, and that this desire incorporates the two projects characteristic of Force and Explanation. At first, these two projects appear at odds, and it seems that the subject can only pursue the object or itself, but never both at once. In an attempt to reconcile this paradox, consciousness sets the paradox into movement. The objects of desire are no longer understood as static and ontologically self-sufficient, but are reconceived as so many shapes of Life, where Life is defined as the incessant consolidation and dissolution of shape. The “play of Force” is thus recast onto the field of objects at a more sophisticated level of ontological organization.
The concept of Life appears, then, to reconcile the moments of determinateness and negativity which, conceived from a static point of view, appeared only paradoxically related. Indeed, this unity is constitutive of Life: “the simple substance of Life is the splitting up of itself into shapes and at the same time the dissolution of these existent differences… life… is just as much an imparting of shape as a supersession of it” (¶ 171). At this point Hegel’s subject concludes that the proper object of desire is Life, and subscribes to a primitive form of pantheism which attributes creative powers to the objective world. Excluded from this dialectic of vitalism, the subject views this active world from a distance that signals its relapse into ontological exile. This subject desires Life, but as one who is himself incapable of living, so that desire is mixed with pathos, the inevitable melancholy which attends the knowledge of irretraversible distance. Conceived here as an initial stage of self-consciousness, the subject is wise to Life without being “of” it.
This form of estrangement is reminiscent of the Emily Dickinson poem beginning, “I cannot live with You–It would be Life–And Life is over there–.” Like the irony of that poetic voice which so intimately disavows its own proximity to the living, so Hegel’s melancholic self-consciousness vitally refutes any claim to Life. This subject does not yet know its own “livelihood,” its capacity to create and dissolve shape, and, in fact, does not gain that knowledge until the end of the section “Lordship and Bondage”; indeed, the bondsman exists as a “lifeless thing” until he labors on objects that reflect his creative powers. At this juncture, however, the subject is out of work, like a meditative Faust whose sadness turns to frustration and, finally, to destructive envy.10 Life here appears as a monolith, self-sufficient and impervious, and human desire, a futile and humiliating enterprise. Like Fichte’s notion of human reality as an intrinsically insatiable Sehnsucht or longing, so desire at this moment in the Phenomenology is a constant reminder of the uselessness of human endeavors. Desire is vacuity, a pure for-itself, the “useless passion” which will later appear in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Either our traveling subject has forgotten his lessons, or he no longer knows how to sustain his new-found identity as a mediating agent in this encounter with Life. Both are doubtless true, difficulty begetting forgetfulness. Because this hapless agency does not participate in the Life that he desires, he seems not to consider himself a living being, and so desire becomes the experience of a kind of death in life, an isolated moment of non-being, what Emily Dickinson’s speaker refers to as “my Right of Frost–Death’s privilege…” Experiencing itself as an essential poverty, self-consciousness becomes a vacuum that must consume Life in order to gain some temporary reality for itself. This subject does not sit with its identity as a static nothingness in the midst of being; indeed, it seems unable to bear the stasis of its own negativity. Thus, without intentionally challenging the presumption of ontological exile, this agent sets its own negativity into motion, becoming an agent of nothingness, an actor whose role is to negate. Thematizing the presumed conditions of its own identity, this subject dramatizes its despair. Instead of a dead being, it becomes an agency of death.
This reflexive appropriation of the conditions of its own identity results in an enactment of negativity which, predictably, has paradoxical rhetorical consequences. As an effort to negate, consuming desire seeks to annihilate the independence of some living object (it cannot negate Life in the general sense, so restricts itself to some determinate manifestation of the enemy). By negating this living object, rendering this object as nothing, self-consciousness comes to view the object as no longer existing, and accounts for its vanishing from existence in terms of its own actions. Thus, self-consciousness recognizes itself as the agency of accomplishment; certain of the nothingness of this object, self-consciousness explicitly affirms that this nothingness is for itself the truth of this object. The ontological roles are thus inverted. Through destroying the living object, self-consciousness gives itself positive form as an agency of destruction. Regarding its own agency in this accomplished act, self-consciousness becomes certain of its own reality once again. The lessons gleaned from the drama of Explanation are thus recapitulated in the scene of consuming desire.
Having destroyed an independently living object, self-consciousness now knows itself as an agency of destruction. Its certainty of itself is, of course, dependent on that object that once was and now no longer is. As the effort to consume or destroy life, desire proves to be essentially related to Life, even if only in the mode of negation. The experience of consuming desire makes explicit the mediated relationship of self-consciousness and its object once again, for the experience of desire cannot furnish self-certainty without first relating to an independent object. In effect, a destructive agent has no identity without a world to be destroyed; thus, this being who, convinced of his exile from Life, endeavors to destroy all living things, ends up paradoxically dramatizing his essential dependence on the world of the living.
As a destructive or consuming agency, self-consciousness as desire essays to gain reality through the consumption of a living thing. The reality that it gains, however, is different from the reality that it intended to appropriate: having assumed that the object monopolized Life, this agency sought to consume the object and appropriate Life as an attribute that could be easily transferred from the object to self-consciousness. Now this same agency realizes that having negated the object, it still retains a dependency on that object; moreover, that determinate living object is not the same as Life itself, and so a potentially infinite number of living objects must be negated for self-consciousness to gain the monopoly on Life that it seeks, and this project soon appears endless and futile. Self-consciousness thus concludes that Life and living objects cannot be fully assimilated, that desire must find some new form, that it must develop from destruction to a recognition of the insurpassibility of other living things: “In this satisfaction… experience makes it aware that the object has its own independence.… It is in fact something other than self-consciousness which is the essence of Desire; and through this experience self-consciousness has realized its own truth” (¶ 175).
The project of consuming desire is itself conditioned by a prior ontological assumption which casts self-consciousness in the role of a pure vacuity, external and unrelated to substantive being. This scheme is disrupted through the dramatization of destruction inasmuch as desire once again determines itself as a positive reality through its own determinate acts. Desire is thus revealed as a negating negativity, no longer a lifeless and isolated nothingness. As an active or generative negation, desire is once again articulated as a determinate reality. And insofar as desire in this general sense is self-consciousness, we discover at yet another level of experience the reflexivity of self-consciousness as that which dramatizes itself, and the intentionality of self-consciousness—the insurpassability of otherness: “Desire and the self-certainty obtained in its gratification are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from superseding this other; in order that this supersession can take place, there must be this other” (¶ 175).
We saw the intentional enthrallment characteristic of consciousness, and here we see it recapitulated as a mediating structure of self-consciousness. As the experience of desire, self-consciousness sustains a necessarily ambiguous relation to that which is other to itself. Desire is always desire “for” something other than self-consciousness (even when what is desired is the obliteration of the other, it is “the obliteration of the other” which remains its intentional object). Moreover, the intentionality of desire is always also informed by its reflexive project; desire always reveals the desiring agent as intrinsically other to itself: self-consciousness is an ek-static being, outside itself, in search of self-recovery. The proliferation of objects of desire affirm for self-consciousness the persistent realm of alterity. In order for desire to gain determinate reality, it must continually pursue an indefinite domain of alterity; the reflexive experience of desire is only possible in and through the experience of desirable things. The conclusion drawn by self-consciousness that the world of objects is not consumable in its entirety has an unexpected inverse conclusion: desire requires this endless proliferation of alterity in order to stay alive as desire, as a desire that not only wants life, but is living. If the domain of living things could be consumed, desire would, paradoxically, lose its life; it would be a quiescent satiety, an end to the negative generativity that is self-consciousness. This agency that once assumed that a counterposing world of being monopolized Life, that “Life is over there,” now distrusts self-identical being as death itself, and safeguards its own negativity as the source of its own perpetual life.
The drama of consuming desire proves to be not wholly satisfying. As self-consciousness eats its way through the world, it realizes that this mode of contending with difference is exceedingly tiresome. For a while, this ravenous agent figures that ultimately the domain of external objects will all be consumed, but Life proves to be more prolific than expected, and instead of gradually eliminating the domain of alterity, self-consciousness confronts the infinity of determinate objects and, accordingly, the infinite insatiability of desire. As the constant activity of negation, desire never successfully thematizes itself in and through a given object, for that object is always vanishing into the stomach of desire, as it were, and so vanishes self-consciousness’ own experience of itself. Self-consciousness knows itself as that which consumes alterity, but it only knows this indirectly, inferring from the absence of an object its own power of agency. Now convinced of its own status as a living being, self-consciousness becomes weary of its own vanishing act, and comes to wonder whether it might not reconcile Life with some more permanent sense of self. Endeavoring to escape the fate of a purely transient self, self-consciousness develops the notion of a being like itself which might remain independent and offer a more stable experience of reflexivity than the consumption of natural objects could provide. The intentional object of desire thus alters from the infinity of natural objects to the finite Other:
It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence of Desire; and through this experience self-consciousness has realized its truth. But at the same time it is no less absolutely for itself, and it is so only by superseding the object; and it must experience its satisfaction, for it is the truth. On account of the independence of the object, therefore, it can achieve satisfaction only when the object effects the negation within itself [my emphasis]; and it must carry out this negation of itself in itself, for it is in itself the negative, and must be for the other what it is. Since the object is in its own self negation, and in being so is at the same time independent, it is consciousness. (¶ 175)
When Hegel claims that something “other than self-consciousness” must be the essence of desire, he seems to be relying on the previously drawn conclusion that for desire the realm of alterity is insurpassable. And yet the very next sentence casts doubt on this initial claim: “at the same time it [self-consciousness] is no less absolutely for itself.” The question then emerges, how are we to understand self-consciousness as essentially realized in otherness, and yet as absolutely for itself? What kind of “otherness” must self-consciousness find such that self-realization mediated by this Other results in self-recovery? If desire is realized in otherness, and this otherness reflects itself, then the otherness that desire seeks must be another self-consciousness. Hence, the only true satisfaction for desire is to be found in an object that mirrors the reflexive structure of desire itself. The externality of the independent object can only be overcome if intrinsic to that externality is a self-negating or reflexive structure: “on account of the independence of the object, therefore, it can achieve satisfaction only when the object effects the negation within itself.”
We might well question whether self-consciousness is the kind of phenomenon that fits this requirement exclusively. Hegel tells us that negation is specified in self-consciousness as “absolute negation” (¶ 178), which distinguishes self-consciousness from other phenomena that embody negation in other ways. Apart from absolute negation, which is equivalently referred to as “Desire” or “negation in another self-consciousness,” there is negation as a determinateness or apparent externality, and negation as “the inorganic universal nature of Life,” the dynamic of consolidating and dissolving shape already considered (¶ 178). In absolute negation, we find negation operating as the essence and final actualization of a given reality. Like Spinoza’s definition of desire as a “final end,” 11 Hegel here characterizes the negativity of desire as the final, fully realized form of self-consciousness. To understand this correctly, we must not assume that negation is nothingness; on the contrary, as a differentiating relation that mediates the terms that initially counter each other, negation, understood in the sense of Aufhebung, cancels, preserves, and transcends the apparent differences it interrelates. As the final realization of self-consciousness, negation is a principle of absolute mediation, an infinitely capable subject that is its interrelations with all apparently different phenomena. The human capacity for negation is privileged inasmuch as the work of negation can be thematized and appropriated by the negating agency itself; indeed, thematization and appropriation become essential moments of “the labour of the negative,” the work of discovering relations where there seemed to be none. Hence, Hegel claims that only in self-consciousness do we find a “universal independent nature in which negation is present as absolute negation.” In the following paragraph, Hegel elaborates: “the immediate ‘I’”—the other self-consciousness that is the object of desire—“is itself absolute mediation, it is only as a supersession of the independent object, in other words, it is Desire” (¶ 176).
For desire to enact absolute negation, it must find a way to embody absolute negation as an object of experience; and if it is absolute negation, it must, therefore, duplicate itself as the object of desire. Only through its duplication as an Other can desire be rendered explicit, realized as its own final end: “a self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it” (¶ 177).
In “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” this other self-consciousness is imagined as the logically appropriate object of desire, but not until the following section, “Lordship and Bondage,” do we meet such an Other, and only in the course of that section do we become convinced of the necessity of its existence. We have understood desire as the effort of a disembodied consciousness to acquire reality from an ostensibly disparate world of substance, and we have altered our notion of human agency to fit the reflexive requirements of self-consciousness. As a sensuous articulation of consciousness, desire discloses self-consciousness as that which participates in what it investigates. Desire thus constantly widens its intentional aims and thereby expands the domain of reflexivity which it indicates and enacts. Indeed, from Force to Explanation, to the consumption of Life, we have gained insight into the ever widening circumference of reflexivity that constitutes the emerging subject of the Phenomenology. In this last dramatic moment, we learn that this subject not only consumes its world, that the mediation of difference is not only the internalization of otherness, but also the externalization of the subject. These two moments of assimilation and projection are part of the same movement, that ever-widening circumference of reality which, in Hegel’s words, “unifies” subject and substance, those two related but independent moments which condition the irreducible ambiguity of this emerging identity. Desire is this subject’s necessarily ambiguous movement toward the world, consumption and externalization, appropriation and dispersal; the “Life” of the subject is the constant consolidation and dissolution of itself. As desire becomes desire-for-another-desire, this subject hopes to get a self-sustaining picture of himself, an independent embodiment of negation that will reflect his own powers of absolute negation. This subject no doubt expects that this is the end of the journey, that to know oneself as “absolute negation” is to recognize one’s own self-sufficiency, the unity of independence—explicit reality—and negativity that one is. But at this point this subject’s vision is too narrow, for he mistakenly restricts his dependence to the world of natural objects, and does not anticipate his dependence on the self-consciousness he will meet. He shows no understanding of human embodiment, and he surely underestimates the complexity and consequences of what it means to be reflected in and by another emerging subject. Vain and headstrong, this subject once again travels swiftly toward defeat.
An infernal love… aims at subjugating a freedom in order to take shelter in it from the world.—Sartre, Saint Genet
Desire is aufgehoben in “Lordship and Bondage”; it is canceled yet preserved, which is to say that it is transformed into a more internally complicated mode of human striving. Viewed as the least sophisticated project of self-consciousness, desire is sometimes dismissed as no longer having an ontological role to play in this section;12 it may be said to be supplanted by the struggle for recognition and the dialectic of lord and bondsman, but the meaning of “supplanted” must be critically attended. As long as we are still within the experience of self-consciousness, and “Desire in general” is its essential character, then the drama of recognition and labor must be seen as permutations of desire; indeed, what we witness in this chapter is the gradual specification of desire: self-consciousness as desire in particular. The notion of desire loses its reified character as an abstract universal, and becomes situated in terms of an embodied identity. For Hegel, labor is “inhibited desire” (¶ 195), and recognition becomes the more sophisticated form of reflection that promises to satisfy desire.
The above argument is in some sense superfluous, for it is not finally appropriate to consider whether desire, conceived as some independent agency, is aufgehoben or superseded in “Lordship and Bondage.” The action of supersession is not applied to desire as a force externally imposed upon a discrete agent; desire is nothing other than the action of supersession itself. Moreover, what it means to “supersede” a given externality itself changes and develops throughout the Phenomenology, and Aufhebung is only the abstract and logical term for a developing set of experiences which dramatize the negation of difference and thereby posit/reveal ever more encompassing unities or interrelations. The concrete meaning of Aufhebung is here understood as the developing sequence: consuming desire, desire for recognition, desire for another’s desire. Hence, in asking whether desire is still operative in “Lordship and Bondage,” we misunderstand the operative force in the Phenomenology at large, its logical motor, as it were, which, embodied by human subjects, is desire itself. The sophistication of desire’s intentional aims is at once the enhancement of human conceptual powers, the ever-expanding capacity to discern identity in difference, to expand the hermeneutical circle of Hegel’s traveling metaphysician.
In “The Truth of Self-Certainty” we learn that through the experience of desire self-consciousness discovers itself as “essentially negative.” Moreover, we come to see how the “difference” between consciousness and its object becomes the ground for a new identity. The effort of desire to appropriate an object, and through that appropriation to assert its own identity, reveals self-consciousness as that which must relate itself to another being in order to become itself. The gradual yet insistent effort of Hegel’s journeying subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit never relinquishes this project to relate itself to externality in order to rediscover itself as more inclusive being. The insurpassability of externality implies the permanence of desire. In this sense, insofar as Hegel’s subject never achieves a static union with externality, it is hopelessly beyond its own grasp, although it retains as its highest aim the thorough comprehension of itself. This thoroughgoing self-determination is the ideal of integrity toward which self-consciousness strives, and this striving is denoted by desire.
On the one hand, we concede that desire alone will never achieve this total self-comprehension for desire alone is the consumption of objects, and we have seen how consumption fails effectively to assimilate externality. On the other hand, we need to ask whether speaking of “desire alone” in Hegel’s view makes any sense. After all, desire revealed an implicit intentional aim, namely, to disclose and enact a common ontological structure with the world. Hence, despite the alleged object of desire, i.e., “this piece of fruit,” or its more general aim, “the consumption of this brute being which poses as other to me,” desire has at base a metaphysical project which, while requiring determinate objects, transcends them as well, i.e., to effect a unity with the realm of externality which both preserves that realm and renders it into a reflection of self-consciousness. The dissatisfaction of desire implies that something would satisfy desire, that this something is missing, and that a consideration of the inadequacies of the mode of consumption will provide the criteria for a satisfying object. In the turn to another self-consciousness as a possible object of satisfaction, we can see that it is not desire itself that is superseded, but a peculiar form of desire, and that the aim of self-consciousness, even as it leaves the section on self-certainty, is still the satisfaction of desire.
Desire does not merely survive into the section “Lordship and Bondage,” but remains essential to the ever-expanding project of negation that structures the Phenomenology. Because desire is the principle of self-consciousness’ reflexivity or inner difference, and because it has as its highest aim the assimilation of all external relations into relations of inner difference, desire forms the experiential basis for the project of the Phenomenology at large. Desire and its satisfaction constitute the first and final moments of the philosophical pursuit of self-knowledge (¶ 165). In this regard, the metaphysical project that informs the entire project of Geist finds its original and final measure in the criteria desire sets forth for its satisfaction. Hence, to claim that desire is simply an unsophisticated form of knowing and being in Hegel’s system is to misread the standard of truth that governs the Phenomenology generally; the gradual sophistication of desire—the expanding inclusiveness of its intentional aims—is the principle of progress in the Phenomenology.
Stanley Rosen, a student of Kojève’s, argues that desire is the basis of both historical progress and the development of philosophical self-reflection; he places Hegel among those modern philosophers who stress the primacy of desire in human development:
In the tradition of such modern philosophers as Machiavelli and Hobbes, [Hegel] recognizes desire as the “engine” of world-history (thereby uniting the Platonic Eros with the directedness of historical development). The spirit first knows itself as subjective feeling. When feeling is localized externally, or given an objective status, spirit divides itself into inner and outer world. We become alienated from ourselves or regard our true self as contained in the object outside us, which we desire to assimilate. Desire is thus fundamentally desire for myself, or for my interior essence from which I have become detached. The struggle to satisfy my desires leads to the development of individual consciousness. Since others desire the same things, this struggle is also the origin of the family, the state, and, in general, of world-history.13
As Rosen suggests, the dramatic education of Hegel’s journeying subject consists of a series of self-alienations which prompt a revision of the subject itself.14 Every confrontation with an external reality is at once an alienation of the subject; difference threatens the subject with annihilation until the subject can discover that difference as an essential moment of itself. In the section “Lordship and Bondage,” Hegel’s emergent subject confronts another self-consciousness, and immediately concludes that it, the initial subject, has lost itself. Desire remains defeated until it can find a way of revealing that other subject as essential to its own identity; this way is forged through the struggle for recognition.
The previous section on self-certainty provides a theoretical understanding of the necessity of the Other. Self-consciousness needed to understand itself as self-negation, as a self-determining being. The Other was distinguished from other objects in that it was like the first self-consciousness—an independently subsisting being who exhibited the principle of self-negation. Discovering this Other self-consciousness appears in that section to be the only way that the initial self-consciousness can regard its own essential structure rendered explicit. The task of “Lordship and Bondage” is to demonstrate how this process is effected in experience. The reflection of the subject in and through the Other is achieved through the process of reciprocal recognition, and this recognition proves to be—in the terms of that section—the satisfaction of desire. Our task, then, is to understand the project of desire—the negation and assimilation of otherness and the concomitant expansion of the proper domain of the subject—in the encounter with another subject with a structurally identical set of aims.
The transition from “The Truth of Self-Certainty” to “Lordship and Bondage” is a curious one in that the former section conjectures the existence of the Other as an adequate object for self-consciousness’ desire in theoretical terms. And yet the progress of the Phenomenology is ostensibly necessitated by knowledge gained from experience. The first paragraph of “Lordship and Bondage” reiterates this theoretical conclusion, asserting prior to its demonstration that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [anerkannt]” (¶ 178). Because we cannot expect that self-consciousness has certain knowledge of its own requirements before these requirements are made clear in experience, we are forced to regard the emergence of the Other in the following paragraph as puzzling: “Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness” (¶ 179)—but why? And why has it not happened earlier? Why did the journeying subject of the Phenomenology begin its journey alone, and why was its confrontation with the sensuous and perceptual world previous to its confrontation on with an Other?
As I noted in my earlier discussion of the “appearance” of desire, the development of the Phenomenology suggests that the reader must make a strict distinction between the appearance of a given entity and its conceptual reality. The appearance of the Other must be understood as an emergence into explicit reality which has hitherto remained an implicit or nascent being. Before its actual appearance, the Other remains opaque, but not for that reason without reality. Coming into existence—or explicit appearance—is never, for Hegel, a creation ex nihilo, but is, rather, a moment in the development of a Concept (Begriff). The Other is revealed as an essential structure of all experience in the course of the Phenomenology; indeed, there can be no experience outside the context of inter-subjectivity. Hence, even as the Phenomenology claims to be an experience of the genesis of Geist, it is a fictive experience created by and through the text, and must be understood as an experience uniquely philosophical—a sustained inverted world—which delineates in the terms of its own temporality the structures that condition and inform historical experience as we know it.15
To say, then, that the Other appears is not to claim that the initial self-consciousness discovers a phenomenon that previously had no ontological status; rather, it is only now that the Other becomes explicit in virtue of its centrality to the initial self-consciousness’ pursuit of an identity that encompasses the world. The Other becomes the general object of desire.
The optimism that characterized the closure of “The Truth of Self-Certainty” and the opening paragraph of “Lordship and Bondage” is a function of the purely conceptual nature of the conclusion that mutual recognition is a possible and gratifying object for desire; this possibility, however, must be dramatized in order to be known. Self-consciousness begins this struggle in ¶ 179 where it discovers that the structural similarity of the Other is not an immediate occasion for deriving an adequate reflection of itself in the Other; indeed, the first experience of the Other’s similarity is that of self-loss.
Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a two-fold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self, (¶ 178)16
The initial self-consciousness seeks to have itself reflected in the other self-consciousness, but finds itself not merely reflected, but wholly absorbed. The initial self-consciousness no longer seeks to consume the Other, as it sought to consume objects, but is instead consumed by the Other. Self-consciousness comes out of itself when faced with the Other, where “ausser sich” in German not only denotes coming out of oneself, but ecstasy as well as anger.17 The intentional and reflexive relations to the Other are temporarily lost, and self-consciousness is convinced that the Other has occupied its own essence—self-negation—stolen it even, and in this sense self-consciousness finds itself besieged by the Other. In one respect, self-consciousness discovers that the self-negating principle of self-consciousness itself is a detachable attribute, one that might be extricated from the particular embodiment that the initial self-consciousness is. And insofar as self-negation is its own essence, self-consciousness concludes that essence and embodiment are only contingently related, that the same essence might inhabit different embodiments at different times. That self-consciousness can find its own essential principle embodied elsewhere appears as a frightening and even angering experience. And yet the ambiguity of “ausser sich sein” suggests that the externality that self-consciousness is now seen to inhabit is not wholly external: in desiring the Other, self-consciousness discovers itself as ecstatic being, a being that has it in itself to become other to itself, which, through the self-surpassing principle of desire, gives itself up to the Other even as it charges that the Other has somehow appropriated it. The ambiguity of gift and appropriation characterizes the initial encounter with the Other, and transforms this meeting of two desires into a struggle (Kampf).18
The first lesson gleaned from the encounter with the Other is that of the essential ambiguity of self-consciousness’ externalization. Self-consciousness seeks a reflection of its own identity through the Other, but finds instead the enslaving and engulfing potential of the Other. As desire for a comprehensive identity, self-consciousness initially expects the Other to be a passive medium of reflection for itself; the Other will mirror itself since the Other is like itself. Perhaps extrapolating from its experience with objects, self-consciousness naively expects that the Other will be passive like objects, and differ only insofar as it can reflect self-consciousness’ structure. Apparently, this initial self-consciousness did not take seriously enough the extent to which the Other is, indeed, like itself, i.e., a principle of active negation, and so is scandalized by the independent freedom of the Other. The independence that was to be a passive reflection of the initial self-consciousness is now conceived as an externality which safeguards freedom within the Other, a situation considered threatening by the first self-consciousness who viewed freedom as its own exclusive property.
Self-consciousness’ anger—the way in which it is “ausser sich”—does not proceed directly from the perceptual experience described above, but as a consequence of its own ecstatic involvement with the Other. The Other embodies its freedom because the initial self-consciousness has forfeited its freedom to the Other. Desire is here understood as ecstatic self-sacrifice, which is in direct contradiction to the overriding project of desire, i.e., to attain an ever more capable identity. Desire thus founders on contradiction, and becomes a passion divided against itself. Striving to become coextensive with the world, an autonomous being that finds itself everywhere reflected in the world, self-consciousness discovers that implicit in its own identity as a desiring being is the necessity of being claimed by another.
The initial encounter with the Other is thus a narcissistic project which fails through an inability to recognize the Other’s freedom. This failure of recognition is itself conditioned by the view of the Other’s externality as encapsulating, a view that presupposes that the ecstatic involvement of the first self-consciousness is necessarily self-annihilating. The philosophical assumption of this experience is that freedom is an exclusive characteristic of the individual, and that it can inhabit a particular embodiment only as that embodiment’s exclusive property. Thus, insofar as it is the body of the Other that is seen to lay claim to freedom, it is that body that must be destroyed. Only through the death of the Other will the initial self-consciousness retrieve its claim to autonomy.
The quandary conditioning the struggle of life and death is that of having to choose between ecstatic and self-determining existence. Not only the bodily exteriority of the Other offends the initial self-consciousness, but its own estrangement from itself. This estrangement is not to be understood solely in terms of the fact of the Other as an independent freedom, but also as the self-estrangement implicit in the experience of desire. As an intentional movement, desire tends to eclipse the self that is its origin. Enthralled with its object, the desiring self can only regard itself as estranged. As a movement outside of itself, desire becomes an act of willful self-estrangement even as its overriding project is to establish a more inclusive self. Thus, the effort to overcome the Other is simultaneously an effort to overcome self-consciousness’ own otherness to itself.
The ambiguity of the otherness self-consciousness seeks to overcome forms the central theme of “Lordship and Bondage,” and it becomes clear that any reflexive relation that self-consciousness seeks to have is itself only possible through an intentional relation to an Other; it can overcome its own self-alienation only through overcoming the externality of the Other’s self-consciousness:
It must supersede this otherness of itself. This is the supersession of the first ambiguity, and is therefore itself a second ambiguity. First, it must proceed to supersede the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being; secondly, in so doing it proceeds to supersede its own self, for this other is itself. (¶ 180)
The experiential meaning of “supersession” or “overcoming” in the above reveals itself as recognition (Anerkennung). The initial self-consciousness can only retrieve itself from its ecstatic involvement with the Other insofar as it recognizes the Other as also in the process of retrieving itself from its own estrangement in desire. Self-consciousness’ predicament, that of having to choose between ecstatic and self-determining existence, is seen to be the predicament of the Other as well. This similarity between the two self-consciousnesses ultimately proves to be the basis of their harmonious interdependence, the discovery of each that “as consciousness, it does indeed come out of itself, yet, though out of itself, is at the same time kept back within itself, is for itself, and the self outside it, is for it. It is aware that it at once is, and is not, another consciousness” (¶ 184). Recognition, once achieved, affirms the ambiguity of self-consciousness as both ecstatic and self-determining. The process of recognition reveals that the self-consciousness which is self-estranged, unrecognizable to itself, is still the author of its own experience: “there is nothing in it of which it is itself not the origin” (¶ 182). When the Other is viewed as the same as the subject, and this subject understands his own act of recognition as having brought the Other into explicitness, then the self is also revealed as the author of the Other. As it becomes clear that the same truths hold true of the Other’s relationship to the self, the Other is also viewed as the author of the subject. Desire here loses its character as a purely consumptive activity, and becomes characterized by the ambiguity of an exchange in which two self-consciousnesses affirm their respective autonomy (independence) and alienation (otherness).
The life and death struggle appears as a necessary dramatic move for a self-consciousness that assumes that the Other’s embodiment is primarily responsible for thwarting self-consciousness’ pursuit of its own identity. Here corporeality everywhere signifies limitation, and the body which once seemed to condition freedom’s concrete determination now requires annihilation in order for that freedom to be retrieved. The corporeal externality of each to the other presents itself as an insurpassable barrier, and seems to imply that each subject can be certain only of his own determinate life, but never can get beyond his own life to be certain of the life of the Other. Determinate life itself becomes suspect in this predicament; it thwarts self-consciousness’ project to transcend its own particularity and discover itself as the essence of objects and Others in the world. The effort to annihilate the Other is originally motivated by the desire of the initial self-consciousness to present itself as a “pure abstraction”; it seeks to break its dependence on the Other and, hence, prove “that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that is, not attached to life” (¶ 187). And yet in order to disenthrall itself from the enslaving externality of the Other, this self-consciousness must stake its own life in the process. The project of “pure abstraction” is quickly foiled as it becomes clear that without determinate existence the initial self-consciousness would never live to see the identity after which it strives. Moreover, the death of the Other would deprive self-consciousness of the explicit recognition it requires.
The life and death struggle is a crucial section in the Phenomenology’s development of the notion of autonomy; as Hegel claims, “the individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness” (¶187). Although determinate life is a necessary precondition for the project of self-consciousness, desire is never satisfied when it is merely the desire to live. In order to discover itself as a negative or self-surpassing being, self-consciousness must do more than merely live; it must transcend the immediacy of pure life. It cannot stay content with the “first nature” into which it is born, but must engage itself in the creation of a “second nature” which establishes the self, not merely as a presupposition or a point of view, but as an achievement of its own making. Autonomy can be achieved only through relinquishing an enslavement to life.19
The life and death struggle is an extension of self-consciousness’ initial project to gain unity with the Other, and to find its own identity through the Other. Insofar as the effort to obliterate the Other is a mutual or “two-fold action” (¶ 187), each self-consciousness seeks to destroy the determinate boundaries that exist between them; they seek to destroy each other’s bodies. Violence to the Other appears as the most efficient route by which to nullify the Other’s body. And insofar as both individuals seek to rid themselves of their dependence on determinate existence, and release the pure freedom which they view as trapped within corporeality, each seeks to merge with the Other as the abstract principle of freedom, “absolute abstraction” (¶ 186), pure being-for-self.
Thus, the life and death struggle is a continuation of the erotic that introduces Hegel’s chapter; it is desire once again transformed to destruction, a project that assumes that true freedom exists only beyond the body. Whereas destructive desire in its first appearance sought to internalize otherness into a self-sufficient body, this second appearance of destructive desire endeavors to overcome bodily life altogether, i.e., to become an abstract identity without corporeal needs. Endeavoring to rid the Other of its determinate life, each self-consciousness engages in an anti-corporeal erotic which endeavors to prove in vain that the body is the ultimate limit to freedom, rather than its necessary ground and mediation.
The dynamic of lord and bondsman emerges as an extenuation of the desire to annihilate, but, because annihilation would undermine the project altogether by taking away life, this desire is held in check. Domination, the relation that replaces the urge to kill, must be understood as the effort to annihilate within the context of life. The Other must now live its own death. Rather than become an indeterminate nothingness through death, the Other must now prove its essential nothingness in life. The Other which was at first captivating, now becomes that which must be captured, subdued, contained. Angered at having been captivated by the Other, self-consciousness in pursuit of its own absolute freedom forces this Other to annihilate its own freedom and thus affirm the illusion that the Other is an unfree body, a lifeless instrument.
The lord’s reflexive relation must be understood as an internalization of the intentional relation it had toward the Other in the life and death struggle. Self-consciousness’ original effort to annihilate the body of the Other entailed the staking of its own bodily life. In dramatizing annihilation, this subject learns that annihilation can be dramatized, that is, given a living form; moreover, the fear and trembling accompanying the risking of his own life teaches him the relief of abstraction. Terror gives rise to dissociation. The lord cannot deny his body through suicide, so he proceeds to embody his denial. This internalization of an intentional relation, i.e., its transformation into a reflexive one, itself engenders a new intentional one: the reflexive project of disembodiment becomes linked to the domination of the Other. The lord cannot get rid of the body once and for all—this was the lesson of the life and death struggle. And yet he retains the project of becoming a pure, disembodied “I,” a freedom unfettered by particularity and determinate existence, a universal and abstract identity. He still acts on the philosophical assumption that freedom and bodily life are not essential to one another, except that bodily life appears to be a precondition of freedom. But freedom does not, in the tacit view of the lord, require bodily life for its concrete expression and determination. For the lord, bodily life must be taken care of, but just as well by an Other, for the body is not part of his own project of identity. The lord’s identity is essentially beyond the body; he gains illusory confirmation for this view by requiring the Other to be the body that he endeavors not to be.
The lord appears at the outset to live as a desire without needs; significantly, the lord is said to “enjoy” (“im Genusse sich zu befriedigen”) the fruits of the bondsman’s labor, where enjoyment implies a passive reception and consumption of something other to self-consciousness, as distinct from desire which requires an active principle of negation (¶ 190). The lord desires without having to negate the thing desired, except in the impoverished sense of consuming it; the bondsman, through working on the thing, embodies the principle of negation as an active and creative principle, and thus inadvertently dramatizes that he is more than a mere body, and that the body itself is an embodying or expressive medium for the project of a self-determining identity. Through the experience of work, the body is revealed as an essential expression of freedom. And insofar as the bondsman works to create goods that sustain life, the bondsman also demonstrates that desire—rather than expressing a freedom from needs—can find fulfillment through the satisfaction of needs. Indeed, insofar as the bondsman creates a reflection of himself through his labor on products, he triumphs as the freedom that, through finding itself expressed in determinate existence (through physical labor on physical things), has found some semblance of recognition for himself as a self-determining agent. And although the lord endeavors to be free of the need for physical life, he can sustain this illusory project only through developing a need for the bondsman. As needed by the lord, the bondsman discovers his action as efficacious. The lord’s need thus confirms the bondsman as more than a body; it affirms him indirectly as a laboring freedom. It provides indirect recognition of the bondsman’s power of self-determination.
At the outset of the struggle of lord and bondsman we know that self-consciousness’ desire is, at its most general articulation, a desire to discover itself as an all-inclusive identity, and also a desire to live. Desire must arrange for its satisfaction within the context of life, for death is the end of desire, a negativity which, except in the imaginary realms of Augustine’s or Dante’s hells, cannot be sustained. Desire is coextensive with life, with the realm of otherness, and with Others. Whatever the ultimate satisfaction for desire, we know at this stage that certain preconditions must first be met. We also know from our introductory remarks on Hegel that whatever exists as a precondition of desire serves also as an intentional aim of desire’s articulation. The lord acknowledges with reservation and self-deception that he is, indeed, tied to life. Life appears as a necessary precondition for the satisfaction of desire. The bondsman asserts this precondition as the proper end of desire; acting in the face of the fear of death (¶ 194), the bondsman asserts the desire to live.
Both the posture of the lord and the posture of the bondsman can be seen as configurations of death in life, as death-bent desires emerging in the shadows of more explicit desires to die. Domination and enslavement are thus defenses against life within the context of life; they emerge in the spirit of nostalgia over the failed effort to die. In this sense, domination and enslavement are projects of despair, what Kierkegaard termed the despair of not being able to die.20 Life or determinate existence requires the sustained interrelationship of physical existence and the cultivation of identity. As such, it requires the maintenance of the body in conjunction with the project of autonomous freedom.
The lord and the bondsman turn against life in different ways, but both resist the synthesis of corporeality and freedom, a synthesis that alone is constitutive of human life; the lord lives in dread of his body, while the bondsman lives in dread of freedom. The dissolution of their antagonism paves the way for an embodied pursuit of freedom, a desire to live in the fullest sense. “Life” in this mediated sense is not a merely physical enduring—that was seen as a posture of death in life in the case of the bondsman. The desire to live in the full sense is rendered synonymous with the desire to attain a more capable identity through reciprocal recognition. Hence, the desire to live is demonstrated here not merely as the precondition of the pursuit of a self-determining identity, but as its highest achievement. Desire that seeks to rediscover substance as subject is the desire to become the whole of life. Desire is thus always an implicit struggle against the easier routes of death; domination and enslavement are metaphors for death in life, the presence of contradictions, that keep one from wanting life enough.21
The dialectic of lord and bondsman is implicitly a struggle with the generalized problem of life. The division of labor between lord and bondsman presupposes a discrepancy between the desire to live and the desire to be free. The lord, displeased with the prospect of having to live, delegates the task to the bondsman. The bondsman takes to working on things, fashioning them into products for human consumption. For the lord, life appears as material exigency, as a limit to his project of abstraction. The lord’s desire to be beyond life (the intentionality of his desire) reveals a desire to be beyond desire (the reflexivity of his desire). He does not relish the dialectic of want and satisfaction; his sole project is to remain sated and, hence, to banish desire and its possibilities.
The bondsman, delegated the task of trafficking with life, is originally cast as a mere thing, “the consciousness for which thinghood is the essential characteristic” (¶ 190), but this role did not accommodate the repetitive dimension of having to live. The bondsman cannot merely exist as a thing and yet endeavor to live; in fact, the inorganic quality of things is constitutive of their deathlike dimension. Life is not, as the lord assumed, a merely material and, hence, limiting precondition of self-consciousness. It is a task that demands to be taken up again and again. The bondsman cannot be identified with the Naturwüchsigkeit of the things he works upon, precisely because work turns out to be the negation of naturalness: “through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it” (¶ 194). The labor of the bondsman emerges as a truncated form of desire: he exhibits the principle of active negation, but does not wholly view himself as the author of his actions; he still works for the lord rather than for himself. In the case of the bondsman, the desire to live, specified as the desire to create the goods to live, cannot become integrated with the desire to be free until he relinquishes his shackles through disobedience and the attendant fear of death.
The division of tasks between lord and bondsman can be seen to explicate two different yet related projects of dissatisfied desire. The lord implicitly restricts desire to the consumption of ready-made goods and thus substitutes the satisfaction of desire for the entirety of the process. The bondsman exemplifies the dimension of desire missing from the lord’s implicit account; his is a project of survival and activity encompassed by the meaning of labor. The lord’s project of disembodiment becomes, ironically, a posture of greed; distanced from the physical world, yet requiring it to live, the lord becomes a passive consumer who, despite his privilege, can never be satisfied.
The lord’s project to be beyond need becomes itself a pressing and relentless need; and his requirement to remain always sated ties him irrevocably to particularity and his own body, a tie he originally sought to break. And the bondsman, consigned to the realm of particularity, discovers through laboring on natural things his own capacity to transform the brutely given world into a reflection of his own self. The lord becomes schooled in the lessons of life, while the bondsman becomes schooled in freedom. And the gradual inversion of their initial roles offers lessons in the general structure and meaning of desire.
The project or desire to live and the project or desire to gain autonomous identity can be integrated only in the desire that explicitly takes account of need. The denial of need alienates self-consciousness from itself, and is a key way in which self-consciousness renders part of itself as an externality. As long as need is considered to be a contingency or piece of affective facticity, self-consciousness remains split off from itself, and the possibility of attaining an integrated self is foreclosed. When the satisfaction of needs becomes integrated into the pursuit of identity, we find that needs are but the alienated forms of desire; the need to live, formulated as such, affirms the view of life as mere exigency, and confirms the faulty distinction between the desire to live and the desire to achieve a self-determining identity. When needs are owned, they are experienced as desire.
Desire requires as well the transformation of the particularity of the natural world (the lived body as well as natural objects) into reflections of human activity; desire must become expressed through labor, for desire must give shape or form to the natural world in order to find itself reflected there (¶195). Giving form is thus the external determination of desire; in order to find satisfaction, i.e., recognition for itself, desire must give way to creative work. Desire is not wholly canceled through work of this kind, but work is “desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence” (¶ 195; my emphasis).
The negating or appropriative function of desire is no longer to be construed as consumption, the ecstatic enthrallment with another, nor domination, but as the re-creation of natural objects into reflections of their maker. Desire is to find its satisfaction, the reflection of itself as a self-determining and determinate existence, through effecting a human genesis of the external world. The externality of the world is negated through becoming transformed into a creation of human will. Self-consciousness is to attain to a godlike authorship of the world, “a universal formative activity,” not “master over some things, but… over the universal power and the whole of objective being” (¶ 196).
I have argued that desire always maintains a reflexive as well as an intentional structure; I must now add that desire’s intentionality is twofold: desire is always linked with the problem of recognition of and by another self-consciousness, and desire is always an effort to negate/transform the natural world. The realm of sensuous and perceptual reality relinquished in the discovery of the Other as a self-negating independence is here resurrected in new form. Mutual recognition only becomes possible in the context of a shared orientation toward the material world. Self-consciousness is mediated not only through another self-consciousness, but each recognizes the other in virtue of the form each gives to the world. Hence, we are recognized not merely for the form we inhabit in the world (our various embodiments), but for the forms we create of the world (our works); our bodies are but transient expressions of our freedom, while our works shield our freedom in their very structure.
Hegel begins “Lordship and Bondage” with the claim that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [als ein Anerkanntes]” (¶ 178). But what is it that the other recognizes us as? The answer is, as a desiring being: “Self-consciousness is Desire in general” (¶ 167). We have seen that desire is a polyvalent structure, a movement to establish an identity coextensive with the world. Hegel’s discussion of labor begins to show us how the world of substance becomes recast as the world of the subject. Desire as a transformation of the natural world is simultaneously the transformation of its own natural self into an embodied freedom. And yet, these transformations cannot occur outside of an historically constituted intersubjectivity which mediates the relation to nature and to the self. True subjectivities come to flourish only in communities that provide for reciprocal recognition, for we do not come to ourselves through work alone, but through the acknowledging look of the Other who confirms us.
At the close of “Lordship and Bondage” we have the sense that the life of self-consciousness is slowly drawing to an end. With the possibility of mutual recognition, we see the beginnings of Spirit or Geist, that collective identity which signifies yet a different set of ontological presumptions. The subject of Hegel’s Phenomenology emerges not only as a mode of intentional enthrallment and the reflexive pursuit of identity, but as a desire that requires Others for its satisfaction and for its own constitution as an intersubjective being. In the effort to gain reflection of itself through the recognition of and by the Other, this subject discovers its dependency not only as one of many attributes, but as its very self. This interdependence, this new subject, is still desire, but one that seeks metaphysical satisfaction through the articulation of the subject’s historical place in a given community.
This reformulation of desire as the articulation of historical identity and historical place forms the philosophical starting point of Alexandre Kojève’s introduction of Hegel into twentieth-century French intellectual life. In effect, Kojève halts the Phenomenology at the end of “Lordship and Bondage,” and retells Hegel’s narrative from the point of view of that struggling individual on the brink of collective identity. Kojève’s subject retains all the metaphysical impulses of his Hegelian precursor, but is tempered by a Marxian distrust of Hegel’s idealism. Hence, self-consciousness emerges decades later in the French language as an historical actor requiring recognition by Others, and fully expecting his sense of immanent metaphysical place to be confirmed therein. In seeking to historicize the metaphysical plan of Hegel’s traveler, Kojève unwittingly introduces the possibility that historical action and metaphysical satisfaction may not imply each other mutually. Indeed, as Hegel’s subject makes his way across the border into France, and into the twentieth century, we will see that the question of historical agency and historical experience will come to challenge that subject’s well-planned itinerary. Indeed, without his progressive journey, it will become unclear whether the traveler himself can survive.