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in the Deducing Desire and Recognition Phenomenologyof Spirit FREDERICK NEUHOUSER THE READEROF HEGEL'SPhenomenologyofSpiritis confronted in the chapter on self-consciousness with a series of engaging, if at the same time, bewildering moves which purport to show the necessary dialectical development of an abstract, naive conception of self-awareness into one which expresses more adequately the truth of self-consciousness. The master-slave portion of this dialectic isjustifiably the most famous, in large part because of the richness of its analysis of the foundations of human relationships, but also because the movement which it undergoes is a particularly clear demonstration of the basic structure of the dialectical progression that is to be found throughout the work. Given self-consciousness' need for recognition, the events which follow--the fight to the death between two self-consciousnesses, the enslavement of one by the other and the eventual dissolution of the relationship-arise out of one another in a coherent and plausible manner. The picture becomes less clear, however, when we ask about the origin of the need for recognition itself. One sees that it is somehow derivative of desire in general, but the origin of desire is itself no less mysterious. How is it that the capacity for desire is suddenly attributed to a self-consciousness which at its inception was nothing more than the certainty that it "was"? The objection is not that an analysis of desire has no place within a treatment of self-consciousness but, rather, that its introduction into the dialectic is not adequately grounded and that, consequently, Hegel is deceiving us--and himself as well--with his claim to be doing a rigorous and presuppositionless phenomenology. It is of no help to explain the occurrence of desire in the analysis as simply an expression of Hegel's view that human consciousness is always embodied and hence incapable of being fully understood in abstrac- [243] 244 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY tion from its appetitive activities. This is, of course, a fine view for Hegel to hold, but he must argue for its truth, especially in light of the strong claims of rigor which he makes for his analysis. If we are to take Hegel seriously, then, we must attempt to find this rigor which he thought belonged to the dialectic; in the case at hand, we must set out on the search for a "deduction" of desire. We encounter our first obstacle in posing the task itself, for it is not immediately evident what would fulfill our demand for a deduction. The term's connection with syllogistic reasoning comes to mind first, but the Phenomenol0gy is obviously not a concatenation of statements which follow logically from an opening set of premises. Still, in our initial conception of what might constitute a deduction it is only natural to retain this notion of "following from" and, given the story-like character of the Phenomenology,to think of some state of affairs as "deduced" if it necessarily follows from--is an inevitable result of--that which has gone before it. Deduction, according to this view, would be a forward movement of the dialectic, an unfolding of events one out of another. In this sense the life-risking fight between future master and slave, for example, could be said to be deduced because it follows from the need for recognition and various other factors which have already been established within the course of the dialectic. We cannot, of course, pretend to have hereby eliminated all of the imprecision in our notion of deduction, but we shall set aside these worries for now in the hope of attaining a clearer picture of what we are after as we engage in the search itself. Koj~ve is one commentator who explicitly addresses the question at hand but, as we shall see, fails to give a satisfactory answer. According to Koj~ve, desire is necessary in Hegel's analysis because it serves a particular purpose; namely, it contributes to the satisfaction of the human self's need for internal integrity. Desire is what brings the merely cognitive consciousness out of the world of objects "back to itself"--it is what makes it aware...

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