Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit

CHAPTER ONE: On Hegel’s Claim That Self-Consciousness Is “Desire Itself ” (Begierde überhaupt)

Chapter One On Hegel’s ClaimThat Self-Consciousness Is “Desire Itself” (Begierde überhaupt) I Kant held that what distinguishes an object in our experience from the mere subjective play of representations is rule-governed unity. His famous definition of an object is just “that in the concept of which a manifold is united” (B137). This means that consciousness itself must be understood as a discriminating, unifying activity, paradigmatically as judging, and not as the passive recorder of sensory impressions . Such a claim opens up a vast territory of possibilities and questions since Kant does not mean that our awake attentiveness is to be understood as something we intentionally do, in the standard sense, even if it is not also a mere event that happens to us, as if we happen to be triggered into a determinate mental state, or as if sensory stimuli just activate an active mental machinery. Kant also clearly does not mean to suggest by his claim that the form of consciousness is a judgmental form that consciousness consists of thousands of very rapid judgmental 7 desire itself claims being deliberately made, thousands of “S is P’s” or “If A then B’s” taking place. The world is taken to be such and such without such takings being isolatable, intentional judgments . What Kant does mean by understanding consciousness as “synthetic” is quite a formidable, independent topic in itself.1 Kant’s main interest in the argument of the deduction was toshowfirstthattherulesgoverningsuchactivities(whatever the right way to describe such activities) cannot be wholly empirical rules, all derived from experience, that there must be rules for the derivation of such rules that cannot themselves be derived, or that there must be pure concepts of the understanding; and second, that these non-derived rules have genuine “objective validity,” are not mere subjective impositions on an independently received manifold, that, as he puts it, the a priori prescribed “synthetic unity of consciousness ” “is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an object, but is a condition under which any intuition must stand in order to become an object for me” (B138). Kant seems to realize that he gives the impression that for him consciousness is a two-step process—the mere reception of sensory data, and then the conceptualization of such data—but he works hard in the pursuit of the second desideratum to disabuse his readers of that impression. Aside from some Kant scholars, there are not many philosophers who still believe that Kant proved in this argument that we possess synthetic a priori knowledge, although there is wide admiration for the power of Kant’s arguments about, at least, causality and substance. But there remains a great deal of interest in his basic picture of the nature of 1 I present an interpretation of the point in “What Is Conceptual Activity ?” forthcoming in The Myth of the Mental? ed. J. Shear. 8 chapter one conscious mindedness. For the central component of his account , judgment, is, as already noted, not a mental event that merely happens, as if causally triggered into its synthetic activity by sensory stimuli. Judging, while not a practical action initiated by a decision, is nevertheless an activity sustained and resolved, sometimes in conditions of uncertainty, by a subject and that means that it is normatively structured. The categorical rules of judgment governing such activity are rules about what ought to be judged, how our experience ought to be (must be) organized.For example,we distinguish or judge successive perceptions of a stable object as really simultaneous in time, and not actually representing something successive. This is a distinction that we must make; we experience successiveness in both cases and must be able to determine what ought to be judged simultaneous and what actually successive.2 So such rules are not rules describing how we do operate, are not psychological laws of thought, but involve a responsiveness to normative proprieties. And, to come to the point of contact with Hegel that is the subject of the following, this all means that consciousness must be inherently reflective or apperceptive. (I cannot be sustaining an activity, implicitly trying to get, say, the objective temporal order right in making up my mind, without in some sense knowing I am so taking the world to be such, or without 2 To be as clear as possible: we do not have an option or choice about...