Hegel on Self-Consciousness

Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400836949
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

In the most influential chapter of his most important philosophical work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes the central and disarming assertions that "self-consciousness is desire itself" and that it attains its "satisfaction" only in another self-consciousness. Hegel on Self-Consciousness presents a groundbreaking new interpretation of these revolutionary claims, tracing their roots to Kant's philosophy and demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary thought.
As Robert Pippin shows, Hegel argues that we must understand Kant's account of the self-conscious nature of consciousness as a claim in practical philosophy, and that therefore we need radically different views of human sentience, the conditions of our knowledge of the world, and the social nature of subjectivity and normativity. Pippin explains why this chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology should be seen as the basis of much later continental philosophy and the Marxist, neo-Marxist, and critical-theory traditions. He also contrasts his own interpretation of Hegel's assertions with influential interpretations of the chapter put forward by philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom.

Chapter One

On Hegel’s Claim That 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 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 to show first that the rules governing such activities (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 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 apperceptively taking it so. I am taking or construing rather than merely recording because I am also in such taking holding open the possibility that I may be taking falsely.) So all consciousness is inherently, though rarely explicitly, self-conscious. It is incorrect to think of a conscious state as just filled with the rich details of a house-perception, as if consciousness merely registers its presence; I take or judge the presence of a house, not a barn or gas station; or in Kant’s famous formula: “the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations.” But what could be meant by “inherently,” or “in some sense knowing I am taking or judging it to be such and such”? In what sense am I in a relation to myself in any conscious relation to an object? That is, the claim is that all consciousness involves a kind of self-consciousness, taking S to be P and thus taking myself to be taking S to be P. But in a self-relation like this, the self in question cannot be just another object of intentional awareness. If it were, then there would obviously be a regress problem. By parity of whatever reasoning established that the self must be able to observe itself as an object in taking anything to be anything, one would have to also argue that the observing self must also be observable, and so on. The self-relation, whatever it is, cannot be a two-place intentional relation, and the self-consciousness of consciousness cannot invite a two-stage or two-element picture: our conscious sentience and then, in addition, our self-monitoring self-relation. (As Kant and Hegel would put it: the latter is just consciousness again and we have not found self-consciousness.)³

Hegel’s own most famous discussion of these issues is found in the first four chapters of his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (hereafter PhG). The first three chapters of that book are grouped together under the heading “Consciousness” and the fourth chapter is called simply “Self-Consciousness.” (That fourth chapter has only one subsection, called “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” and that will be the focus of the following discussion.)⁴ Accordingly, especially given the extraordinarily sweeping claims Hegel makes about his indebtedness to the Kantian doctrine of apperception,⁵ one would expect that these sections have something to do with the Kantian points noted earlier, and so with the issue of the self-conscious character of experience and the conditions for the possibility of experience so understood. But there has been a lot of understandable controversy about the relation between the first three chapters of the PhG and the fourth. Since the fourth chapter discusses desire, life, a struggle to the death for recognition between opposed subjects, and a resulting Lord-Bondsman social structure, it has not been easy to see how the discussion of sense-certainty, perception, and the understanding is being continued. Some very influential commentators, like Alexandre Kojève, pay almost no attention to the first three chapters. They write as if we should isolate the Self-Consciousness chapter as a free-standing philosophical anthropology, a theory of the inherently violent and class-riven nature of human sociality. (There are never simply human beings as such in Kojève’s account. Our species status as one and all equal free subjects must be collectively achieved, and until the final bloody revolution ushers in a classless society, there are only Masters and Slaves.) Others argue that in Chapter Four, Hegel simply changes the subject to the problem of sociality. We can see why it might be natural for him to change the subject at this point, for it is a different subject. (Having introduced the necessary role of self-consciousness in consciousness, Hegel understandably changes the topic to very broad and different and independent questions like: what, in general, is self-consciousness? What is a self? What is it to be a being “for which” things can be, to use Brandom’s language, who offers his own version of the change-of-subject interpretation?)⁶ More recently, some commentators, like John McDowell and Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, have argued that there is actually neither a new beginning nor a shift in topics in Chapter Four. In McDowell’s treatment the problem is an extension and development of the one that emerged in the first three chapters but still basically concerns that issue: how to understand the right “equipoise” between independence and dependence in the relations between subjects and objects. What appear to be the orectic⁷ and social issues of Chapter Four are for McDowell “figures” or analogies for what remains the problem of the mind’s passive dependence on objects and active independence of them in our experience of the world, in just the sense sketched previously in the summary of Kant (i.e., neither independent subjective imposition, nor merely passive receptive dependence). What we have is a picture of our active, spontaneous self in a kind of mythic confrontation and struggle with its own passive empirical self, struggling at first futilely, for radical independence, and then an initial but doomed relation of dominance (as if the soul tries to make of its own corporeal nature a Knecht or mere servant).⁸ So for McDowell, Hegel does not mean to introduce in a direct sense the topic of desire as a necessary element in the understanding of consciousness itself (as the text, however counterintuitively, would seem to imply). Rather, says McDowell, “ ‘Desire überhaupt’ functions as a figure for the general idea of ‘negating otherness’ (admittedly an orectic issue of some sort), by appropriating or consuming, incorporating into oneself what at first figures as merely other, something that happens in perception, say.”⁹ And “life,” the next topic in the chapter, is said to exemplify the structure of der Begriff; let us say: the basic logical structure of all possible intelligibility, all sense-making.¹⁰ The struggle to the death for recognition is said to be a rich and colorful “allegory” of the possible relations of both independent and dependent sides within one consciousness. And so McDowell asserts that Chapter Four does not yet directly introduce the issue of sociality at all, despite the famous phrase there about the new presence of an “I that is a We and a We that is an I.”

This interpretation has the very great virtue of preserving a connection with the first three chapters, but, as I will argue, while the general issue of the logic of the relation between independence and dependence is certainly applicable to the relation between spontaneous apperception and the passive empirical self, McDowell’s interpretation, however rich in itself, fails to do justice to the radicality of what Hegel actually proposes. I want to argue that when Hegel says that self-consciousness is “desire überhaupt”¹¹ he means that to be relevant to the question of the apperceptive nature of consciousness itself; and that thereby he provides the basis for the claim that self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.¹² Defending that interpretation is the task of this book.

So here stated all at once is the thesis I would like to attribute to Hegel. (That is, the thesis worked out and defended in Chapter Four. As noted, the entire book is a meditation on self-consciousness, on the becoming self-consciousness of Geist.) I think that Hegel’s position is that we misunderstand all dimensions of self-consciousness, from apperception in consciousness itself, to simple, explicit reflection about myself, to practical self-knowledge of my own so-called identity, by considering any form of it as in any way observational or inferential or immediate or any sort of two-place intentional relation. However we come to know anything about ourselves (or whatever self-relation is implicit in attending to the world), it is not by observing an object, nor by conceptualizing an inner intuition, nor by any immediate self-certainty or direct presence of the self to itself. From the minimal sense of being aware of being determinately conscious at all (of judging), to complex avowals of who I am, of my own identity...