Desire and Selfhood

Abstract

As Hegel observed in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “Self-consciousness, for the most part, is desire.” Phenomenologically, the “object of consciousness is itself… present only in opposition” to consciousness, while consciousness is felt as the absence of the longed-for object. According to Hegel, when desire is satisfied, this opposition ends and self-consciousness ceases. My essay seeks to answer the question of why desire never really terminates, why it almost continuously characterizes our waking life. I shall do so by exploring desire not just as a subjective phenomenon but as an ontological condition. What does desire say about the being of the subject? Desiring, the subject is stretched out in time. It is ahead of itself in its directedness to a not-yet present object. What is the condition for this temporal extendedness? What role does our embodied being-in-the-world play in it? How does the very spatiality of our selfhood condition our temporal extendedness? The goal of these questions is to understand desire in terms of the spatial and temporal aspects of our being.

This article is the outcome of the project “Philosophical Investigations of Body Experiences: Transdisciplinary Perspectives” (GAP 401/10/1164), at Charles University in Prague. It was supported by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports—Institutional Support for Long-Term Development of Research—Charles University, Faculty of Humanities. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts are cited with permission from Prof. Rudolf Bernet of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium.

Notes

1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1175a 20, 1175a 35.

2. Edmund Husserl, Ms. C 16, 68a, Sept. 1931, in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), 351. The full quote in German is: “Das Inhaltliche ist das Ichfremde, das Gefühl ist schon ichlich. Das ‘Ansprechen’ des Inhaltes sei nicht Anruf zu etwas, sondern ein fühlendes Dabei-Sein des Ich und zwar nicht erst als ein Dabeisein durch Hinkommen und Anlangen. Das Ich ist nicht etwas für sich und das Ichfremde ein vom Ich Getrenntes und zwischen beiden ist kein Raum für ein Hinwenden. Sondern untrennbar ist Ich und sein Ichfremdes, bei jedem Inhalt im Inhaltszusammenhang und bei dem ganzen Zusammenhang ist das Ich fühlendes.”

3. Husserl: “Was von Seiten der hyletischen Data Affektion auf das Ich heißt, heißt von Seiten des Ich Hintendieren, Hinstreben” (Ms. B III 9, 70a–70b).

4. In Husserl’s words: “Wach wird das Ich durch Affektion von Nicht-Ichlichem, und wach wird es, weil das Nicht-Ichliche von Interesse ist, instinktiv anzieht etc., und das Ich reagiert kinästhetisch, als unmittelbare Reaktion” (Ms. B III 3, 5a). In translation: “The ego is awakened by affection from the non-egological because the non-egological is ‘of interest,’ it instinctively attracts, etc; and the ego reacts kinesthetically as an immediate reaction.”

5. Husserl: “Alles Leben ist unaufhörliches Streben, alle Befriedigung ist Durchgangsbefriedigung” (Ms. A VI 26, 42a).

6. Husserl: “Das Ich ist, was es ist, und wesensmäßig in einem Stil von ursprünglichen und erworbenen Bedürfnissen, in einem Begehrungs- und Befriedigungsstil von begehrend zu Genuß, von Genuß zu begehrend übergehend” (Ms. E III 10, 8a). As Husserl also puts this: “Leben ist Streben in mannigfaltigen Formen und Gehalten der Intention und Erfüllung; in der Erfüllung im weitesten Sinne Lust, in der Unerfülltheit Hintendieren auf Lust als rein begehrendes Streben oder als sich im erfüllenden Realisieren entspannendes Streben und sich erzielend im Prozeß der Realisierung der in sich entspannten Lebensform der Lust.” (Ms. A VI 26, 42b). In translation: “Life is striving in the manifold forms and contents of intention and fulfillment; in the broadest sense, [it is] pleasure in fulfillment; in the lack of fulfillment, [life is] a tending towards pleasure as a pure striving that desires or as a striving that slackens off in the realization that fulfills it, and that accomplishes its purposes in the process of the realization of the life-form of pleasure with its release of tension.”

7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006), 121. The qualification, “for the most part” (überhaupt) is made since, for humans, self-consciousness is more than desire. It involves not just the otherness of subject and object, but a return from otherness, a return that gives the subject an objective sense of its selfhood. The point of the section on “Lordship and Bondage” is to show how this “more” comes about.

8. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 121–22.

9. To say that this sleep is the “image of death” does not imply that the continuation of consciousness involves either sleeplessness or freedom from death. It indicates, rather, that finite desire—the desire for a finite object—cannot per se assure such continuance. The satisfaction of animal desire, which is always finite, remains, as Emil Fackenheim writes, “a mere expression of nature.” To go beyond this, we need a nonfinite desire. In Fackenheim’s words, “To be a genuine power of self-asserting, human desire must be not for this or that part of nature but rather for nature as a whole—a desire which, when acted out, does not express the natural whole but rather tears itself loose from it (The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967], 39). Such a desire cannot, of course, be directly satisfied since it would involve the negation of nature as a whole. It can have, then, only an indirect satisfaction through another person. In Fackenheim’s words, “The desire can be satisfied, not by the negation of nature as a whole, but by the negation of another desire to negate nature as a whole, i.e., another man” (40). Concretely, this means that one’s objective sense of selfhood comes through the recognition of the other person.

10. This response, as the remaining chapters of the Phänomenologie des Geistes make apparent, is shaped by Hegel’s political concerns.

11. Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Laurence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996); hereafter cited in the text.

12. Ms. A VI 26, p. 42a. This having a future does not, from a Hegelian perspective, involve newness. Hegel writes: “Whatever is limited to natural life cannot by itself go beyond its immediate existence.” By contrast, “consciousness… is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself” (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 63). Hegel’s point is that the forms of self-consciousness differ as history unfolds. A modern European’s conception of himself is vastly different from that of a Roman Stoic’s self-perception. It involves something new.

13. Immanuel Kant, “Kritik der reinen Vernunft (2. Aufl.),” in Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: George Reiner, 1955), B37, 3.52; hereafter cited in the text.

14. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 7; hereafter cited in the text.

15. Heidegger’s opposition to considering Dasein as an animal is apparent in his critique of the definition of man as the animal rationale—which, he reminds us, is the Latin translation of the Greek, ζωόν ’εχόν λογόν, the “animal possessing logos.” (Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, ed. and trans. William McNeill [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 245–46). He asks: “are we really on the right track towards the essence of the human being as long as we set him off as one living creature among others?” Even when we attempt to distinguish humanity through the specific difference, “rationality,” we still “abandon the human being to the essential realm of animalitas” (246).

16. In doing this, we do not need a “rich” account of embodiment such as offered by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and Invisible. It is sufficient to focus on the spatiality implicit in embodiment. My references to Merleau-Ponty and Husserl are limited to this point.

17. The full quote is: “Wenn wir von unserer Art, uns selbst innerlich anzuschauen, und vermittelst dieser Anschauung auch alle äußeren Anschauungen in der Vorstellungskraft zu befassen, abstrahieren, und mithin die Gegenstände nehmen, so wie sie an sich selbst sein mögen, so ist die Zeit nichts.” Since as Kant asserts, time is “the apriori formal condition of all appearances whatsoever” (B50), Kant’s remark is not just about the ontological status of time, but also concerns the condition of our self-presence.

18. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 153.

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Linguis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 134. As the register of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium, shows, Merleau-Ponty read Husserl’s Ideen II.

20. There is here only an apparent resemblance with Kant’s refutation of idealism in which he claims that inner intuition depends on outer intuition. Kant’s focus is not on space per se, but rather on “the permanent.” There is in our inner intuition (the intuition of the flowing contents of our consciousness) nothing permanent. To find this, Kant argues, we need to turn to outer intuition. Thus, when we posit an external object, we take it as the same object even though it shows us different sides of itself as we regard it from different angles. The different views we have of it are part of the flowing contents of our consciousness, but the object is distinct from this insofar as, employing the category of substance, we take it as the same object throughout the flow of our different views of it. Kant claims that we need to posit such an external enduring object in order to grasp ourselves in inner experience as something enduring. In his words, “Only through the permanent does existence, in different parts of the time series, acquire a magnitude which can be called duration. For a bare succession of existence is always vanishing and recommencing, and never has the least magnitude” (B226). It is therefore over against the permanent, which we posit through external perception, that we measure our own duration. In Kant’s words, within me all I find are changing representations; but such “representations themselves require a permanent distinct from them, in relation to which their change, and so my existence in the time wherein they change, may be determined” (Bxl). This permanent is not, per se, something extended in space. It is rather a reference point, a point of unification for the changing perceptions that I take as perceptions of one enduring object. In Kantian terms, it is “the object = x.” This point is only apparently at odds with Kant’s assertion: “To give the concept of substance something correspondingly permanent in intuition, we need an intuition in space (of matter)” (B291). The permanent that we intuit in space is not itself something spatially extended. It is the unitary reference point of the spatial predicates that we gain through outer intuition.