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

by Robert B. Pippin

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Research

120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy fucking shit dude

[Christopher Iacovetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

"So here stated all at once is the thesis I would like to attribute to Hegel. ... 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 any sort of two-place intentional relation. However we come to know anything about ourselves ... 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 and deep commitments, Hegel, I want to say, treats self-consciousness as (i) a practical *achievement* of some sort. ... And (ii) Hegel sees such an attempt and achievement as necessarily involving a relation to other people, as inherently social" (pp. 15-19).

"Hegel considers empirical rules of discrimination, unification, essence/appearance distinctions, conceptions of explanation, etc., as normative principles, and he construes some set of these as a possible determinate whole, as all being simply manifestations of the overriding requirements of a 'shape of spirit' considered in this idealized isolation of capacities that makes up Chapters One through Five [of the PhG], and he cites possible illustrations of such a shape and such internal contradictions (determinate illustrative actual cases like trying to say 'this here now,' or trying to distinguish the thing which bears properties from those properties). The concepts involved in organizing perceptual experience are also norms prescribing how the elements of perceptual experience ought to be organized ... and so they do not function like fixed physiological dispositions. We are responsive to a perceivable environment in norm-attentive ways" (pp. 23-4).

"What I am trying to show, as indicated previously, is that Hegel is arguing that the entire logic of the mind-world relation changes on [1] 'consciousness's' discovery in the Understanding chapter that its true object, what it is in fact knowing, is itself. And that relation (to itself) in its relation to the world is then shown to change [2] in the presence of another subject. Hegel is not changing the subject [in the Self-Consciousness chapter], but continuing his exploration of the conditions for object-intentionality" (p. 47n).

[Anmol · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very short, but dense, take on Hegel's claim that "self-consciousness is desire itself" - Pippin reads this in the context of the master-slave dialectic and pragmatism (how self-consciousness itself is constituted based on the purposes of consciousness). I don't think any particularly interesting conclusions are reached here, and Pippin's writing style is too difficult to state such points with any pedagogic value.

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only issue with Pippin is his commitment to what seems to me to be a liberal reconciliation narrative, but throughout this book i think he gives enough space(altho id argue mostly implicit) of how the social space of reasons and epistemic authority is constituted through a process of acting out justification and being subject to the possibility of normative re-assessment at any point. But this epistemic authority would then be constituted through the emergent space of individuals acting out what could be at a certain level incommensurable views and epistemic commitments. Pippin at the end of the book seems to be aware of this and says that for Hegel he only requires the "possibility" of epistemic authority being conferred for the possibility of a coherent relation of mind-world as a process to be enabled.

but wouldn't this open itself to the objection of the rhetoricity of epistemic/justificatory performance? i think i can see from this where Rocio Zambranos objection to Pippin and her re-appraisal of normativity in Hegel comes from, the very insufficiency of individual views of self-ascribed epistemic commitments to ground epistemic authority must be transplanted as an inherent component of the actual functioning of normativity in concrete historical/social circumstances. In other words, epistemic normativity in Hegels account should be seen as "inherently" precarious instead of assumed to be given. I dont think Pippins account completely blocks off this component, but i do think there is a certain emphasis to the authority's "givenness", however much he claims that to be self-ascriptive is to be capable of being cognizant of ones capacity to be in error in the carrying out of practical commitments.

Otherwise i find the account of desire in this interesting, although Pippins account is focused way more on its implications for the possibility of normative judgments of truth rather than as a vantage point for an explanation about a core of human "subjectivity" as constituted through a sort of striving(although id argue Hegel promotes an advance from the Fichtean anstoss in that, for Hegel, desire is only within the play of a constitutive impossible striving in a certain attitude of consciousness with itself, desire is concomitant and parallel to this process of consciousness constituting its relation to the desired object). only a brief mention/gloss of the freudian unconscious occurs throughout this book, so theres not much fascinating insights about libido or whatever.

but overall i like pippins discussion of the distinction between animal and self-conscious desire as a way to make distinctioms between proto and "real" intentionality. a sort of distinction that props up, in my view, in the necessarily sublimated nature that desire is shown to have in a self-conscious being, and how this opens up a bildung or a positive educational and formative drive of the subjects own stance towards nature through various phases/stances of sociality/culture.

[Hussam Nabil · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
It was okay.
It's just that you can't give an account of one of Hegel's arguably most fundamental concepts that hold his philosophy together in some one hundred pages without diluting it to the point that it loses its significance.
I don't recommend this book for a first encounter with Hegel's Philosophy, and you won't need to read it if you know your Hegel.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

As is usual with Pippin, he gets almost everything right. There is definitely much left to be desired in his treatment of fear, service and Bildung, but one can hardly expect that of him when it is in general severely neglected by Hegel readers (Kojeve aside).

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pippin clearly and masterfully explicates the fourth chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology, disclosing how it is both the logical progression from the preceding chapters in that it unveils the movement of self-consciousness from an inward and singular affirmation of itself towards its exteriorized, and thus objectified, recognition as truth, as well as grounding the social and historical movement which this objectification of spirit necessitates.

Desire, as the motivating force of consciousness, is directed towards its outside, towards alterity, so as to relate to it and thus expand itself, or at the very least to sustain itself (consciousness or subjectivity necessitates an object). This desire is the force which moves or directs life, for even animal life must sustain itself through attempting to satiate its natural desires. But this is not enough for self-consciousness, which as a self-posited self desires an-other self-consciousness to recognize, and thus objectively affirm, its subjective truth. This is the break of sapience from natural life - the affirmation of its artificiality qua spirit which (re-)constructs itself and its truths through the negation of nature or the given.

Pippin frames this, in line with Brandom's interpretation of Hegel, as the grounds of giving and asking for reasons - as the social grounds for our normative positions and claims. Reason requires that its claims or propositions be justafiable and affirmable by others, our peers, in order to be determined as true. This social or communitary grounding of self-consciousness and its auto-explicative work as elaborated as necessary by Hegel is thus in line with neo-pragmatist thought (let us not forget that the original pragmatists such as Peirce and Dewey, as well as James to a lesser degree, owed much to their early engagements with Hegel and German Idealism). Pippin thus also weaves a critique of McDowell's interpretation into his reading, evincing the problematics in reading the fourth chapter as an allegorical conception of an inter-consciousness splitting or disremption.

This work is excellent and of great value to thinkers of any level or experience with Hegel. The only glaring fault with the work is how little it engages with death (despite the work's subtitle). Glossed over briefly, Pippin remains silent on the centrality of death and negativity in self-consciousness' rending free of itself from bare life. This is problematic as death is, and remains, just as important as desire in the remainder of the Phenomenology. The fact that we are mortal, that we engage and engage with the negative power or possibility which death grants, is essential to thought and language, and is thus intimately bound up with our humanity, with truth and with thought (cf. Heidegger, especially his claim in On the Way to Language where he speaks to the still unthought relation between death and language, death and thought. We might then refer to Blanchot, who did much for thinking and bringing to language this abyssal relation).

Our eyes opened to death, our negation, in the eyes of the other (cf. Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Spirit), the movement of Geist in its struggles to free itself from the shackles of life by undertaking its adventure through exteriority is incited - to return, altered, to its anonymous truth.

[Cedric]

An evil mixture of narcissism of small difference and lack of zeal. What worth is Pippin's apparently-book-worthy monograph on his own reading of two lines of the 'Phenomenology' if all the interpretation is useful for is the determination of the "mineness" of the reading? The whole approach of Hegel's method takes self-consciousness as itself being the movement between opposed interpretations of it, for it is its own interpretation ("...is what it takes itself to be"). All these academic Hegel scholars can show is another thing that was already 'meant' in the original text. Welcome to academic philosophy, where the experts all out-expert each other by clinging fast to their own understanding of things, which they have no idea already implies the position they will attempt to refute.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has not exactly transformed the way in which I engage with Hegel's corpus, but Pippin's treatment of the Phenomenology of Spirit helpfully highlights and foregrounds elements of Hegel's philosophy that my own work also emphasises and works with. This text was a useful clarifier with respect to Hegel's work, and has helped to shape (to some degree) how I engage with him.

[GJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 120-page book operates at an altitude so high the air is very thin and in a space where there’s no shallow end of the pool. If that’s fun for you