Hegel's Logic of Desire
by
Peter Kalkavage
There is such divine harmony in the realm of lifeless nature,
why this discord within the rational?
--Schiller, The Robbers
To open the pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is to enter a labyrinth. The Minotaur of these regions, the Demon of Difficulty, haunts every chamber. The difficulty of Hegel is both legend and cliché. It tends to be so great and so persistent, so much a part of how Hegel thinks and speaks, that we risk losing our way at every turn. Early on, Hegel tells us that the Phenomenology chronicles no mere path of Cartesian doubt but a way of despair. And yet, how little he seems to realize that his book, intended as a ladder to the absolute, is itself a way of despair for the would-be reader.
This essay is an introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. I shall try to provide a thread to guide us through Hegel's labyrinth. The center of this labyrinth is the self: it is the point around which everything else in the Phenomenology turns. The word "spirit" or Geist that appears in the title, a word that also means "mind," is just this-- the condition of fully developed selfhood. Hegel's book tells us how this condition is achieved. In his commentary on Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve begins with the following definition: "Man is self-consciousness." My efforts take their cue from this definition and are devoted to an exploration of what Hegel means by the self.
