The structure of desire and recognition: Self-consciousness and self-constitution

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 127-150

  Brandom, Robert B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

Author keywords

Commitments; Desire; Experience; G. W. F. Hegel; Identity; Recognition; Risk; Sacrifice; Self consciousness; Self constitution

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547347350     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453707071389     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. This way of putting things, in terms of commitments rather than desires, will be discussed and justified below.
2. This comparison is developed in 'Holism and Idealism in Hegel's Phenomenology', chapter six of Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
3. Daniel C. Dennett, 'Intentional Systems', reprinted in John Haugeland (ed.) Mind Design (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 1981).
4. Hegel makes claims along these lines in his telegraphic discussion of the relation between self-consciousness and desire. One example is the summary claim that 'the unity of self-consciousness with itself must become essential to self-consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness is Desire in general' [§167].
5. He stresses that 'Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness' [§175], that is, in another recognized recognizer. 'The satisfaction of Desire is. the reflection of self-consciousness into itself, or the certainty that has become truth [that is, what things are for it and what things are in themselves coincide].
6. But the truth of this certainty is really a double reflection, the duplication of self-consciousness. Consciousness has for its object one which, of its own self posits its otherness or difference as a nothingness' [§176].
7. The object is the other one recognizes, who cancels the difference between it and the index consciousness in the sense that it, too, recognizes the other, thereby applying to both the other and itself one universal expressing a respect of similarity or identity: being something things can be something for.
8. A self-consciousness exists only for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact a self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it' [§177].
9. Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [nur als ein Annerkanntes]
10. The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition [Annerkennen]' [§178].
11. Reflexivity is not redundant in the mathematical definition of equivalence relation because the argument depends on the relation being everywheredefined, in the sense that that for every x there is some y such that xRy, i.e. that everyone recognizes someone. Given the philosophical surround, this condition can, I think, be suppressed.