Hegel on Desire's Knowledge

I HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT IS FOUNDED on the methodological commitment to treat itself as the final court of appeal for all questions concerning the ultimate nature of knowledge and of reality. (1) In the Phenomenology, Hegel suspends in advance all epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions concerning what knowledge and its object really are, and instead seeks to describe what we can call the experience of solely on its own terms. (2) The goal is to capture how the actual of knowing, as it is concretely lived by us, generates solely from within itself the standards for determining both what counts as knowledge in the first place, and what counts as the true object of this knowledge. (3) In the course of his exposition, Hegel brings into focus the radically different forms that the actual of knowing can take, as well as the radically different and irreconcilable epistemological and metaphysical commitments that generates from out of itself. Many of the distinct forms of considered in the Phenomenology correspond to familiar theories of knowledge that have been developed in the history of the Western philosophical tradition. For instance, along the way Hegel engages with versions of empiricism, rationalism, and Kantian idealism, and each of these is treated, not first and foremost as a conceptually articulated philosophical position, but as rooted in a distinctive way of experiencing what it is like to have knowledge, as well as in a distinctive stance on what it is to be a true object of knowledge. (4) But in addition to these more familiar positions, Hegel also considers various forms of practical as though each form constituted a distinctive and comprehensive of knowing in its own right. In the course of the Phenomenology we consider, for instance, the of being immediately compelled to actualize one's own desires, (5) the of producing objects through one's own labor, (6) and the of needing to honor the customs of one's nation, (7) and each of these experiences is treated as though it operated in terms of its own, autonomously generated standards for determining both what counts as a genuine way of knowing the real and what counts as the real in relation to which it is taking a practical stance. For Hegel, our knowledge of ourselves qua agents, along with our corresponding knowledge of the world in its basic capacity to motivate, demand, and receive our actions, is qualitatively distinct from, and irreducible to, other forms of knowledge we claim to possess, and so we cannot conceive of this essentially practical knowledge on the model of those more familiar, theoretical forms of knowing we associate with straightforward sense perception, the rational understanding of natural laws, or self-reflective thought. It is an of knowing to which only actively engaged agents, specifically in their capacity as engaged agents, have access. My goal in this paper is to make clear the sense in which, for Hegel, our distinctive of ourselves as agents can be said to generate from within itself its own autonomous claim to possess the ultimate truth about the nature of knowledge and of reality. I will be focusing primarily on what is for Hegel the most primitive of agency--the immediate compulsion to actualize one's desires--and I will show that at the heart of Hegel's phenomenology of desire is the thesis that we as desiring agents necessarily lay claim to knowing the world, not simply as a set of fully determined, independent objects that stand against us and that determine our from the outside; rather, the world necessarily appears to us as something that gets its determinacy and truth precisely in and through our autonomous, self-relating subjectivity, precisely in and through the sells unconditioned affirmation of itself as a self-determining subject embroiled in the project of actualizing itself in the world. …