Hunger (The Art of Living) by Raymond Tallis

Author:Raymond Tallis [Tallis, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317488569
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-12-05T08:00:00+00:00

Hegel — and Sartre

for each self is the enemy of all others and would like to tyrannise them.

(Pascal 1995: 597)

Hegel was not the first to remind human beings that they differed from all other sentient beings in virtue of being not only conscious but also self-conscious. But he arrived at some compelling conclusions by reflecting on this difference. Conscious beings have a sense of lack that can be linked to physiological needs: these are their hungers, their appetites. Self-conscious beings also have a sense of lack. They have hungers, too, some of which are ultimately grounded in physiological need; they are, however, as we have discussed, dramatically transformed in human beings. What is more, much of the transformation is directed towards sustaining hungers themselves so that the journey towards satisfaction might be prolonged or sustained. This is because there is something unsatisfactory about satisfaction itself. We have examined one aspect of this: for the self-conscious human animal, appetites take the form of propositional attitudes and they are to an increasing extent narrated. The state of affairs that satisfies a propositional attitude such as a desire is only one possible instance of what has been generally envisaged. The satisfaction of desire therefore leaves something unsatisfied. Desire regrets its own passing; desire desires itself. What does it really want? It wants not merely some particular object: it wants something that is equal to the desiring self. As Hegel puts it, a self-consciousness can only be gratified by another self-consciousness. At the root of all my desires is a felt lack that can be filled only by being acknowledged by another.

At the heart of Hegel’s vision are some quite straightforward intuitions, although the book in which he set them out, Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1977), is to most of those who have attempted to read it, including the present author, entirely opaque for long stretches. I can become aware of myself only by contrast with something that is not myself: Omnis determination est negatio – all determination is through negation. It is not sufficient that that Other in virtue of which I am conscious of myself should be a material object. It has no gaze and is not my equal. To be self-conscious requires that I should be conscious of myself as I am in the eyes of one who is conscious of me and who is in some sense my equal: at the very least is self-aware, a self. But things are not as simple, or as benign, as this, for many reason. The most important reason is that in the world as it is so ordered, the relationships between people are rarely between equals and acknowledgement may not be reciprocated. Even where there is no explicit hierarchy of lord and commoner, there are still those who are more needy than others, who have more prestige than others, who are more attractive than others. Historically, the inequalities have been even more stark: there are those who are masters and those who are slaves.

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