Difference and Desire

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Last time, I described the model of thought proposed by Hegel, with its three moments: positive, negative, and reflective. This time, I want to consider those moments from a subjective perspective, i.e. to think about what it looks like to encounter a world of things intertwined in these positive, negative, and reflective relationships and how our understanding of these relationships changes our ethical priorities. 

If you recall from last time, the first moment of thought is the positive moment, or the moment associated with the mode of thought called “the understanding.” This moment considers objects “as they are,” abstracted from their contextual relationships and entirely on their own terms. Objects are just that—objects: free-floating and unrelated.

But, as we saw in the last post, the understanding finds that it can’t coherently grasp what its object actually is without putting it into a negative relationship with something else. For example, “this” only means anything if there’s a “that,” otherwise everything is equally a “this.” From a subjective perspective, what this negative relationship looks like is that all the particular objects we encounter share a particular negative quality that makes them, in part, what they are, namely that they are not us, or not me. This is the relationship of pure difference I’ve been talking about between self and other.

Most people are only used to explicitly thinking in terms of the understanding, in terms of objects and the relationships between them. But as I mentioned last time, the objects of our experience simply can’t be objects without the particularity granted by the other modes of thought, specifically this negative moment of difference. They need this negativity to distinguish them from each other and from the “background” of our experience. So even though we may believe that the objects we encounter are just “out there” in the world, it is actually we who make them what they are to us. Hegel has a very provocative and instructive name for this form of consciousness that, whether it realizes it or not, negatively constitutes the very objects it encounters: “Desire.” Desire is what gives things their particular significance to us; it is what lights up our world.

Food only is food to that which eats it; it lacks the significance of food outside that relationship. It may be something else—a tool, a threat, a friend, or nothing at all—but it is only food to me if I can eat it. But now consider a slime mold, the kind of life form for which the entire world may lack significance except in terms of “food” or “not-food.” For a slime mold, there are no such things as computers or works of art or the myriad other objects we encounter in the world. Those things only exist for beings like us with greater complexity, which means that we have more complex (negative) relationships with the world, and therefore more numerous desires. As a result, a greater number of things stand out from the “background” for us. We endow the world with greater significance. Notice also that this means that a narrower self-definition can result in a narrower world with fewer significant things. We all know people with one-track minds for whom the world loses all other significance aside from a particular goal. These people live in a world that contains only tools or obstacles.

Also notice that we’re still only talking about the negative moment of thought, and even this moment is not often consciously acknowledged. As far as the understanding is concerned, “I” may “have” a desire for an object, or the object may have the quality of “desirability,” but the understanding fundamentally can’t see that both my desire and the desirability of the object arise together as a relationship of negativity. Without the negativity of this relationship—that is, if there were no difference between us and the object—then there would be no object separate from us and no separate self to desire it. This is to say: desire and lack are one. To exist as a distinct being is therefore necessarily to desire. Total satisfaction of desire is nothing short of death, the dissolution of self back into the world. Temporary satisfaction of particular desires is possible, as after eating a meal or attaining a desired object, but some desires must necessarily return for as long as we live, for it is these desires that maintain our metabolism as separate beings. Those familiar with Buddhist doctrine will likely already recognize the significance of this necessary tension between desire and lack. This is the root of suffering, its fundamental logical shape: the lack of something which nevertheless defines us.

But now let us consider the final, reflective moment of thought, in which we learn that both the positive and negative moments are mutually constitutive, that what anything is is to be the other of its other. If we are unused to thinking of things in terms of their negative relation to us, we are even less used to thinking of things as also somehow positively constitutive of us. But to think this way is to realize that our world gives rise to us, is our own self, and that we in turn give rise to the world and give the world its consciousness and agency. As the saying goes: “we are the universe experiencing itself.” 

The negative moment of desire remains, but its significance is transformed. The self-different self doesn’t truly suffer because it doesn’t truly lack. The difference between self and other, the negative moment of desire, must be maintained, but it is recontextualized within an infinite, self-sustaining process by which the whole gives from one hand and receives with the other. When I see myself as part of the world, I understand myself and the food I consume to be two organs in the same body. When I pluck fruit from a tree, I am no longer taking it from something alien to me and using it to strengthen myself for further conquest. Instead, I am maintaining the total organism that sustains us both: the tree feeds me so I can tend the tree and the rest of the earth.

These are the two basic ethical shapes embodied by pure difference and self-difference, respectively. From the perspective of pure difference, the self takes from the other to better resist the other. And because the self, desire, and suffering all co-arise as a result of the pure (i.e purely negative) difference between self and other, the self becomes defined by an arms race against the other, its own ever growing desire, and its own infinite suffering. This should sound familiar. It is how many people spend their lives, and it’s how we’re expected to spend them. But we thwart those expectations to the degree that we take care of each other and the world. This is the perspective of self-difference, where we see ourselves in others and understand our own existence in the context of the greater whole. 

I’ve used the metaphor of a body and its organs a few times in this post. It’s an extremely useful example of what self-difference actually looks like in practice, but it can be carried further to drive home the danger of its opposite, the belief in pure difference. In a very real sense, we, and all the life forms on this planet, constitute a single ecosystem, a single body. But if we do not come to a fuller consciousness of this fact, if we continue to consume the resources of the earth as if it were something other than our own body in a futile attempt to drown our suffering, then we will become the terminal cancer of this planet, and we will all die with our host. The attitudes we take toward the world and other people, our understanding of ourselves as either a cancer or a cure for this universal body, matter, because our actions flow from our self-concept. I can only hope we have enough time to collectively understand ourselves and our purpose more clearly.