When the question of practical philosophy, that is, bringing philosophy in a practical relationship with living, then it has always delved into the question of desire. Why? Butler adds, to live a philosophical life, is to ask the question, is the human individual capable of living a philosophical, hence moral life? Does ‘ought’ imply ‘can’. And if desire were just seen to be an irrational component with no inherent competency, then the moral project would founder. But, on the contrary, moral philosophy has
On Spinoza
Hegel is sceptical of the notion of metaphysical closure, Butler adds that Hegel charges Spinoza with erecting a metaphysical system that “excludes the negativity of self-consciousness, that aspect of human life that precludes its final assimilation into Being …” (10) And it is in Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s over-theistic mono-mania, that is Spinoza’s excluding of “consciousness’s own negativity” that we find hegel’s original contribution to the formulation of desire
A very nice summary of the Phenomenology
Spinoza’s metaphysics takes the point of view of the completed system as its starting point, but Hegel’s Phenomenology poses the question of how this system is known, and how the knower comes to know himeself as part of this system. In other words, Hegel wants to know how the movement of human knowledge, the negativity of self-consciousness, comes to be understood as necessary for the constitution of the system itself and further, how the necessity of human negativity confirms the impossiblity of that system’s completion and closure (12).
For Butler, no doubt heavily influenced by the French reading of Hegel, the negativity of self-consciousness is desire. Desire is the negative dialectic. Of which she poses the question to Hegel as to whether he is “guilty of silencing the power of the negative?” (14).
The deceptive pursuit of the Absolute is not a vain “running around in circles,” but a progressive cycle which reveals every deception as permitting some grander act of synthesis, an insight into yet more regions of interrelated reality (22).
Desire
Nothing just appears ex nihilo for Hegel, “‘Appearance’ is but one explicit or actual moment in the development of a phenomenon. In the Phenomenology, a given phenomenon appears in the context of a given configuration of the world. In the case of desire, we must ask, what kind of world makes desire possilbe? What must the world be like for desire to exist?” (24).