Hegel on desire

Peter Singer ( Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) ) gives a neat summary of the paradoxes of desire in Hegel: “Desire appeared as the expression of the fact that self-consciousness needs an external object, and yet finds itself limited by anything that is outside itself.  But to desire something is to be unsatisfied; so desire is – to make a typically Hegelian play on words – an unsatisfactory state for self-consciousness.  Worse still, self-consciousness seems doomed to be permanently unsatisfied, for if the object of desire is done away with as an independent object, self-consciousness will have destroyed what it needed for its own existence.

“Hegel’s solution to this dilemma is to make the object of self-consciousness another self-consciousness.  In this manner each self-conscious being has another object with which to contrast itself, yet the other ‘object’ turns out to be not a simple object which must be possessed and thereby ‘negated’ as an external object, but another self-consciousness which can possess itself, and thereby can do away with itself as an external object.”