Desire : Polarizing Function in the Dialectics of Hegel and Marx

In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), G.W. F. Hegel argues that in order for self-consciousness to develop independence, he must subject another form of self-consciousness to dependence by means of consumption or domination in a death-and-life struggle. The battle for independence between these two self-consciousnesses forces them to engage in a mutually reinforcing and recognizing state of identification: one cannot exist without the other. The primary vehicle that drives such interdependent dialectic is desire – a motivational force that allows one self-consciousness to exert his superiority and primacy over the other. This struggle for self-preservation is further explicated by Hegel’s dialectical model that situates the slave against the master, or the bondsman against the lord. The desire to dominate functions constructively for the slave in the master/slave binary, for he develops a more cohesive sense of selfhood that is independent of his embodiment and is able to transcend the stage of desire for consumption. Through his struggle with the master, the slave emerges from the dialectic further more mature, self-expressive, and sufficient. Heavily influenced by Hegelian master/slave dialectic, Karl Marx also appropriates the language of servitude and binary opposition in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) by transforming Hegel’s master/slave dialect into a socioeconomic construct between the worker/product. Such transformation also prompts desire to be manifested into “avarice,” a hunger for production that propels political economy forward. Marxist desire drives the capitalist system, a system that creates a deleterious effect on the worker as he becomes a slave to the product of his own labor, or of his object, which results in an alienation or estrangement between the worker and his work. In an inverse of Hegelian dialectic, the slave in Marxist construct loses his “means of life” by placing his life into the hands of his product and becomes an essential lack devoid of self-governing potential. The Hegelian desire that constitutes the psychoanalytical formation of the self is not applicable to Marxist socioeconomic construction of the worker. Instead, Marx complicates the notion of desire by injecting it into a socioeconomic dialectic to expose the rather polarizing effect of desire that drives the capitalist system’s deprivation of the worker’s self-determining agency and potential. Both G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx seek to bring idealist philosophy down to earth by foregrounding the social contexts of intersubjectivity in which Hegel provides an idealist framework of the dialectic while Marx offers a critique of Hegel’s model by transforming the dialectic into a materialist one