THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

satisfaction of our desires. 325 Thus our basic desire for food becomes the desire for
seared tuna, grilled asparagus, or fois gras, and our basic desire for shelter becomes a
desire for a house with large windows, wooden floors, and vaulted ceilings. The
increasing complexity and quantity of our desires doesn’t necessarily change the structure
of these desires. It is plausible and perhaps correct to say that I desire the tuna steak and
the asparagus as a means to the pleasurable sensations that eating them produces.
Likewise, I might simply desire the large windows so that I can sit content and warm in
the sun on a winter day, reading by natural light. In this case it also seems plausible to
describe my pleasurable sensations of warmth and contentment as the ultimate end
towards which my shelter serves as a means.
However, in addition to the multiplication of desires, advanced production and
social interaction also lead to fundamentally new kinds of desire. Hegel discusses these
new desires in terms of social recognition (Anerkennung), a process that transforms
“isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction” into ones that are
“concrete” and “social.” 326 Hegel argues that recognition imports social relations into the
very structure of our needs and desires. He mentions two examples – the “need for
equality and emulation, which is the equalizing of oneself with others,” and the “need of
the particular to assert itself in some distinctive way.” 327 Social interaction and the
process of recognition produce the desire to be like others as well as the desire to be
325 Social production, with its attendant multiplication of desires, serves as one of the features that
distinguishes humans from other animals. In paragraph 190, Hegel comments: “An animal’s needs and its
means of satisfying them are both alike restricted in scope. Though man is subject to this restriction too,
yet at the same time he evinces his transcendence of it and his universality…by the multiplication of needs
and means of satisfying them.”
326 Philosophy of Right, paragraph 192.
327 Philosophy of Right, paragraph 193.
293