ABSTRACT
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's aims were of a much more fundamental sort than the historicizing or sociological interpretation cared to realize. He was not primarily interested in elucidating an historical event or instance of conflict, but a transcendental fact which should prove to be a prerequisite of all human sociality. Hegel clearly intends his notion of "desire", which outlines the second stage of self-consciousness, as a far-reaching critique of the philosophy of consciousness of his time. For Hegel, the confirmation of desires plays a double role with regard to self-consciousness. The subject experiences itself both as a part of nature, because it is involved in the determining and heteronomous "movement of Life", and as the active organizing center of this life, because it can make essential differentiations in life by virtue of its consciousness. Hegel appears to claim that the philosophy of consciousness denies that the subject has any kind of direct, unmediated experience of its own corporeality.
