Yet human social life is not always and only a matter of the continuing
reproduction of the same. As Hegel observes, production– in hunting,
cooking, building, and dressing the body, as well as in art–takes place in
the service not only of standing needs, but also in the service of recognition.^2
Human beings are creatures not only of need (Bedurfnis,besoin), but also of
desire (Begierde,désir). Plato makes a similar point in having Socrates accede
to the demand of Glaucon that they together imagine an ideal city with
“cooked dishes,”“seasonings,”and luxuries that is thereby fit for men,
rather than being a “city of pigs.”^3 Human beings are creatures, Plato
acknowledges, oferos, not simply of pastoral reproduction of the same form
of life, day after day. They are articulately aware of or have a conception of
what they are doing in making something, and they are aware of alternatives
that present themselves either in the course of making or among objects to
be made. In their making they seek not only to satisfy needs by making
useful objects, but also to display their personalities and talents in ways that
win approval, from others and from themselves. They seek not simply to use
what they have made, but also to look on what they have done and to see for
themselves and with others that it is good, whether they are cooking, build-
ing, adorning the body, chanting, plowing, preparing for war, marking the
passing of the seasons, or practicing fertility rites.
It is unclear how and why this is so. Hegel notoriously argues that the
existence of desiring, self-conscious, recognition-seeking human beings is a
logical requirement for the development of Spirit to full self-consciousness.
Spirit will come to recognize itself in and through their most richly
developed and reasonably sustainable doings, in something like the way we
may sometimes recognize ourselves in our artistic works and other doings.
This may be so with Spirit, but it is a distinctly theological, even salvationist
view of our condition that it is difficult to support with proof or to ground in
unambiguous evidence. Hölderlin has a similar sense of the human condi-
tion, but he is substantially more cautious about its causes and cure. As he
writes in a fragment that may be a letter/essay/response to Hegel:(^2) Thelocus classicusfor these points is Hegel’s discussion of recognition in chapter 4 of
Phenomenology of Spirit, centering around the claim that“Self-consciousness is Desire in
general”(p. 105). For explication of this gnomic claim, see Eldridge,Leading a Human Life,
pp. 29–32.
(^3) Plato,Republic, Book II, 372c, 372d, p. 42.
254 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art