5 - Subjective desire

Summary

Desire is that which transforms Being.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

Belief and desire

Seen from the perspective of the subject of the disenchanted world and its political analogue, the modern State, the prospect of restoring a context for belief would seem tempting indeed. If we take the divisions within the subject of transcendental ego and empirical self, together with the separation of public and private inherent in the modern State, as symptomatic of the antinomies of culture in the modern age, then the spirit that animates the psychology of belief would seem to say that the self is whole, that the domains of value and fact, ought and is, ideal and norm, are not at all divided but are in fact one. While the existence of the modem State is predicated on the secularization of society, the most radical implications of the psychology of belief would suggest that the ideal does not transcend the real but rather animates and moves it at every point. Similarly, values seen in the context of belief themselves appear as a species of fact and have a mode of existence independent of the subjects who posit and pursue them; facts so seen are correspondingly already what they ought to become. Phrased in other terms, the promise of belief is that of a context in which the intelligible essence of each thing in the world is of a piece with its ideal.