Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Part I

 Hegel is hard to understand, so I'm working through an introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit before going through the Phenomenology itself, and the Science of Logic, if I get that far. Alexandre Kojeve has high praise in Straussian circles, so I'm starting with him. I may go through Peter Kalkavage's introduction too, but the goal is to grapple with Hegel myself, unmediated. So I hope to use Kojeve as a good first teacher, and his preparation, if the forward to my edition of Introduction is correct, was spending more than six years reading nothing but Phenomenology of Spirit, which is exactly the sort of zeal that inclines me to view a man as a reliable guide. 

Most of my writing on Kojeve's book will be paraphrasing the concepts I encounter so that I can at least explain them to myself. Only after I understand the logic of his/Hegel's arguments and their content can I begin to determine if they're true. I'll start with a few pages (5-10) each day, and the book is a brief 266 pages. A first pass will take at least a month, probably two. It will be very slow going in the beginning, I expect. 

Man is Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness is his identity. But his rational activity, reasoning, contemplating, etc. do not reveal this identity because the subject (the thinking, reasoning being) tends to lose himself in what is being thought/reasoned about to the degree that he more purely and powerfully reasons and thinks. 

Desire does this. The conscious desire of a being is what constitutes that being as an "I" and reveals it as such. It is in and as desire that man is formed and revealed to himself as an individual, an "I". The very existence of man therefore, presumes and implies desire. But animals have desire too, and lack self-consciousness. Therefore the specifically human desire that reveals the individual must be different. 

The action that satisfies desire does so by the negation (i.e. the destruction or transformation) of the desired object, e.g. food when you are hungry. The "I" of desire is an emptiness that receives a real positive content only by the negating action that satisfies desire by destroying, transforming, and assimilating the desired non-I. The positive content of that "I" is determined by the positive content of the negated non-I, in this case food. The end of desire determines the nature of the "I", so that a purely natural desire results only in a purely natural "I", the animal Sentiment of Self, not Self-Consciousness.