Self-Consciousness

I am not what I am.

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.

Desire

The Phenomenology’s chapter on self-consciousness marks a turning point in the book; in some sense, everything that follows is an examination of self-consciousness. At the opening of the chapter, Hegel remarks that ‘in the preceding kinds of certainty, the truth for consciousness is something other than consciousness itself’.¹ Sensuous certainty gave way to perception, which gave way to the understanding, and these overcomings occurred because ‘the concept of the truth vanishes in the experience of it’.² That is to say, each stage of knowing posits a particular concept (whether that is the This, the One, or force) as absolute, certain truth. As experience undermined the truth of these concepts, eventually consciousness came to recognise itself as the common denominator, the movement of concepts. Thus, for the first time, consciousness is its own object. Just as before, consciousness is making a claim to absolute truth; this time, it asserts consciousness itself as absolute truth. The claim of self-consciousness, to start with, is therefore: ‘That which cannot be doubted is that I am myself.’

This is likely to remind us of Descartes’ cogito. But it is even more reminiscent of Kant’s idealism, which Hyppolite summarises in the formula: ‘Self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness’.³ For Kant, the only way we can possibly ascertain knowledge is if the conditions of the object are equal to the conditions of the subject; in other words, the structure of the world must match the structure of consciousness. Thus, knowledge of the world is also knowledge of the self. As Hegel himself remarked, at the end of the previous chapter, ‘there is so much self-satisfaction in explanation, because the consciousness involved in it is, to put it this way, in an immediate conversation with itself, enjoying only itself’.⁴ So, in ‘enjoying itself’, self-consciousness imposes itself on the whole world around it. That I am myself is, for self-consciousness, the highest level of truth. And yet, there is a kind of shallowness to the bare claim that I am myself. Far back in sensuous certainty, there was already a conception – albeit a primitive one – of the I as a This which apprehends the being of a sensuous object. In a sense, the ‘self’ had existed implicitly throughout the Phenomenology’s section on consciousness, if only as the implicit being who holds certainty, perceptive content, or explanations of force to be true. Does this section on self-consciousness simply develop an analysis of this being, bringing it into the foreground, or is it a new kind of analysis altogether?

In response to this issue of the continuity between the consciousness and self-consciousness chapters, some interpretations have essentially ignored Hegel’s first three chapters, deeming them to be inessential to the Phenomenology’s apparently central task of philosophical anthropology.⁵ Others have suggested that there is a close continuity from the first three chapters into the fourth. John McDowell, for example, understands the present chapter on self-consciousness as a continuation of the analysis of dependence and independence in the context of subject and object; an analysis which is indebted to Kant’s revolutionary discovery that experience is neither the independent invention or imposition of the subject, nor the passive and receptive dependency on the object. When Hegel identifies self-consciousness with desire, therefore, McDowell interprets it as a way for consciousness to incorporate that which at first is purely other; he understands the struggle for recognition as the struggle between various ways of consciousness negotiating between dependence and independence. Thus, for McDowell, this fourth chapter largely continues the project of the section on consciousness, and introduces nothing overtly social or anthropological.⁶

But what if we avoid such allegorical interpretations, and instead take Hegel at his word? At the opening of the chapter, Hegel introduces two crucial claims about self-consciousness: firstly, that insofar as it ‘only distinguishes itself from itself’, self-consciousness is merely a ‘motionless tautology’; secondly, that ‘self-consciousness is desire’.⁷ These two premises, I think, are essentially linked: the otherness that desire involves (since desire is always desire for an other) is what gives self-consciousness its determinate content, setting it apart from mere tautology.

Life and the Dependency of Selfhood

In order for self-consciousness to actually express something beyond tautology – that is, in order for it to really be self-consciousness – it must recognise an Other for the sake of distinguishing itself from the Other. (We saw this same route to determinacy in Perception, when consciousness posited the thing as an ‘excluding One’.) Thus, ‘I am myself’ must become something like, ‘I am not you’. This negation of the Other is no ordinary negation, but a sublation – a determinate negation – that, in negating the Other, affirms the self. ‘Self-consciousness is therefore only certain of itself through the sublating of this other’.⁸ Now, this sublation which affirms the self is, in fact, the acting-out of desire. To understand this, recall Hegel’s remark regarding animals and the Eleusinian mysteries in the first chapter of the Phenomenology: when animals naturally come to desire food, ‘they without further ado simply help themselves to them and devour them’; likewise, Ceres and Bacchus take up the drinks at their mysteries and ‘bring about their nothingness’.⁹ In both scenarios, the outcome of desire is the annihilation of the desired object. Now, this might not seem applicable to all forms of desire: for instance, in romantic love, is the ‘annihilation’ of one’s lover really what is desired? When we are more precise, the answer turns out to be yes; since, to be exact, it is the otherness of the Other that desire seeks to annihilate: as J. N. Findlay parenthetically notes in his analysis of the Phenomenology, ‘The nature of desire: to abolish the otherness of the Other’.¹⁰ In romantic love, the ultimate (if impossible) ambition of desire is for both lovers to become one, and see any separation between them dissolve. Furthermore, even thinking is a kind of desire, as I, the thinking self, negate the particularity – the otherness – of my object by subsuming it under my conceptualisation.

The process created by the acting-out of desire is life; consequently, it is with self-consciousness that we enter the ‘sphere’ of life.¹¹ The essence of self-consciousness, as it reaches out in desire in order to gaze inwards again in self-affirmation, is ‘pure movement rotating on its own axis’.¹² It is both stable and in motion, just as a ball spinning on its axis stays in the same place, and yet moves in its rotation. Life as a whole takes place upon the rotating sphere of the Earth, which embodies the movement of time as it spins and moves living creatures through the infinite cycle of day and night. While the Earth – the location of all life – is both stable and in motion, so too is life (as it maintains its stability through the cycle of reproduction and death) and self-consciousness (as it remains aware of itself through the movement of desire). The sublation of desire in self-consciousness is the Phenomenology’s first glimpse of life.

At this moment, however, a dilemma arises within self-consciousness: ‘For this sublating even to be, there must be this other’.¹³ That is to say, the self is conscious of itself only by sublating the Other, but as soon as the Other is sublated, it is gone: there is nothing left to sublate, and therefore nothing left through which the self can identify itself. Self-consciousness must therefore constantly find a new object for its desire, for fear that it will no longer be able to assert itself. It is for this reason that Thomas Hobbes observes, as ‘a general inclination of all mankind’, ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death’.¹⁴

Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prosperity, is that men call felicity; I mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and never can be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.¹⁵

Recognition

And since you know you cannot see yourself so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself which you yet know not of.

What can bring an end to self-consciousness’s ‘restless desire’, and bring it toward tranquility and absolute self-affirmation? As always, we should remember the golden rule of the Phenomenology: that which is only for-consciousness in one moment becomes for-the-object in the next. To save itself from constant negation of its objects, therefore, self-consciousness must focus its desire on an object that negates itself. In Hegel’s words, ‘self-consciousness can thus only arrive at satisfaction by this object effecting the negation in itself; and the object must in itself effect this negation of itself’.¹⁶ What kind of object can negate itself? That is, what kind of being can offer itself to an Other, voluntarily denying its independence and recognising its dependence on other beings? Only another desiring, conscious being. As such, the Phenomenology reaches its next triumphant conclusion:

‘Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’.¹⁷

The implications of this claim are enormous. For a start, it reveals that the self cannot be understood in isolation; for Hegel, to be a self is to be involved in a community of some sort. As he declares in the last paragraph of this section, ‘a self-consciousness is for a self-consciousness’.¹⁸ In other words, to be an ‘I’ is to be part of a ‘we’. In addition to this, the claim also brings the concept of spirit into the present for us (‘us’ being the phenomenological observers of spirit). Spirit is the unity of subject and object, and that unity has made its appearance here, as the object of self-consciousness is (another) self-consciousness. At this point, spirit is ‘leaving behind the colorful semblance of the this-worldly sensuous, and leaving behind the empty night of the supersensible other-worldly beyond, [as] it steps into the spiritual daylight of the present’.¹⁹

Mastery and Servitude

Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency of Self-Consciousness

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.

The present section is possibly the most-read passage in all of Hegel’s work, though it lasts less than ten pages. At the opening, Hegel explains that self-consciousness is only ‘in and for itself’ – that is, it is only fully manifest in its complete logical form – when it is ‘a recognized being’.²⁰ Hegel’s sense of recognition relies upon a typically Hegelian contradiction: it is the process by which spiritual unity emerges out of a doubling. As I understand it, this logic of recognition bears a similarity to the logic of force in the previous chapter. Recall that, in asserting itself, force reaches outside of itself and presses up against an external force. In Hyppolite’s words, force is ‘the unity of itself and its externalization’.²¹ In the same way, ‘self-consciousness is outside of itself’.²² Just as a force is manifest only insofar as it comes into contact with another force, so too does self-consciousness only exist insofar as it is recognised to exist by an Other. The process of ‘reaching out’ and being recognised is like a reflection: first, self-consciousness ‘loses itself’ in the Other, recognising them; second, it sublates the Other, and recognises them recognising it. Think of somebody looking into a mirror: they first recognise the image, and then they recognise that the image is an image of themselves. In both the Hegelian process of recognition, and the process of looking into a mirror, the self-consciousness returns into itself by negating the otherness (either the Other or the mirror-image). ‘It gets itself back through sublation, for it comes to be in equality with itself again through the sublation of its otherness’.²³

The peculiarity that arises here is that being conscious of one’s self is not, and can never be, a purely singular activity. It necessarily involves a self-sufficient Other, who themselves is engaged in self-consciousness, by involving an Other … and so on. Each consciousness ‘himself does what he demands of the other and for that reason also does what he does only insofar as the other does the same’.²⁴ Both consciousnesses – both ‘extremes’ in the dialectical process – reach out, and in so doing, withdraw back into themselves. My self-consciousness, my internality, is externality. This is the act of mutual recognition: the act wherein the unity of self-consciousness arises from its doubling. As Hegel writes, ‘what is supposed to happen can only be brought about through both of [the self-consciousnesses] bringing it about’; that is to say, the realisation of the self only happens when both parties, both consciousnesses, recognise each other in the same way.

’Each sees the other do the same as he does; each himself does what he demands of the other and for that reason also does what he does only insofar as the other does the same.²⁵

The Trial of Subjectivity

Hegel acknowledges that the stable mediation of mutual recognition does not come about immediately; like all other moments in the Phenomenology, it is a process. The I and the Other first start as ‘extremes’, opposed to each other, and when recognition first emerges, it will be only in one direction.

At first, the I is a singular being, experienced immediately, asserted in its self-equality by opposition to the Other. ‘What is other for it,’ Hegel writes, ‘is, as an inessential object, designated by the character of the negative’.²⁶ That is to say, the Other is at this point merely a simple object, depersonalised and exploited by the I for the sake of the I’s certainty of itself. The I is not yet self-consciousness, because it is still asserted as something immediate; since it doesn’t yet acknowledge itself as mediated through a self-sufficient Other, it remains in the Hobbesian state of ‘restless desire’. To escape this state, and to realise itself as a self, as a subject, the I must move beyond the immediacy of self-certainty and, recognising itself as mediated by an equally mediated Other, show ‘that it is not at all bound to the universal singularity of existence, that it is not shackled to life’.²⁷

Dramatically, this process evolves into a trial by death: the I that wants to be seen as a subject is ultimately willing to sacrifice their own life, and take the life of the Other, in order to have their subjectivity recognised. Why? In the first case, in the fight to count as a subject, and not merely a living thing, the I is willing to give up everything objective about their existence: they will readily bring about ‘the destruction of all immediate being’, revealing their pure subjectivity as ‘the pure negation of [their] objective mode’.²⁸ If I put my life at stake, I am asserting my subjectivity, by demonstrating that my existence is determined by my own will. As Hegel writes in the Philosophy of Right,

As a person, I at the same time possess my life and body, like other things, only in so far as I so will it. … I have these limbs and my life only in so far as I will it; the animal cannot mutilate or destroy itself, but the human being can.²⁹

In order to demonstrate its freedom and subjectivity, therefore, the I is willing to devote itself to the ultimate act of freedom: facing the risk of death. Now, as well as demonstrating the control I have over my existence, the conflict that must necessarily arise alongside the risk of death reveals the brave claim of subjectivity: my subjectivity, my freedom, is such that it can be defended in a situation of conflict and thus be ‘proven’ as true and universal. As Frantz Fanon writes, willingly facing the risk of death ‘means that I go beyond life toward a supreme good that is the transformation of subjective certainty of my own worth into a universally valid objective truth’.³⁰

In the situation of conflict, the I is not only defending themselves, but is even prepared to kill the Other, who also wants to assert themselves as independent, and in so doing threatens the independence of the I. In this reasoning there is a profound critique of Hobbes, for whom the primary trial by death in human life takes place in the state of nature, where individuals attack others to satisfy their desires and gain reputation. For Hobbes, humans are – ‘by a real necessity of nature’ – drawn to ‘shun death’; the Hobbesian individual values self-preservation above all else, and would never risk death solely for the sake of freedom, as the Hegelian self-consciousness does.³¹

The Rise of the Master

Eventually, someone must win the trial by death by killing their opponent. But this success turns into a failure when the ‘winner’ no longer has a living Other to provide them with recognition. Thus, Hegel explains, the trial ‘sublates the truth which was supposed to emerge from it’.³² Once it finally comes to this realisation, self-consciousness tries to attain stable recognition not through killing the Other, but by enslaving them. We thus arrive at the first concrete human relation in the Phenomenology of Spirit: that of the master and the slave.

In his Politics, Aristotle defines a slave as a person who is the possession of another:

Hence we see what is the nature and office of a slave; he who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another’s man who, being a human being, is also a possession. And a possession may be defined as an instrument of action, separable from the possessor.³³

Hegel is not interested in justifying slavery, as Aristotle was, but nonetheless their analyses have important similarities: just as Aristotle sees the slave as ‘an instrument of action’, so too does Hegel recognise that the slave as a kind of ‘outsourcing’ of the master’s desire. As Kalkavage describes it, ‘the slave works on things in order to satisfy the natural desire of the master’.³⁴ When a self-consciousness has become a master, they are thereby in the position to act upon their desire by mediating it through the action of the slave, and, as such, they no longer have to worry about their object of desire being nullified. The negation of the desired object – that is, the satisfaction of desire – is ensured by the servitude of the slave, rather than by annihilation. As Hegel puts it, the slave only counts as a negative for the master.³⁵ Furthermore, the master is no longer burdened with the burdens of the aforementioned ‘objective mode’ of selfhood; the weaknesses of the body, for instance, are no challenge to somebody who employs the body of another to do their dirty work.

With this new capacity of control, the master is able to work on the world, to control the world, without having to negate everything in their path. As Harris points out, the master is not a God, but is more akin to an Adam who has become ‘God-like’: the master (or ‘Lord’)

simply enjoys the world; but it does not hear his word immediately, as Heaven and Earth sprang from nothing when God spoke “in the beginning.” The serf [slave] is the middle term between them. Hearing the Lord’s word, he works on the world, to bring it into harmony with the Lord’s will. The human Lord is Adam who has become “like God”; he is not expelled from Eden after all, because he eats his bread in the sweat of another’s brow.³⁶

As Hegel explains, the slave is a ‘middle term’ between the master and the object of desire. Only the ‘non-self-sufficiency’ – the ‘consumable’ aspect – of the desired thing is of any interest to the master; the self-sufficient, objective mode of the thing – its very thinghood – is left ‘in the care of the servant’.³⁷

The Lord showed himself to be ‘like God’ in the struggle; and the other learned to fear him accordingly. … It is the element of fear in the relation of lord and serf that constitutes the sublated survival of the life and death struggle in this new relationship. The ‘knowledge of good and evil’ is the knowledge of who is afraid of death and who is not.³⁸

The slave does as the master commands, because the only other option is to risk their life again in another trial by death. The slave is therefore in a similar position to a religious devotee: fear God (the master), or face damnation. Everything the slave does is done out of fear of death; in effect, then, it is done out of necessity. As such, ‘what the servant does is really the master’s doing’.³⁹ The slave has essentially become an extension of the master’s capacity, like an artificial limb. It is here that an issue arises; for, in the quest for recognition, what good is this ‘limb’ – an ‘inessential doing’, dependent upon another, with little regard for itself? What God would care for a ‘devotee’ who has no choice but to believe? The master has denigrated the slave so much, and has reduced its self-sufficiency to such an extent, that any ‘recognition’ that the slave can provide is worthless. ‘As a result, a form of recognition has arisen that is one-sided and unequal’.⁴⁰ We consequently arrive at a point of dialectical inversion: ‘the truth of the self-sufficient consciousness [the master] is thus the servile consciousness’; yet again, a claim to truth has shown itself to be the inversion of what it proclaims itself to be.⁴¹ The master has effectively refused any recognition, by objectifying the Other who could recognise them; furthermore, the master is entirely dependent on their slave’s work, and is thus a slave themselves.

The Liberation of the Slave

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

The master is a consumer, who makes demands of the slave and then consumes the products of the slave’s work. In this sense, the master is still ruled by desire. A product is desired, demanded, and then consumed; and through this consumption, the master ‘has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object’.⁴² The master’s satisfaction is thus always transitory. The life of the slave, on the other hand, is ruled not by desire but by work, which Hegel describes as ‘desire held in check’.⁴³ The slave works upon a thing, but doesn’t consume it. As such, the object for the slave is something that endures; it is a stable existence upon which a slave can assert themselves, contrasting to the ever-vanishing objects of consumption that the master has to continuously demand. In leaving their mark upon these enduring objects, the slave gets closer to realising their true subjectivity; ‘through work, this servile consciousness comes round to itself … work cultivates and educates [bildet]’.⁴⁴

Work is only one of three ways in which the slave liberates themselves. Fear also plays a role, as Hegel makes reference to the claim in Proverbs, ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’.⁴⁵ In the oppressive condition of servitude, the slave ‘had anxiety about its entire essence. It felt the fear of death, the absolute master’.⁴⁶ In this state of anxiety, ‘all stable existence becomes absolutely fluid’; the slave is forced to acknowledge that life is temporary and the body degrades. As Heidegger would later understand, fear and anxiety cause the world to slip away, leaving us alone with what Hegel calls the simple essence of self-consciousness: ‘anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole … In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Dasein [human existence] is all that is still there’.⁴⁷ In other words, the fear inherent in slavery allows the slave to shrug off everything that is temporary, all of ‘natural existence’, and confront the subjective truth of their self-consciousness – the self-consciousness that they have cultivated, and imprinted on the world, in their labour.

The third part in the slave’s liberation is the ‘service’ which the slave provides to the master. As Hegel explains, fear causes the dissolution of the slave’s natural existence from the subjective perspective: in anxiety, the slave sees the temporary, inessential parts of their world and existence slip away. In service, however, ‘the servant also achieves this dissolution in actuality’.⁴⁸ In serving the master, the slave actually gives over the ownership of their natural existence; as Kalkavage writes, ‘in service, I give up my claim to all natural existence: to food and drink, procreation, even sleep’.⁴⁹ In so doing, the slave realises their independence from this natural existence; they no longer have authority over their body or any of its activity, and yet something that is truly their own still remains: their independent self-consciousness.

Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic thus comes to an end as we discover that, in Hyppolite’s words, ‘The path of mastery is a dead end in human experience; the path of servitude is the true path of human liberation.’⁵⁰ The master is left behind in history, endlessly repeating the demands of unsatisfied desire; the slave, on the other hand, has discovered their independent self-consciousness, brought to light through the trauma of fear and service, and they have imprinted it on the world in their work. The slave has mastered the ‘labor of the negative’,⁵¹ negating things not by destroying their form (as in desire), but by transforming them. In the beginning, serving the master leads a slave to be a stranger to themselves. But through work, they imprint themselves upon the world, and thus eventually see themselves looking back.

Crucially, the downfall of the master shows us the way in which the oppression of social relations cannot be abolished simply by negating an ‘opponent’. We can take the dialectic of mastery and servitude as an allegory: if an individual seeks self-independence and freedom, they cannot find it simply by killing or enslaving their opponent, because their very identity is dependent upon their relation to this opponent (the slave is their servitude to the master, the master is their authority over the slave). As Wendy Brown writes in States of Injury:

Ideals of freedom ordinarily emerge to vanquish their imagined immediate enemies, but in this move they frequently recycle and reinstate rather than transform the terms of domination that generated them. Consider exploited workers who dream of a world in which work has been abolished, blacks who imagine a world without whites, feminists who conjure a world either without men or without sex, or teenagers who fantasize a world without parents. Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced and without addressing the subject constitution that domination effects, that is, the constitution of the social categories, “workers”, “blacks”, “women”, or “teenagers”.⁵²

Stoicism and Skepticism

Freedom of Self-Consciousness, Part One

Stoicism

Here is where the last chapter has left us: the master has imposed the demands of their desire onto the slave, and has thus become a repetitive consumer. The master is never satisfied, because they continue to destroy (i.e., consume) the objects of their desire, and they are also are not free, because they rely so constantly on the work of the slave. Freedom requires intelligent self-sufficiency, Hegel claims, just as Spinoza had recognised in the Ethics:

That thing is said to be free [liber] which exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone.⁵³

The slave, on the other hand, has moved towards freedom by expressing their subjectivity through work, imposing their identity on an object and thereby ‘solidifying’ it. Nonetheless, the slave is not yet entirely free, because they still depend somewhat upon the object. Because the slave’s work was demanded by the master, the slave still sees the master as the essential being – that is, the subject – in the situation. The slave hasn’t yet understood what we, the phenomenological observers, realise: that the crafted object’s very form is bestowed upon it by the slave, and that the slave is therefore the substance of the object. As Kalkavage puts it, we recognise that ‘the substance of things is their relation to the thinking subject or consciousness’.⁵⁴

What kind of self-consciousness can realise this? What kind of character is able to recognise that they are self-sufficient and autonomous, with no need to refer to a master, a Beyond, or a mundane thing? And what kind of activity would this character be involved in? Hegel’s answer is: the stoic and thought itself.

While the slave was tied to the object, and found independence only through recognising themselves in the object, the stoic’s thinking is concerned with concepts instead of objects. This, after all, is what thinking really is; while the slave and the master obviously had thoughts, they had them only in a limited and dependent sense. As Harris describes them, ‘Being human, they both think, but they think finitely, and in Vorstellungen [representations]. Their thoughts have external referents, and are not the comprehensive grasping of completely intellectual contents (the Understanding’s concept of Force was the first “pure thought” that we had to deal with)’.⁵⁵ That is to say, free thought – which is precisely what the stoic practices – operates not ‘according to representations or shapes but rather in concepts, which is to say, the object moves itself within a differentiated being-in-itself, which for consciousness is not anything immediately differentiated from it’.⁵⁶ Because a concept is purely mental, and makes no attempt to represent objects separate from consciousness, it is always my own. Miller’s translation has a useful phrase with which to contrast the stoic’s thinking: it never manifests as ‘picture-thought’. This kind of thinking is free precisely because it is self-sufficient, and relies merely on the self alone. It might seem, therefore, like a precursor to Descartes’ self-reliant cogito. In thinking, consciousness is ‘an object to itself’; ‘its meaning is that of the being-for-itself of that consciousness [who thinks]’.⁵⁷ As the object of free thought, the concept is a thing of sorts (a ‘determinate and distinguished existent’, in Hegel’s words), but it is never a represented thing; it is never something other than consciousness.

In that this content [of the stoic’s thought] is at the same time a conceptually grasped content, consciousness remains immediately self-aware of its unity with this determinate and distinguished existent, not as it would be in the case of representation, in which consciousness especially has to remind itself that this is its representation; rather, the concept is to me immediately my concept.⁵⁸

Hegel summarises the stoic’s freedom when he says that ‘within thinking, I am free because I am not in an other … my moving about in concepts is a movement within myself’.⁵⁹ As such, the stoic is neither a naïve master, who finds their truth in the slave, nor a slave, whose truth is found in serving the master. Hegel is perhaps thinking of how the two masters of stoicism (Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus) were an emperor and a slave, respectively, when he says that stoicism ‘consists in being free within all the dependencies of one’s singular existence, whether on the throne or in fetters’. The stoic withdraws from ‘actual doing’, from ‘suffering’, and from life itself, ‘and withdraws into the simple essentiality of thought’.⁶⁰

As has happened before in the Phenomenology, the language we use to describe our grasp on truth has overtaken us; the very words used in describing stoicism’s strength give a voice to its weaknesses. To be specific, stoicism has prided itself on its withdrawal from life into the immediacy of self-consciousness’s own concepts, but by doing this, it has ‘let go of natural existence’ and cast itself into a state of purely internal reflection.⁶¹ The comparison with Descartes can thus continue in a critical direction: it seems that the stoic has ended up trapped as the famous ‘ghost in the machine’.⁶² To be sure, the stoic is an adept thinker, but in stoicism, Hegel writes, ‘thought only has pure thoguhts as its truth, a truth without any fulfillment in life’; as such, the ‘freedom’ that the stoic held onto so proudly is ‘not living freedom itself but only the concept of freedom’.⁶³ What good is freedom if it isn’t exercised against the grip of life and its suffering? There is no real content to a stoic’s thinking – only concepts reflected in other concepts. Furthermore, this empty and formalistic thinking even falls into contradiction when it is asked for the criterion of truth:

To the question put to it, “What is good and true?”, its answer was once more that it was the abstract thinking devoid of all content itself, namely, that the true and the good is supposed to consist in rationality. However, this self-equality of thinking is only again the pure form in which nothing is determinate.

That is to say, there can be no real truth in thought that has no content. There is nothing against which the stoic’s thinking can be tested; as such, all high-minded reference the stoic makes to ‘truth’, ‘the good’, and so on, eventually dissolves.

The general terms, “true” and “good”, or “wisdom” and “virtue”, with which stoicism is stuck, are on the whole undeniably uplifting, but because they cannot in fact end up in any kind of expansion of content, they quickly start to become tiresome.⁶⁴

Skepticism

Where is self-consciousness to go after its claim to truth has lost all content? It might seem intuitive to revoke the logic of stoicism, with the hope of finding some content in the external world that the stoic had shrunk away from. The dialectical approach, however, is to persevere; to take the logic of stoicism to its utmost conclusion, and embrace its negativity (namely, the loss of truth-content).

Skepticism realises that which for stoicism was only a potentiality. Precisely, ‘it is the actual experience of what freedom of thought is’.⁶⁵ Stoicism was only an ‘incomplete negation’ of otherness, while ‘skepticism is in itself the negative’.⁶⁶ What does this mean? Think of how the Phenomenology shows that experience always undermines conceptualisation: as Harris puts it, ‘“Realizing” [a] concept produces a result that is the opposite of what is projected in the conceptual blueprint’.⁶⁷ The same applies to skepticism’s realisation of stoicism’s concept. Skepticism accepts the stoic insistence on mental reflection, but claims that this insistence, if it is taken seriously, must imply a complete refusal to claim any certain knowledge, because the mental world has no necessary connection with the external world, wherein the criterion for truth lies. That is, skepticism reveals that stoicism lacks a mediation between what appears and what is thought – between the manifest and the scientific. (In Consciousness, the positing of supersensible force was such a mediation.) Stoicism posits the concept of self-sufficient consciousness; skepticism realises the corresponding experience, which is that of the annihilation of the world.

The skepticism Hegel has in mind has more in common with ancient Pyrrhonism than with the work of Hume or Schulze. While the modern skeptics have primarily epistemological concerns, ancient skepticism was directly aimed at the good life, by means of achieving ataraxia – a state of mental quietude or undisturbedness. As Sextus Empiricus writes, ‘Scepticism is an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgements in any way whatsoever’.⁶⁸ As such, while stoicism’s shrinking away from the world was an unintended side-effect of its theory of the world – namely, the theory that the self is at the centre – skepticism embraces a kind of worldlessness. It is ‘the rejection of all theories about the world, since the world, if there is one, is unknowable and there is nothing intelligible to say about it’, as Robert Solomon puts it.⁶⁹ Hegel himself says, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, that ‘the general aim of Skepticism is that, with the vanishing of all [finite] being, of everything determinate, everything affirmative, self-consciousness should attain within itself this inner stability, a perfect ἀταραξία, ataraxia’.⁷⁰

The significance of this distinction – between ancient Pyyrhonic skepticism and modern Humean skepticism – is that only the ancient skeptics were invested in a project that wasn’t merely epistemological, but practical; a project concerning self-consciousness itself. As Hegel writes in an early essay of 1802, ‘[early] skepticism … did not give itself out for a decided option [haeresis] or school, but rather … for an agōgē, an education for a way of life, a formative process’.⁷¹ That is to say, the skeptic’s ‘annihilation’ of the world is not for the sake of proving an epistemological point; rather, as Kalkavage explains, ‘His spree of bubble bursting is the act in which he asserts himself and his thinking as master of the world’.⁷² Just like the stoic, the skeptic wants to liberate the individual; this is where skepticism finds its absolute truth. The uniquely skeptical way of liberating the individual is to negate all otherness; that is, to deny all worldly certainty.

Hegel’s analysis of skepticism is made clearer when he makes an interesting reference back to the dialectic of the master and slave:

It is clear that just as stoicism corresponds to the concept of self-sufficient consciousness (which appeared as a relationship between mastery and servitude), skepticism corresponds to the realization of the concept of self-sufficient consciousness as the negative direction (of desire and work) towards otherness.⁷³

There are two points being made in this sentence. The first is one that has already been explored, namely that ‘skepticism corresponds to the realization’ of stoicism’s concept. The second point is more complex: Hegel is explaining that the movement of stoicism to skepticism is, in essence, a repetition of the master-slave dialectic. The relation of mastery and servitude arose as a two-sided attempt to posit self-sufficiency, and in its experience – that is, through its enactment – it resulted in the negation of otherness (through desire, on the side of the master, and work, on the side of the slave). In the same way, the movement from stoicism to skepticism demonstrated the transformation of a conceptual positing of self-sufficient consciousness into the concrete experience of the ‘annihilation’ of the world. The difference now is that the ‘work’ of skepticism is able to go further than the master’s desire or the slave’s work:

However much desire and work were not able to achieve the negation for self-consciousness, by contrast this polemical direction towards the manifold self-sufficiency of things meets with success because, within itself, as an already culminated and free self-consciousness, it turns against them.⁷⁴

Desire was unsuccessful, as we saw, because it always had to renew its object. The slave’s labour was unsuccessful because it ‘produced an independent object that embodied the worker-slave’s chain to his master’.⁷⁵ The skeptic, however, is in a different position. The skeptic has a grasp on ‘the infinity of thought’.⁷⁶ Infinity, as explained above, is the containment of opposites within the same object. The pointing out of these internal oppositions is precisely the activity of the skeptic: Sextus, for example, can point out that something appears one way, and also a contradicting way, to the same person. The skeptic’s work is thus better equipped than that of the slave, because thinking the Hegelian infinite allows for the skeptic to realise the negation of everything (in thought, at least) at once. The slave, on the other hand, had to toil over each individual object, only to find at the end of the labour a sign of their subjugation staring back at them.

The skeptical self negates the world, annihilates all established differences, and in this negation experiences nothing but itself. This is the negativity and otherness that define self-consciousness.⁷⁷

Skepticism progresses by negating, and in this way it is the first consciously dialectical thinker to appear in the Phenomenology. To be sure, the master, slave, and stoic all underwent dialectical development, as did the subjects of sensuous certainty, perception, and the understanding. But in skepticism, dialectics ‘is a moment of self-consciousness, to which it does not simply happen that the true and the real for it vanishes without its knowing how this comes about’.⁷⁸ That is to say, the real now vanishes because the skeptic consciously lets it vanish; dialectical overturning is no longer an unconscious side-effect of claiming absolute truth.

Disarray, Vertigo and Disorder

By naming the skeptic the first truly dialectical thinker, Hegel clearly holds skepticism in high regard. Naturally, however, he also finds contradiction within it. Indeed, the skeptic ends up in a state of real disorder. A skeptic is only self-sufficient and comfortable within the world insofar as they are constantly undermining the world, and they can only do this insofar as they formally negate everything that is given to them. Hegel puts this nicely when he says that the skeptic’s ‘talk is indeed like that of a squabble among stubborn children, one of whom says A when the other says B, and then says B when the other says A’.⁷⁹ For as long as a skeptic wants to be free, they have no choice but to engage in this endless ‘squabble’, to act as a stubborn contrarian who has no fixed principles of their own. The result of this is that skeptical self-consciousness becomes ‘an utterly contingent disarray, the vertigo of a perpetually self-creating disorder’.⁸⁰ What is most damaging is that the skeptic’s nay-saying applies even to their own identity: in order to maintain the spirit of skepticism, the skeptic must concede that they are a singular, contingent being, a ‘forsaken’ part of ‘animal life’, prone to the delusions of the senses and thus incapable of confident judgment. And yet, at the same time, the whole point of the skeptical mindset is to posit oneself as the master of the world, rationally detached (like the stoic) from contingent things, in ataraxic indifference! ‘This consciousness’, Hegel writes, ‘is thus the insensible claptrap that goes to and fro from the one extreme of self-equal self-consciousness to the other extreme of contingent, disordered, and disordering consciousness’.⁸¹

In addition to this, the practice of skepticism inevitably results in a performative contradiction. The skeptic calls things into question by opposing the various appearances of those things, but doing so is only possible if the givenness of those appearances is not called into question. As Hegel points out, skepticism ‘speaks about absolute disappearance, but that “speaking about” itself is … It speaks about the nullity of seeing, hearing, and so on, and it itself sees, hears, and so on’.⁸²

Through experience, therefore, skepticism eventually realises that the skeptic is a self-contradictory self-consciousness. There is a doubling of consciousness in skepticism. This doubling ‘was previously distributed between two singular individuals, the master and the servant’, Hegel points out; now, skepticism has brought it into one singular being.⁸³ In order to reconcile itself to this contradiction, consciousness must form itself into a new shape, one which is self-aware about its doubled nature. The name of this new shape is unhappy consciousness.

Unhappy Consciousness

Freedom of Self-Consciousness, Part Two

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war, but I would not believe it.

The unhappiness of this stage in the development of self-consciousness is easy enough to understand. As Robert Stern writes, ‘on the one hand, the Unhappy Consciousness believes that it is unable to transcend the world of changeable appearances, but on the other hand holds that it can only attain satisfaction by so doing’.⁸⁴ As such, consciousness has given up on the quest for ataraxia, or any sort of satisfaction; instead, it is withdrawn to a sad admission of its own finitude. The unhappy consciousness takes the two parts of skepticism’s doubled state – the ‘changeable consciousness’ of contingent, finite existence, and the ‘unchangeable consciousness’ that was desired – and posits the latter as an unreachable, divine individual. That is to say, the unhappy consciousness does not realise that this double is itself; rather, it projects a part of itself onto a separate, imaginary being: ‘an opaque sensuous One possessing all the aloofness of something actual’.⁸⁵ As Hegel explains, the unhappy consciousness ‘both brings together and keeps together pure thinking and singular individuality, but it has not yet been elevated to that thinking for which the singular individuality of consciousness is reconciled with pure thinking itself’. Just as self-consciousness started out with desire, here it is still agonised with the desire to be like the ‘unchangeable’, ‘other-worldly’ One that it has some awareness of … and yet it fails to realise that this object ‘is it itself, is itself the singularity of consciousness’.⁸⁶

As Judith Butler points out, this stage of self-consciousness sees the tension between mastery and servitude take place within one single subject:

The bondsman takes the place of the lord by recognizing his own formative capacity, but once the lord is displaced, the bondsman becomes lord over himself, more specifically, lord over his own body; this form of reflexivity signals the passage from bondage to unhappy consciousness.⁸⁷

For Butler, the body in which self-consciousness resides is the prime example of the particularity and contingency which makes for the unhappiness in unhappy consciousness. Previously, Hegel compared skeptics to ‘stubborn children’ who take delight in negating anything that the Other says. Now, Butler explains, ‘the childish and stubborn pleasure that the skeptic takes in watching another fall turns into a profound unhappiness when he is, as it were, forced to watch himself [as unhappy consciousness] fall into endless contradictions’.⁸⁸ To continue the analysis of unhappy consciousness as split, then, we can say that the side of this split who takes the place of the master – the ‘unchangeable consciousness’ – acts out of sadomasochism upon the enslaved side of the split, the ‘changeable consciousness’ that the body is taken to represent. As Butler puts it, ‘the subject subordinates its own body in the service of the thought of the unchangeable’.⁸⁹

The unhappy consciousness is the final stage in self-consciousness, before the Phenomenology moves on to ‘Reason’. The unhappiness of self-consciousness at this stage is, as Jean Wahl realises, the sign of ‘absolute negativity’ becoming ‘fully aware of itself’ for the first time.⁹⁰ With this awareness, Wahl argues, the project of the Phenomenology really begins – that is, ‘the narration of consciousness’s efforts to fill in the separations that it feels within itself’. Consciousness could only be happy if it were to become conscious of its unity; instead, it is currently stuck as ‘the vision of one consciousness in another’.⁹¹ The unhappy subject has not yet realised that they are the unity of contradictions.

Judaism and Christianity

Jean Wahl makes an observation which is now becoming increasingly evident: the unhappy consciousness represents, in a basic form, the foundations of Abrahamic religion. While self-consciousness fails to realise that the divine unchangeable is, in fact, within it – while it is ‘the inward movement of the pure heart which painfully feels itself as estranged’ – its unhappy thinking is a form of ‘devotion’.⁹² As Wahl writes, the same is true in Judaism:

Jewish consciousness knows its contradiction. It turns out to be the deepening of Scepticism and the still incomplete unification of that which remains separated in Scepticism. It is the religion of the sublime in which the essential and the inessential are most firmly opposed to each other, but in which they are also shown in their reciprocal necessity.⁹³

Why Judaism specifically? Does Christianity not also estrange the believer from God, reducing human life to the unhappy experience of lack? To be sure, there are important Christian philosophers who characterise the unhappy consciousness. For instance, Augustine addresses his Confessions to a God that is ‘incorruptible’; in his conversion, Augustine is led to a realisation – a ‘single truth [which] was the only weapon with which I could try to drive from my mind’s eye all the unclean images which swarmed before it’ – namely, ‘that what remains constant is better than that which is changeable … the incorruptible is better than the corruptible’.⁹⁴ Pascal is even closer to Hegel’s description of the unhappy consciousness, claiming that ‘Man’s greatness lies in his capacity to recognize his wretchedness’.⁹⁵ Just like Hegel’s unhappy subject, Pascal positions his unhappiness as a successor to stoicism:

The stoics say: ‘Go back into yourselves. There you will find peace.’ And it is not true. Others say: ‘Go out, look for happiness in some distraction.’ And that is not true. Illness is the result. Happiness is neither outside us nor within us. It is in God, and both outside and within us.⁹⁶

Nonetheless, two things (in my judgment) make Judaism a more appropriate representative of the unhappy consciousness, at least in its first stage. Firstly, and most simply, Judaism chronologically precedes Christianity. Thus, any consciousness of the separation of humanity and divinity in Christianity can be seen as a derivation of Jewish thought. For Jean Hyppolite, Judaism was the foremost representative of this separation-thinking; he’s reported to have said during wartime that ‘insofar as we seek the universal, we are all Jews’.⁹⁷ Secondly, one of the crucial events in Christianity – the incarnation of God as Jesus – marks a denial of this separation, as God (the unchangeable) takes the changeable form of a man, who undergoes the greatest act of finitude in the crucifixion.

… And yet, it is the crucifixion that takes Jesus back out of the changeable world. To understand the consequence of this, the meaning of the crucifixion to the unhappy consciousness, we will make a diversion through Hegel’s analysis of feeling.

The object of unhappy consciousness’s focus – that is, the unchangeable – is so separate from consciousness that, as Harris puts it, ‘the Unhappy Consciousness does not properly think but feels’.⁹⁸ The encounter between changeable and unchangeable, insofar as there is one, is one of silence. No matter how much I call out, God does not reply. ‘As such’, Hegel writes, ‘its thinking remains that of the shapeless roar of the pealing of bells, or that of a warm, all-suffusing vapor, or that of a musical thinking which does not amount to concepts’.⁹⁹ Consider a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal:

Knight: I want to talk to you as openly as I can, but my heart is empty … The emptiness is a mirror turned towards my own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled with fear and disgust.

Death does not answer. [silence]¹⁰⁰

Here, the knight is an example of unhappy consciousness. He wants to make sense of his contingent existence through dialogue with a being beyond such existence, and yet standing before this being he realises his own ‘emptiness’. Just like the slave before the master, he is ‘filled with fear’ when he realises his changeable existence, his contingency.

But why does the knight direct his confession – his devotion, or ‘shapeless roar’ – to death, and not God? Hegel has the answer. The aforementioned event of the crucifixion effects a transformation in unhappy religious thinking, namely, that ‘the singular being who was God is dead’.¹⁰¹ This is the biblical story, at any rate. In rather abstract terms, Hegel describes the logical structure of this transformation:

Where the other [God, the unchangeable, etc.] is sought, it cannot be found, for it is just supposed to be an other-worldly beyond, or the kind of thing that cannot be found. Sought as individual [Jesus], it turns out not to be a universal singular individuality of thought, or it turns out not to be a concept but rather to be the singular individual as an object, or as an actuality, an object of immediate sense certainty. Just for that reason, it thus turns out only to be the kind of thing that has vanished.¹⁰²

In other words, because the unchangeable is taken to be an ‘other-worldly beyond’, any worldly appearance of it must be as fleeting as the ‘This-Here-Now’ of sensuous certainty. In religion, Jesus was this fleeting appearance, and the crucifixion marked him as ‘the kind of thing that has vanished’. Thus, all that remains for consciousness to devote itself to is the ‘grave’ of God.¹⁰³

Thanksgiving and Priesthood

The unhappy subject is thus left in an abandoned world, the grave of a crucified God. As such, just like the slave who was left alone with their labour, the unhappy subject undergoes ‘the return of the heart into itself’: now that God has gone, self-consciousness turns to itself as an object.¹⁰⁴ This begins the second stage of unhappy consciousness, in which – again, like the slave – it seeks to overcome its alienation through desire and labour. Through work, the subject hopes to prove itself; however, Hegel admits, this will result in ‘only the proof of the worth of what it is for itself, namely, its estrangement’.¹⁰⁵

There is of course a difference between the work of the slave and the work of the unhappy consciousness: now, the object worked upon is not just something desired by a master, but the world itself. The world, like the subject, is split: it is both empty, having been abandoned by God, and sacred, being God’s divine creation. It is, in Hegel’s words, ‘an actuality at odds with itself’:

This actuality is a shape of the unchangeable, for the latter has preserved singular individuality in itself, and because, as the unchangeable, it is the universal, the meaning of its singular individuality itself is that of all actuality.¹⁰⁶

Understood this way, the world is indeed a metaphorical grave, because a grave is both a marker of somebody’s absence, a sign of their having left this world, and a concrete record of their having existed. A grave is a sign that the person whose absence it marks will, in fact, live on through the materialisation of their life. Thus the world is God’s grave, the sign left behind by God; and the subject works upon it – transforms and consumes it – in order to come closer to God. Now, even at this point, the unhappy subject is still not entirely self-sufficient. If it were, and if the world were purely null, then the subject’s work would ‘sublate actuality’ and result in satisfaction: namely, the feeling or realisation of self-sufficiency. However, since the world is split and contains the unchangeable as its essence or form (it is, ‘to itself, the shape of the unchangeable’, as Hegel explains), the subject’s labour sublates the world only insofar as ‘the unchangeable itself surrenders its shape and hands it over to consciousness to consume’.¹⁰⁷ Of course, the subject is also split, with its ‘powers’ – its capacity to work upon the world – being seemingly derived from the other-worldly beyond. That is to say, insofar as the subject is at all able to affect a world whose essence is the unchangeable, the subject’s power to do so must be an ‘alien gift’ from the unchangeable itself.

The splitting of both the world and the subject is essential for desire and work to have any significance, for without the unchangeable elements within each of them, the subject would merely be ‘an active this-worldliness, confronted by passive actuality’.¹⁰⁸ The world only ‘gives itself over’, so to speak, because its unchangeable essence ‘repels’ its changeable existence. Likewise, the subject also surrenders itself; since the satisfied feeling of self-sufficiency is not possible, the subject’s work instead takes the shape of ‘giving thanks’ to the unchangeable ‘beyond’ that has bestowed it with powers and a world to confront.

At this point, the relation between the unhappy consciousness and God seems to be one wherein both sides are surrendering themselves. However, Hegel shows that the ‘surrender’ of both sides actually amounts to very little. God’s surrender is, really, half-hearted: God renounces only the surface of Godly existence, and only insofar as the subject then has to work on it. Likewise, the subject claims to work and give thanks out of a spirit of renunication, but is this excessive humility not for the sake of earning recognition or praise? When La Rochefoucauld suggests that ‘a refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice over’, is he not stuck within the thinking of this stage of unhappy consciousness?¹⁰⁹ More simply, Hegel acknowledges that the unhappy subject ‘has willed, acted, and consumed’; does this really describe a subject who has truly surrendered themselves? As Harris puts it beautifully, ‘What we try to put into the hands of God remains obstinately the work of our own hands’.¹¹⁰ So, in what is becoming the true Hegelian fashion, in work and thanksgiving, the subject does the opposite of what it intends to do; ‘consciousness makes a show of renouncing the satisfaction of its own self-feeling’, and has reflected on itself while trying to reflect humbly on the Other. The subject is thus closer to realising what we, the phenomenological observers, have known from the start: these two individuals, the God and the worshipper, are in fact the same individual, singular but divided:

In work and consumption, as the realization of this essenceless being, [unhappy consciousness] can immediately forget itself, and its conscious ownness in this actuality is suppressed through the thankful bestowal of recognition. However, this suppression is in truth a return of consciousness back into itself, namely, into itself, to itself, as the genuine actuality.¹¹¹

Is this not a success? Self-consciousness has realised itself as the ‘genuine actuality’; and has itself at the centre of its world-image. But recall, at the start of this chapter, that the real satisfaction for unhappy consciousness is dissatisfaction: as such, this ‘return of consciousness back into itself’ is a wrong turn for a subject that wants only to assert its own finitude. Thus, if it is stuck with itself as the ‘genuine actuality’ of the world, the unhappy subject looks to degrade its actuality as much as possible. The subject, in this final stage of unhappiness, is a miserable ascetic, ridden with shame regarding the singular, contingent body and its ‘animal functions’:

These functions, instead of being performed without emabarrassment as something which are in and for themselves null and which can acquire no importance and essentiality for spirit, are instead now objects of serious attention and they acquire the utmost importance, since it is in them that the enemy shows itself shows itself in its distinctive shape.¹¹²

Now, the very same body that took centre stage through its desire and labour is derided as a fool. It is not simply that ‘animal functions’ are of the changeable world; indeed, in Christianity, they are often the medium through which the unchangeable is accessed, in the Eucharist. But these mundane, ‘shameful’ functions (Harris takes Hegel to be thinking of Luther’s constipation as an example) are a constant reminder of how ‘impoverished’ the unhappy subject is, in the face of an unchangeable God who has no such problems.¹¹³ Crucially, since this shame only comes about through the subject’s comparison of themselves to God, the subject’s unhappiness is still ‘mediated through the thought of the unchangeable’. Noticing this mediation allows us to realise Hegel’s final syllogism of self-consciousness, wherein the shameful unhappy consciousness and God are the two extremes, and the figure of the priest is the mediating conclusion. Hegel doesn’t refer explicitly to a ‘priest’, but to a mediator ‘in an immediate relation to the unchangeable essence’, who ‘renders service by offering counsel about what is right’.¹¹⁴ It might seem bizarre that priesthood – which might appear as a relic of an outdated world – marks the conclusion of self-consciousness. However, Hegel’s argument seems more plausible when we recall that the unhappy consciousness’s ‘God’ is not necessarily an omniscient heavenly being, but in fact an (unconscious) side of the split subject. As the above quotations from Wahl noted, unhappy consciousness is ‘the inward movement of the pure heart which painfully feels itself as estranged’. Thus, instead of a ‘priest’, one might think of a psychoanalyst who mediates the relationship between an analysand and their unconscious.

In many ways, the priest saves the shameful subject from themselves; now, all of the subject’s activity can be attributed to priestly instruction, which bears the honour of being divinely inspired. The priest is the messenger between God and the subject, and the subject is now a devoted object of the priest, who ‘has the certainty of having in truth emptied itself of its I, and of having made its immediate self-consciousness into a thing, into an objective being.’¹¹⁵ In a sense, the problems of unhappy consciousness have been solved: the subject is permitted to wallow away quietly, having found stability in a mediated relationship with God. At this point, the subject’s ‘doing and its being as this singularly individual consciousness is, to itself, being and doing in itself’, because it has sacrificed itself to an objective doing; namely, the will of God. As such, reason is born within the subject, as the priest’s mediation has allowed the ‘singular individual’ (unhappy subject) and the ‘objective’ (God) to be united in one moment.