Freedom of self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness, from "Self-Consciousness" The Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY

B. Freedom of self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness (§§197-230)

Hegel begins by telling us that the dialectical progress that we readers saw in the slave is not something that the slave recognizes within himself (§197) but that this modality of slave-self-consciousness has an historical instantiation in Stoicism (§198). Stoic consciousness entails that only conscious thought abstracted from all aspects of our natural being (desires, animal functions, etc) is essential, all the rest is chaff (§§198-9). The stoic-consciousness treats this as freedom, but it is not, it is only the idea of freedom and one that is unable to pronounce authoritatively on truth or goodness because nothing external to consciousness can matter to it. The best it can do is to judge something as reasonable, a substitute which may be “uplifting” but is ultimately facile and “tedious” (§200). Stoicism “is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness” (§201).

“Scepticism is the realization of that of which Stoicism was only the Notion, and is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is” (§202). That sounds pretty good, but as always, will be found to not be enough. Sceptical-consciousness is a thorough-going “negative attitude toward otherness, to desire and work” (§202), this is a change from the Stoic’s mere disregard of it all as inessential. The skeptic experiences the freedom of thought as pure negativity but is still mired in the world and perforce must have beliefs about it. Hegel sees these beliefs as diverse and confused (§205). The sceptical-consciousness knows itself as dual (master and slave within itself) “which is essential in the Notion of Spirit” but is not yet unified (§206).

The unity of these aspects emerges in the Unhappy Consciousness which is “a single consciousness” that is not, to begin with “explicitly aware that this is its essential nature” (§207). The Unhappy Consciousness regards these two aspects as “Unchangeable (...) essential Being” and “Changeable” as “unessential” (§208). The Unhappy Consciousness is caught in a loop, it takes itself to be merely changeable being and sees the unchangeable as “an Alien Being” and “yet it is itself a simple, hence unchangeable, consciousness. This loop this is then when “one opposite does not come to rest in its opposite, but in it only produces itself afresh as an opposite”(§208). The dialectic which allows an escape from this vicious circle works like this; 1st the Unhappy Consciousness is opposed to the Unchangeable which simply sustains the conflict unless we move to the 2nd moment in which it learns that “individuality belongs to the Unchangeable itself” and thirdly it recognizes itself, in all it unique particularity as individual in the Unchangeable and thus in the mode of Spirit (§210). The unhappy consciousness is at this moment very close to what will have been its goal (when the book is done) but it fails to see it as such, these determinations are essential in Hegel’s view but this form of consciousness sees them as wholly contingent and the resultant form as “an opaque sensuous unit” (§212) dependent upon some impossibly remote past when an unchangeable individual was a concrete reality, that is it cannot face “the pure formless Unchangeable” and can only come into any relation with the “Unchangeable in its embodied or incarnate form” - i.e., Christ (§213). The Unhappy Consciousness has attained to both “pure thinking and particular individuality” but cannot reconcile the two and is instead stuck between these two positions unable to see that they are united and that this unity “is its own self” (§216). Its thinking is only “a movement towards thinking” which is “no more than the chaotic jingling of bells, or a mist of warm incense, a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion” (§217). It is the devotional attitude that seems the only possible embodiment the Unchangeable as other than itself and never anywhere present which makes it explicitly unhappy. It more everyday terms, it holds itself to a standard that it can only comprehend as impossible of attainment.