The Truth of Self-Certainty, from Self-Consciousness, Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY (§§166-77)

This opening summation of where we have come to and overview of where this chapter will take us is very dense in content. What I take to the be most salient points are that throughout the stages of consciousness, the truth was always located outside the subject in the object. But with the appearance of infinity at the close of the last section, everything changes. Self-consciousness now is both subject as knower and its own object as what is known. It is only with self-consciousness that, for the first time, “the object corresponds to the concept” (§166). Self-consciousness depends upon an internal division (not unlike psyche & soma) which will be canceled later. That is, to take myself as the object of my knowledge, I insist upon this division, but when self-consciousness does this “what it distinguishes from itself is only itself as itself, the difference, as otherness, is immediately superseded for it” with the result that self-consciousness is initially only “the motionless tautology of: ‘I am I’” (§167). In the first moment of this internal division “self-consciousness is in the form of consciousness” and thus grasps this via sense-certain, perception and understanding, but in the second moment self-consciousness unifies itself as subject and object and relegates the external world to mere appearance (§167). Truth then, is internal to self-consciousness at this stage. In §168 Hegel tells us that taking the subject as object is the same as taking life as object, an object of “immediate desire” a “living thing” (§168). Life is a perpetual flux of becoming for which consciousness’ various concepts of the object were inadequate. Life is the object now and at the same time it is “a negative element” that is “desire” (§168). Life is thus the negative of self-consciousness itself, or consciousness and self-conscious opposed. With desire now as motive force, self-consciousness cannot find truth in an external object of dead matter, instead it requires another self-consciousness to mirror it back to itself. Here the effect of desire upon self-consciousness means that selfhood will be “an absolutely restless infinity” (§169) which we can see in Lacan’s notion of desire very clearly (though “desire” is not strictly equivalent for the two). As desirous beings we eat, drink, etc satisfying our desires directly and assert our individuality and agency in this process and doing so we also deny or disavow our absolute dependance upon the world as “the universal substance” of life (§171). That was simple desire or animal desire perhaps, but we also desire recognition and thus we require other self-consciousnesses (as we will see below).

The I of self-consciousness takes itself to be the absolute end of all activities and it is the measure of its world; the objects in the world are only what they are for desire, for this I, beyond that they are nothing (here I mean mere objects, not other subjects). Desire then is self as negativity relating to its world. But a “self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness” (§177) and it is not a self-consciousness without this other, so the recognition component of desire is crucial to show why it is only at this point in the book that we enter history per se.