Phenomenology of Spirit

In this chapter, Hegel narrows his focus from consciousness—which is a larger concept that includes the consciousness of community—to self-consciousness. Hegel’s ideas about the cognitive subject differ from his contemporaries in that he equates it with the individual person: “Opposed to an other, the ‘I’ is its own self, and at the same time it overarches this other which, for the ‘I’, is equally only the ‘I’ itself” (104). Hegel views self-consciousness as essential to understanding a greater system of consciousness; therefore, it is necessary to consider how the individual relates to the other, as this forms the distinction between one person’s experience and another’s.

Hegel suggests that what people perceive to be external objects are only emergences of cognition; the object does not appear in its true form but in the mind because of sense-experience and perception. Hegel views the “I” as the subject of differentiation between the interior and exterior. This exterior includes others. Self-consciousness is formed by the distinction between the self and others. A struggle emerges as the “I” encounters another “I,” another person or entity that also lives as a being-for-itself. A unity of the two can be formed through desire and the removal of the

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