Brandom-1992

Self-Consciousness:

Desire, Pride, and Independence

I. Introduction

1. With the exposition of the experience of self-consciousness, we "leave behind the colorful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and step out into the spiritual daylight," [177]. With the transition to the Self-Consciousness section, the topic of the Phenomenology shifts from conceptions of empirical objects to conceptions of the subject of such conceptions. For the first time we get a sketch of what kind of being Hegel takes us to be (phenomenal and phenomenological consciousness alike). What is special about us is that in addition to being natural creatures1, we are what he calls 'spiritual' creatures. Specifically, each of us is an "individual self-consciousness" who, in community with others, actualizes the concretely and practically universal social substance. The discussion takes place at two levels, which must not be run together. At the phenomenological level, for us who are being educated by this exposition, there is a progressive development in our understanding of the sort of identity in multiplicity implicit in taking something to be a determinate individual. From our first glimpse of the issue as directed to the determinate observable properties and objects, which appear to phenomenal consciousness in determinately contentful perception, our conception has been enriched by the advent of the model of the "play of forces", which appears to phenomenal consciousness in determinately contentful understanding.2 Our understanding of determinate individuality is to be further developed by the discussion of the relation between individual living things and their species, the unfolding of the concept of Life. Finally, the sort of identity out of diversity exhibited by life, in which the individual enacts the species and the species produces and preserves the individual is eventually revealed as displaying in a merely implicit form what becomes explicit in the concept of the relation between individual self-consciousnesses and universal Spirit.

2. At the other level, following not the order of exposition corresponding to our development but the order of development of phenomenal consciousness, a 1 It is not harmless to paraphrase this in terms of "having a body".2 Understanding does not differ from perception in essentially involving mediation (inferential and incompatibility relations among repeatables). Both do. They differ in that perception deals on with mediated repeatables that can be noninferentially reported, and so are also immediately accessible, while understanding deals also with mediated repeatables that are not accessible noninferentially, and so are purely mediated. These are theoretical entities in general--where this phrase should be understood to indicate not a difference in ontological kind, but only a difference in methodological access.

fundamentally naturalistic story is told about how spiritual creatures can arise out of merely natural ones. Here we take as our initial object living things (using the concept living thing, rather than talking about it). We see how it is possible to characterize animals that exhibit desire as having a primitive form of consciousness (we might call it awareness). According to this erotic theory of consciousness, things are something for desiring beings, a particular can appear as an instance of universal to them.3

Inorganic things just are what they are in themselves. But there are other kinds of things, desiring things, such that things can be something for them, as the hungry animal distinguishes food from non-food. Since something can be something for them, since things can appear as something, say food, to them, desiring animals are subjects of experience, as that term is used in the Introduction. What a hungry animal takes to be food, by practically treating it as food, "falling to without further ado and eating it up," as [109] puts it, may reveal itself not to have been what it appeared to be, not to have been in itself what it was for the animal, if it proves to be offensive-tasting and inedible. As such a subject of experience, what a desiring animal is in itself depends on what things are for it. The question is then what must be true of (what is at least) a desiring animal in order for it to count not just as aware of something as food, when hungry, but also as aware of itself as aware, for instance as hungry. By turning the erotic account of conscious awareness on itself, an account of self-awareness is to be offered to explain what else we are attributing to an animal when we take it to be conscious of itself as conscious, or self-conscious. Creatures of this sort are something in themselves, and things are something for them, but they also are something for themselves. In consequence, they are historical beings in a stronger sense than are the merely desiring, and so experiencing ones. For an alteration in what they are for themselves alters also what they are in themselves. Thus self-conscious beings can develop progressively, from our phenomenological point of view, when they change what they are in themselves by changing what they are for themselves and when the change in what they are for themselves is expressively clarifying, a matter of making explicit for themselves what they implicitly were in themselves. In following the exposition of the Phenomenology we are discerning such expressively progressive developments, and by rehearsing a sufficiently complete set of them4, will so alter what we are for ourselves as to achieve a

3 The consciousness that arises with desire must be distinguished both from the sort of classification that a chunk of iron does when it rusts in some environments and not in others, and from the consciousness discussed in the first section of the Phenomenology. As will emerge below, classification by desire is distinguished from that of the iron by its activity, the impetus it involves toward abolishing itself by finding the truth of its certainty in the satisfaction of desire (determinately negating the determinate negation that is desire). It is also distinguished from the particular shapes discussed under the headings of "Sense Certainty", "Perception", and "Understanding". For that exposition begins with consciousness that is already fully linguistically articulated and sophisticated. We start there with attempts to understand empirical knowledge--attempts that are undertaken by consciousnesses the already have a great deal of conceptual apparatus. Thus we start with phenomenal consciousness understanding the authority of its claims to empirical knowledge according to a model of Sense Certainty that is a determinate model only in virtue of its contrasting the sort of mere indication or pointing-out that it takes to be expressed by using indexicals and demonstratives, on the one hand, with inferential articulation of a sort that is explicitly to be excluded from immediate sense knowledge, on the other. It must have already mastered the use of these sorts of mediation in order to have the (mistaken) model it does of immediacy. In any case, the issue of how to understand the authority peculiar to sense is a sophisticated, late-coming one.4 Spread out in the exposition both vertically in a stratification of reconstructed historical experiences such that what we learn from one presupposes what we have learned from the previous ones hierarchically, and

new kind of identity in ourselves where what we are for ourselves and in ourselves coincide in important formal ways--what Hegel calls achieving Absolute Knowledge.

3. It remains to ask what is required for a being to count as being something for itself, as having a self-conception, or as being aware of itself as aware, that is, as being self-conscious. The two aspects whose various dependencies on each other are the structure that defines Spirit are self-conscious individuals and the substantial universal--the latter being the evolving tangle of norms and concepts implicit in the actual practices and practical experience of the community that comprises those individuals. Hegel accordingly offers a social account of self-consciousness, according to which both the individual and the universal aspects of Spirit depend on mutual recognition by particular consciousnesses.

Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [Anerkanntes]....The detailed exposition of the Notion [Begriff] of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition [die Bewegung des Anerkennens]. [178]

This structure of recognition produces the "'I' that is 'We' and the 'We' that is 'I',"[177]. As between mutually recognizing consciousnesses, it is symmetric--each is to understand its own identity as including its relation to other self-consciousnesses.

Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another [Sie anerkennen sich als gegenseitig sich anerkennend]. [184]

Hegel here is making an ontological point. Beings that are what they are recognized to be by those they recognize are, as such, a special kind of thing. Only they, he claims, can have a concept of conscious selfhood and can apply it to themselves. That is, in the terms canvassed above, only such consciousnesses can be explicitly for themselves what they are implicitly or in themselves. His claim is not to be confused with the sort of psychological point Isaiah Berlin makes when he says

Those who have grasped the notion that men are made miserable not only by poverty, disease, stupidity, or the effects of ignorance, but also because they are misfits or outsiders or not spoken to, that liberty and equality are nothing without fraternity...are in possession of one of Herder's idées maitresses.

Both the ontological and the psychological sort of claim are taken by their authors ultimately to have moral significance, but they are very different.

4. Before seeing how it might be argued that self-consciousness is possible only

horizontally across aspects of what we are in ourselves: our empirical knowledge (Consciousness), constitution of knowing and acting selves (Self-Consciousness), and practical purposive action (Reason).

according to the structure of mutual recognition, it will be helpful to see what could motivate one to think of self-conscious selves as taking themselves to be selves by taking themselves to be recognized by those they recognize. The antecedents that inspire that approach are to be found embedded in a voluntarist tradition that extends through Kant from Rousseau. I'll expound the idea in the terms they encourage, which emphasize deliberate choice, and then indicate how Hegel has broadened the concept by founding explicit recognition of that sort on recognition that is implicit in a sort of practice we always find ourselves already engaged in. In his essay "Was ist Aufklärung", Kant interprets the Enlightenment as the coming of age of humanity, its emergence from dependence to independence as the enlightened individual takes responsibility for claims and actions that result from rational deliberation about evidence and goals. Kant counts Rousseau as a hero of the Enlightenment because of his emphasis on autonomy as a moral sina qua non. It is incompatible with the dignity of mature humanity to be constrained by laws governing belief and conduct that are imposed on it from without. For the purposes of this discussion we may ignore such minor points as what difference it makes whether what is within is thought of as Nature or Reason (or Custom, as Herder has it). Kant identifies reason with the form of rule-governedness in general. 'Necessary' for him means according to a rule. Simply from the point of view of conceptual engineering one cannot help but admire the way in which Kant manufactures a notion of Freedom out of those of Autonomy and Necessity, by the use of use rule-based conception of constraint by norms. To be rational is to be constrained by rules of a special kind: rules whose determinate content, if made fully explicit, would not contradict their form as rules, namely necessity and universality (to offer a description of this view in terms that are particularly important to Hegel). But it is incompatible with our dignity to be constrained by any rules we have not freely chosen. So we are independent in our choice of rules to be constrained by or dependent upon, subject only to restrictions of form. This particular combination of independence and dependence is rational freedom, which defines the kind of being we are and the kind of moral dignity we have.

5. Hegel endorses both the aspiration for reconciliation that animates this account and the general outlines of the approach pursued. He does not think that we should follow Kant in restricting the constraint of reason to a purely formal role, however. The picture of

Spirit...this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence...,

is to explain how determinately contentful and so limited independence (by contrast to Kant's wide open invitation: "Choose any rule...) is constrained by its determinately contentful dependence on something else concrete (by contrast to Kant's purely formal qualification: "...so long as its content, if made explicit, is not incompatible with its form,"). To see what difference this move makes, interpret for the moment the concept of recognition--which for us has until now been essentially a black box with certain reputed capacities but an unknown internal constitution--as "taking to be or treating as a member of a particular community". Membership in a community we might understand to be a normative matter of liability to assessments of the propriety of one's conduct (as if

only members of the tribe are beaten with stick for misbehaving) and entitlement to engage in such assessments of the conduct of others (and so take up the stick on appropriate occasions). Hegel's idea here would take the form that actually being a member of the community means being treated as a member by those one treats as a member. Recognizing others can then be a purely practical matter of to whom one addresses stick-assessments, and from whom one accepts them. I am independent in the matter of what others I recognize in the sense that whether or not I recognize them is entirely a matter of how I treat them. This independence has a determinate, limited content already both because only some concrete individuals are available to be recognized, and because I always already find myself in some sort of recognitive posture towards them, which would need to be modified.5 I am dependent for what I really am, what community if any I am really a member of, on how I am treated by those I recognize. Whether I succeed in my bid to be constrained by the communal norms I have committed myself to by my recognitive behavior (and in that implicit sense have 'chosen') depends on more than my activity. There is in the recognitive structure the moment of the independence of the individual, in which it throw its lot in with a community (perhaps by behaving in a certain way), and there is the corresponding moment of dependence in which the community, having become by the individual's recognition entitled to a say in what the individual really (as concerns being one of us), accepts or rejects that petition.

6. Here are two examples in which recognition takes the special form of a conscious and deliberate choice. Consider first being a metallurgist. I might decide that I want to be a metallurgist, that I project this role for myself as an ideal. I desire to be conscious of myself as a metallurgist, a special sort of self-consciousness, corresponding to a specific sort of self-conception. Insofar as this case is like the basic ones,6 what gives determinate content to my desire is my recognition of some others as being metallurgists in the sense I aspire to. What I want is to be one of them. To succeed is to do whatever is required to earn their recognition of me as one of them. Their response to me only becomes relevant to what I really am, to whether I succeed in becoming in actuality or in myself, what I am ideally or for myself, because I have made it relevant by my response to them. I am independent in that it is up to me whether to recognize metallurgists or, say, whitewater canoeists, but the exercise of that independence entails a corresponding dependence on the ones I have recognized to recognize me in turn.

A second example will show how the balance between the independence of the

5 Eventually, of course, the important determinate content is a matter of what I approve or disapprove, what particular commitments and entitlements I attribute. But this dimension does not come to the fore until 'Reason'.6 The qualification is needed because mutual recognition in its most basic instances must not presuppose antecedent uses of language (it is at most coeval with language, and may be presupposed by it). But where conscious deliberation about things like whether to be a metallurgist is possible , they only take place against a background of prior language use in a broader community to which the deliberator already belongs. With the full powers of language to make conceptually articulated contents available, it is possible to constitute virtual communities by linguistic recognition. For the concrete experience that has shaped the concepts used to characterize a dead of even fictional character may suffice to settle what would be required to entitle one to recognition of a certain sort from that figure (Sherlock Holmes, Zuleika Dobson, or whoever). It is for this reason that I can aspire to join Wordsworth or Blake as poets of the imagination, and can wonder whether Wallace Stevens has succeeded in doing so.

individual and the dependence of that individual on the community can have multiple equilibrium points. Suppose I want to be a good chess player. I can make things hard on myself or easy on myself. I can make it very easy to earn the recognition (in this respect) of those I recognize as good chess players, if I am prepared to set my standards low enough. If I count as a good chess player anyone who can play a legal game, I won't have to learn much in order to earn the recognition of those who can play a legal game of my capacity to play a legal game. The cost is, of course, that what I achieve is only to be entitled to classify myself as a member of this not at all exclusive community. On the other hand, if I want to be entitled to look up to myself7, I can exercise my independence and set my standards high, recognizing only Grandmasters as good chess players. To be entitled to class oneself with them, be aware of oneself as exhibiting the property they give concrete determinate content to, would be an accomplishment indeed. But it is not easy to earn their recognition as a good chess player. The difference in the determinate contents of these self-conceptions, and of the chances of realizing them and becoming in oneself what one is for oneself, illustrates one dimension along which are arrayed different constellations of self-consciousness that is determinately independent as recognizing, and determinately dependent as recognized.

7. On this account, then, I can constitute myself as self-conscious, but I need help. My understanding of my own identity is tied up with my understanding of the identity of others, whom I recognize, and it is tied up with their understanding of my identity, their recognition of me. Each recognized and recognizing self-consciousness has an identity that depends on its relation to others. The individual self-consciousness both distinguishes itself from those it recognizes, as other self-consciousnesses, and identifies itself with them, in recognizing them as other self-consciousnesses it is recognizing them as what it itself is. The certainty or being-for-self of individual self-consciousness, its recognizing, achieves its objective truth in its being-for-others, in its being recognized. The individual who is recognized is thereby concretely classified under the universal to the constitution of which that individual contributes by recognizing. The individual would not be the individual it is if it did not fall under that universal (if the self-consciousness did not belong to that community, was not bound by its norms, was not entitled to deploy its concepts). But the universal would equally not be what it is if it did not stand in judgement over this individual; that depends on the recognizing activity of the individual. The identity of each self-consciousness depends on and consists in its relations to a diversity of other self-consciousnesses. The identity of the recognitive community depends on and consists in its relations to each of the diverse recognized and recognizing self-consciousnesses. The individual and universal aspects of recognitively constituted Spirit are both identities forged out of each others differences.

8. These are the sorts of things Hegel says about a community of individual self-consciousnesses in which the roles corresponding to each are constituted by mutual recognition. I hope by now we can see what he is saying by doing so. This conception of the social structure of Spirit is what Hegel will use to understand practically everything.

7 A contortion Hegel insists we are capable of, thereby inspiring Nietzsche to a view according to which we must aspire to the even more difficult feat of simultaneously looking up to ourselves and down on ourselves. See the brief discussion of Nietzsche below.

It functions in two related ways: as providing a conceptual model by which to understand all sorts of identity in difference and applications of the general to the individual case (in the practical contexts to be discussed under the heading of Reason as well as the cognitive contexts already discussed under the heading of Consciousness), and as providing a concrete matrix within which the determinately contentful norm-governed activities that when made explicit take the form of applying general rules to particular cases take place. Now that we have a preliminary grip on the recognitive structure that distinguishes spiritual individuals from the merely natural particulars, it should be possible to begin to make sense of appeals to it as the fixed end of a comparison making explicit for us what is implicit in phenomenal consciousness' conceptions of, for instance, the play of forces or the way in which the determinate identity of the object of perception consists in the being-for-others (other properties and therefore also other objects) of its diverse determinate properties. In the remainder of the work this project is pursued, in parallel with the exposition of the function of Spirit as the medium in which perception and action, no less than self-consciousness, alone are possible. The first part of the section on Self Consciousness provides an account both of how we can understand concrete Spirit as arising out of Nature, and an analysis of why, given its roots in the natural, self-consciousness must be understood as taking the social form of mutual recognition.

II. Desire and the Erotic Theory of Consciousness

9. In paragraphs [169] to [172] Hegel expounds the concept of Life. Although a detailed treatment will not be attempted here, it may be worth assembling a couple of reminders. First, we are eventually to see the concept of life as involving implicitly the sort of identity through difference that becomes explicit for us in the concept of social self-consciousness constituted by mutual recognition. The following passage is representative:

Thus the simple substance of Life is the splitting-up of itself into shapes and at the same time the dissolution of these existent differences; and the dissolution of the splitting-up is just as much a splitting-up and a forming of members...The fluid element is itself only the abstraction of essence, or it is actual only as shape; and its articulation [sich gliedert] of itself is again a splitting-up of what was articulated into form or a dissolution of it. It is the whole round of this activity that constitutes Life...Life consists...in being the self-developing whole which dissolves its development and in this movement simply preserves itself. [171]

A species exists only in its members. This is its "splitting itself up into shapes". The "dissolution of the splitting up" is the fact that it is of the essence of the species that it survives the death of each of the members into which it is split up. The preservation of the species is the coming to be and the passing away of its individuals. Thus the species has the identity it does because of its relation to its diverse individual instances, and each of those instances has the identity it does because of its relation to the rest of the species, from which it has arisen and into which it will pass as its posterity. This process is the

life of the species and of the individuals. Again, life as a whole is split up into individual species, and is nothing apart from the collection of these, though it preserves itself across those differences. But the species survive by consuming one another, and so are what they are by their differences from one another. As differences between individuals are essential to the process of reproducing the species by mating, so differences between species are essential to reproducing life via the food chain.

In mating we are to find an implicit and immediate form of what, when it is unfolded explicitly, becomes mutual recognition. The social substance that is constituted by recognition in this sense is the species, and the animals that produce and are produced by this process are more than mere particulars, they are biological individuals. The second point to notice is that Hegel is committed to telling a basically naturalistic story about the relation between the genuine recognition that institutes both individual self-consciousnesses and social substance, on the one hand, and the process of life that comprise both individual organisms and biological species, on the other. In particular, he wants to make it intelligible how the one could arise out of and be a development of the other. We are to see how Spirit is rooted in Nature in the form of Life.

10. Hobbes said "To be without Desire is to be Dead."8 Desire is the feature of life that gives rise to consciousness and self-consciousness. Hegel says "Self-consciousness is Desire [Begierde]," [174]. Although desire is here and elsewhere is explicitly identified connected to self-consciousness rather than consciousness9, for reasons that will become clear I think we ought to understand this choice of terminology primarily as reflecting the official topic of the exposition of this section rather than a restriction in the doctrine. The erotic theory of self-consciousness in fact presupposes an erotic theory of consciousness.

The idea is that things are something for desiring beings--they can take something as something. Each biologically based desire involves a response to the presence of an object of the desired kind. The hungry animal treats something as food by "falling to without further ado and eating it up," [109]. In this way it classifies the particulars it encounters as being of one of two kinds, food/nonfood, by how it treats them in practice in its desiring activity. We learned from the exposition of the experience of phenomenal consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty that consciousness requires a universal or repeatable element. The basic form of awareness is awareness of something particular as something universal. Only particulars can satisfy a biological desire, but a whole class of particulars is equally eligible. The respect of similarity (a universal) shared by a class of particulars is thus a possible response on the part of the desiring organism. The desire disposing the animal to respond differentially to presented objects (e.g. eating some and not others) partitions the world into two equivalence classes of objects, depending on their role as stimuli eliciting or not eliciting the felt satisfaction of that particular desire. Universality, we saw in the discussion of Perception, is a form of mediation. 8 Leviathan, Ch.8.9 He is not completely consistent in this usage, sometimes falling back into talking just about consciousnesses instead of self-consciousnesses (for instance in the critical paragraph [175]). He is entitled to do this because any individual self-consciousness just is a particular consciousness--one, namely, that recognizes and is recognized by others.

11. At this point one might ask why desire (and so life) needs to be invoked here. For it seems that all sorts of things could play the role assigned here to desire, of inducing classifications. A chunk of iron rusts in some environments and not in others, and thereby classifies particulars as falling under two different repeatables. Any repeatable response will partition the universe of particular stimuli into two equivalence classes, those that elicit a response of that kind and those that do not. What is special about desire?

Hegel's answer is that desire is a kind of negation. A number of different features of desire are invoked under this heading. First, desire is active, restless, an impetus toward abolishing itself. It is a striving10 to cancel itself through satisfaction. What a desire is implicitly is expressed in a disposition to transform the desiring state into a different state, its satisfaction, and it is in this sense a negative state or it "contains negation within it". Notice also that if desire is in this sense a negative state, then satisfaction of a desire is negating the negation, a formula that is central to Hegel's logical characterization of consciousness (for instance in the Preface).

12. Thus desire introduces not only a universal element (because a given desire can be satisfied by anything of a certain kind), but an ideal element. Desire enforces a felt contrast between the present actual state and the ideal future state it is promoting. Desire is both the origin of the ideal element in consciousness, and the cause of its realization. Because of this active, motivating side of desire, things can be something for desiring beings in the sense that a particular can appear as an instance of universal to them. Things can appear as something, say food, to desiring animals in that they are subjects of experience, as that term is used in the Introduction. What a hungry animal takes to be food, by practically treating it as food, "falling to without further ado and eating it up," may reveal itself not to have been what it appeared to be, not to have been in itself what it was for the animal, if it proves to be offensive-tasting and inedible.

Self-consciousness which is simply for itself and directly characterizes its object as a negative element, or is primarily desire, will therefore, on the contrary, learn through experience that the object is independent. [168]

The distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for the desiring animal is thus something that the desiring animal itself experiences in its practical activity. What the desiring animal takes things to be, its certainty regarding them, for instance that there is food in front of it, may not find its truth in satisfaction. A chunk of iron responds differentially to its environment, and things happen to it, but it has nothing corresponding to this experience, with its historical determinate negations of takings that reveal themselves as mistakings.

13. Besides being a dynamically self-negating state, desire has a "negative relation to the 10 Pointing out the apparent unavoidability of using patently inappropriately voluntaristic language ('striving', 'trying', 'aiming') in talking about the dynamic aspect of desire on which all deliberate or explicitly purposive action is based is simply another way of getting to the point Hegel is trying to make in talking about Life as being implicitly what Spirit is explicitly.

object" of desire [175]. As desire self-consciousness "characterizes its object as a negative element," [168]. The object of desire is felt as a determinate lack. Desiring being feels itself incomplete in the sense that it is motivated to develop into its fully satisfied self, what it feels itself to be ideally, apart from this actual lack. The object of desire is present to the desirer precisely as absent, as something that is not there, something it does not have. Further, because desire involves a tendency to abolish itself, it involves equally a tendency to abolish the object of desire, qua object of desire. This may involve destroying the particular that satisfies the desire ("eating it up"), but it need not. For once the desire is satisfied that particular is no longer an object of the desire, even if it is otherwise unchanged.

14. I have been talking as though desire can only constitute a two-sorted world (e.g. food/non-food ). Such a situation would be quite exceptional, though conceivable--"Hume imagined a variant of Plato's simple sea creature [from the Philebus], a consciousness 'reduc'd even below the life of an oyster' whose appetitive life was one monotonous hunger-cum-thirst--a one desire consciousness..."11

The general case is quite different. For any animal has many desires. Depending on mood, the world may be divided also into possible sexual partners and the rest, or into level places in full sunlight and the rest, or things it would be fun to chase and the rest. A complicated preconceptually articulated world can thus be generated by a comparable set of desires.

The satisfaction responses corresponding to some of the desires will be incompatible with one another. As a practical matter, the animal cannot both sleep in the sun and chase a rabbit. The universals induced by desires which cannot be simultaneously satisfied will accordingly be incompatible with one another. So incompatibility relations on universals are induced by incompatibilities of practical performance. As we have seen, incompatibility relations among predicates in turn induce inferential relations among them, so that the application of one can entail the application of another. The desiring animal's world will thus already be articulated by determinate negation (incompatibility) and mediation (inference). Awareness or consciousness is classificatory, for Hegel as for others. To be aware of something one must be aware of it as something, as falling into some class or other. There is no bare or immediate awareness. The desiring animal first is capable of becoming aware of something as, e.g., food, as the kind of thing which would (or would not) satisfy an occurrent desire. As we shall see, this classificatory demand is one crucial constraint on the possibility of self-consciousness. One cannot be aware of oneself simply as oneself (this particular), for some universal notion of consciousness which one can then be aware of oneself as falling under is required.

15. The consciousness as awareness that arises with desire must be distinguished from the particular shapes discussed under the headings of Sense Certainty, 'Perception, and Understanding, which are very sophisticated developments of the primitive animal variety. For that exposition begins with consciousness that is already fully linguistically

11 Quoted from A. Baier, in "What Emotions Are About," pp. 1-29 in Philosophical Perspectives 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind 1990, Ridgeview Press, p. 5. The Plato reference is to Philebus 21 D; the Hume reference is to p. 634 of the Treatise.

articulated and sophisticated. We start there with attempts to understand empirical knowledge theoretically, attempts that are undertaken by consciousnesses that already have control of a great deal of conceptual apparatus. Thus we start with phenomenal consciousness understanding the authority of its empirical knowledge according to a model of sense certainty that is a determinate model only by contrasting the sort of mere indication it takes to be expressed by using indexicals with inferential articulation of a sort that is explicitly to be excluded. It must have mastered the use of these sorts of mediation to have the model it does of immediacy. In any case, the issue of how to understand the authority of sense is a sophisticated, late-coming one--hardly the sort of issue that arises for the beasts of the field.

16. The naturalistic starting-point Hegel has found in the erotic theory of the origins of consciousness will permit him to avoid erecting a divide of the Kantian kind between the theoretical and the practical exercise of thought. Cognitive activity is to be understood in the first instance in terms of implicitly purposive activity. Hegel is here bringing down out of the clouds the insight Fichte had gathered from Kant, that theoretical reason finds its proper place as a province of practical reason. By beginning an account of what eventually develops into discursive, rational consciousness with primitive concepts of Life and Desire, Hegel also lays the foundation for overcoming some of the Romantic oppositions of heart and head, organic desire conceived as feeling versus reason conceived as mechanical calculation. Hegel's use of the biological shows us a robust practical conception of desire, which he thinks the Romantics have subjectivized in a bad Cartesian way in rendering it as feeling, sensation, frisson. It is because of this error that they placed such mistaken emphasis on intensity and diversity of feelings for their own sake. For Hegel, by contrast, what matters is that desire's introduction of an ideal element into actuality makes possible a specials sort of development in the expressive powers of such things as variations of feeling. (Compare being interested in the amplitude and frequency of a signal only insofar as modulations of them can convey complex messages.)

III. From Erotic Consciousness to Erotic Self-Consciousness

17. Desire, then, makes possible a certain sort of primitive consciousness, awareness of something particular as being or not being of a certain desired kind. The desiring subject is conscious of particulars as (being or not being) objects of desire. This is consciousness by the desiring subject of something else. The subject is not itself the object of consciousness. In particular, merely by desiring the subject is not aware of itself as conscious, that is, as desiring.12 One of the lessons that we learned from the Consciousness section of the exposition is the incoherence of the idea of a form of consciousness that is immediate in the sense of not involving the application of repeatables. The form of the primitive consciousness that is all we understand at this stage in the Self-Consciousness section is of something particular as something universal. These constraints apply to the special form of consciousness that is self-consciousness as well. There is no form of self-consciousness that is immediate in the sense of involving

12 The perhaps not wholly irrelevant claim "I need therefore I am," is as yet only implicitly the principle of desiring consciousness, which is accordingly not yet self-conscious.

no application of universals--just taking oneself as oneself. The same problems and presuppositions arise for an attempt to remain within the confines of the immediacy of 'I'='I' as were rehearsed for 'This'='This' in the discussion of Sense Certainty. Self-consciousness accordingly must take the form of taking a particular, oneself, as instantiating a universal, consciousness, that is, classifying oneself as conscious.

This other Life, however, for which the genus as such exists and which is for itself its own genus13 viz. self-consciousness, exists in the first instance for self-consciousness only as this simple essence, and has itself as pure 'I' for object. In the course of its experience which we are now to consider, this abstract object will enrich itself for the 'I' and undergo the unfolding which we have seen in the sphere of life. [173]

The "pure 'I'", the "genus as such", the "simple essence", is the concept of consciousness in general. Self-consciousness is consciousness that grasps (some version of) that concept ("for which the genus as such exists") and applies it to itself ("has itself as pure 'I' as object"). The question is how this particular universal arises in practice. This unfolding of the concept of consciousness, enriching the pure 'I', under which it classifies itself (and which accordingly is then a concept of self-consciousness) reveals the fundamentally social character of self-consciousness. This latter doctrine is one of the primary reasons to be interested in Hegel, so the argument by which it is introduced is of particular importance, and is worth looking at in some detail.

18. That argument presents a puzzling face. The concept of consciousness that a desiring consciousness must grasp and apply to its own case is the concept of desiring in general. Consciousness is to be aware of itself as desiring, or as an instance of desiring being. The first move Hegel presents us with in thinking about what self-consciousness of this sort involves is couched as an exposition of the process by which "Self-consciousness... which is primarily desire,...learns through experience that the object is independent,"[168]. The initial issue is to be what sorts of independence and dependence are exhibited by the desiring subject and desired object.

...self-consciousness is Desire. Certain of the nothingness of this other, it explicitly affirms that this nothingness is for it the truth of the other; it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty, a certainty which has become explicit for self-consciousness itself in an objective manner. [174]

There is in consciousness as desire a moment of independence, in canceling the independence of objects of desire and making them into what one takes them to be--the rabbit is food because I eat it. As object of desire, it is dependent on the desirer. Classification has a moment of constitution. Furthermore, the certainty of such classification can be show itself to be truth by the satisfaction of the original desire. The importance of Desire is that something can be something for it (e.g. a possible source of satisfaction, or not). It is therefore possible for us (and indirectly for desiring being) to compare and contrast the object as it is in itself to the object as it is for this sort of

13 I've altered Miller here; Hegel has: "Dies andere Leben aber, für welches die Gattung als solche und welches für sich selbst Gattung ist."

consciousness. What the object is for consciousness is a negativity in the dual sense we have already considered. The object of desire is negative for consciousness in that it is experienced as a lack or absence. The object of desire is negative for consciousness in that it is experienced as a means for the transformation of the desiring state into the ideal or desired state, and is to be destroyed, abolished, or used up as object of desire in fulfilling that instrumental function. Considered in itself, however, the object is not negative in either of these senses. It is only as object of desire, that is, as it is for desiring consciousness that the object is a lack with respect to that consciousness. Qua object of Desire, the object exists only in relation to that desire, and hence is dependent upon it. In itself it is what it is and would be that whether or not there were desiring animals in its vicinity. The negativity of the object in the sense of its being a lack is due entirely to its relation to Desire, and is nothing apart from that relation.

On the other hand, the object shows that in itself it is not a pure means subordinate to the satisfaction of Desire in the resistance it offers to that satisfaction. The object shows its independence and that its existence in itself transcends its existence for Desire by its recalcitrance, the fact that it must be found or caught or persuaded to cooperate in the abolition of a determinate Desire. The very existence of Desire not-yet-abolished in its satisfaction shows the stubborn independence of the object of Desire from the Desire it is the object of, and so that what it is in itself transcends what it is for Desire. This transcendence manifests itself not only for us, but for the desiring animal who experiences the stubbornness and lack of cooperation of the world in the form of the prolongation of unsatisfied Desire. The certainty of Desire is thus not yet the truth of its object. The stubbornness of the object with respect to Desire (which is a necessary aspect of its appearance as absent though desired) shows that there is more to the object than desiring being is aware of in desiring it.

19. So desire involves equally a moment of dependence on the object. As the philosopher said, "You can't always get what you want." [175] points out:

i) In this satisfaction, however, experience makes it aware that the object has its own independence. Desire and the certainty obtained in its gratification, are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from superseding this other; in order that this supersession can take place, there must be this other.

The passage continues:

ii) Thus self-consciousness, by its negative relation to the object, is unable to supersede it; it is really because of that relation that it produces the object again, and the desire as well. It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence of Desire; and through this experience self-consciousness has itself realized this truth...

Desire itself is the certainty of desire, but the desired object is its truth, and that truth retains a moment of recalcitrance or independence. Dependence on objects of desire in general cannot be overcome as dependence on particular ones sometimes can.

iii) On account of the independence of the object, therefore, it can achieve satisfaction only when the object itself effects the negation within itself; and it must carry out this negation of itself in itself, for it is in itself the negative, and must be for the other what it is.

iv) Since the object is in its own self negation, and in being so is at the same time independent, it is consciousness. In the sphere of Life, which is the object of Desire, negation is present either in an other, viz in Desire, or...as absolute negation,...the genus as such, or the genus as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness. [175].

The decisive moves in the conjuring trick are the ones recounted in (iii) and (iv). Why does the independence of the object mean that self-consciousness can acquire satisfaction (=df. achieving truth with its certainty, as in satisfying a desire by getting its object) only by desiring an object with negation in it, another consciousness or self-consciousness, as in (iii)? And why does desiring such a negative object require finding it in another desired consciousness?

20. These questions are put starkly in the following paragraph:

The notion of self-consciousness is only completed in these three moments:

(a) the pure undifferentiated 'I' is its first immediate object.

(b) But this immediacy is itself an absolute mediation, it is only as the supersession of the independent object, in other words, it is Desire...

(c) But the truth of this certainty is really a double reflection, the duplication of self-consciousness...

The object of self-consciousness, however, is equally independent in this negativity of itself; and thus it is for itself a genus, a universal fluid element in the peculiarity of its own separate being; it is a living self-consciousness. [176]

(a) is the idea of the simple genus of consciousness, which consciousness must grasp in order to be able to classify itself under, and so to be aware of itself as conscious, which is what self-consciousness is all about.

(b) is pointing out that that genus is Desiring being in general. This is mediated and negative in the sense in which Desire is mediated and negative. It is mediated in essentially involving a relation. It is negative in being a felt lack, an active motive force leading to the annihilation of the desired being qua desired (satisfaction), and hence aiming at cancelling also itself. This is what is being said in passage (iii) above in [175]: the universal that consciousness must grasp in order to become conscious of itself as conscious is desire in general. The question that remains is then how to fill in the steps that lead from (iii) to (iv), or equivalently from (a) and (b) to (c), the duplication of self-

consciousness. How is the social element in self-consciousness supposed to emerge in this exposition?

IV. The Paradox of Desire

21. These steps can be supplied, if we fill in and develop the underlying idea of desiring consciousness becoming self-conscious, that is, conscious of itself as falling into the class of desiring things in general. To rehearse a bit: Desire is cancelled with its satisfaction. When Desire is satisfied, the thing no longer exists qua object of Desire, and the animal no longer exists qua desirer. Desire is a negation (of object as lacked, and of self as lacking or contrasted with a potential or merely ideal projected state of organism). Thus satisfaction of Desire is the negation of such negation. Consciousness, which is negation in the same dual sense, is thereby abolished as well. For consciousness exists only as long as a subjective and an objective pole (corresponding to certainty and truth) are distinguished (though still related). With the satisfaction of Desire the distinction between desiring and desired state in which this subject-object split originates disappears, and consciousness with it. Again, it is only in virtue of the felt lack that external objects can be sorted accordingly as they would or would not repair that lack, and hence that their practical classification under universals permitting them to appear as something is possible. Thus consciousness, born out of the differentiation of self felt to be incomplete and ideal projected complete self ceases with the satisfaction of Desire. So animal consciousness is a sometime thing, flickering and intermittent. Indeed, animal consciousness as desire is negation in the further sense of negating itself. For Desire is in principle a self-destructive state, destructive of the state of desire. It is essential to the nature of Desire that it provide the motive for its own supercession. An animal with only one sort of Desire would be conscious only when driven by that desire. The success of the desire in achieving satisfaction eliminates the desire and its concomitant awareness. Even with a variety of desires, so that one of them is always active and consciousness is never entirely abolished, still animal awareness will shift kaleidoscopically, as different active desires animate different principles of classification. Thus the animal will be aware only of food at one time, only of sun at another. Consciousness is a by-product or epiphenomenon of desire-driven activity.

22. The satisfaction of desire is a determinate negation of desire, however. The satisfied organism is left in a particular determinate state which in general is not simply a return to the state occupied before the onset of Desire, a state of abstract un-Desire. For Desire is satisfied by some particular object, not by a universal itself. As a particular, the satisfying object falls under many universals, has many properties, besides that in virtue of which it satisfies the desire in question. These other properties are constituted by their relation to other possible desires of the organism, and as such come in incompatibility classes and hence are determinate. So the determinate negation by satisfaction of the determinate negation which is a particular desire is more like a spiral than a circle. If the animal's hunger is satisfied by some fruit rather than by the grain which would equally have abolished the hunger, it may not become thirsty as rapidly as if some other particular had provided the satisfaction. On the other hand, having its hunger satisfied in that particular way may refine the beast's tastes, so that it acquires a new species of

desire, hunger-for-fruit, satisfiable by a more restricted class of particulars than previously.

23. In this cyclic rhythm of Desire and satiation something new has arisen for the animal, namely occasional states of consciousness. These are consequences and concomitants of Desire. The next stage in the development of human consciousness is taken when these states become for the first time objects of Desire instead of merely effects of it. Consciousness at this stage consists in the active differentiation of subject and object in the form of the distinction between actual desiring state and the object lacking to transform that state into the ideal completed or satisfied state. In making that distinction, the animal becomes aware of the objects of desire, which accordingly are the objects of consciousness. But this is to be aware of only one side of the subject-object double, namely the side of the object. To be aware of the other, subjective, side, one must make consciousness (or, what is here the same thing, Desire) the object of one's desire. So self-consciousness, consciousness of consciousness, requires Desire for Desire ["At the height of pleasure I long for desire."]. The new state of consciousness which arises in Desire must itself become desirable. Self-reflection originates in Desire's directing of itself on itself. Desire must now be for desiring, and not just for the object desired.

24. But a paradox arises concerning this requirement. For Desire exists only as long as it remains unsatisfied, that is lacks the desired object needed to satisfy it. If what is desired is Desire then:

a) If the Desire (for Desire) is not satisfied, then it remains Desire. But this is what was desired, the object of Desire. Hence in this case the object of Desire has been achieved, and the Desire for Desire is satisfied. So if that Desire is not satisfied, then it is satisfied.

b) If the Desire is satisfied, then Desire is abolished in satisfaction. But then the object of the Desire is not present but absent, for it is exactly the cancelled Desire which is that object. So if the Desire for Desire is satisfied, then it is not satisfied. This is the Paradox of Desire. Desire itself is one thing that cannot be the object of Desire. Since the possibility of Desire for Desire is presupposed by that of Consciousness of Consciousness, in the framework of the erotic theory of consciousness, we must understand how the paradox can be resolved.

25. It might seem that the paradox here is merely apparent, due to the failure to specify the objects of the desires in question. But suppose that what is desired is that something or other be desired, that is that we have a quantified desire. In Desire(1) for Desire(2), the object of Desire(1) is that there is an x such that x is the object of Desire(2). The paradox still obtains. For if Desire(1) exists as desire, i.e. is not yet satisfied, then given the specification of its object just above this entails that there is no Desire(2) for any object at all. This is incompatible with the assumption that there is at least one desire, namely Desire(1) which has not yet achieved its object. So such a Desire(1) will be satisfied (and hence abolished) whenever it exists, and hence cannot exist as a desire. One might of course have a desire whose object is an unquantified desire, as one might desire to desire a sloop. Hegel is ultimately concerned with consciousness of oneself as

conscious in general, so this case is of little interest to him. But there is nothing paradoxical about a desire for a particular desire in this sense. On the other hand, Hegel may well believe that at the animal stage here considered, a desire for a desire for x just is a desire for x. For the complicated circumstances which permit us to keep such iteration of desire from collapsing may not apply to merely animal desires.

26. The paradox of desire, I am claiming, is what warrants the step from conceiving of self-consciousness as desire for desiring in general to the conclusion that one can only become conscious of oneself as one of us, as one of a kind among which others, whom I recognize, are as well. The form that Hegel's resolution of the paradox takes is to mediate consciousness of oneself as subject with consciousness of another as subject. Desire can be the object of Desire, as long as the subjects of the two Desires are different. It is by coming to be aware of other subjects of Desire and awareness as such subjects, that one will acquire the universal notion of conscious subjectivity. That universal can then be applied to oneself, and classifying oneself as particular under that universal will be awareness of oneself as subject. Without the detour through other subjects conceived of as subjects, self-consciousness can be pursued only in the form of the futile attempt to classify oneself as oneself, to be aware of a particular only as that particular, which is forbidden by the classificatory nature of consciousness.

27. The paradox of desire plays a role in some ways analogous, in the practical sphere, to that played by the paradox of the liar, in the theoretical sphere. For it exhibits a kind of paradoxical self-reference with respect to the satisfaction of desire, as the liar paradox does with respect to the truth of belief. Instead of a belief that is true just in case it is not true, and not true just in case it is true, we have a desire that is satisfied just in case it is not satisfied, and is not satisfied just in case it is satisfied. There is an important respect, however, in which the concept of desire for desire is not as paradoxical as that of the claim that says of itself that it is not true, at least on some understandings of the latter. Thought of this way, the paradox of desire belongs in a box rather with the paradox of the barber in the small Spanish town who shaves all those who do not shave themselves. The right thing to say about this case is that when one examines the description of the barber carefully, one sees that there can be no such barber. In the same way, when one unpacks the concept of desire for desire in general, one sees that there can be no single consciousness that is directly characterized by such a state. It is not clear that the claim made by the self-described liar can be dismissed along these lines.14 The weaker conclusion is still strong enough for the conclusion Hegel needs from it, however. For what the concept that the paradox seems to forbid the applicability of, by analogy to "barber who shaves all those who do not shave themselves", namely that of desire for desiring in general, has been shown to be what must be true of a consciousness for it to become self-conscious, according to the erotic theory of consciousness. So the paradox genuinely threatens to make it impossible to develop a theory of self-consciousness starting with the conceptual raw materials provided by the model of consciousness as desire. It is this difficulty that is then overcome by the move to a social conception, within which alone the erotic model of consciousness provides a conception of self-consciousness that is not paradoxical.

14 This point is due to Irad Kimhi.

28. This move can be likened to that recounted in the exposition of the experience of perceiving consciousness, where the fact that the determinateness of each property consists in its determinate incompatibilities with other properties. This seemed paradoxical, for, as incompatible with it, these other properties are precisely excluded from the property whose identity their differences with it nonetheless somehow constituted. The resolution there, as here, was to distinguish different centers in which the incompatible but mutually defining properties could inhere. There is nothing paradoxical about incompatible properties characterizing distinct objects. Indeed, the identity of the objects that come to be discriminated according to this realization then can be seen to derive precisely from its distinctions from objects characterized by incompatible properties. Analogously, distinct self-consciousnesses are defined by the way in which the satisfaction of the one's desires excludes or is incompatible with the satisfaction of the other's. The dialectic of Mastery rehearses the significance attributed to such incompatibility by self-consciousness that misunderstands itself according to categories of independence.

V. The Ideal of Mutual Recognition

29. In this way it is possible to see how desiring consciousness can come to be able to classify things as desiring, and why the possibility of applying that universal to particulars other than itself is essential to its capacity to deploy the universal at all. Classifying something as desiring, that is as conscious, is taking that particular to be a taker, something for which things are something. This is the origin out of which the full-blown concept of recognition grows. That concept is rooted in awareness of another as aware, which translates into desire for another as desiring. (This is how Hegel understands love, which in the spiritual community constituted by mutual recognition is expressed as trust). Recognizing others is taking them to be takers. It is a practical attitude in which what someone is for some (recognizing) consciousness is a (recognized) consciousness that things are something for. The paradox of desire, it has been claimed, shows that recognition must in principle be a social affair. This does not yet show how self-consciousness, that is self-recognition, is possible however. The paradox shows that self-recognition cannot be immediate. One's capacity to recognize oneself (take oneself as a taker, and so be for oneself what one is in oneself) must be mediated by one's capacity to recognize others. But mediated how, exactly? Mediation by recognition of others has been shown to be a necessary condition of self-recognition. But what sort of mediation is sufficient? Why doesn't the paradox of desire still block the application of the concept of desiring being in general to the desirer's own case?

30. Hegel's answer is his symmetrically social story of the constitution of individual self-consciousnesses and universal spiritual substance by mutual recognition. It is the principle that fully explicit self-recognition is that in which the certainty that is my recognition of myself achieves its truth in my being recognized by those I recognize. The way this works is that I come to be able to classify myself under the universal of recognizers-of-me, which is a universal that I also classify others under. Grasping and attributing this universal depends on being able to grasp and attribute that of being a

recognizer in general, but the two universals are not identical. Structurally, Hegel's picture is like this. Reflexive recognition, cannot be achieved immediately. How can recognition of others mediate my recognition of myself? I cannot desire my own desiring, but can desire the desiring of another. This seems to preclude exactly the case in which I apply that concept to myself. How does my being able to apply it to others help resolve the paradox involved in my applying it to myself? The answer is to make recognition both transitive and symmetric, from which it will follow that it is reflexive. This is why the social form of self-consciousness as self-recognition is an equivalence relation. Transitivity means recognizing those recognized by those one recognizes.15 Symmetry is what Hegel calls mutual [gegenseitig] recognition. The idea is that one's self-recognition (reflexive recognition) is mediated by another in case it is achieved by being recognized by someone one recognizes (symmetric or mutual recognition), in the context of a general commitment to recognize those recognized by those one recognizes (transitivity of recognition).

31. The structural point about recognition will eventually be seen to concern not just takings, but the authority of takings. My certainty consists in my takings having a certain sort of authority for me. To become for myself what I am in myself, to make explicit to myself what I am implicitly, I must be able to classify myself as a taker whose takings have that sort of authority. To do so, we have seen, requires taking others to be takers whose takings have that same sort of authority. But this is to say that the task of self-consciousness is to become entitled to classify itself as belonging to a group of takers, whose takings have the same sort of authority that mine do. Recognizing them is recognizing their authority.16 This means that recognition can be transitive. Where recognition is transitive, when A recognizes B and B recognizes C, A recognizes C. In such a context, for A to be entitled to recognize itself it is sufficient for A to secure the recognition of someone A recognizes. Transitivity of recognition makes the achievement of symmetric or mutual recognition sufficient for reflexive recognition or self-consciousness. The transitivity of recognition is the concrete form taken by the identification of each self-consciousness with those it recognizes. Recognizing those recognized by those one recognizes is classifying oneself as one of them. Exactly what one has attributed to oneself in this way, the determinate content of the commitment undertaken in recognizing someone in a sense that involves commitment to recognizing those whom they recognize, need not at all be apparent. Attributing the certainty of self-recognition to someone is attributing a commitment to recognize those recognized by those that individual recognizes. The truth attaching to such an attributed certainty then consists in the extent to which those recognized in fact (symmetrically) reciprocate the recognition. The determinate extent to which they do, the actual content of their

15 One conception of recognition that is explicitly committed to its transitivity is, as will be seen, the conception of Mastery, which understands its own independence as a matter of being a constitutive taker--one whose taking it so is making it so, as the desirer is independent in making something an object of desire by taking it to be such. Thus I am committed to taking as a constitutive taker anyone taken to be such by anyone I take to be a constitutive taker. The commitment to transitivity is one bit of truth revealing itself even in this disastrously defective conception of recognition.16 Which is not to say that that authority cannot be overridden--that anyone (myself included) is such that their takings cannot show themselves to mistakings. But that possibility is not to the fore here.

reciprocated recognitions17 determines the truth of their self-consciousness, the implicit in-itself that is to become explicit for-itself in self-consciousness. It follows that what each of us actually does and is depends, on this view, on what others actually do and are. The claim is that recognizing oneself in the sense that one recognizes others implicitly involves a commitment to recognize those whom they recognize, and so to be entitled to one's self-recognition only in the case where they reciprocate the recognition. It is this de jure transitivity of recognition that, when joined with a de facto achievement of symmetry of recognition, results in the reflexivity of recognition that is self-consciousness. This is the answer to the question of how the demand for mutual recognition arises.

32. Hegel's view is that everyone (at least everyone we know, each of us) is the individual self each of us is by being recognized by those we recognize. Phenomenal (self-)consciousness does not always realize this about itself, of course. As this truth about what we always already implicitly are gradually becomes explicit to us in its various aspects, what we are for ourselves and so what we are in ourselves changes in an expressively progressive way, and we ascend the ladder of Spirit into the daylight of the completely explicit, where these coincide in what Hegel calls Absolute Knowledge, the end of history.18 Before that point, we look back over various misunderstandings and inadequate explicitations of the structure that is implicit in all self-consciousness. What sort of recognitive commitments a particular shape of phenomenal self-consciousness is undertaking from our phenomenological point of view need not at all coincide with the commitments that shape of phenomenal self-consciousness takes itself to be undertaking. We are offered a striking example of this sort of deception in the treatment of self-consciousness understanding itself on the model of independence, that is, the shape of Mastery or domination. We see there how the fact that Spirit always implicitly is a recognitive equivalence class of self-consciousnesses--that is, one bound together by recognition relations that are symmetric, transitive, and reflexive19--appears as an ideal that expresses itself from our phenomenological perspective in metaphysical irony, the way in which domination as a strategy of self-consciousness is doomed to achieve just the opposite of what it aims at.

17 In the eventual conceptually articulated development of recognition, this content consists in the specific takings--thought of as undertakings or commitments attributed to an individual. This is the determinately contentful certainty that they attribute in taking someone to be a taker, an undertaker of commitments, that is, to be normatively bindable and bound. This sort of development is discussed in the "Reason" section.18 I take this not to mean that we won't stub our toes or eat vile things anymore. Experience of the immediate will go on, and so the evolution of our concepts. But our practical understanding of it will have so altered in terms of its fundamental categories that we will be, for and in ourselves, quite different sorts of beings than we have hitherto been. Our development will not then take the form of history--an expressively progressive process of self-explicitation we discern retrospectively within the seething mass of immediate experience. For that is precisely what we will have undestood ourselves well enought to have gotten beyond. Just what form it might take we are not in a position to say. To understand it would require actually passing over into Absolute Knowledge, as the Phenomenology aspires to prepare us to do.19 This point can be put by saying that according to Hegel's theory, the structure of genuine communities is S5. For the modal logic induced semantically by a relational accessibility structure that is symmetric, reflexive, and transitive, that is, in which accessibility is an equivalence relation, is S5. And as its accessibility semantics shows, modal logic makes explicit the structure of discourse of a certain general sort about a relational structure as it appears from one of its nodes. This is how things are for individual self-consciousnesses in a recognitively structured social substance, according to Hegel.

33. In line with some previous remarks, it may be pointed out for future reference that the relation of individual self-consciousnesses to the social substance constituted (along with themselves) by their mutual recognition serves in the rest of the book not only as the matrix within which everything else that happens in the book must be understood--action, as discussed in the section on Reason (cf. "Reason is purposive action,"), for instance, always being the action of such individuals in such a community--but also the model according to which we are to understand various things. Thus, although we are not yet in a position to appreciate the details of the story, the relation of particulars to the universals that characterize them is to be understood according to the model of determinately mutually dependent because mutually constituting individuals and communities. Again, the relation between rules or norms embodied in practice, on the one hand, and the particular concrete cases that fall under them or to which they apply is to be conceived according to this same model. (The story we are still missing is the one that will elaborate the path that takes us from the recognitive communities as a matrix in which rules etc. are applied to the appropriateness of using their structure as a model. For that we need the elaboration of particular respects of recognition, that is, attribution of particular commitments and other normative statuses, which we will hear about under the heading of Reason.) A community is open to more members than it actually contains, so there will be something in the model that corresponds to the distinction between the extension of a universal (what actually falls under it) and its comprehension (what things would fall under it under other circumstances). But notice that according to this model, not only does what individual something is depend on what universals it falls under, but also what universal something is depends on what individuals actually fall under it (indeed, when the model is fully elaborated, even what individuals are taken to fall under it). This two-way dependence is unusual and difficult to get a hold of--we are used to thinking of universals, at least, as independent of what in fact they are true of. When made fully explicit, such a view is, Hegel thinks, incompatible with the possession of determinate content by such universals. It is perhaps easier to see how this account will work for universals such as '...is self-conscious' than for "...is red', but it is meant to apply to both.

VI. Pride

34. Being self-conscious is being conscious of oneself as a conscious self. We have so far discussed what is required, according to the theory of consciousness as desire, for a desiring consciousness to be able to deploy the universal that is required for self-consciousness. We have not talked about what it is for a desirer to apply the concept of desiring in general, not just to other particulars, but to itself. What is required for a desiring animal to count as taking or treating itself as a desiring animal in the sense required for self-consciousness? There is another element to Hegel's story, which has not yet been considered. Consciousness is born of Desire, but humanity is the offspring of Pride.20 The desiring animal is merely accidentally conscious. Consciousness is a by-product or epiphenomenon of Desire. At the level of humanity, one becomes essentially conscious.

20 Hegel doesn't give us special terms for the consciousness that counts as 'staking its own life' [187], so I have supplied these.

The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. [187]

For pride, then, a new element is required. One must identify oneself with an ideal or desired state of oneself rather than with the actual desiring state. The identification with the ideal is expressed as the willingness to risk one's biological life rather than relinquish the pursuit of that self-conception. This is the attempt to become in oneself (actually or in truth) what one is for oneself (ideally, or merely certainly). We have already seen that for a universal to count as a self-conception, it must be a conception of oneself as a subject (of consciousness), as something for which things are something, or which takes things as something. Thus, consciousness must be transformed from a by-product of Desire to an object of Desire. This element is a form of Desire for Desire, specifically Desire for desiring.

35. According to this requirement, proud consciousness must take the element of ideality which Desire has introduced and identify itself with an ideal (merely thought or desired) self rather than with the actual (thinking or desiring) self. That one identifies with that ideal rather than with the actual self is shown by one's willingness to risk one's life in the pursuit of that ideal.

It is only through staking one's life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as vanishing moments, that is only pure being-for-self. [187]

Here the claim is that in taking someone to be essentially something more than merely biological (ultimately, something spiritual, someone rather than something), one takes it that there is something toward which its desire is directed that it is committed to being willing to risk its life for. An extreme example is the classical Japanese samurai code of Bushido, which required ritual suicide under a daunting variety of circumstances. To be samurai was to identify oneself with the ideal code of conduct. In a situation requiring seppuku, either the biological organism or the samurai must be destroyed. Failure to commit biological suicide in such a case would be the suicide of the samurai, who would be survived only by an animal. The animal had been a merely necessary condition of the existence of the samurai (like the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is important to us, but which we do not for that reason identify ourselves with). No doubt even good samurai must have hoped that such situations would not arise. But when and if they do, failure to act appropriately according to samurai practices shows that one never was a samurai, but only an animal who sometimes aspired to be one. One would thereby demonstrate that one was not, in oneself, what one had taken oneself to be, what one was for oneself. The decision as to whether to risk one's life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.

36. In such a case one not only finds out who one is (animal or samurai) by one's performance, but constitutes oneself as animal or samurai by it. One can turn oneself into something higher than an animal simply by valuing something more than one values one's biological existence. By such an expression of preference one becomes a new kind of thing, a thing whose biological existence is not its essence, but merely a necessary condition. Henceforth one's self-conception, what one is for oneself, becomes essential to what one actually is, what one is in oneself. The taking of oneself to be, e.g., samurai, is, like all takings, a matter of responsive dispositions. The response which defines such self-takings is the willingness to risk life. Being willing to risk life for various features of one's self-conception makes those features essential to what one really is. It is by this means that desiring animals lift themselves by ideal bootstraps to a new plane of existence where the actual is governed by the ideal. That for this very special case consciousness appears to constitute its object, that these practical self-takings are self-makings, exhibits a crucial feature of consciousness. That feature is misunderstood, however, by the first form of proud consciousness, and becomes the conception of consciousness as independent, that is as sovereign or constitutive of its objects, which we discuss below.

37. I have been talking about these practical self-takings as 'decisions' here for dramatic effect. This is misleading insofar as it suggests that what is at issue generally is something deliberately done. But nothing that is not already a spiritual being can literally deliberate and make decisions. The difference that is being invoked here must be applicable already to animals that cannot talk, and so cannot reason instrumentally. The transition in question is one that we discern, looking backwards at our antecedents. So the proper way to put the general view is that offered above: in attributing to something more-than-merely-biological existence, one is committing oneself (as attributor) to there being some aspect of the practical self-conception, some ideal or object of desire, for which the organism in question would be disposed to risking its life. For those of us who always already find ourselves as spiritual beings in a spiritual community, not just bound by but constituted by its practical norms, it may be too strong to insist even on the disposition. It may be that for us the difference pointed to by the requirement of pride consists just in that there is something for which we are committed to risk our lives under suitable circumstances. This commitment need not even be acknowledged within the community (though it sometimes is, as for instance by Mastery). For it may be something we discern, as the basis for our distinguishing this phenomenal community as spiritual, while treating a superficially similar case as merely a constellation of social animals. On such a reading, members of a community can be accorded the status of being proud quite apart from any risk-taking dispositions they may exhibit, a status that they could at worst lose upon being tested by circumstance. For the game to get going in the first place, however, I understand Hegel to be saying that we must be able to discern actual dispositions to risk life under some circumstances.

38. The claim here is not that one identifies oneself with whatever object of Desire one is prepared to risk one's life in continued pursuit of. Crazed animals may risk their lives in pursuit of the objects of all sorts of desires. A predator who overcomes accustomed fear and plunges into dangerous rapids pursuing prey it will not starve without does not

thereby identify itself with the object of the Desire which leads it to that act. To count as Pride, willingness (or commitment) to risk one's biological life must be in the service of a self-conception. The object of the Desire for which one will risk all must be one's self, the very subject of Desire. It is only risk for such an object of Desire that shows that one is not essentially a living being that only happens to exhibit consciousness-as-Desire, but essentially a conscious being who happens to require life as a merely necessary condition of existence. For the object of Desire for which one is willing to risk life to be a self-conception is for it to be a conception of a taker, one for whom things are something, a subject. One must thus take oneself to be a taker. If one is disposed to risk one's life to make that self-taking true or actual, then the taking becomes constitutive of a new kind of being. One may not become essentially or in oneself a taker simply by so taking oneself (though independent consciousness does not understand this). But one at least becomes something which essentially takes itself to be a taker. Thus what this new sort of being is for itself it part of what it is in itself. Taking something to be a taker, its being for one something that things are for, is recognizing it. The resolution of the paradox of desire for desiring requires that to satisfy this desire and constitutively take oneself to be a taker (recognize oneself) one also recognize others and be recognized by them. But this lesson can be appropriated explicitly only by a thorough understanding of the "causality of Fate" whereby each strategy employed to evade that conclusion by consciousness understanding itself as independent is doomed to be frustrated.

39. Pride thus requires practical commitment to the ideal of oneself as a taker, and Hegel's account of what such practical commitment consists in for the original 'bootstrap' cases is identifying oneself with that desired ideal state in the sense of being willing to risk life for it. One must be for oneself a taker, and willing to risk one's life to become in oneself a taker. One must be both recognizer and recognized by oneself. The Slave-to-be is anyone who won't risk her life for this self-recognition. The Master-to-be is anyone who will. For the Slave must repress desire. She pursues not her own desires and ideals, but those of her Master. The Slave's consciousness-as-Desire is not hers but her Master's. The Slave does not desire her own desiring enough to risk life for it. Things are to be for the Slave what they are for her Master, so only the Master takes himself to be a taker, and, by being willing to die for that taking, initially only the Master is one. Human history separates itself from the accidental and flickering self-feeling of merely desiring animals with the advent of Mastery as the first form of proud consciousness.21

VII. Independence

40 Independence is the concept of consciousness that initially corresponds to Pride. Proud consciousness makes itself more than merely a desiring animal simply by taking itself to be more, in its practical willingness to risk its animal existence. The attitude that

21 A note on anaphoric policy and politics: In the exposition of the dialectic of domination and submission I'll distinguish between Masters and Slaves by gender. Though the main purpose of employing this linguistic device is disambiguation of pronoun antecedents, this practice can also serve as a reminder that the metaphysically ironic structure of domination and submission that Hegel is diagnosing is not intended to be restricted in its application to ancient peoples threatening each other (individually or en masse) with swords. I trust it will not be taken as a backhanded endorsement of the Aristotelian notion that some are fit by nature to slaves.

understands consciousness as independent generalizes this achievement to all possible objects of consciousness. For phenomenal (self-)consciousness to understand itself according to the conception of independence is for it to take consciousness as constitutive of its objects. Everything is taken by this concept of consciousness to be in-itself exactly what it is for consciousness. Thus, independent consciousness is consciousness that takes itself to be constituting consciousness, consciousness that makes things so by taking them so. As is apparent already from the discussion of the independence of the object of desire, no consciousness can be in itself independent in this sense. The independence consists rather in how consciousness takes itself to be, that is, how it is for itself.

41. The independent consciousness, then, insists on the sovereignty of its takings. Descartes formulated and developed an old tradition that finds the boundaries of the self by tracing the extent of cognitive and practical sovereignty. For him, the mind consists of that which we cannot mis-take. Cognitive mental activity (cognition) is that which is whatever it is for the mind i.e. whatever it seems or is taken to be. Practical mental activity (volition) is that over which we have total dominion, where no means are necessary to satisfy one's desires. As there is no gap between seeming and being in our cognitive sovereignty over our mental states (seemings or takings), there is no gap between trying and succeeding in our practical sovereignty over our volitions (minimal tryings). (We will see Hegel explicitly arguing against the practical part of this theory in his discussion of action in the Reason section.) In this context the independent consciousness can be seen as extending sovereignty over self to sovereignty over everything, to be expanding in its self-conception the boundaries of itself until they are all-inclusive. It is important to realize that the "independence" of independent consciousness is not compatible with the existence of other beings that are independent in the same sense. The insistence on being a constitutive subject (a sovereign taker) precludes the recognition of others as being subjects in the sense one is oneself. This is imperial rather than pluralistic independence, where everything else must depend upon the sovereign subject. This ultimately unworkable demand follows inexorably from the self-concept by which independent consciousness understands and defines itself (unto death). If independent consciousness took itself to be just a taker rather than a constitutive taker, something things are for without the addition that things just are whatever they are for that taker, then that consciousness could be what it takes itself to be compatibly with others taking and correctly taking themselves to be subjects of the same kind, and with objects retaining some independence in the form of resistance to desire. But for independent consciousness as consciousness conceiving itself as constitutive this is not possible, for structural reasons rehearsed below.

42. Why does proud consciousness take the form of independent consciousness? Pride requires only that one be willing to risk death in preference to relinquishing one's concept of oneself as essentially a taker, someone for whom things are something. What is the origin of the additional and ultimately self-defeating condition of the sovereignty of the subject in those takings? The process of pride by which humanity arises exhibits two important aspects. Independent consciousness fastens on one of them, and learns a mistaken lesson from its self-formative process. One can constitutively take oneself to be essentially a taker, by being willing to risk one's life for that self-conception. In this self-

constitution, the self appears both as subject and as subject-as-object, the (constitutively) taking self and that which is taken to be that self. Independent consciousness fastens on the constitutiveness of itself as taking taker (in this special self-taking), and assumes that constitutiveness characterizes itself as taken taker. Since its taking of itself was constitutive, it takes itself to be a constitutive taker. The formal difficulties this taking engenders stem from the fact that while one can constitutively take oneself to be essentially a taker, one cannot constitutively take oneself to be a constitutive taker. One cannot even in general be a constitutive self-taker. Some self-concepts one can constitutively attribute to oneself (e.g. being a taker) and others one cannot constitutively attribute to oneself (e.g. being a constitutive taker). Independent consciousness is the result of drawing an incorrectly generalized conclusion from the success of the project of pride.

43. Independent consciousness understands consciousness as independence--taking as constitutive taking. For it to recognize something, to take it as a taker, is to take it as a constitutive taker. A proud consciousness, even if it does not conceive of itself as independent cannot recognize another consciousness as independent (in the sense of sovereign). For to do so is to take it that everything is whatever it is for that recognized sovereign taker, including oneself. And the refusal to surrender one's self conception in this way is what pride is. If the one who is recognized as sovereign (taken to be a constitutive taker) took the proud consciousness not to be a taker, then in virtue of its recognition of the constitutiveness of those takings, the proud consciousness is committed to not being a taker, either in itself (for it is in itself whatever it is for the constitutive consciousness) or for itself. So a proud (self-)consciousness cannot recognize another as a constitutive taker. And since independent consciousness understands taking as constitutive taking, for it no one else can be recognized as a taker at all. This does not show that it is impossible to constitutively take oneself to be a constitutive taker, only that if one does one must be careful not to take anyone else to be one as well. So the independent consciousness must treat itself as the only subject (it understands "subject" to mean sovereign subject). Everything must be object for it. Further, the independence of objects, their resistance and recalcitrance to desire, must be cancelled in the objective realm. Independence (sovereignty) of taking and independence of things are each abstract moments.22 But independent consciousness (what Hegel for that reason calls an "abstract ego") identifies itself with only one of these abstract aspects, and cancels or denies the other. Independent consciousness is committed by its self-concept to satisfying its desires without having to transform its world to overcome the absence of the desired object. Its strategy is Mastery.

VIII. Mastery or Domination

44. The Master's self-conception, which he will not relinquish short of death, requires that he recognize no others but himself (that is, take no one else to be a taker or subject) 22 Their ultimate reconciliation will be social, when we see how the community as a whole constitutes its objects and itself, while its activity consists entirely of the activities of its individual members, each of whom is constrained, via the socially constituting practices, by the independence of things. But the community as a whole develops only itself. Constraint on the individuals is only a necessary aspect of the free development of the community.

and that he cancel in actuality the independence of objects which he has already cancelled in his conception of himself and them. The servitude of the Slave is meant to be a single solution to both of these problems, permitting the Master to realize his self-conception and be in himself what he is for himself, namely a constitutive taker who makes everything (himself included) be in itself whatever it is for him. The problem of the other as subject is solved by turning him into an object. The problem of the recalcitrance of objects is solved by using subservient Slaves as objects to subdue objects which are less immediately obedient than the Slave (whose will is her Master's though her work is her own and only for the Master). These may be other objects, or they may be human beings not yet subdued.

44. The Slave becomes an object for herself and for the Master by recognizing the Master under the same concept under which the Master recognizes himself, namely as constitutive taker. Since the Master takes the Slave to be an object (without the pride required for humanity) and the Slave takes the Master's takings as constitutive of what things are in themselves, the Slave can conceive of herself only as object, not as subject. To be even potentially a proud subject, one must at least conceive of oneself as a subject, so that one may acquire the courage to risk one's life for that conception. What things are for the Slave is not determined by the Slave's desires, but by the Master's. So what they are for the Slave is whatever they are for the Master. She is not a separate taker, either of self or of other things. For herself she is what she is for the Master, an object. Both she and the Master take this to be what the Slave is in herself as well, though they are wrong.

45. A putative consciousness is treated as an object by being used to cancel the independence of stubborn objects. The Slave works so that the Master's desires can be satisfied without trouble or delay (for the Master). The effect of the work is then that the stubbornness of objects in impeding satisfaction is nothing for the Master. For him a desire expressed is a desire satisfied. But both the Master and the Slave take it that things are in themselves whatever they are for the Master. So both take it that in the cancelling of the independence of things as it is for the Master, that independence has been cancelled in itself. They are both wrong, of course. The Master is wrong in an abstract way, since he simply ignores the independence of the objects the Slave works on. The Slave is determinately wrong, since she still confronts the independence of objects that her concept of consciousness (the Master) and of herself (whom she takes not to be a consciousness) attempt to deny. Out of this confrontation grows the rest of human history, which henceforth leaves the Master behind. That the independence of things has not been cancelled for the Slave in that the Slave must still work on them is taken by both to be of no significance. For working is not taken by either to prove that things are something for the Slave (though it does and they are), and in any case would not show that she was a constitutive taker and hence a subject such that whether things are independent for her matters to whether things are independent in themselves.

46. The Master is for himself and the Slave the consciousness constituting himself, the Slave, and other objects. But the Master as he is in himself is not a constituting consciousness. He is not in himself what he is for himself (namely constituting consciousness). For such a gap to exist is for his consciousness not to be sovereign. The

Master fails even to be self-constitutive, by insisting on a self-concept requiring him to be constitutive of everything. The Master accordingly is not what he thinks he is, he has failed to have his desire (as expressed in his self-concept) satisfied, though he doesn't know that. To be a Master is to be just this combination of what one is in oneself and what one is for oneself. As a (confused) form of proud consciousness, what it is in itself depends on (though it is not constituted by) what it is for itself. It is by being what he is for himself (independent) that the Master is what he is in himself (dependent). It is the Slave who makes him the Master. It is the Slave's recognition of him as constitutive that permits the Master to cancel for himself the independence of objects, including the independence of the Slave. The Slave's failure of pride (humility)--consisting in her acknowledgment of right motivated only by fear of power--is what constitutes the Slave as object to be used by the Master. So both in relation to subjects used as objects and objects worked on by them and so cancelled as independent of Master's desire, the sovereignty of the Master is actually constituted by the Slave's recognition of the Master.

Now no one can in fact be a constituting consciousness, for subjects and objects are in part independent (in a non-imperialistic sense). But insofar as the independence of objects is cancelled, it is the Slave who cancels it, and insofar as the Master is a Master, it is the Slave who constitutes him. Insofar, then, as there is a constituting consciousness in this situation, it is the Slave rather than the Master. The Master's sovereignty over subjects as objects and over objects as stripped of their impermeability to desire is constituted by the Slave's concrete recognition of the Master, as expressed in her practical discipline and work. The Master is thus consciousness constituted by being recognized, rather than constituting by recognizing. The Master's strategy of independence by dominion ensures that the Master will by pursuing that strategy achieve just the reverse of what he desires.

47. The "causality of fate" that enforces this reversal Hegel attributes to the nature of true recognition, which requires mutual recognition for the constitution of social substance, and of individuals who by being recognized and recognizing and understanding themselves as such have overcome the opposition of dependence and independence and passed over to freedom. The Master wants to recognize himself (take himself to be a constitutive taker), and be recognized by no one else since he recognizes no one as competent to recognize him, takes no one else to be a taker and hence no one else to be a recognizer. As we have seen, for Hegel, true recognition is always an equivalence relation -- reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Recognition is to be de jure transitive. It is required that one recognize those recognized by those one recognizes. In order to make it de facto reflexive, for it to be possible to recognize oneself, it is necessary and sufficient that one make the relation de facto symmetric, that is, that one in fact be recognized (taken to be a taker) by everyone one recognizes. For symmetry and transitivity entail reflexivity. This is a prospective account of the recognitive structure of Geist, of which the Master has no inkling. But the nature of the ideal is nonetheless active in even in the distorted actual approximation of recognition entertained by consciousness conceiving itself as independent. It is this efficacy Hegel calls the "causality of fate". What happens to the Master is the metaphysical version of what happens psychologically to someone who aspires to celebrity, acquiring along the way a

contempt for the mass of admirers whose acknowledgement constitutes that celebrity. Self-respect is difficult to achieve by regarding oneself as reflected in a mirror of morons. The Master is who he is insofar as he is recognized as Master by those whom the Master is committed to regarding only with contempt. He is no more than they can make him. His low opinion of them is in fact a low opinion of himself. The mechanism of reversal here is not mysterious. It is just an absolutized version of what we already saw happen in discussing someone who seeks to recognize himself as a good chess player. The less worthy those are whom one recognizes, the less worth does their recognition in turn establish. It is combining this simple feature of mediated self-recognition with the peculiar structure of domination and submission that is metaphysically ironic, turning both the dominating and the submissive consciousness in themselves into the opposite of what they are for themselves.

48. Recognition is taking to be a taker. Independent consciousness understands taking as constitutive taking, and hence recognition as constitutively taking to be a constitutive taker. We have seen how this mistaken conception arose from the original self-constitutive achievement of proud consciousness, which makes itself more than animal by taking (concretely and unto death) itself to be more. But recognition for independent consciousness displays the two crucial formal features which lead to the requirement for true mutual recognition. For taking to be a constitutive taker is de jure transitive, and it cannot be immediately reflexive. It is transitive because if A takes B to be a constitutive taker, and B takes C to be a constitutive taker, then A must take C to be what the constitutive taker B took him to be, namely a constitutive taker. So independent consciousness is committed to recognizing whoever is recognized by those it recognizes. And recognition is not immediately or de jure reflexive, because although one can constitutively take oneself to be a taker, one cannot constitutively take oneself to be a constitutive taker. As we have seen, the independence of other subjects and objects must be cancelled if one is to take oneself to be a constitutive taker. And this cancelling requires an other, the Slave, to mediate between independent consciousness and stubborn world. Thus the Master can in fact only recognize himself insofar as he is recognized by the Slave. Understanding this is recognizing the Slave (taking her to be at least a taker). As we have seen, the Master's self-concept and corresponding concept of recognition precludes his recognizing the Slave. But the structure of that concept of recognition as transitive but not immediately reflexive ensures that reflexivity of recognition can be achieved only by symmetry, only by such recognition of the Slave and by the Slave. It is thus the real or ideal structure of recognition which, peeking through the distorted appropriation of that structure by independent consciousness, ensures that the Master cannot get what he wants.

49. The causality of fate thus exhibited exists and operates in itself or for us. It is implicit in the self-conception of independent consciousness, but need not be explicit for it. If it were made explicit, however, surely the account just given would be the best possible motive for a change of self-conception. Seeing that the nature of one's desire makes it certain that one will be frustrated is a good reason to change that desire. What Hegel talks about as the end of history is the shift that occurs when forms of consciousness become explicitly or for themselves what they are implicitly or in

themselves. The blind causality of fate is then replaced by conscious understanding and control. Freedom in a new sense becomes possible because the formation and transformation of self-concepts is not now governed by a blind because unappreciated causality of fate. History begins with the self-formative process of proud consciousness, and ends when the opposition between what one is for oneself and what one is in oneself is overcome through the making explicit of all that is implicit in that self-formative process. Hegel's logic will be the tool which makes that explicitation, and hence the end of history (though not of self-formation) possible.

IX. Slavery or Submission, and Thought

50. The Master, as the first form of proud consciousness, is the catalyst who begins human history. But his mistaken projection of the significance of the success of the initial project of pride into the ideal of independence freezes the Master into essential self-deception, which remains opaque to him so long as he remains Master. Mastery is accordingly a developmental dead-end. Irony, ontologically explicated as the causality of fate, becomes an active metaphysical and social principle as the deluded Master forces the Slave, through Work and Discipline, to develop the power to overthrow the Master, and to become in fact the free consciousness the Master only believes himself to be.

51. The Master's relations to desiring subject and desired object are immediate. He is the desiring subject, and his consciousness waxes and wanes with that desiring. His relation to the desired objects is also immediate, namely satisfaction (He "falls to without further ado and eats them up"[109]). The Slave's relation to both desiring and the desired is mediated. The Slave conceives the Master as desiring, but is not permitted this herself. The Slave conceives the object as desired, but does not feel the desire herself. She is motivated not by desire, but by her conception of desire. Where desiring consciousness immediately is the distinction between actual desiring state ideal desired one, the Slave's consciousness is the mediated (inferentially articulated) conception of that distinction. The Slave accordingly has desiring and the desired as an object in a sense prohibited for the Master. In being an ideal being in this new sense, not to be confused with the ideality of Pride with which it must ultimately be united, the Slave is in herself a new kind of (self-)consciousness.

52. The new form of consciousness of which the Slave is an inchoate and incipient form, is Thought. As Hegel puts it in the long introductory paragraph to the discussion of the development of the Slave through Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness:

We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinitude of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness. [197]

Of course the Slave has not yet fully realized this new form. The passage continues:

For to think does not mean to be an abstract ego, but an ego which has at the same time the significance of Ansichsein; of having itself for an object, or relating itself to objective

being in such a way that the significance of objective being for it is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is an object. [197]

The merely abstract ego referred to by contrast is the Master, who identifies himself with one moment of consciousness namely independence, abstracting this from its necessary unity with the moment of dependence of consciousness on its objects. Hegel also puts this point here by saying that the Master by this identification fails to develop his inner or implicit differences. The Master thus tries to be immediately self-identical, without the mediation of inferentially articulated concepts. The freedom of the Master is merely apparent, it exists only for a consciousness which is not free in itself. Only the Slave can develop freedom Ansich by thinking. The two remaining conditions mentioned in the passage specify the access Slavery has which Mastery is denied to the ideal of thought and the conception of oneself as thinking. The text clearly disjoins these ("oder"), but they seem to function conceptually as individually necessary and perhaps jointly sufficient conditions of thought (they are in any case jointly sufficient for the imperfect sort of thought exhibited by the Slave).

53. Recall that the requirement motivating the paradox of desire for desiring was that to be self-conscious one must be an object for oneself, and that what one takes that object as (classifying something as something being the invariant form of consciousness or awareness) be a subject. This the Master fails to do (though he believes he succeeds). But the Slave actually succeeds (though she does not believe she does). The sense in which the Slave is an object for herself is dual, and the imperfection of the Slave's realization of the ideal of thinking is in part expressed in the fact that these two sides do not coincide for the Slave. First, the Slave takes herself to be whatever she is constituted as by the takings of the Master. Since the Slave is an object for the Master, she is an object also for herself. Second, the Slave has as an object of her consciousness the Master, whom she takes to be a subject. So the Slave both has herself as an object, and has an object which she is conscious of as a subject. The latter she does not take to be an awareness of herself, since she takes the Master to be the constitutive taker. But as we have seen, insofar as there is a constitutive taker in the structure of domination, it is the Slave. So the Slave's concept of subject under which she classifies the Master is in fact though not for her a self-concept.

54. Subservient or submissive consciousness in fact has two sorts of object: ordinary objects, of which the Slave takes herself to be one, and the Master, as being-for-self or subject, the kind of being things are something for. The Slave sees herself in ordinary objects in that many of them are products of her formative activity and hence direct expressions of her conceptual development, and the rest are potential raw material for such expressive transformation. The second condition for thought specified in the passage above concerns the concept of the subject which is object for the Slave. It is the requirement that objective being must have the significance for the Slave of the being-for-self or subject for which they are objects of consciousness. That is, she must treat objects as constituted by a subject, and so have the concept of independently active consciousness. What the Slave takes the Master to be is what the Slave in fact is, and so the Slave's concept of the Master is really a self-concept. The Slave has both the property

of being a constituting consciousness (insofar as anything can be one) and the concept of such a consciousness. She is constituting consciousness in herelf, and constituting consciousness is something that things can be for her. These are the raw materials of thought, which the Slave has not yet realized because the two do not yet coincide for her. The Slave does not recognize herself in her concept of the Master, though what the Master is for the Slave is what the Slave in fact is in herself (insofar as anything can be one). Human history is the working out of the interdependence of the Slave's two sorts of self-conception: of herself as merely dependent or constituted (compare: recognized) being, and as independent of constituting (compare: recognizing) being. The correct understanding of the latter is not (pace the Master) possible without seeing its presupposition of the former. This is the road to the appreciation of the essentially social nature of subjectivity, which requires mutual recognition synthesizing independence and dependence in freedom, and universality and particularity in individuality.

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