| In chapter four of the Phenomenology of Spirit,Hegel presents self-consciousness as an important moment of the movement towards the expression and return of the sole subject of spirit.His new interpretation of the relationship between spirit and self-consciousness can be said to bridge the dichotomy that has existed in modern western philosophy since Descartes.What is the role of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit and what role does it play? Three questions will be raised around this issue: Firstly,why is spirit the only subject and why is self-consciousness reconstructed by Hegel as a non-subjective spiritual moment? Secondly,how does the life-determination of self-consciousness and the activity of recognition between self-consciousnesses,as presented in the self-consciousness moment,provide the spirit with a in-and-for-itself self-determination? Finally,after the spirit has experienced a series of contents and determinations of the self-consciousness moment and has become the absolute,how do the two concepts of man and freedom alienated,and how does the intertwined movement of these two concepts allow the world spirit（culture）to take on three different shapes in the self-consciousness moment? In response to these three questions,I will give the following answers: Firstly,Hegel critically inherited Kant’s idea of the transcendental subject,he transformed the purely logical form of self-consciousness in Kant’s First Critique into the spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit,reconstructed the self-consciousness of the transcendental subject in the phenomenal world as a moment of movement of spirit,and solved the problem of the split between the Kantian noumenal and phenomenal worlds by means of the movement of speculation.Secondly,when consciousness negates all previously acquired object experience in the movement of desire,it returns from the object to itself,so that the previously object consciousness awakens to self-consciousness,it acquires the determination of the form "I am I",and then it negates itself as an object.This movement of desire sublates all differences to the form,so "I am I" is not only a tautology,but more importantly it contains all differences in itself,becoming a living fluid "in itself".This self-consciousness undergoes a movement of differentiation from the universal to the individual and a movement of return from the individual to the universal,and then acquires the experience of "I am we,we are I",and self-consciousness takes on the experience of "for-itself",whereby the spirit In this way acquires a "in-and-for-itself" determination in the self-consciousness moment.Finally,the absolute spirit itself is divided into two extends: man,a phenomenon gradually socialised through labour in the lordship-bondage dialectic of the self-consciousness moment,and the concept of freedom at the other extend,which guides man,and at different stages of history,as a result of the intertwined movement of the three moments of the lordship-bondage moment and freedom,which takes the form of Stoicism,scepticism and unhappy consciousness.When the lordship-bondage division returns to unity,the spirit will lead man to Reason,where man becomes rational under the education of a spiritual culture. |
