Abstract

The essay contains a systematic analysis of the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit devoted to the so called “unhappy consciousness”, which is aware of its inner duality and contradiction. To obtain self-consciousness, Hegel says, the struggle is here “against an enemy, victory over whom really means being worsted, where to have attained one result is really to lose it in the opposite”; so that “therein consciousness finds only consciousness of its opposite as its essence – and of its own nothingness” as single, individual, particular. But in discovering that the Unchangeable, which comes to consciousness, is at the same time affected by particularity, consciousness essentially moves towards the awareness that “the true is the whole” – that is, to the accomplished goal of Spirit.