What follows is an account of the development of consciousness based on the development Hegel outlines in his “Phenomenology of Spirit”, reinterpreted through a modern lens which has is informed by developmental linguistics, psychoanalytic theory, non-duality, and so on, and aims to offer a cohesive and synthetic modern articulation.
1. At first there is being-in-itself. It is pure being, pure immediacy, undifferentiated immediate experience. It has no relation, there is no self and no other, there no subjectivity, there is only being, simply what is. Everything in consciousness — everything in what we call the outside and the inner world — just flows: there are no objects, no concepts, nothing is static, nothing is the same, nothing repeats. Since there is nothing static, there is no way to grasp experience, no way to form and store memories, there is no sense of time, everything keeps changing and everything happens now.
2. Then being-in-itself begins to distinguish self from other. It posits objects on the outside world, it recognizes there are other things (trees, animals, other people). These these other things are “being-for-consciousness” rather than being-in-itself. Now, for the first time, there starts to be something static, permanent, something that doesn’t change as experience flows: things, objects, concepts. Now there is the flow of immediate experience, but there is also a projection of concepts on the flowing immediate experience. This projection of concepts is something that persists, that is static, that can be grasped, that can be remembered — this is the start of the sense of time. Now consciousness begins creating a model of the world that is can observe outside of immediate experience. It starts to be able to theorize. This process is the gradual acquisition of symbolic thought, of language.
3. Now that there are other objects, consciousness can grasp itself as an object opposed to these other objects. Now consciousness gradually realizes that, just as from its point of view other people are “being-for-consciousness” (i.e. they are external things for it), from the point of view of other people it is also “being-for-consciousness”. As other people are “other” to it, so it is “other” for other people. Now external objects as well as itself become “being-for-another”.
Up until now, there was no subject: consciousness was only being-in-itself, nothing other than pure immediacy. But now it begins to recognize itself, it starts to form a self-image. This self-image — this sense of myself — is constructed by internalizing the gaze of the other: I see myself as I perceive that I appear to others. This self-image is constructed out of the concepts others predicate about me: I am the name others call me by, I am the gender others assign me (male or female), I am the nationality others assign to me (American, or German, or Arab, or Indian, etc.), I am the religion others predicate of me (Christian, or Jew, or Muslim, etc.), and so on. These static concepts allow me to start building a model of myself that persists over time, an image of myself that I can observe through the mediation of these concepts: they act as a mirror for consciousness to self-reflect, to build an identity, to build an ego, to theorize itself as other [to “theorize” in the original sense of the Greek word “θεωρία”, from “θέα” (sight, view, perspective) and “ὁράω” (I see)]. Consciousness starts becoming a subject, a self-consciousness.
All these concepts consciousness uses to build its identity are externally-derived: not only are they predicated on — and subsequently internalized by — consciousness by others, but their meaning is also externally-derived. Initially, consciousness doesn’t really understand or get to decide what being “Christian”, or being “Greek”, or being “smart” — or any of the concepts making up its self-image — mean: the concepts are still something external, something alien to consciousness. Their content — their innerness — is inaccessible to consciousness, only their externality is accessible to it: the concepts are “things” that are fundamentally different than the subject.
4. So now consciousness can self-reflect, but the reflection it sees — the self-image it theorizes — is externally derived both in the recognition of the concepts it consists of, as well as in the meaning — the innerness — of those concepts. This means that the self-image of consciousness, its identity, the ego, is fundamentally alien to itself. It is mediated entirely through external recognition and other-grounded meaning. The direct experience of consciousness as being-in-itself and its symbolically-mediated self-reflection as being-for-itself are fundamentally alienated.
Furthermore, this alienation does not apply only to consciousness’ relationship to its self-image, but also to consciousness’ relationship to the world at large: at the outset, the conceptualization of the outer world (the distinctions between different tree species, different materials, the model of physics, etc.), of the inner world (concepts such as “emotions”, “instincts”, the “unconscious”, the “ego”, “happy”, “depressed”, “anxious”, “excited”, “alienated”, etc.), and of the social world (“democracy”, “anarchy”, “justice”, “right and wrong”, “good and bad”, “freedom”, etc.) is entirely externally-absorbed and externally-grounded. The relationship consciousness has to both itself and the world is entirely other-mediated; consciousness is fundamentally alienated.
5. Now there is an inner conflict: my being-in-itself (my lived actuality) and my externally-derived being-for-myself (the image of myself derived from the others) do not coincide. My self-image and my immediate actuality are different. This difference creates inner turmoil, inner disharmony, inner contradiction, a polyphony of inner voices — wants, needs, obligations, ideas, morals — at odds with each other. This creates a deep split: it places me at odds with myself and at odds with the world.
This forces me to go through the master-slave dialectic, where I’m seeking to make this deep split disappear by changing the world to fit my image of it: I struggle to negate the world in order to affirm myself as the truth (as the absolute standard by which everything else is judged, as the center of the world that everything else is there to serve, as absolute freedom), to make the world (both the outside world, but even my own lived actuality) bend into what I perceive as my will. This process will eventually struggle into the will of others: the forces of the natural order (the resistance of matter, gravity, cold, etc.), the will of other living entities (who, to a greater or lesser degree also strive towards enforcing their own will onto the world), and, finally, the will of other self-consciousnesses. Ultimately, it is in the will of other self-consciousnesses that I can try to obtain recognition, affirmation of myself as the truth, as my self-image is entirely other-mediated. The alienated self-consciousness seeks recognition from another but, by so doing, is caught up in another contradiction because the other self-consciousness seeks the same things from me. This is a clash of narcissistic egos: but because both are alienated and other-grounded, neither can provide the ultimate affirmation the other desires (which is, effectively, to recognize the other as self).
Through the clash of the egos in the master-slave dialectic, consciousness sees itself mirrored in another self-consciousness, and now starts to become aware of itself as self-consciousness (which means that it is not only a consciousness that is aware of itself as an object similar to other objects, but a consciousness that is aware of itself as self-consciousness similar to how other consciousnesses are self-consciousnesses).
6. At the same time, through consciousness’ struggle with the outside world, if it can arrive at acts of creation which shape the external world according to its own will (its own innerness, its own essence), it will externalize itself onto the outside world in a way that it can observe its essence in the objects it has shaped and the art it has created. In so doing, self-consciousness can now observe itself in its creations: it can observe itself as being-for-another. Its art becomes an alternative external reflective surface to obtain affirmation of its truth: its own self-consciousness starts being able to recognize itself. Thus, being-in-itself and being-for-itself begin to mediate one another: I no longer depend exclusively on the gaze of the other. There is now a place to stand on to start closing the gap between how I am and how I appear. I now can start predicating on myself my own concepts. This is the beginning of self-conscious autopoiesis — the beginning of freedom — the birth of the Spirit.
At the same time, a third aspect of this process of self-consciousness’ transformation towards freedom — a third aspect which affords and is afforded by the other two aspects — is the process of beginning to relate to the innerness of the concepts it uses to conceptualize the world (both the outer world, the inner world and the social world). As I explore the innerness of each concept (its genealogy, its inner contradictions, the consequences of different conceptualizations, etc.), the concept, which, until now, was alien to me (it was entirely other-mediated, it was only a being-for-another), starts becoming self-mediated. I start to see myself in the meaning I project into the world, and that meaning becomes alive: it becomes something that can hold contradictions, that relates to my conscious decisions. Thus my worldview, and the subsequent field of potential choices and ways of being in the world, becomes alive, and the gap between myself and the world in general can now start closing. By starting to inhabit the conceptualization I project onto the world, I have the ability to transform it in order to encounter fewer and fewer contradictions between my actions and the natural order, the Logos… to become like the water that always finds the path of least resistance and, by so doing, shapes-and-is-shaped-by the rocks it relates to.
Note: Another key moment in this confrontation of the ego with the other — the self-consciousness that strives to prove its separateness and absolute self-sufficiency and self-determination, but which tries to prove that through external proof (because it is alienated and other-defined) — is a moment of total loss or total incapacity: self-consciousness stakes its entire life, its entire worth, its entire will towards a goal and fails. In that moment “everything fixed and stable has been shaken to its foundations”, and in that moment what is left is the simple universal essence of self-consciousness: pure being-for-self. This is the moment when self-consciousness experiences the dissolution of the fixed, stable, unbending ego it had thus far identified itself with. The experience of this “ego-death” is a necessary moment towards liberation from absolute heteronomy (and, other than the confrontation with other self-consciousnesses or the unbendingness of the material world at large, can be experienced in different — perhaps complimentary — ways, including in the ego’s confrontation with the “other” in deep spiritual practices like meditation and plant medicines).
7. When I no-longer depend on the external recognition of others, when I no longer see myself as an object but instead recognize myself in my own living actuality, when fully inhabit my worldview (the conceptualization I project onto the inner and outer world) rendering it from a static construct to a living process, then my being-in-itself and my being-for-itself coincide. I am for myself what I am, and what I am for myself is what I am: my image of myself and my immediate living actuality are aligned and ever-flowing. That is fully being-in-and-for-itself: self-conscious freedom.
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