Hegel on Self-Consciousness

I want to argue that when Hegel says that self-consciousness is “desire überhaupt”11 he means that to be relevant to the question of the apperceptive nature of consciousness itself; and that thereby he provides the basis for the claim that self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.12 Defending that interpretation is the task of this book.

Besides the claim that consciousness, as he says, “negates” what it is presented with, that it does not merely take in but determines what is the case, the claim is also that ordinary, everyday consciousness is always “going beyond itself,” never wholly absorbed in what it is attending to, never simply or only in a perceptual state, but always resolving its own conceptual activity;