Philosophic Classics From Plato to Derrida

This pure concept of acknowledgement, the duplication of self-consciousness in its
unity, will now be studied in the way in which its process appears for self-consciousness.
This process will first present the facet of the inequalityof the two, or the coming out of
the centre into the extremes, which, being extremes, are opposed to one another, the one
acknowledged only, the other acknowledging only.
Self-consciousness is to begin with simple being-for-itself, equal-with-itself
through the exclusion of everything other from itself;its essence and absolute object is
to it “I”; and it is in this immediacy,or in this beingof its being-for-itself, an individual.
Whatever else there is for it, is as an inessential object, one marked with the character of
the negative. But the other is also a self-consciousness: an individual comes on opposite
an individual. Thus immediatelycoming on, they are for each other in the way of com-
mon objects:independentforms, consciousnesses immersed in the existenceof life—for
it is as life that the existent object has here determined itself—which have not yet
carried out for each otherthe movement of absolute abstraction, of expunging all
immediate existence and of being merely the purely negative existence of conscious-
ness equal-with-itself, or which have not yet presented themselves to each other as pure
being-for-self,that is, as self-consciousness. Each is indeed certain of itself, but not of
the other, and consequently each’s own certainty of itself has as yet no truth; for its truth
could only be that its own being-for-itself had presented itself to it as an independent
object or, what amounts to the same thing, that the object had presented itself as this
pure certainty of itself. This, however, on the concept of acknowledgement is not possi-
ble, save that as the other does for the one, so the one does for the other, each with itself
through its own activity, and again through the activity of the other, carrying out this
pure abstraction of being-for-itself.
The presentationof oneself as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness, however,
consists in showing oneself to be the pure negation of one’s objective way of being, that
is, in showing oneself not to be attached to a particular concrete existence,nor to the uni-
versal individuality of concrete existence in general, nor even to life. This presentation is
a doubledoing: doing of the other, and doing through oneself. Inasmuch as it is the doing
of the other,each then is set upon the death of the other. But in this there is present also
the second doing,the doing through oneself;for the former contains within itself the
staking of one’s own life. The relation of the two self-consciousnesses is hence deter-
mined in such a way that through the combat for life and death they provethemselves
and each other.—They must enter this combat, for they must raise the certainty of them-
selves,of being for themselves,to truth in the other and in themselves. And it is solely
through the staking of life that freedom arises, that it is confirmed to self-consciousness
that it is not being,not the immediateway in which it comes on, not its being immersed
in the expanse of life which is its essence—but that there is nothing present in it which is
not for it a vanishing moment, that it is just pure being-for-itself.The individual that has
not risked life can indeed be acknowledged as a person;but it has not attained the truth
of this state of acknowledgement as that of an independent self-consciousness. Likewise,
each must as much aim at the death of the other as it stakes its own life; for the other
means no more to it than it itself does; the individual’s essence presents itself to it as
another, it is outside itself, it must do away with its being-outside-itself; the other is a
consciousness engaged and existing in manifold ways; it must view its otherness as pure
being-for-self, or as absolute negation.
This proving through death does away, however, with the truth that was to result
from it, just as much as it thereby also does away with the certainty of oneself alto-
gether; for just as life was the naturalposition of consciousness, independence without

912 G.W.F. HEGEL