Abstract

This paper offers a close reading of the transition into the “Self-Consciousness” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In this transition, Hegel articulates a concept of self-consciousness that is closely bound up with his concept of life. This paper’s central interpretive argument is that life plays an instructive role for self-consciousness, demonstrating to it that its most basic concept of selfhood is dependent upon the concrete, finite, embodied activity of organic nature. To this end, this paper asks what is required of Hegel’s concept of life such that it may play this role, explicating the concept of the living body presented at the beginning of the fourth chapter as a phenomenological object in which self-consciousness recognizes something of its own minimal conception of itself. In this moment of recognition, self-consciousness also grasps a constitutive difference that separates it from the living body, and this difference is a key condition of life serving its central instructive role. Contrasting this interpretation with recent scholarship on this passage, the paper argues that this concept of the living body and its instructive difference from self-consciousness suggest an approach to this chapter’s famous passages on recognition and the struggle of lord and bondsman that is grounded in self-consciousness’s recognition of life at the start of the chapter.