I. Introduction

The fourth chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit introduces the topic of self-consciousness as the ‘native realm of truth’.Footnote ¹ It does so by revealing the insufficiency of the shape in which self-consciousness initially presents itself and by indicating how this insufficiency is to be overcome, once this shape of consciousness properly articulates itself. In this way, it draws up a novel conception of self-consciousness that aims to resolve some deep-rooted concerns with subjectivity present in modern philosophy. While the main readings of the fourth chapter stress the importance of sociality, corporeality and practicality for Hegel's comprehensive conception of self-consciousness, I contend that the main argument is often overlooked or not properly accounted for. As I argue in the following, the fourth chapter articulates self-consciousness as a living being's capacity to conceive of itself in light of the life-form it instantiates. If properly understood, this thought should help to overcome the modern alienation of the subject from the objective world.

The setting of the fourth chapter is defined by a shape of consciousness that has itself as an object, in contrast with the previous forms of consciousness that are seemingly of an object that is other than the shape of consciousness that supposedly knows it. This new shape of consciousness conceives the ways in which it relates to the objective world—namely by means of sensing, perceiving or understanding—as moments of its conceptual activity. For it realizes that the categories by which the objective world is known are categories of its own conceptual activity. That is to say, it realizes that an act of knowledge, in so far as it relies on an understanding of the categories of knowledge, is essentially a self-conscious act.

What consciousness thereby knows is the form of its own conceptual activity: its knowledge is self-knowledge. Since the subject and the object of this knowledge coincide, self-consciousness first appears in the shape of self-certainty. However, knowing the form of knowledge does not straight away account for the objectivity of knowledge. The sense in which I am conscious of the categories of knowledge cannot be the sense in which I am the self-sufficient source of the knowledge in which those categories are employed. Hence, the self-conscious character of knowledge cannot by itself warrant its objectivity. On that account, natural consciousness sees the objectivity of its knowledge threatened by a gulf between the sensory capacities by virtue of which it is consciousness of the objective world and the conceptual capacities by virtue of which it is consciousness of itself. It must therefore, through the process of articulating itself, clarify the sense in which its conceptual activity is objective and the sense in which its account of the form of knowledge actually pertains to the objective realm. To this end, the title of the chapter—‘The Truth of Self-Certainty’—suggests, in standard Hegelian language, that, despite the insufficiency of its initial self-expression, self-consciousness will unfold itself to discover the unity of those distinct capacities in what it as self-consciousness already is.

The fourth chapter has attracted perennial interest because it promises to overcome the one-sidedness of an idealist account of subjectivity. Particularly the introduction of the notions of Geist and recognition in this chapter has been seen to improve on the idealist conception of subjectivity by means of a theory of social recognition. According to the traditional reading, which goes back to Kojève (Reference Kojève1947), Lukács (1975) and ultimately Marx, the main message is that self-consciousness depends on the mutual recognition of equals. In a similar vein, Brandom (Reference Brandom and Krijnen2013, Reference Brandom2019), Honneth (Reference Honneth1995, Reference Honneth2012) and Pinkard (Reference Pinkard1994) among others argue that the fourth chapter makes the case that the objectivity of knowledge is warranted by an inter-subjective community instituted by social recognition. Alternatively, more recent readings (McDowell Reference McDowell2009; Stekeler-Weithofer Reference Stekeler-Weithofer and Krijnen2013) have pointed out that the traditional interpretation does not accurately fit the setting of the chapter and its textual details and does not directly address the pressing question of how the self-conscious character of purported knowledge vindicates it as objective knowledge. These recent readings argue that, instead of a relation between distinct subjects, the chapter articulates an intra-personal relation within self-consciousness, confronted not so much with the sociality of consciousness but rather with its empirical, bodily, and practical conditions.

My paper proceeds as follows: In section II, I review the three main readings of the fourth chapter. Each of them emphasizes one constitutive aspect of subjectivity: sociality, corporeality and practicality. I argue that these aspects should be reconsidered against the background of Hegel's explicit definition of self-consciousness as a form of life ‘for which the genus as such is, and which is the genus for its own self’ (PhG: ¶173, 75).

In section III, I attempt to show how the conception that self-consciousness instantiates a life-form is enacted in the opening of the fourth chapter, i.e., how the movement of what appears to be a self-positing I turns out to be the activity of a life-form. I reconstruct Hegel's argument that the unity which self-certain consciousness inherently desires in its initial self-expression, the unity of its being consciousness of an objective world and its being self-conscious, is satisfied by the fact that self-consciousness instantiates a life-form. If the gulf between the sensory and the conceptual capacities initially threatens to render the pursuit of knowledge futile, these capacities prove to belong together in the unity of a life-form that perceives conceptually and actualizes its conceptual capacities as the sensible being it is.

In section IV, I address the key point that self-consciousness is a life-form for itself, which specifies the kind of living being self-consciousness instantiates: a living being that conceives of itself in light of a concept of its life-form. I argue that this is what Hegel envisions through the introduction of the notion of Geist.Footnote ² But Geist as the capacity of the human being to conceive of itself in light of a concept of the human life-form particularizes itself in a historical and social framework in which human life is understood. The concept of a life-form in terms of which a self-conscious being understands itself cannot be seen as predetermined by the human species. By contrast, Hegel's notion of Geist entails that the sense in which self-consciousness is for itself the genus is the sense in which the particular conception of the human life-form determines its historic and social form of life.

In section V, I briefly discuss the passage on lordship and bondage and argue that it plays an important role in articulating the interdependency between our sensitive and conceptual capacities. The master-slave dialectic gradually dismantles the assumption of a self-sufficient rational capacity by virtue of which the subject unilaterally appropriates the objective realm in conceptual terms. It illustrates that the exercise of epistemic and practical capacities is not merely dependent on sensibility but that those capacities are actualized in an objective world in the first place and thus reliant on objective constraints. If, by virtue of being self-conscious, consciousness is able to provide a conceptual account of its epistemic and practical activities, this account cannot be traced back to a merely subjective source for the rules of those activities.

In the concluding section VI, I outline the significance of the fourth chapter for the Phenomenology and for Hegel's overall philosophical project. I briefly clarify how the fourth chapter tackles the assumption of a rationality sui generis and how it paves the way for an argument that Hegel develops in the Logic and in the Encyclopaedia, namely that the idea of life is indispensable for making the case for the objectivity of thought.

II. The main readings of the Self-Consciousness chapter

The recognition process depicted in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology, that is, the process by which natural consciousness grasps what it, as self-consciousness, actually is, is generally interpreted in light of one of three constitutive features of subjectivity: sociality, corporeality and practicality. If the standpoint of self-certainty initially abstracts from these features in its quest for self-determination, the prevalent readings argue that the fourth chapter depicts the process by which consciousness realizes how it can objectively determine itself: as a social, corporeal or practical being.

The conventional reading features the social condition of self-consciousness. For a long time, Hegel has been understood to argue that the condition of autonomy is a community of equals which mutually recognize themselves as free subjects (Honneth Reference Honneth1995, Reference Honneth2012).Footnote ³ The exercise of the capacity for self-determination cannot have a normative force only by virtue of the authority ascribed by the individual subject to itself but is possible only against the background of a historical society within which the idea of freedom itself is handed down and renegotiated as a normative status, relying thus on the mutual attribution of authority and responsibility among individuals in a community (Brandom Reference Brandom and Krijnen2013, Reference Brandom2019). In this light, social recognition is not merely a guarantor for genuine autonomy, but also a condition for agency itself (Pippin Reference Pippin2000). However, this reading appears to be, firstly, removed from the textual basis: the topic of the phenomenological description at this point is consciousness confronted with an objectivity understood, simultaneously, as an otherness and as itself.Footnote ⁴ Second, if this reading attempts to solve the issue concerning the relationship between self-consciousness and objectivity by appealing to a collective subjectivity sharing, and thus warranting, an objective world of experience, the problem appears to be merely shifted to another level. If the normative force of autonomous activity is seen to be warranted by social recognition, the problem of subjective solipsism is reiterated in the form of social constructivism. Third, this reading does not pay due attention to the central thesis of the fourth chapter: the argument that self-consciousness recognizes itself as a living self-consciousness. Instead, the notion of life is generally interpreted as a placeholder for the objects which consciousness desires to consume or annihilate in order to prove its self-sufficiency.

John McDowell (Reference McDowell2009) has argued that the Self-Consciousness chapter is an attempt to integrate the Kantian apperceptive I with the empirical consciousness immersed in the lifeworld. Hegel addresses the problem that, in Kant, empirical reality is conceived of as constrained by the subjective form of human sensibility, thus making room for an unassimilated objectivity on the other side of the human world of experience. This understanding of objectivity is reflected in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology in the experience self-certain consciousness makes of life as an otherness which, in as much as it is unassimilated, appears in need of being devoured or effaced. By thus downplaying its own reliance on objective life, consciousness undermines the objectivity of its autonomous activity. Against this backdrop, the fourth chapter discloses how the otherness of the world as the scene of conscious life is actually the life of consciousness itself, such that it is ‘purged of its threat to open a gulf between subjective and objective’ (McDowell Reference McDowell2009: 160). If the life from which natural consciousness separates itself proves to be the medium of self-conscious activity, then the apperceptive activity of the subject is genuinely engaged with the objective. While this interpretation is the closest to Hegel's text, it has been argued that it does not give a sufficient account of why the reconciliation between the apperceptive and the empirical subject should involve the recognition of ‘I’ as ‘we’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2011). This points indeed to an open question which, however, does not primarily concern the social condition of self-consciousness. While McDowell is right to argue that, for Hegel, ‘self-consciousness can have individuality only as the individuality of a living being’, which is, as such, immersed in ‘life in the world’ (McDowell Reference McDowell2009: 164), his reading leaves open the significance of the fact that, as a living being, self-consciousness conceives of itself as of a kind. The open question concerns, therefore, the pivotal rapport of self-consciousness with its genus.

Advocating a similar reading according to which the fourth chapter portrays an intra-personal relation of consciousness such that, in the dialectic of lordship and bondage, the master represents the thinking soul, while the servant symbolizes the performing body, Stekeler-Weithofer (Reference Stekeler-Weithofer and Krijnen2013) has argued that Hegel's conception of recognition primarily refers to the recognition of norms as forms of joint practices. To recognize an individual as a person means to recognize her as a participant in our practices. The desire of self-consciousness to be autonomous, i.e., subject of norms, cannot be satisfied by self-reassuring strategies as mere self-attribution but only by verifying and realizing the invoked norms in appropriate actions. Accordingly, the main argument of the chapter would read that the true recognition of normativity consists in the practical realization of norms.Footnote ⁵ In this context, the notion of life is a reminder that a living being cannot be split into two parts: what has been traditionally considered to be a hierarchic relationship between soul and body is specified by Hegel as a relationship between deliberative intentions and immediate embodiment and is unified in the concept of the human life-form. By introducing the notion of a life-form, Hegel indicates, according to Stekeler-Weithofer, that practical self-determination is informed by the standard of what it means for a member of the human species to pursue a good life, that is to say, that practical reason is informed by the generic form of ‘a good life given by our species’ (Stekeler-Weithofer Reference Stekeler-Weithofer and Krijnen2013: 224). However, the fact that self-consciousness is a life-form that conceives of itself as such cannot be equated with the appeal to the given coordinates of a biological species. As I later argue, the fact that self-consciousness is for itself a genus means that it has a certain conception of its life-form: any attempt to determine a good life in light of the human species moves within such a particular conception.

To recapitulate, according to these readings, Hegel argues, against an insulated conception of spontaneous activity, that: (1) the I is autonomous only by virtue of belonging to a historical and linguistic community, within which it can be recognized as autonomous and held accountable as such; (2) the I can exercise its spontaneity only as an embodied living being engaged in the objective world; and (3) the I is self-determined only in so far as it verifies the ideality of norms in practical reality.

These aspects of human subjectivity are, to be sure, present in Hegel's text, but they have to be understood and brought together by the guiding thought of the chapter, the definition of self-consciousness as ‘this other life for which the genus as such is and which is the genus for itself’ (PhG: ¶173, 75). The idea that self-consciousness is a living kind that grasps itself as a living kind specifies the way in which the features of sociality, corporeality and practicality are to be understood: (1) The recognition of the we as constitutive to the I does not primarily refer to other empirical human subjects or to a particular community to which one belongs, but to the category of a life-form which is conceptually prior to any historical community; (2) the recognition of the sensible realm as constitutive for self-conscious activity does not merely refer to the genuine, embodied engagement of the subject with the objective realm, but rather to the fact that the very possibility of self-consciousness—the actualization of conceptual capacities—relies on a certain kind of natural life;Footnote ⁶ and (3) if practice is constitutive to self-consciousness in as much as the realization of norms is constitutive to normativity, the principle of the latter is not merely predetermined by the human species. But the capacity of this species to act in light of a concept of its life-form particularizes itself in a conception of human life. For Hegel, it is this conception that plays the role of a regulative principle.

III. The unity of self-consciousness and otherness

Hegel introduces the concept of life in the third chapter of the Phenomenology synonymously with the ‘absolute concept’ as a category which is to capture the unity of what the understanding keeps apart.Footnote ⁷ The understanding draws a dividing line between universality and actuality, as reflected in the division between the realm of law and the realm of force, the world of appearances and things in themselves, the supersensible and the sensuous world. In the course of the third chapter, these discriminations are disclosed as distinctions in the order of explanation, falling as such within the scope of the conceptual movement of consciousness (PhG: ¶154, 66).

Hegel states that, in so far as consciousness realizes that these explanatory differentiations fall within itself, ‘consciousness is for its own self, it is a differentiating of the undifferentiated, or self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶164, 71). If the explanatory effort of the understanding to elucidate the relationship of universals to reality or of thought to actuality relies on the categorial tools of consciousness, proving to be ‘only a description of what self-consciousness is’ (PhG: ¶163, 101), then objective knowledge can be properly explained through self-knowledge: knowledge of the form of objective knowledge as knowledge of the conceptual activity of consciousness.

The challenge now consists in clarifying the sense in which this new shape of consciousness, which has its own conceptual activity as object of its knowledge, is a form of life. This challenge is tied to the question of how self-knowledge bears on the unity of subjectivity and objectivity.Footnote ⁸ It is an intrinsic exigency of self-consciousness that its conceptual activity is objective: its unity cannot be undermined by a separate form of objectivity. This is also the sense in which self-consciousness is desire: ‘this unity must become essential to self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶167, 72). To desire the unity of self-consciousness—of knowing and what is being known—means to desire the objectivity of self-knowledge.Footnote ⁹ But we are warned already at the end of the third chapter that ‘self-consciousness has become only for itself, not yet as unity with consciousness in general’, namely, with consciousness of the objective other (PhG: ¶164, 71). The new shape of consciousness has the ‘pure concept’ as its object but ‘does not recognize its essence in what has gone before, but regards it as another thing altogether’ (PhG: ¶164, 71). It must therefore still grasp how exactly the concept is ‘the truth of those shapes’ (PhG: ¶164, 71). In other words, it must elucidate how knowledge of the conceptual form hangs together with knowledge of the objective other.

At the beginning of the fourth chapter, Hegel remarks that the previous shapes of consciousness of an other—sensing, perceiving, understanding—are still preserved ‘as moments of self-consciousness, i.e. as abstractions or distinctions which at the same time are null for consciousness itself, or not distinctions at all’ (PhG: ¶167, 72). For natural consciousness, the objectivity of self-consciousness is achieved through the negation of sensitive consciousness. Natural consciousness understands the unity of its conceptual activity as the unity of the pure I, whose objectivity is realized against those moments of consciousness by virtue of which it still relates to ‘the whole expanse of the sensory world‘ (PhG: ¶167, 73). The object of desire—the objectivity of the unity of self-consciousness—is, for natural consciousness, a ‘double object’: it is both the otherness which it desires to negate and the pure I which it desires to achieve through that negation.

The notion of life appears, both in the third and the fourth chapter, to be introduced as a category by the phenomenological observer. It is ‘for us’, says Hegel, that the double object of consciousness is life:

The result of the third chapter, as Hegel reminds us in the next sentence, is that consciousness distinguishes from itself ‘what is not to be distinguished’: it is ‘the unity of what is distinguished’ (PhG: ¶168, 73). From the phenomenological perspective, we know that the category containing the unity of distinct but related moments is life. We know that self-consciousness is, as a living creature, sensitive consciousness. The subsequent exposition on the ‘determination of life’ (¶¶169–72), which also has the character of a phenomenological digression, articulates the teleological structure of a genus as the unity of its particular moments. We learn that the genus is actual only through its particular moments and that these moments are, in turn, determined by their belonging together to the genus. This exposition helps us understand how self-consciousness is a unity only through its particular ways of being in the sensuous world and that its sensory capacities are determined by their belonging to the conceptual activity of self-consciousness.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, we learn that the life-form which self-consciousness instantiates has the unifying function of a genus only by virtue of being for itself this genus—i.e., in so far as it conceives of itself as a life-form (PhG: ¶169, 74). What vindicates the unity of its sensory and conceptual capacities is thus the kind of genus it instantiates: a self-conscious life-form.

However, in natural consciousness, this concept of unity ‘divides itself into the opposition of self-consciousness and life’ (PhG: ¶169, 73). The unity desired by self-certain consciousness, the pure I, is thus an abstract object. Natural consciousness must undergo a process in order to recognize that the actual unity of self-consciousness is the unity of a life-form: ‘this abstract object will enrich itself for self-consciousness and undergo the unfolding which we have seen in life’ (PhG: ¶173, 75). In one of the most enigmatic passages (¶175), Hegel describes how consciousness experiences the independence of the object it desires to negate.

There are three steps outlining this experience: (1) the attempt to achieve self-certainty by negating or suppressing the sensuous world fails because it renders self-consciousness dependent on this negation and thus on the otherness. This attempt, as Hegel puts it, ‘instead generates this object again, and the desire as well’ (PhG: ¶175, 75). This occurs because, as we later find out, it is the same consciousness—self-consciousness as empirical consciousness—that attempts the negation and that should be negated; (2) if the moment of otherness cannot be unilaterally overcome by consciousness, the object of desire must effect ‘the negation within itself’. In so far as it is able to do so, this object proves to be itself consciousness. But this could be misleading: the term ‘consciousness’ does not refer here to another consciousness but means as much as ‘life’, since we know from ¶168 that what ‘returns into itself’ is life. We do not know at this point what the ‘consciousness’ or the life fulfilling the negation within itself actually is. This is specified first in the third step of the passage; (3) this consciousness, due to which the otherness is sublated, is, as Hegel explicitly concludes this passage, ‘the genus as such, or as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶175, 75–76).

What consciousness encounters in this attempt to efface its dependence on life is the unity of the genus it instantiates: the fact that the moments of otherness are already sublated (in contrast with being negated) in the unity of the living kind it actualizes. The consciousness operating the sublation of otherness, that is, the consciousness in which self-consciousness achieves the satisfaction of self-knowledge is the life-form it already instantiates. The passage reveals that self-consciousness is, as the life-form it instantiates, one consciousness, at once empirical and conceptual. The moments by virtue of which consciousness finds itself in a sensuous world cannot be nullified, because they are constitutive to this self-conscious life-form.

To sublate the independence of the otherness means now to overcome the appearance that being a living creature poses a threat to being autonomous. Self-consciousness achieves self-knowledge by recognizing that the capacities by virtue of which it is empirical consciousness are part of what it means for it to be a conceptual, self-referential life-form. The living world is the only realm within which self-conscious activity can conceptually relate to itself and determine itself. Therefore, through the experience sketched in this passage, the otherness ceases to be a threat to the unity of the I and the I ceases to be understood as a pure I exempted from sensibility.

Being in the sensuous world and being conceptual belong together in the unity of the living kind self-consciousness instantiates. Grasping this unity as such is self-knowledge, in as much as self-consciousness already conceives of itself as a genus or instantiates a genus conceiving of itself as such. In being self-conscious, I instantiate a life-form that has a concept of itself, that is to say, a life-form that conceives of its activities and capacities in light of the unity of this life-form. It is against this backdrop that the doubling of self-consciousness must be understood. When Hegel states in the next passage that ‘the truth of this certainty is really a double reflexion, the duplication of self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶176, 76), he specifies that the object of self-consciousness—the object positing the difference within itself such that, on the one hand, the otherness ceases to be what it appears to be and, on the other hand, consciousness achieves autonomy in the unity of its distinct moments—is ‘for itself genus […] it is living self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶176, 76). The doubling consists in the fact that the genus is at once subject and object of self-conscious activity. When I understand myself in light of the life-form I bear, it is by virtue of that life-form that I understand myself as such. My doing is thereby the doing of my life-form, while the doing of my life-form is possible only as the doing of an I. This line of argument is crucial for the introduction of the notion of Geist, as I argue in the next section.

As a result of the experience outlined by Hegel in the prologue to the fourth chapter, the journey that consciousness undertakes from now on in the Phenomenology does not unfold any further under the auspices of a division between the conceptual realm and reality but within the frame of a unified realm of human life. In this frame, the conception consciousness has of its life-form is the actuality of that form of life. In the chapter on reason, consciousness still grapples with the meaning of the concept being the entire reality—whether as observing reason, as realization of ideals, or as lawgiver. But in the chapter on spirit, the unity of reality and reason will be acknowledged as the actuality of the human world. The sense in which this world—the realm of human purposes—is objective is the sense in which it is ‘alive’, i.e., the objective world of a certain kind of living being (PhG: ¶439, 174).

IV. The meaning of the we

Immediately after addressing the duplication of self-consciousness, Hegel introduces the notion of Geist: ‘the I, that is we, and we that is I’ (PhG: ¶177, 76). We have seen in section II that the we has been interpreted either as a historical-linguistic community, which, by dint of handing down a standard form of life, functions as a generic subject, or as the human species, i.e., the shared rational life-form which transcends both the individuality of a subject and the particularity of a historical community. The introduction of the notion of Geist must, however, be put into context, because it specifies the previously introduced notion of genus (Gattung) and, more precisely, the doubling of self-consciousness. The passage introducing Geist begins with the following lines:

The object of self-consciousness proved to be life—not the external realm of living creatures, but the life consciousness itself instantiates. Recognizing that it instantiates a life-form, consciousness recognizes the unity between its being sensitive and its being conceptual consciousness. This life-form is not merely the object of self-knowledge, but also its subject: it is the generic form of self-consciousness. This generic form is actualized in self-conscious activity and it is thus as such only for a concrete self-consciousness. This means that the sense in which self-consciousness conceives of its activity in light of the unity between sensibility and conceptuality is the sense in which it has a concept of the life-form it bears.

The capacity of self-consciousness to conceive of itself as of a kind particularizes itself in a conception of the human life-form. A human form of life is shaped by the conception one has of it—by the particular framework in which one understands human life. To have a conception of one's form of life implies belonging to a historical community, bearing, as I, a we. This fact is captured by the concept of Geist: this concept stands for the capacity of self-consciousness to conceive of the relationship between sensibility and conceptuality in light of a generic life-form such that the particular conception in which this capacity is actualized determines the respective historical form of life.Footnote ¹²

Against this background, Hegel's thought that self-consciousness is for itself a genus does not merely say that the human individual understands itself as member of a species but rather that it conceives of its kind through a particular conception of the life-form it bears. Since a particular conception of human life relies on the human capacity to judge and act in light of its kind, the historical dynamic of establishing, embracing and challenging norms is accompanied by a regulative idea of the human kind. By dint of this idea, one is able to demand universality in ethical claims or question the norms handed down by a particular community. But the content of this regulative idea is not given by the human species but determined by the particular way in which that capacity—Geist—is actualized.Footnote ¹³

V. Autonomy as mastery

The section on lordship and bondage illustrates the initial form that the ‘doubling’ of self-consciousness has in natural consciousness: the relation of self-consciousness to its genus takes the form of an opposition between consciousness and life (PhG: ¶178, 76). The master-slave dialectic depicts how natural consciousness makes the experience that the opposing terms of this relation are facets of a unified activity. What consciousness intends to do against itself as a living creature is what it does as a living being; what it does as a living creature is the doing of consciousness.

There is sufficient textual evidence to read this doubling as bearing on the relationship between consciousness and its embodiment. In the Encyclopaedia Phenomenology, precisely in the chapter entitled ‘The Recognizing Self-Consciousness’, Hegel explicitly states that the immediate otherness which I am bent on sublating in order to ‘give reality to my freedom’ is ‘the bodiliness of self-consciousness [die Leiblichkeit des Selbstbewustsseins]’ (EM: §431, 157/430).Footnote ¹⁴ If this is the case, then the section on lordship and bondage describes the dialectic between a subject understanding autonomy as detachment from any objective condition and its dependency on objective embodiment.

The argument of this section can only be outlined here. The initial assumption of natural consciousness is that it can prove the unconditioned character of its autonomy by repudiating the constraining conditions of its embodiment or of its being a living creature.Footnote ¹⁵ This desire corresponds to what has been presented in the introductory section of the fourth chapter as the negation of the moments by virtue of which consciousness is bound to the sensuous world—the negation of itself as empirical consciousness. As a result of this desire, natural consciousness believes itself to be able to demonstrate its autonomy through the readiness to sacrifice its life.Footnote ¹⁶

Since the sacrifice of one's life involves an annihilation of oneself,Footnote ¹⁷ consciousness fails the test of negating its dependency on sensibility. Acknowledging the indispensability of life, it now seeks to repress the significance of its embodiment by governing its sensitive, perceptive and desiderative capacities. If it cannot cancel its being conscious of another, it hopes to define it in its own terms. It thus considers its embodiment as material means for its purposes, such that ‘what the bondsman does is really the doing of the lord’ (PhG: ¶191, 80). In this instrumental relationship, the governing consciousness sees itself as ‘the essential doing in this relationship’, while the serving body represents the ‘unessential’ doing, the performing instance ‘synthetized’ with ‘the thinghood in general’—i.e., with the sensible realm in which it carries out the intentions of the master (PhG: ¶191, 80).

Yet it is only by virtue of activities carried out in the sensible realm that consciousness is self-conscious. Self-consciousness resides in the conceptually determined exercise of activities in the living world. To make this point, Hegel introduces the categories of fear and labour. Consciousness has a proper understanding of its existence as realm of possible purposes only by appropriating its finite condition: in the fear of death, i.e., in the knowledge that its ‘self’ is embodied (PhG: ¶196, 81). In other words, only by being conscious of itself as a finite living being is the subject capable of purposive activities. Engaging in labour with empirical reality, consciousness understands that its forming activity is not the mere result of an intention from within itself, but that its forming activity is constrained by objective conditions of its embodiment and of the empirical realm, much in the way constructing is constrained by material and spatial conditions. To be sure, the living environment is meaningful for and through the practices of self-consciousness in the way stone has the potentiality of becoming the wall of a building and a building is as such intended for dwelling. But the forming capacities of consciousness—its mastery—are first acquired in labour by means of embodied activities, that is to say, through a process which is bound as such to objective constraints. This interdependency indicates that autonomy is not the one-sided affair of a self-sufficient subject but rather the character of activities carried out within the boundaries of an objective living world.Footnote ¹⁸ This is why the ‘truth’ of the master, as Hegel puts it, or the true meaning of autonomy, is ‘the unessential consciousness and its unessential doing’ (PhG: ¶192, 80).

Therefore, the experience made by consciousness in the section on lordship and bondage is that the autonomy of its conceptual capacities is not given or self-contained such that they could be exercised over and against the objective world. But autonomy names the self-conscious character of activities undertaken in and made possible by a concrete living environment. Against this background, the quest for self-sufficiency is self-deceiving, not because the subject cannot break free from its natural inclinations, needs and drives, but because it overlooks the fact that autonomy is realized only by a living being in objective activities. Drives and instincts do not have a different nature than reasons for rational actions, but they are, as such—as drives and instincts of a self-conscious being—conceptually determined reasons for action. Deliveries of sensibility are not an alien material in need of a subjective translation, but they are familiar to a self-consciousness whose capacities for perception have always already been constituted in the sensible realm.

VI. Form and content

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit aims to overcome the assumption that the human capacity to think is estranged from the objective world and entrapped in a purely subjective form. If this were the case, then our capacity to give an account of the form of knowledge would amount only to subjective categories. A critique of the human faculty for knowledge would be a critique of a faculty detached from what there is objectively to be known. On that basis, gaining certainty about the necessity and the universality of our categories of thought would only deepen the isolation of the subject, for it would account only for how the world of the subject is experienced but not for how objectivity has a bearing on thought. The appeal to the fact that the subject has access to the objective realm by virtue of its sensory capacities would be equally confronted with the subjective form of sensibility: what is sensibly given is given to us and formed by our subjectivity. If one instead hopes to break free from the subjective medium altering the objectively given in order to gain pure access to it, one merely opens a rift between sensory and conceptual capacities: conceptual capacities are seen as disjoined from the truly objective, while sensory capacities as lacking a conceptual form and thus a bearing on thought.

The objective purport of thought cannot be elucidated by pointing out the dependence of the exercise of thought on sensibility. The idea that thoughts without sensible intuitions are empty still leaves room for the idea that the rules of thought are independent from the sensible realm in which thought is exercised. In other words, the idea that the exercise of thought is dependent upon sensibility is compatible with the assumption of a hierarchical relation of form to content, according to which the rational subject transforms, by virtue of the self-sufficiency of reason, the world it inhabits. This assumption, the assumption of a rationality sui generis, is what Hegel aims to overcome with his conception of self-consciousness as a living kind. If the capacity to think is actualized by a living being belonging to the objective world, which is potentially the object of its knowledge, then there is no reason to doubt the basic objectivity of thought. The assumption that concepts unilaterally form the experience of the world overlooks how conceptual capacities are actualized in the first place. If concepts articulate the rules of epistemic and practical activities, Hegel reminds us that these activities are exercises of capacities actualized by a living being in an objective environment. Hence, if there is any sense in saying, as the consciousness of the master does, that the objective world is conceptually appropriated, then this is also the sense in which the conceptual realm itself is first constituted, by responding to objective constraints.

What it means for a concept to be the form of an objective activity is exemplified by the idea of life. In the Logic, Hegel will say more about the way in which the idea of life illustrates what he thinks under the heading of the Idea, the unity of conceptual form and actuality. As he claims in the section on the idea of cognition in the Logic, the idea of life elucidates the sense in which the logical realm is ‘immersed in objectivity’ (L: 690/192). The concept of a life-form is the concept of the principle, i.e., the genus, organizing the material development of a particular living being. The sense in which the notion of a life-form is the conceptual form of that objective process is the sense in which the latter—the concrete existence of a living being as determined by its genus—is the ‘real content’ of that notion (EL: 282/203). The concept synthesizing the objective development of a living being expresses the principle of its actual existence. Hence, in so far as it exemplifies how the concept is not a subjective representation but the synthesis of an actuality, the idea of life is indispensable for Hegel's case for the objectivity of thought.Footnote ¹⁹

In the Logic, Hegel introduces the idea of cognition by distinguishing a life-form that has the concept of itself: a life-form that is ‘the genus for itself’ (L: 688/191; EL: 290/210). I have tried to distinguish three facets of this central thought of Hegel's philosophy as presented in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology. First, a self-conscious life-form, i.e., a life-form with conceptual capacities, is itself the result of an objective process by which it actualizes its capacities: the conceptual capacities it acquires depend on the objective constraints of the living process through which they are acquired. Second, if conceptual capacities are self-conscious in the sense in which they can articulate the rules of their exercise, then the formal concepts articulating those rules pertain to the objective realm in which they are actualized in the first place.Footnote ²⁰ Third, the generic capacity of conceiving of oneself as a life-form, the capacity that Hegel names Geist, particularizes itself in the conceptions that human beings historically develop about human life, such that these very conceptions of the kind they instantiate shape their ethical life.