20th WCP: The Life, Work and Death of Self-Consciousness in Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic

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Top Highlights

• the aim of Life is to free itself from confinement "in-itself" and to become "for-itself."

• the very beginning

• development of self-consciousness,

• characterizes self-consciousness itself as a form of Life

• he role of death as an essential ingredient in

• life's struggle and Spirit's birth.

• the development of self-consciousness in the Master/Slave dialectic as an essential moment in the fulfillment of this aim of Life to become 'for-itself.'

• The following paper delineates this overlooked thread of the dialectic.

• self-consciousness itself as a form of Life

• central thesis

• the necessary condition for the fulfillment of Life's aim lies in work

• Recognition in the Master-Slave dialectic.

• beginning of the path towards true recognition is marked itself by the recognition of finitude or death

• freedom

• s intimately tied to its confrontation with the "absolute Master," death.

• Hegel has articulated one of the most profound and paradoxical truths of human existence, namely that an awareness of death and finitude is the inception

• man's self-consciousness.

• for Hegel, all self-conscious desire is desire of self

• A living object, on the one hand, and a self-consciousness, on the other, are manifestations of one and the same relation, Life or reflection-into-self, a relation which first manifested itself at the stage of Understanding.

• when mere consciousness became self-consciousness by returning into itself, so did the object return into itself.