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We’re within the Self-Consciousness chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically starting at sec. 206, which is the transition between two sections we’ve already considered on this podcast: Stoicism (and Skepticism) and Reason.
The more famous part of the self-consciousness portion of the book is on the Master-Slave conflict, and in this section, we’ve got a similar dividedness, but it’s all within one psyche, like you’re being tortured by a voice in your head that you don’t realize is just part of you.
The two parts in question here are “self-liberating, unchangeable, self-equal self-consciousness” and “self-confusing, self-inverting.” Think of the first as just the Cartesian point of view: the phenomena parade before it in experience, but it seems to be just a changeless window on to all that variety. So what’s the second one? We know from the Reason chapter that this is supposed to end with idealism: The realization that the spectator consciousness and all the experienced phenomena are really one and the same: It’s all my mind somehow putting on a show for itself. So at the stages before that, I haven’t realized that all this stuff is really just me, and instead it seems like some kind of uncooperative matter bent on my destruction (a la the master-slave conflict).
We start out in the Pinkard translation, but by the end of this reading (after dabbling also in the Inwood), we determined that we should move back to the Miller that we’ve used for all our other coverage of this book (so start on p126 or PDF p163 if you just want to follow along with us throughout in the Miller, so you too can see where the others diverge as we read them).
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