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Concluding Remarks
- Princeton University Press
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In ¶184, Hegel sums up what he takes himself to have shown to be the basic “movement,” as he calls it, of selfconsciousness . Self-consciousness, that is, is never the direct presence of anything like a “self-object” to itself; it is a processual or dynamic self-relation that is to be achieved. Selfconstituting self-construals (taking oneself to know something or taking oneself to be committed to doing something) are as mere avowals only provisional and are redeemable as such only in the future and with others. We have just seen why Hegel thinks that such a self-consciousness, construed this way, can only find its “satisfaction,” can only redeem those “self-certainties” in “truth,” in “another self-consciousness .” He now says that such a movement, so construed, must be about an attempt at recognition; to any putative pair of opposed self-consciousnesses must be ascribed an inherent practical teleology, the ultimate outcome of which is that “They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other” (¶184). By inherent teleology he means to say that the attempted fulfillment of a desire (and the self-relation characteristic of desire) can be imagined to be experienced differently in a situation of conflict, especially ultimate conflict. One can be Concluding Remarks 89 concluding remarks imagined to have to determine what is worth fighting for, why, what value life has and so forth. (In this sense a practical teleology just means a discovered expansion of the “in order to” structure characteristic of action. One can be presumed to discover, in trying to satisfy one’s desire under certain limited assumptions, that the assumptions must be changed and the formulation of the practical project itself must be reconceived.) But this alteration also means that one’s avowals of commitments, importance, significance, what is essential to oneself and so forth, now understood as claims against another, contending self-consciousness, are thereby also understood as expressed with some claim to authority. And as we have seen, they can only be asserted if they are asserted with some assumption of normative force; otherwise they would just be expressions of reactions to various internal pushes and pulls of desires, passions, fears and so forth. I could not be said to be avowing a commitment if I am indifferent to denials of its realization, or indifferent to inconsistencies with other claims I avow. (It is in this sense that consciousness itself is for Hegel essentially a rational phenomenon.) In the presence of an imagined extreme challenge by another “taker,” the projected satisfaction of a desire now must count as a claim against the other’s attempt. If that is so, then the assertion of such a claim is also the attribution to oneself of an authority to make it. But such a self-attribution would not be the attribution of authority unless one understood the difference between merely attributing the authority to oneself and actually having such authority. At the stage of mere conflicting claims of authority , Hegel suggests that only one sort of step, consistent with the limited premises of such an account, will settle such an issue: the submission by one party to another, acknowledging such an authority under such a threat; one that can only [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:05 GMT) 90 concluding remarks be understood at this point as motivated by (practically rationally justified by) an unwillingness to risk everything on the authority claim, an unwillingness to die. This assumption of a “fight to the death,” a raising of the stakes beyond what any attachment to life could explain, is meant then to short-circuit any interpretation that remains at the animal or natural, or desire-triggered level. And so, just in themselves, such avowals raise the question of their own success-conditions, the relation between subjective self-certainty, and truth, in Hegel’s frequent formulations. I can avow all sorts of entitlements to things, demand to be treated in a certain way, insist that the status I assert for myself should be the status I have in the world, and so forth. But avowing it doesn’t make it so, and I cannot be indifferent to the relevant realization of what is demanded or claimed. (And there is no indication that Hegel has lost sight here of the breadth of this issue. The authority of epistemic claims and commitments is also part of this story.) This inherent condition (for putative claims to authority really being authoritative) is something Hegel...