Unhappy Consciousness

In the ‘Freedom of Self-Consciousness’ chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit, which follows the better-known parable about the master and the slave, Hegel considers two schools of ancient philosophy: stoicism and scepticism. Stoicism, he says, begins as the slave’s rationalization of its own powerlessness. The slave’s consciousness withdraws from the external world into the self, where at least it has control over what it thinks. Scepticism attempts to actualize this freedom by negating the independence of the external world altogether, leaving the thinking self as the sole remaining real entity. The result is self-defeating. When the world is reduced to the perceiving subject, the sceptical consciousness inevitably negates that too, in a ‘giddy whorl of perpetually self-creating disorder’. The self becomes doubled and divided – it is at once master and slave, the being with the power to negate reality and the being whose reality is negated. Hegel describes its actions as ‘miserable and insignificant, its enjoyment pain.’ He calls this poor, alienated soul the Unhappy Consciousness.