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Ryan Ruby, Unhappy Consciousness — Sidecar

newleftreview.org · 3,739 words · saved by 3 readers

Rachel Cusk’s ‘Life of M’.

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…

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