Diference v identitě – Karásek Jindřich (2021)

This Czech-language philosophical study examines the constitution of self-consciousness as analysed by Hegel in the chapter “Force and Understanding” of his Phenomenology of Spirit. Kant identifies self-consciousness as an important phenomenon in answering the question of what a human being is, while Hegel, following Fichte, expands the discussion to include its intersubjective dimension, which develops through what he calls the “movement of recognition”. At the beginning of this movement, two individual self-consciousnesses confront one another, but self-consciousness must already be constituted for the movement to take place. The study focuses on this constitution. The fundamental movement consciousness carries out in constituting itself as self-consciousness can be described as a journey from the externally perceived world of natural phenomena back into its own interior. In this process, consciousness overcomes the difference it places between itself and the external world it perceives. Once this difference has been overcome and becomes a difference that is no difference, as Hegel repeatedly puts it, consciousness understands that the interior it believed it was uncovering as the interior of natural phenomena was its own interior. Hegel describes this state through the metaphor of a curtain: the curtain is drawn aside, and the interior looks only into itself.