Hegel speaks of human self-knowledge in terms of “self-elevation” above the singularity of sensation to the universality of thought and as addressing human truth and knowledge. However, if we regard his famous injunction “know thyself” as meaning that a self-conscious I must become another for itself, only in order to be able to identify with itself, then our self-knowledge would rest upon a hypertrophy of the subject’s sense of identity. For this reason Hegel has been charged with subordinating concrete difference and real alterity to abstract and idealistic self-identity. Is this Hegel’s lesson on our subjective identity? To answer this question I examine how the phenomenological path brings to light the awareness of the common rationality of human beings in terms of the subject’s capability to know oneself as oneself within the others passing through the necessity of negating the self-sense of one’s own natural essential singularity. My aim is to show how Hegel’s initially abstract subjective identity (the ‘I’) is torn out of its simplicity and self-relation (I am I), loses its independent punctual subsistence and, by overcoming the indifference and immediacy of what is other than itself, assumes an inter-subjective and objective dimension. I shall account for the ‘I’’s phenomenological process of transforming the accidentality, externality and necessity of its outwardness and inwardness into the socially shared spiritual representations, purposes and norms of any historical statal community of human agents. By focusing on the master-serf relationship and on the import of what appears to be objectified in the serf’s work for the externalization of the master’s own inwardness, I highlight Hegel’s idea of freedom as intersubjective cognitive and practical actualization. In Hegel’s absolute idealism, relational characteristics enter the definition of what is substantial in human individuals qua embodied ‘Egos’, embedded in an interconnected totality.
