hegel's phenomenology of spirit

potentially valuable? reflection i had while reading this book

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04.09.2023

ok so ig this is a weird synthesis of hegel with freud that my brain did here so. generally speaking hegel is right in his discussion of consciousness in that the way one can perceive their own consciousness, their own self is only tertiary, most importantly most processing is subconscious and the consciousness as it exists in its pure form - experiencing itself - is the subconscious content of it that has undergone basic processing and a lot of the time this processing is actually a reversal since it's a reaction, in the way my subconscious thing may be guilt because of believing (due to childhood conditioning) in morality and being convinced (because of lack of appropriate emotional responses and whatnot) of being immoral, but the way it'll manifest in my consciousness - stream of consciousness - is a strong negative response to morality as a concept and a very strong rejection of it - subconscious moralist notions find a response in the conscious as aggressive amoralism. it's like a negative in terms of photographs, portrays the opposite side of the same thing because it is reactive. however you can only perceive your own stream of consciousness indirectly because you're experiencing it all the time, so if you want to say something about it you have to step out and look at it from the outside, from distance, allowing for the consciousness to know or describe itself, it has to register itself as an external subject, and so if i attempt to capture my response i'll say "morality just really pisses me off", which would once again put it close to the original subconscious notion where morality is upsetting to me to encounter. this is the tertiary perception one has of themself - their original response to outside stimuli once reverted to manifest in the conscious as its reactive (won't say "opposite" because that'd be a simplification - but reactive so like, the opposite aspect) and then once again in an attempt to self-understand or describe that secondary (reactive) you'll go back to how it makes you feel and therefore back to something closer to the primary

another aspect of it is repression as a thing - the whole point of reppression is that you hold [consciously] a notion opposite to whatever your subconscious notion is, i mean that's the point of denial, in order to deny something you have to believe the opposite either literally (i.e. believing that you support someone because you feel you should while in reality you experience schadenfreude and would rather they fail, and you refuse to accept that hope and these feelings in yourself) or at least in the sense where you deny that it is there (i.e. being attracted to someone but consciously thinking you aren't), repression appears to be a literal reversion of something between your conscious and your subconscious. when you become aware of the subconscious notion, there's like a classical hegelian synthesis between these opposite notions resulting in a more nuanced view but also in that the subconscious notion stops existing in subconscious because it becomes known and they kinda cancel each other out

also i find that it helps with my synthesis between freud and nietzsche although that's probably not why one usually reads hegel

so basically i think the nietzschean will to power is tertiary perception of the libido. basically subconscious instinctual drives (i.e. sexual instinct/desire) manifest as conscious ambitions (i.e. to create art and express oneself) which in turn are then isolated as an external thing from the stream and captured as a generalised will to power and can be operated on as such by the consciousness itself on the philosophical level since that's the form of these drives it can perceive and define

trace your footsteps home...