T’s Reviews > The Phenomenology of Mind > Status Update

Action is the daylight of consciousness

From first attempt at self consciousness to consciousness, observing Reason, from inorganic nature to the organism, higher yet toward the individual, who finds themselves within an ethical order in a nation, but yet retreats from it toward infinite pleasure where it only finds abstract necessity and death. 💀

This book is difficult as hell, but you always somehow manage to understand the previous section in the next...

Observing Nature recapitulates elements of prior moments, with the current ability to observe the "organic." Instinctual Reason and our first approaches to the organic are to set laws against what is fluid, but these fail time and time again. In order to understand the empirical, it may not be statistical or fixed, but rather must retain the Notional fluidity (I think, lmao)

The unhappy consciousness which, in its freedom, retreats into itself in the face of the multiplicity of the world and its emotions (as Stoicism and Skepticism) eventually turns to Reason and declares itself to be all of reality, but not as yet comprehending what this means as a process.

The lordship and bondage section, as well as the preceding one on life and desire, are ponderous to read, but I guess rewarding? He condenses entire books of Fichte's, Kant's, and Schelling's into about 20 pages...