Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Section B - Self-consciouness, The truth of certainty of oneself

In section B of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel discusses how the conscious mind comes to attain a higher level of awareness of oneself which can be called “self-consciouness“. This section is called Self-consciouness and the first subsection is “The truth of certainty of oneself“. In this section, Hegel suggests that self-consciouness is not something which is just given to a living being but rather something which the mind has to go through a struggle to attain. The first attempt to understand oneself is to define itself as absolutely other to everything else but this turns out not to be so simple as to call it the essence of what it is to be Self-consciouness. one reason for this is that although initially it may appear that the world is indifferent to the conscious mind’s perception of it, upon reflection it is absolutely mediated (this was demonstrated in the previous section). Another reason is that “being in itself and being for an other are the s