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The other is different as a result of distinction, but the alienated
can also be myself. Why? Because I can be alienated not only from
others, but also from myself. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, which
I quoted earlier, Hegel accurately describes the process by which
consciousness slowly recognizes, through its sensory-perception,
that its other is not independent of it, not a stranger, but itself, its
own, which is nothing but knowledge of itself through the other.
In the last pages of the chapter on consciousness, he reveals the
essence of the whole process: in cognition, the cognizer and the
cognized are present as two extremes, and the mediating element
(the middle) coincides as a result of the phenomenon (Erscheinung
= Er-scheinen, that which emerges is the self itself; the way the two
extremes disappear is the way the mediating center does.
Raised above perception, consciousness exhibits itself as merged with
the supersensible world through the mediating middle of appearance
through which it gazes into this background. The two extremes, the
one of the purely inner, the other of the inner gazing into the purely
inner, have now merged together, and just as they have vanished
as extremes, the mediating middle, as something other than these
extremes, has also vanished. The curtain is therefore lifted away
from the inner, and what is present is the gazing of the inner into
the inner, the gazing of the non-distinguished “like pole,” which repels
itself from itself, positing itself as a distinguished inner, but for which
there is present just as immediately the non-difference of both of them,
self-consciousness. It turns out that behind the so-called curtain, which
is supposed to hide what is inner, there is nothing to be seen if we
ourselves do not go behind it, and one can see something behind
the curtain only if there is something behind the curtain to be seen.
However, at the same time it turns out that one cannot without any
more fuss go straightway behind the curtain, for this knowing of the
truth of the representation of appearance and of appearance’s inner
is itself only the result of a complex movement, through which the
modes of consciousness that go from meaning something, then to
perceiving, and then to the understanding itself all vanish. It likewise