I haven't able to access J.M. Bernstein's seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit these last few days. The site has been down. Then my server was down.
With Seminar 4 we have shifted from consciousness to self-consciousness. This seminar is a long way from those who continue to mis-read Hegel in terms of being a Platonist logicist metaphysics that denies the existence of individual things; Hegel's metaphysics really being about God; and the metaphysics is the foundation of modern statism and totalitarianism.
We jump straight in once again to soemthignh that has been going on for a while. It takes a while to pick up what is going on, and to figure out which bit of the text we are working from, and how Bernstein is reading this well-known passage.
Hegel says:
'SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or "recognized"'...Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double significance. First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other.' (para 178-9)