A Struggle for Life and Death

Abstract

essence of life or an expression of the unconscious impulses of a species. For then life itself, or the species itself, remains outside of the individuality of the relation. True fulfillment requires an object who would consciously represent the species, so that what one takes into oneself, and so realize for oneself, is the species itself, and there is nothing left outside of that relation. The true object of desire must be self-standing or substantial even as still stamped with negativity as a being-for-me. There would be no true, lasting certainty in the satisfaction of desire if the other who is the object of desire did not have the self-standingness of a being who participates in the universality of life, but does so consciously, who experiences life as also for herself. The satisfaction of desire must be a true fulfillment of self, and not a mere elimination of something that is almost nothing. One cannot realize oneself through a non-being. For the satisfaction to be real, for the transformation of the other into self to be a true fulfillment, the other that is transformed into oneself must reciprocally achieve thereby her own self-standing being, i.e., realize herself too in this mutual self-transformation. As long as the relation to the object is purely, one-sidedly, simply negative, the self-conscious individual devours he object but does not truly transform it and so rise along with it to a higher level. And so the desire, fleetingly satisfied, re-emerges along with another object of desire. The essence of desire, expressed in this re-emerging of desire and desirable objects, consists in this essential dependence on something other than myself. I remain immersed in the natural world. The self-conscious individual, for whom the world ought to be only for him, thus experiences his contradictory dependence on the world. He does so in a way that is only possible for a being who is at the same time essentially independent because he is a species being, not merely an individual being through which the species plays its games. Since the new consciousness arises out of the defeat of the previous forms of consciousness which deny their own essentiality, selfconsciousness is absolutely for itself. It cannot therefore content itself with the otherness of animal instinct, which is the unconscious or involuntary operation of organic life within the individual, the species reproducing itself through the individual. The self-conscious individual therefore must search for a way out of the repetitions of natural desire, this otherness of the circle of life in which he loses himself along with the destruction of his object. He must relate to an