Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism & Scepticism: The Unhappy Consciousness Summary and Analysis

This chapter starts with the self as both free and abstract. The reason that this form of consciousness is unhappy is that it desires completeness while being aware that there is a gap between what it has attained and what it is wishing to achieve. In this case, the completeness is in the consciousness itself. In some sense this is akin to the awareness of growing children that they have the potentiality for becoming adults. Teens are often frustrated because not only are they close to reaching this point, but the fact that they are not quite there, or that they have reached it but others have not fully accepted it, is very intense.

The development of Reason as an apex of consciousness, emerges within individuals and...