Das Ich als Gattung seiner selbst

This article lays out Hegel’s account of the ‘I’. The ‘I’ does not have a higher universality outside of it. Unlike the genus in the animal kingdom, spirit is not a genus that determines the individual ‘I’ externally. In this sense, the ‘I’ is its own genus. The ‘I’ is abstract in not being identical with anything particular. It is concrete in only having this freedom from the particular within particularization. The ‘I’ is, thus, concrete universality. Drawing from Hegel’s remarks on the ‘I’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic, I investigate this peculiar character of the ‘I’. Finally, I discuss how this character of the ‘I’ rules out naturalism and the hermeneutics of suspicion.