To say of an essentially self-conscious being that what it is for itself is an essential element of what it is in itself entails that an alteration in self conception carries with it an alteration in the self of which it is a conception. Essentially self-conscious creatures accordingly enjoy the possibility of a distinctive kind of self-transformation: making themselves be different by taking themselves to be different.
Here Brandom defines self-consciousness: the ability for ones conception of oneself to be essential to what one actually is. This is a basic feature of human agency, but the question Hegel wants to know is how it is achieved as it is clearly not innate in biological humans. There is a long story about recognition, but for our purposes, I want to focus on the struggle for life and this risk of death.
So we should ask: What is it that one must do in order properly to be understood as thereby identifying oneself with some but perhaps not all elements of one’s self-conception? The answer we are given in Self-Consciousness is that one identifies with what one is willing to risk and sacrifice for. Hegel’s metonymic image for this point concerns the important case of making the initial transition from being merely a living organism, belonging to the realm of Nature, to being a denizen of the normative realm of Spirit. The key element in this index case is willingness to risk one’s biological life in the service of a commitment—something that goes beyond a mere desire.
A quote from Hegel:
It is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as vanishing moments, that it is only pure being-forself.
and a further quote from Brandom.
By being willing to risk one’s life for something, one makes it the case that the life one risks is not an essential element of the self one is thereby constituting, while that for which one risks it is. An extreme example is the classical Japanese samurai code of Bushido. It required ritual suicide under a daunting variety of circumstances. To be samurai was to identify oneself with that ideal code of conduct. In a situation requiring seppuku, either the biological organism or the samurai must be destroyed, for the existence of the one has become incompatible with the existence of the other. Failure to commit biological suicide in such a case would be the suicide of the samurai, who would be survived only by an animal. The animal had been a merely necessary condition of the existence of the samurai (like the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is important to us, but with which we do not just for that reason count as identifying ourselves). No doubt even sincere and committed samurai must often have hoped that such situations would not arise. But when and if they did, failure to act appropriately according to samurai practices would make it the case that one never had been a samurai, but only an animal who sometimes aspired to be one. One would thereby demonstrate that one was not, in oneself, what one had taken oneself to be, what one was for oneself. The decision as to whether to risk one’s actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.
The example of the Samurai spells out what Hegel takes to be necessary for our ability to make our self-conception constitutive of our being, our existence - that we be willing to RISK our being, to give our life, for our commitment. One is a Samurai more fundamentally than a bipedal ape if one is willing to give up ones existence as a bipedal ape to preserve their existence as a Samurai. It is only the possibility of Death that makes it possible for our self-conception to be essential for our very existence - our taking ourself to be ESSENTIALLY this or that could not have the meaning it did if we could not hinge our existence on this self-conception.
This conception elucidates Rei's desire for death immensely. Rei is not essentially self-conscious, what she takes herself to be, her self-conception is not essential to her because she is subjugated, because her life is not hers to give - it belongs to Commander Ikari. Rei is like the Hegelian slave, her self-conception is false and accidental compared to the Master's conception of her. Rei is willing to but cannot risk her life for her commitments and her self-image, she is literally not allowed to die for Shinji or for any of her own commitments but is instead revived and not allowed to die until she fulfills her purpose, the purpose that Commander Ikari impresses on her. It is ultimately Commander Ikari's choice what is essential to Rei's existence, as only he can decide what is worth sacrificing it for. What Rei essentially IS is not what she takes herself to be, but what Commander Ikari takes her to be. This explains her desire to die as not necessarily straightforwardly suicidal. Rei wanted to die for her commitment and thus define herself, make her self-conception constitutive of herself and essential to herself by sacrificing her life for it - but she is not allowed to do so, her life is not hers - and so her desire for death is a desire for self-definition, for the freedom of defining her own life by choosing what she is willing to give it for.
I will grant that this reading does not explain everything. Rei does seem to have some sort of more innate urge to die, exhibited in various places, but I think this conception of death and sacrifice as constitutive of self-consciousness is at least helpful in making Rei more amendable to the themes of risk and self-love surrounding Shinji.
Thoughts?
