Consciousness must lose itself in the absolute to attain self-consciousness

Evidence

When I read that page, I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, “The generation of the younger black poets has just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven.” Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing. For once, that bom Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 508

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s narrower question about how locally vs externally educated blacks receive different narratives about their identity. — connects to: Self-certainty requires recognition from the other; The neurotic conflict between self-denial and self-assertion is resolved only through universal human connection; Self-consciousness depends on being recognized by another consciousness (+9 more)

Related

• The neurotic conflict between self-denial and self-assertion is resolved only through universal human connection (similarity 0.87)
• Black consciousness precedes the ego and resists external framing as a lack (similarity 0.83)
• Black consciousness is immanent and whole, not a potential lacking universality (similarity 0.83)
• Consciousness’s transcendence is haunted by love, understanding, and dissolved truths (similarity 0.80)
• Sartre relativized negritude at a moment when Black consciousness needed absoluteness (similarity 0.79)
• Recognition given without struggle never constitutes genuine self-consciousness (similarity 0.78)
• Self-consciousness depends on being recognized by another consciousness (similarity 0.78)