Abstract
How can we achieve a unified sense of the self through a manifold of its manifestations, if our selfhood is - unlike the wholeness of a sock - its own continuous accomplishment and cannot be "mended" in any post hoc constructed unity? This issue will allow me to highlight several convergent themes between Hegel and existential phenomenology, starting with the emphasis on the experienced lack of unity as imminent motivation for making explicit the nature of our self-relation. Contrary to Husserl, the self-relation does not get its clarity through transcendental reflection on the stream of experience, but rather through self-understanding stemming from one's worldly dealings.
However, new contradictions will arise in this ontological reinterpretation of self-question: to produce oneself through objectification appears both as a necessary condition and as a fundamental obstacle for doing justice to the unity of our lives as wholes. In the end, Heideggerian emphasis on one's own "ability-to-be" will be rejected through the reappropriation of Hegelian perspective, according to which the self-consciousness repeatedly achieves its precarious unity by both accepting and critically revising its objectification in the public sphere