system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit… paragraph 175

“self consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self consciousness” 

I have been trying to understand and play around with this quote for a while and can’t understand its application.  I can see why a self consciousness being would get satisfaction from another one, but why ‘only’?
gpt
Because Hegel in this paragraph is in a way repeating and then going beyond Hobbes' discussion of felicity in *Leviathan*, chapter VI. Hobbes writes there: "*Continual success* in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is what men call felicity... There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire." So, this 'felicity' is in a sense impossible; it depends upon the constant occurrence of a desire, and then the appearance of a natural object which is its satisfaction. The self knows that it ought to be, and ought to enjoy its being, but the self's experience of desire is to find itself constantly serving the needs of the not-self (e.g. dealing with the material needs of a living body as something of objective independence). So, the satisfaction of natural desires and the endless struggle of satisfying the living body is not the realization of the self, it is rather the service of something else (as Hegel puts it: "Thus self-consciousness, by its negative relation to the object, is unable to supersede it; it is really because of that relation that it produces the object again, and the desire as well").

Hobbes and Hegel diverge then as Hegel claims that "self-consciousness" still gives us the certainty that that "tranquility of mind" can still be achieved. Only the employment of *another* self-consciousness "as the inorganic universal nature of Life" can bring us this satisfaction. The "inorganic universal nature of Life" of one's self is the selfhood of another (being careful to note that Hegel makes the distinction between desire and recognition; desire here is an immediate *having* of another self for oneself), which can be used as an instrument for its demands for, primarily, the *knowledge* from another self-consciousness. Only another self-consciousness can supply the conceptual content that is demanded here. Just as a maturing infant requires the conceptual guidance and assistance of others in order to survive and grow, so does self-consciousness in its *Bildung* (compare the discussion of *Bildung* and the self-consciousness of substance in §28). This is how self-consciousness is "reflected into itself", as mentioned in the following paragraph. So in short answer to your question: "self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness" can only mean that the desiring self must preoccupy itself with and assimilate the conceptual content of another self-consciousness, and conversely as well that self-consciousness knows that it must communicate and pass on its experience.