With the introduction of the dynamic concept of force, which functions as the mechanism that phenomenalizes the relation between consciousness ('I') and the world (objects), the argument shifts its focus to that relation itself as manifested in the emerging shape of consciousness in the form of Understanding.[NOTE 18] When this consciousness realizes that it is not just sensing and perceiving things in the world but adapting and transforming itself in relation to these experiences, it brings about the transition to self-consciousness:
Force is essential to the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness because it posits the externality of the world of sensuous and perceptual reality as one that is essentially related to consciousness itself; in effect, Force posits externalization as a necessary moment of thought. In order that consciousness complete its own intentional requirement to think "something," it must become determinate thought: it must be a thought "of" something external to itself, and, in turn, become determined by that external something. (Butler 26)
The transition to self-consciousness is accomplished in and through language where "thought" becomes a "thing." This quasi-alchemical process is aptly described by Hyppolite:
In language, thought insofar as it is signification is there immediately; it exists as a thing. It finds itself outside itself. This is why the logical dialectic will be a dialectic of being. It will say immediate being before it says essence, which is reflection just as signification is reflection in relation to the sign. But reflection in its turn is; it is immediately as sense within the totality of discourse. As we have described it, language presents the passage from the sensible to the sense which makes being say itself, which makes being self-consciousness. (Hyppolite 43)
We see that the movement of sense travels in both directions: as objects shed their material bodies, thoughts are incorporated in the "bodies" of words. The transition to self-consciousness occurs in the chapter "The Truth of Self-Certainty" which, along with the final sections of the chapter on "Force," introduces "Life" into the mix and shows that things are changing not only in the world but also in the mind; that there is a reciprocity in these relations; that the concept of force destabilizes the solidity of objects in the perceptual field at the same time that it manifests these things in a concept that phenomenalizes the invisible and the vanishing. Thus at the same time that the world dematerializes, the consciousness which is in the process of becoming self-consciousness begins to materialize. In order to establish this dialectic, the medium of Appearance "appears" as that which mediates between the empirical world and the supersensible beyond:
In relation to the beyond, sense-experience is a figuration of "consciousness" emptied of any substantive truth or value it might have appeared to have. In relation to a sense-experience that never completes this elevation, the beyond can only appear as an elusive, pure appearance (appearance qua appearance). Appearance, the almost biological medium out of which the supersensible and transcendental grows, sells sense-experience to transcendence, monopolizing a metaphysical commerce." (Sussman 41)
The thing (inner world) breaks out of its husk and hovers in the unstable world of appearances detached from the Understanding which has been "forced" out of its mode of fixing things under stable categories. The sensible and supersensible, the particular and the universal must give rise to each other and "this immediate conversion is effected by the semblance or show (Schein) at the etymological heart of Appearance (Erscheinung). Schein is an immediate bond between being and nonbeing: 'being that is directly and in its own self a non-being'" (Sussman 39). The notion of the supersensible world "arises" as if above and beyond this world, which then becomes inverted in order to show us that there is no beyond but what is here and now, but "now" revealed through and suffused with the "lifeblood" of the spirit. Appearance allows for the shift from the external world to the inner world of consciousness, just as in the Aesthetics it facilitates the shedding of the sensuous exterior of the art object as the prelude to cognition. In order to express this sense of objects vanishing in our midst Hegel employs a rhetorically accurate and poetically virtuosic sequence of paradoxical statements/images: [¶136: "these matters are each where the other is; they mutually interpenetrate, but without coming into contact with one another. . .] [¶138: "each of these forms at the same time appears only as a vanishing moment'] [¶141: "their being has really the significance of a sheer vanishing"] [¶156: "a permanence of impermanence"] [¶149: "the stable image of unstable appearance"(the law)]. This should recall an equally evanescent passage from the Preface ¶47: "Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is "in itself" [i.e. subsists intrinsically], and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth."
Appearance provides a way of getting at what doesn't exist, of making "it" appear as determinate expression. The movement between being and non-being is activated by "force," which is a power of negation: "Force is that which impels an inner reality to gain determinate form, but it is also that which frustrates the absorption of that inner reality into determinate form. In other words, Force sustains a tension between that which appears and that which does not appear, and in this sense is different from other principles of teleological development" (Butler 26). Not fixated on what is, nor on what is not, but on the reciprocal relations between these states, this movement "sustains a tension" between that which animates the inanimate and that which dematerializes material objects and, thus, is also the movement of language: "Since in its existing signification, language appears as the negation of the sensible in the sign itself; it is really the signification itself that I hear in speech and that I see in writing. Language's progress, at the heart of representation, is this disappearance of the sensible which manifests it" (Hyppolite 44). In regard to language then, and specifically, in relation to the subject, how is this absence made present? "By negating the sensible, the "I" still preserves it as an echo. It imagines the absence. It refers itself to what is not there in what is there, to what is there in what is not there" (Hyppolite 29). Indeed, not simply be referring to an object that does not in fact need to exist, but by using language as a medium of spirit -- "Language is the Dasein of Spirit" (Hyppolite 19) -- a universal, in order that the words themselves "appear" as things. Thus, it could be stated that language is referential only in the strict sense that it is self-referential; that is, it refers to itself as taking place and taking the place of the "self" in the communication of a message. Not referring to the self as object either, but to the very process of self-construction in language, where the self becomes what it is through the intermediary moments of alienation and externalization.
The words of language, however, are the "I" outside of itself, finding itself there before actually being there. The "I" continues to be in their mutual relation, in their past arrangement as in their present transformation. It embraces the language which seems to it to be an alienation of itself, and now makes it say what it had never said, with words that were existing in the past. Self-expression makes progress because, across the expressed content (what was there earlier), sense announces itself and states itself in a universal way. The self can never withdraw from this language, from this universal reference which nevertheless, in its exteriority, remains reflection and sense. (Hyppolite 46-7)
Any subject, self, or "I" cannot pass through this stage of expressing itself in language and remain unchanged -- it must be re-evaluated. It cannot revert to itself, but by referring to itself it is able to reverse its own progress, to invert its own inversion in order to produce a new version of itself; that is, to reinvent itself. "I" is the process through which it becomes what it is not.