THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

prior to our cognitive awareness of them, nor are they simply what we cognize them to
be. Our actions generally consist in the relation between (1) the relation of their
embedded norm and their actuality as it fulfills or fails to fulfill that norm, and (2) our
explicit conception or conscious awareness of (a) the general normative principle we take
to be guiding the action and (b) the various particulars in which this general normative
principle is embedded.
Consciousness – i.e. the ability to make our own actions, intentions, feelings, or
sensations an object distinct from our immediate life – presents the fundamental
distinction between nature and mind. It is the ability to reflect on conceptual structures
and make them explicit that distinguishes us as humans from the merely natural world. It
is not, in other words, the existence of conceptual structure itself that distinguishes the
mental from the natural, despite what Quote 1 seems to imply.
Before returning to our basic line of argument about the presence of conceptual
activity in the most basic forms of sentient awareness and emotional affection, we should
note two more things about Hegel’s distinction between the natural and the mental. We
have already argued that the distinction between the mental and the natural does not rest
upon the presence or absence of logical structure. Instead, it rests upon the degree of
articulation or consciousness of the conceptual structures present in both the natural and
the mental. Consciousness, along with its varying degrees of conceptual articulation,
distinguishes the mental from the natural. However, it should be noted that
consciousness does not simply present the possibility for the articulation of otherwise
implicit conceptual structures. Or rather, articulation is never mere articulation. Instead,
articulation always involves transformation, clarification, or distortion. These
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