Reading a bit of Hegel for a course on Milton

I'm taking a course on Milton at Southern Connecticut State University and the first set of assignments included a bit of Hegel, from his _Phenomenology of Mind_. It is a short passage on Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage (#178-196). Fascinating. I haven't read Hegel much and not since college, 35 years ago.

Some key words in the text (English): sublate, cancel, double, self, other, consciousness, desire, independence, dependence, free, subject, object, return, loss, action, recognition, negation, struggle, risk, life, immediate, absolute, death, life, process, extremes, essential, unessential.

 He says, more or less, that to be self-aware one must be aware of a mirrored self, the other within oneself, a doubling of the self. The self and the double are in relation to one another, recognize each other, cancel or negate each other, struggle with each other, and that self-awareness arises from that relationship within oneself's double self. Self-consciousness, then, is a process, a social process, within the individual, and to be free, the individual must risk the destruction or death of both the self and the self's other. Innocence, then is a a-social state of a kind of awareness that is immediate and direct and lacking in the reflected doubleness of self-awareness.

 Some Hegel sites online: 
1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel
 2. Stanford ... : http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/
 3. IEP: http://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc/
 4. P of Mind (text):  http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/Phil%20310/ToC/Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm