The problem is, according to Hegel, that the self-consciousness is initially, that is as it “first makes its appearance” (§167), nothing but pure self-identity of “I am I”. Yet as it is with Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, or even more so with Fichte’s pure I of “Thathandlung” (the I that is “the content of the relation and the relating itself” [§166]), the pure form of “I-ness” existentially depends on the content given from outside. It exists only as the movement of “the return from the otherness” (§167). Thus, when natural consciousness managed to reduce every determined other to the unity of self-consciousness, it inadvertently withdrew the very ground it was standing on. “It thus seems that only the principal moment itself has disappeared, namely, simple independent existence for self-consciousness” (§167). And since there is now no such independent other, self-consciousness does not have any existence either: “It is not self-consciousness” (§167).