As for the servant, there might be something else that happened in the struggle. Facing death, this absolute master, the self-conscious subject evidently felt fear for its whole existence. According to Hegel, however, in this experience it took a certain positive lesson as well. In this experience it had inwardly fallen into dissolution, trembled in its depths, and all that was fixed within it has been shaken loose. 

However, this pure universal movement, this absolute liquefying of everything stable, is the simple essence of self-consciousness, absolute negativity,pure being-for-itself, which thereby is in this consciousness. (§195) The total inner dissolution provoked by the feeling of ultimate fear made it experience the essence of self-consciousness; it made it realize that inits absolute negativity there is nothing that would be fixed and stable, nothing that would exist in the way of things. 

To be self-consciousness accordingly means not to be attached to anything pertaining to the realm of determinate being. It is only on the positive ground of this lesson that the self-conscious subject, already aware of equal essentiality of life, was now able to make this further, truly heroic act of freely giving up the struggle, and even though, having thus lost its freedom, there are now no causes making life worth living left, to go on living!

Zdravko Kobe: True Sacrifice, on Hegel’s Presentation of Self-Consciousness