ABSTRACT
Gillian Rose has bequeathed a philosophical idea which ‘is its own time apprehended in thoughts’. This idea is the broken middle. It is an idea which is philosophical and autobiographical, and which expresses the broken middle of the self, or of self-relation. The logic of self-relation for the individual self-consciousness is the experience of contradiction. It has several constituent moments. When consciousness comes on the scene, the middle is a broken middle, and consciousness is a part which has been separated from it. But consciousness does not see that it is part of that middle. In the experience that universality contradicts the appearance of self-relation as independence, consciousness is forced back into itself. The appearance of consciousness as a self-relation is an illusion, for this appearance is itself in relation to universality. Consciousness is determinate, and only a something. The independence of the person is an illusion, for its non-relation is already the result of its meeting with others.
