Truth as a Self-Sufficent Activity

For Hegel, truth is the activity of coming to knowledge. However, we ought to be careful thinking that the happening of truth is something like a gradual linear progression. Rather, it seems to me, that truth is like walking down a path you have never been on, wearing shoes that don't fit you and without water. As you keep walking, you are going to get lost (probably more than once) and your feet are going to hurt so much that you chuck your shoes, relieving the tension in your feet only briefly before you have to keep walking again (barefoot). Then finally if you don't find some water soon you are totally going to pass out. But if you make it through this weird journey, there will be water at the end, or rather, you'll realize that you could have been eating the leaves that were everywhere along the way the whole time to stay hydrated. If you only would have known! But hey, thats the truth right?

This description pits nature squarely against the individual, which is what I think the Phenomenology brings to light: the tumultuous relationship between consciousness and the external world. However, it is not just consciousness struggling against the world, but struggling with identifying itself within that world. The master-slave dialectic bring forth the fundamental issue of how one can know oneself in the world as both a subject and an object. But only through resistance can consciousness come to know anything. But if consciousness makes the same mistakes over and over again, learning though trial and error but continually failing, then what is it that motivates consciousness to continue? Is it consciousness itself?