Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Part 2 (90-230)

A. Consciousness

1. Sense-Certainty: or the "This" and "Meaning" (Meinen)

We begin with sense-certainty, which "immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge" (91). Hegel began with sense-certainty partly to counter philosophers of intuition: immediacy is not where we end but where we begin. Sense-certainty knows "This," "Here," "Now," but soon becomes aware of the fact that what it takes to be real (a Now, for instance) is fleeting (into the past). Similarly, any "This" is not known only according to the "This" but also according to a "That." The only common element here is the I that perceives them

2. Perception (wahrnehmen = to take as true): or the Thing and Deception

First, a simple definition of aufheben: "Supersession exhibits its true twofold meaning which we have seen in the negative: it is at once a negating and a preserving" (113).

To continue: what does the I perceive? Attributes: the Thing is x, y, z, etc. But how is it that one thing is made from this possibly infinite list of attributes? Or in Hegel's language, how is it that this singular "One" is in fact a "One" based on the infinity of "Also's" through which it is known? Answer: the thing is one in itself, and many for another. Seeing these two aspects "being-for-self" and "being-for-another" in a single unity allows for "unconditioned absolute universality" (129). Unconditioned/concrete here does not mean simply "free from conditions" but rather that the universality is relational.

3. Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World

The "Force" section is what I took to be Hegel's way of dealing with physics. He defines Force as the movement wherein "the 'matters' posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity" (136). Force in the singular is thus always a plural "play of Forces," similar to the way the Thing is always known by a plurality of attributes. The notion of Force disrupts the unconditioned universal by again introducing a plurality. But this plurality of Forces (gravity, electricity, etc.) qua plurality is really only appearance; we know that they in fact operate by a supersensible Law. Thus what Force really is (and thus what the Thing is too) is Law. Law shows the essence (gewesen, that which has become) of appearance. The Law is consciousness' mirror: in the law, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. I'm thinking of Kant's self-legislating law.

B. Self-consciousness

4. The Truth of Self-Certainty

First, a simple definition of Notion: "If we give the name of Notion to the movement of knowing, and the name object to knowing as a passive unity, or as the 'I', then we see that not only for us, but for knowing itself, the object corresponds to the Notion" (166).

To continue: with self-consciousness, desire emerges: desire is born from the doubling of the object for consciousness: "one is the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second, viz. itself, which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only as opposed to the first object" (167). It is in this gap that the striving-toward-unity that desire is emerges. In fact, "self-consciousness is Desire" (174): it now seeks only to completely destroy the independent object "and thereby give itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty" (174). But this certainty is fleeting; when the object is destroyed, so too is the ground of self-consciousness' true certainty. Self-consciousness then realizes that it "achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness" (175); it is only as reflected in another that self-consciousness can truly gain the recognition that affirms itself. It is at this moment that intersubjectivity is born: "I that is We and We that is I" (177).

A. Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage

"Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged" (178). But immediately this recognition is only deemed real when carried to the extreme, when life itself is on the line; one self-consciousness has to prove to another that it is willing to risk death for recognition. But in that battle, the death of the other is no good, for then one eliminates the ground of recognition: the other must be preserved as bondsman. At first, the lord is "the pure, essential action in this relationship, while the action of the bondsman is impure and unessential" (191). But the lord soon realizes that he is at an impasse, for he is dependent on what he considers a lesser being for recognition; it is never enough. The bondsman, on the other hand, through his fear of the lord and with his work realizes he is in fact independent, that he possesses no dependence on another and the ability to transform the objects of his labor into his own self-image.

Freedom of Self-consciousness:

B. Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy consciousness

The bondsman, while still in bondage, retreats into the freedom of thought: "its principle is that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true and good only in so far as it thinks it to be such" (197). But the Stoic's freedom is too abstract; in reality, stoicism leads to scepticism, to the recognition that all is an endless flux of experience. "Consciousness is itself the absolute dialectical unrest, this medley of sensuous and intellectual representations whose differences coincide, and whose identity is equally again dissolved" (205).

Scepticism then devolves into Unhappy consciousness, which posits the Unchangeable in distinction from the changeable I and laments the gap. "But what it does not know is that its object, the Unchangeable, which it knows essentially in the form of individuality, is its own self, is itself the individuality of consciousness" (216). Then some stuff about the "grave of life" (217) and the "return of the feeling heart into itself" (218). And then self-surrender to the Unchangeable (222), where work and enjoyment lose all significance (225). And then Reason. Breaking down to build back up again.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Part 1

Preface: On Scientific Cognition (numbers are paragraphs)

Hegel begins with a few notes about the superfluity of a philosophical preface, how "contextualizing" one's argument only "drags in an extraneous concern" (2). Such prefaces set the work up to either be affirmed or rejected; Hegel, by contrast, wants to "comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth" (2).

His task in the Phenomenology is to "help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title 'love of knowing' and be actual knowing" (5). We need his Science of mediation to counteract the spiritual loss brought up by philosophies of immediacy, intuition and mysticism. We must "tear men away from their preoccupation with the sensuous, from their ordinary, private affairs, and direct their gaze to the star" (7).

This Science, "the crown of a world of Spirit" (12), is only in its beginnings. At present, it is pervaded by a rigid formalism where "in the Absolute everything is the same," the "Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black" (16 - a stab at Schelling).

To get beyond Schelling's formal Absolute, "everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance [which Spinoza did], but equally as Subject" (17). "The Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity" (18). In other words, Substance is a moment in the movement of Subject, and "the True is the whole" (20), or the incessant Substance/Subject movement. Some reject this view with horror, claiming that that which is mediated is false; but, Hegel claims, so long as we understand the work of Reason as mediating with "purposive activity" (22), it is not nightmarish at all. One must grasp the work of the negative from the point of view of system or Science (24); "the True is actual only as system" and it "is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit - the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion" (25).

Spirit has to be worked for: "least of all will it be like the rapturous enthusiasm which, like a shot from a pistol, begins straight away with absolute knowledge" (27). This work is accomplished by the "tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure 'I'" (32). "Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being" (32). In turn, in order for the negative, the I, to attain to Spirit, the I must give "up the fixity of its self-positing" (33) and see itself in an "organic whole" (34).

In 39-47, Hegel examines various conceptions of truth: "truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made" (39). For dogmatism, the True "consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known" (40). There are also historical truths and mathematical truths, neither of which is internal "to the thing" (43); "Philosophy, on the other hand, has to do, not with unessential determinations, but with a determination in so far as it is essential; its element and content is not the abstract or nonactual, but the actual, that which posits itself and it alive within itself - existence within its own Notion" (47). "The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose" (47). Hegel claims later, at the end of the preface, "we must hold to the conviction that it is the nature of truth to prevail when its time has come" (71).

Introduction

Through what instrument are we to "get hold of the Absolute"? (73) The usual notion of an instrument carries the presupposition that "the Absolute is supposed merely to be brought nearer to us through this instrument, without anything in it being altered" (73). This obviously is no good for Hegel.

The road that he will take is a "pathway of doubt, or more precisely,...the way of despair" (78). "This path is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge, for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized Notion" (78). Along this path, consciousness is educated (impt. of "Bildungsroman") and progress is "unhalting" (80); consciousness, when on this path, is essentially "something that goes beyond itself" (80).

Hegel ends the Introduction with a brief explanation of the logic of in-and-for-itself: "being-in-itself," he tells us, "is called truth" (82). Yet this in-itself of the thing only exists for us, and we come to think, like Kant, that "consciousness cannot, as it were get behind the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine what the object is in itself" (85). "So consciousness now has two objects: one is the first in-itself, the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself" (86). The True here ends up being the relation between the two, "the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself" (86), or perhaps, the co-emergence of appearance and essence.