UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 10
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 10 The First Three Chapters of the Phenomenology

Let's go on with Hegel tonight, specifically the first three chapters of the Phenomenology. Please keep in mind that I'm summarizing Hegel here, not stating my own views, which are drastically different.

Remember now, the topic is knowledge, the method is transcendental: What are the conditions that are necessary to make knowledge possible? A good way to start would be with sensory immediacy. After all, seeing is believing, right? So, Hegel started the Phenomenology with the shape of consciousness he called Sense Certainty, the experience of the moment.

I look outside of my window and see a tree. Observant person that I am, I say to myself, "There is a tree." I see it; therefore, my statement must be true.

A little later, as I continue the observations of my surroundings, I remark that now it is night. I just know that it is. It's dark out; I can read the clock; the right programs are playing on TV. I'm certain that it is night. Just to make sure I write it down on a post-it-note: "Now it is night."

After a while, I'm done staring at the tree. I turn my back to the window and no longer see it. So, what does that do to the truth of my earlier statement? If it was based purely on my visual contact with the tree, it should be false now. Similarly, the statement, "Now it is night," should have a pretty short life expectancy as well. If I read my note in the morning, it is no longer true. But does that mean that I wrote down a falsehood last night?

Sense certainty is good for the moment, but the truth of our beliefs is not that ephemeral. The tree is still there, and I can know that it is still there, even if I no longer see it. If I write down tonight, "Now it is night," I'm not writing down something that is true now and false tomorrow because tomorrow it will still be true that tonight, when I wrote the sentence, it was night. There must be something to knowledge that persists beyond the immediate sense certainty. Something immaterial continues beyond the moment; we can think of it as a "universal," such as a Platonic or Aristotelian form. The specific nature of it doesn't matter as much right now as its reality beyond moments of direct sense certainty. Thus, we have arrived at our second shape of consciousness, which Hegel called Perception.

Perception provides the support to make sense certainty possible. Because there are universals connected to the things we perceive, we can have knowledge of them, even when we don't have direct sensory connection with them. In other words, because the universal of the tree abides in my mind, I can tell you all about it, even without seeing it. It is a birch tree with just a few branches and, since it's still winter, there are just a few withered leaves clinging to the twigs. Come to think of it, that means that we also need universals for each of the branches, each of the twigs, and all of the leaves. And let's not stop there! For the branches, we need universals for the bark and the various segments of wood. For each leaf, we need a universal for each vein, and so forth. So, is the tree a single thing, covered by a single universal, or a composite consisting of a multiplicity of universals? This is the celebrated problem of "the one and the many," and it constitutes the second negation, this one arising out of perception. Something cannot be one thing and many things at the same time in the same sense.

Now, that doesn't seem to be an insurmountable problem. Surely our minds can differentiate between a tree and its leaves, or--for that matter--between anything else and its components. But now we are already giving our minds an active role in the process of knowledge, and so we have to stipulate a third shape of consciousness that makes perception possible. It goes by the name of Understanding.

Understanding becomes a little more complex. First of all, in order for the mind to be able to sort out things, it has to have power. It must be able to distinguish between the universal, the general, and the particular, among other things. And, it would appear that with this power, the mind can just as easily create an unreal world for itself as a real one. To keep that from happening, we need to bring up another power, that will control the first power. But who is to say that the second power will actually reveal reality and not unreality? This interplay of powers needs to be regulated by laws in order to keep our minds from going into chaos.

So, bring on the Laws of Science! They will make sure that everything is nice and orderly. Gravity holds things on the ground, lightning is electricity, and on we go.

Wonderful! Isn't it great how applying nomenclature makes us feel informed?

But we're really not learning anything except to substitute one set of words for another. When we give supposedly scientific explanations, all we're doing is unpacking the meaning of words that scientists have given to various phenomena. In that case, the laws of science are really mere tautologies. Tautologies are always true. (That's what "tautology" means, a statement that will always be true, such as "Circles are round.") If the tautologies are based on the meaning that we happen to give to words, they are also arbitrary because you could change around all the meanings of the words. As long as you are totally consistent and comprehensive, you could reverse all of the attributes of the world. Thereby you could create an "upside down" world, as it were, and its description would also be tautologically true. "Hot" is "cold"; "sweet" is "sour"; "north" is "south," and so forth.

Once again we're stuck. How is it possible for our minds to discern what is true? There appears to be a curtain between us and reality. Let us move the curtain a little to the side and take a look at what's behind it. And what do we see behind the curtain?

We see ourselves.

That was a (very) quick summary of the first three chapters of the Phenomenology. The first few shapes of consciousness have led us to realize that consciousness is actually self-consciousness. But, of course, that's just the start. In a sense we have overcome the subject-object distinction, but there's a long and winding road to reach the Absolute.