UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 11
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 11 Overcoming the Subject/Subject Distinction

Last time I summarized the first three chapters of the Phenomenology, and I'm going to pick up from there. But things are going to get somewhat confusing, and we need to realize that that's the point. It's not the fault of either you or me, but it's Hegel's argument that's intended to take us on a roller coaster ride. We continue to look at various shapes of consciousness, and, as we go along, we're going to witness their self-destruction. So, a rule of thumb is, don't take anything Hegel says in one chapter as a self-contained discussion of a topic with a final conclusion. Hegel wants to demonstrate the opposite; the idea is that any part of his system which is not ultimately linked to its grounding in the long and toilsome journey to the Absolute will, indeed, lead to chaos and confusion.

Clearly, you are free to disagree with Hegel, but to get him right, we must remember that in Hegel's methodology the negative generates itself out of a given shape of consciousness, and if you don't see that you will get stuck. If it helps, think of what follows as an Abbott and Costello word-play routine. Hold on, forgive my mixed metaphors, and enjoy the ride!

So, Hegel said that if we peek behind the curtain of our consciousness, what we find is ourselves.-- Not what I had wanted to see.-- But can we ignore the man behind the curtain? Not a chance. Consciousness is self-consciousness, Hegel tells us. The subject/object distinction has been overcome. Time to celebrate a job well done? Sorry, but still no. This is barely the beginning. And there's an obvious problem staring us in the face. That's right, if we're the surprise behind the curtain, then the problem staring us in the face must be us as well.

Let me try to put it plainly. Here's the problem, stated in the form of a question: "How can consciousness be self-consciousness when I am conscious of a crocus?" I am not a crocus, I'm pretty sure. But if consciousness of a crocus is my self-consciousness, then it must also be the crocus's self-consciousness, and that's where I lose me. For that matter, I'm fairly clear on what it means for me to have self-consciousness, but for a crocus, not so much. So, how can my consciousness of a crocus be my self-consciousness?

Obviously, once again, something needs fixing. We need to recognize a distinction within our self-consciousness. [Forgive me for using simpler terminology than Hegel does, but if I don't break this stuff down into words that make sense to me, I won't understand it any longer, and then I can't communicate it to you.] Let's say that self-consciousness has two parts: awareness of myself and awareness of something other than myself (10 bonus points to anyone who immediately recognized that this sounds somewhat like Fichte, but at this point, the "other" is not necessarily a subject and there's no hint of myself as Absolute). Now my "self-awareness" is in charge, but, as we shall see momentarily, it also relies on "other-awareness." Clearly, I couldn't have "other-awareness" if I didn't first have self-awareness. But in order to have self-awareness, I need to have awareness, pure and simple.

So, what, I might ask, is pure awareness? Well, in one sense, you might say, it's total awareness of everything without any impairments. That's great, but if we stopped here, we'd be right back with Anaximander and his infinite explanation that explains everything and, therefore, nothing, or Schelling's nocturnal melanized bovines. Pure awareness would be awareness of everything all at once, which may sound like divine omniscience, but it isn't because it wouldn't recognize any distinctions. It would just be awareness of this big ball of "everything," and, as a result, if pure awareness is not aware of individual entities, it would actually be no different from awareness of nothing.

This is hardly the end we were hoping to achieve, but we've learned a lesson: You can't just have awareness, you also need something of which you are aware. Awareness is nothing without an object. Therefore, my self-awareness must have an "other" to be aware of, and that "other" must be my "self." But then my self-awareness is also a form of other-awareness, and, consequently, just as my other-awareness needs my self-awareness to exist, so my self-awareness needs my other-awareness to exist.

At this point, then, there is a mutual dependence between self-awareness and other-awareness, both of which are constituents of self-consciousness. The relationship between the two can be likened to the relationship between a master and his slave. Self-awareness, the master, relies on other-awareness, the slave, for contact with the (albeit self-constituted) other. So, picture a rich man who for some reason is house-bound, but has an extremely reliable slave. The slave is able to do things, such as to go out and meet with people in the outside world, which the master cannot. But, not to worry, the slave does everything exceedingly well. The master regularly sends the slave to the market to engage in trade on his behalf, and the slave does so, reporting faithfully to the master. Eventually, since the slave is being so obviously responsible, he holds on to the master's purse and keeps the records, and his accounts always appear to be accurate. However, when things have gotten that far, the master no longer has any way of checking up on the truth of the slave's reports. He has become totally dependent on the slave. So, who is really the master now, and who is the slave? Anytime that the slave wants to, he can turn the tables on his owner, declare himself free and the (former) master bound.

In terms of the transcendental project then, if self-awareness becomes totally dependent on other-awareness, then other-awareness can turn around and declare itself in charge. In that case, if self-awareness has become totally subservient to other-awareness, there is no way of telling any more whether other-awareness is telling us the truth or lies.

Well, that's not good. After all of this back-and-forth maneuvering, all we've done is to return to the land of skepticism. By the way, in the course of this long argument Hegel states what you have probably noticed as well, namely that, for all practical purposes, what we see here behind the curtain is the same shtick that we saw in front of the curtain in the first three chapters. We just can't seem to get our faculties together sufficiently to arrive at knowledge with certainty. Skepticism, Hegel says, leads to the "unhappy concsciousness," because our desire for knowledge is not being met.

However, there is a way out. We are not, after all, mechanical entities who are impotently subject to inevitable laws that lead to skepticism. The key to the door out is the concept of "doing." We can make decisions, and thus we need not accept either of the extremes—oscillating between virtual omniscience and total skepticism—as final. By the action of our minds we can take control of our consciousness/self-consciousness and clear a middle path to knowledge. Specifically, the "doing" involves a Fichte-like taking into account the reality of the "other," this time recognizing the other as subjects with self-consciousness like ourselves. By joining our self-consciousnesses together, we can create a standard for truth, and the unhappiness vanishes.

The knowledge that emerges is an idealism, but not a private one. Our self-consciousness constitutes the world, but there is no danger of solipsism (the belief that yours is the only mind in the universe) since we are acting together with the "other." So, we have finally made significant progress after all. In the first chapters of the Phenomenology Hegel overcame the subject-object distinction. Doing so did not seem to solve any problems. Now it might appear that the problems can be solved by keeping our seats on Hegel's train towards overcoming the subject-subject distinction by looking to humanity and not individual selves. Is that enough? Not by far. To arrive at the Absolute, Hegel will now have to overcome the distinction between humanity and God as well.

More on that rather ambitious undertaking later.