Getting Started: Who Am I, and the First Paragraphs of Sense Certainty

I am a curious layman, WEIRD, and a cafeteria Catholic (Catholicism is too rich for any mortal to ingest all of it). Go elsewhere for more educated opinions.

This will be a conversation with the text of Phenomenlogy of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller . I'm skipping the preface and introduction: after saying "It is customary to preface a work with an explanation of the author's aim, why he wrote the book, and the relationship in which he believes it to stand to other earlier or contemporary treatises on the same subject. In the case of a philosophical work, however, such an explanation seems not only superflouous but, in view of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and misleading.", Hegel goes on to present a cliff wall of undefined terms and references to prior works, including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. Some of those authors are not named, but I can recognize some of the concepts as belonging to them. I insist that things I do not recognize be explained more fully, and that those I do recognize have Hegel's interpretation made explicit. It might be useful to read the preface and introduction after reading the rest of the book. So, on to the meat.

A. CONSCIOUSNESS

I. SENSE-CERTAINTY: OR THE 'THIS' AND 'MEANING' [MEINEN]

90. The knowledge and knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowlege itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is. Our approach to the object must be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it we must refrain from trying to comprehend it.

I come to this skeptically; it seems our minds interpret sense data in multiple layers of interpretation before we become "conscious" of it. I wear glasses, and I often glimpse a divergence between what my two eyes present - because of course they do, they see things from different angles, refracted differently. For the vast majority of the time, my mind is integrating the visual data into a comprehended scene. I cannot directly perceive optic nerver signals. In environments with solid colors (e.g., total darkness) I perceive the scintillation of noise in those signals, but I do not attribute that to an external object. The same noise occurs in sound: in total silence, I perceive noise that is internal to my hearing, not from the environment. To be charitable to the premise, let's suppose I direct attention to some minute portion of my senses - e.g., the color of a period mark. Can I apprehend that without comprehending it? Has my vision not already turned a set of pixels into a tiny circle?

91. Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge; for it has not yet omitted anything from the object, but has the object before it in its perfect entirety. But, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing [Sache]. Consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure 'I'; or I am in it only as a pure 'This'. I, this particular I, am certain of this particular thing, not because I, qua consciousness, in knowing it have developed myself or thought about it in various ways; and also not because the thing of which I am certain, in virtue of a host of different qualities, would be in its own self a rich complex of connections, or related in various ways to other things. Neither of these has anything to do with the truth of sense-certainty: here neither I nor the thing has the significance of a complex process of mediation; the 'I' does not have the significance of a manifold imagining or thinking; nor does the contrary, the thing is, and it is, merely because it is. It is; this is the essential point for sense-knowledge, and this pure being, or this simple immediacy, constitues its truth. Similarly, certainty as a connection is an immediate pure connection: consciousness is 'I', nothing more, a pure 'This'; the singular consciousness knows a pure 'This', or the single item.

Piaget demonstrated that babies do not innately posess object permanence; "peak-a-boo" is entertaining to little ones because the permanence of the person playing with them is not yet boring. Material objects do not appear to us in their entirety; vision does not perceive past the surface, touch does not perceive the interior - at least, not without comprehending the object and then interpreting the sensation. I can agree that space and time are abstract, and an external object lacks material existence if it lacks extension in both those dimensions. Hegel seems to look for truth in the sensations interpreted as an object - whether the exterior object, or the 'I', the sensor of the sensations. What Piaget demonstrates is that it is indeed because I have "developed myself or thought about it" that we attribute existence to an object independent of ourselves. This appears to be an elaboration of Descartes' cogito ergo sum.

92. But when we look carefully at this pure being which constitutes the essence of this certainty, and which this certainty pronounces to be its truth, we see that much more is involved. An actual sense-certainty is not mrerely this pure immediacy, but an instance of it. Among countless differences cropping up here we find in every case that the curcial one is that, in sense-certainty, pure being at once splits up into what we have called the two 'Thises', one 'This' as 'I', and the other 'This' as object. When we reflect on this difference, we find that neither one nor the other is only immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated: I have this certainty through the thing; and it, similarly, is in sense-certainty through something else, viz. through the 'I'.

The evidence is that persons who have developed to the point of conversing (using speech) will have gone through the development of object permanence. That may rescue the appeal to common experience of sense-certainty and "pure being" (though I personally don't find it very pure). Object permanence can be interpreted as "being". Our model of reality becomes more useful if we retain it beyond the current sensations, and thus the current sensations present an "instance" of sense-certainty. I interpret the phrase "pure immediacy" as "sensation". This paragraph, however, is emphasizing the components of "pure being", identified as "object" and "I". I understand it to claim that the connection creates certainty.

93. It is not just we who make this distinction between essence and instance, between immediacy and mediation; on the contrary, we find it within sense-certainty itself, and it is to be taken up in the form in which it is present there, not as we have just defined it. One of the terms is posited in sense-certainty in the form a a simple, immediate being, or as the essential and mediated, something which in sense-cerftainty is not in itself but through [the mediation of] an other, the 'I', a knowing which knows the object only because the object is, while the knowing may either be or not be. But the object is: it is what is true, or it is the essence. It is, regardless of whether it is known or not; and it remains, even if it is not known, whereas there is no knowledge if the object is not there.

So "just we" are prior to the more contingent "sense-certainty" containing distinctions between essence and instance, immediacy and mediation. From other reading, I have a glimmer of what is meant by "essence", but it could bear elaboration. To be clear, I agree that a model containing beings existing independently of my (temporarily(?)) existing self is more parsimonious than to model the self as the geocentric measure of the me-contingent universe (solipsism). "[T]here is no knowledge if the object is not there." is too broad, or too much is being stuffed into the word "knowledge". That there are infinitely many digits of the square root of two is an instance of knowledge, regardless of the square root's material existence. And it is true, regardless of your ability to kill those who affirm it (looking at you, Pythagoras). There is also possible knowledge of fictional entities. "Oliver Twist was a woman" cannot be other than a false statement unless you preface it with a denial that you are referring to a creation of Charles Dickens.

94. The question must therefore be considered whether in sense-certainty itself the object is in fact the kind of essence that sense-certainty proclaims it to be; whether this notion of it as the essence corresponds to the way it is present in sense-certainty. To this end, we have not to reflect on it and ponder what it might be in truth, but only to consider the way in which it is present in sense-certainty,

In other words, is sense-certainty fallible? Prima face, yes.

95. It is, then, sense-certainty itself that must be asked: 'What is the 'This?' If we take the 'This' in the twofold shape of its being, as 'Now' and as 'Here', the dialectic it has in it will receive a form as intelligible as the 'This' itself. To the question: 'What is Now?', let us answer, e.g., 'Now is Night.' In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale.

Taoists disagree thaat "a truth cannot lose anything by being written down." Pace, the word 'Now' is inherently temporally contingent, which I'm sure the next paragraphs will explore. And what is this word 'dialectic'? What did Hegel's original audience understand it to be? It has since become synonymous with Hegel and Hegel's interpreters, if nonetheless indeterminate.

96. The Now that is Night is preserved, i.e., it is treated as what it professes to be, as something that is; but it proves itself to be, on the contrary, something that is not. The Now does indeed preserve itself, but as something that is not Night; equally it preserves itself in the face of the Day that it now is, as something that is also not Day, in other words, as a negative in general. This self-preserving Now is, therefore, not immediate but mediated; for it is determined as a permanent and self-preserving Now through the fact that something else, viz. Day and Night, is not. As so determined, it is still just as simply Now as before, as little as Night and Day are its being, just as much also is it Day and Night; it is not in the least affected by this its other-being. A simple thing of thes kind which is through negation, which is neither This nor That, a not-This, and is with equal indifference This as well as That -- such a thing we call a universal. So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty.

These are are idiosyncratic uses of the words "negative" and "universal" (at least, to this ignorant layman), and thus the italicization. And that's OK; new thoughts need new words, even if they're spelled the same as old words.