Force and Understanding, section 3 of "Consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit

A. CONSCIOUSNESS (cont.)
III. FORCE AND THE UNDERSTANDING: APPEARANCE AND THE SUPERSENSIBLE W0RLD

In §§’s 132-42 the notion of force appears, which is initially a substantial being of sorts, but is reduced by the end to an insubstantial aspect of appearance. As with the last two sections, consciousness is here trying to locate truth in its most recent conceptualization of the object. So, if in sense-certainty “Seeing and Hearing have been lost to consciousness” and in perception “consciousness has arrived at thoughts” such that consciousness now has a concept of the object as an “unconditioned universal” (§132). So this newly conceived object “has returned into itself from its relation to an other and has thus become Notion in principle” but only “in principle” because the subject does not recognize itself in the object (§132). So consciousness has recognized instability in the object, an oscillation between it as a One and Many (§134). So if perception could only think the internal otherness and negation in the object as inessential until the moment when its perspective collapsed, understanding sees its internal otherness as essential and given to begin with. Force then is the very movement between One and Many, between recognizing the diverse properties as shared universals and then uniting them in a discrete object (§§’s 136-8). Thought is then force as well, the subject is the one who recognizes differences within a unity and the unity that is hidden behind differences (though it seems that understanding is not clear on this yet). At the same time, force is a physical notion, it is both the muscle power that allows me to leap into the air and the gravitational pull that brings me back to the ground. But this reciprocal canceling of force doesn’t seem to embrace cause or purpose. And the idea itself breaks up into two parts, force as what we see in actions like jumping and falling back to earth and force as something which seems to lie behind all such examples and which makes sense of them (§§’s 141-2).

The second movement of this section is found in §§’s 143-53 where consciousness posits a supersensible world, a beyond which Hegel calls an “incomplete idealism.” This beyond is really the interior of things, but it has been objectified or reified as lying beyond the world of appearances while somehow also being their essence, the core reality which sustains them as lawful (§143). The understanding posits the law-like supersensible world as the positive truth behind the world of appearances (§144). This beyond which is actually the inner truth of appearances is not a positive but a negative (§146-7). But understanding-consciousness sees this beyond as the realm of law, a stable fixed realm which governs all the change and merely apparent flux (§§148-50). Beyond the specific laws Hegel sees the principle of law as a necessity (§151). Specific laws are always for Hegel an expression of a deeper law he gives some physical “laws” as examples and shows the more encompassing law that sustains them (§§152-3).

Understanding having posited force, was driven to posit laws, and then in a third movement here §§’s 154-65 explanation enters the account as scientific understanding (dependent upon law) and tries to mediate between essence and appearance or between law and force. It appears that law might be something that we posit rather than something in the things considered (§154) but this cannot be solely the work of the subject the object is itself caught up in the laws and the supersensible world we posited (§155). But this assertion of a realm of law is tainted by the shiftiness or flux of the world of forces that it was trying to explain. This leads to the idea of the “inverted world” (§§157-9) which runs something like this: we have the sense-world, and then the supersensible world of laws that explains it, but then we posit a 2nd supersensible world which inverts the 1st one (as the 1st was already an inversion of the sense world which contains it as well. So this inverted world likewise contains the preceding two and unites the oppositions of all into “Infinity” (§§160-1). All of this then would be “explanation” (?)... it seems so.* In the final paragraphs (§§163-6) Hegel tells us (we post-Kantian philosophers and observers of the progression of Spirit) that Understanding still has not recognized how it, as subject, is entwined within all of this and that the world is not external to it, though this realization is coming...

* The “inverted world” stuff is some of the least comprehensible to me. At one level I feel like positing the inverted world is simply there to allow Hegel to pull off the final aufhebung so that we can move to the next form of consciousness. But then the conclusion of it, by ditching the dualism and reinstating the supersensible into the interior of things seems somehow ‘right’ to me - or at least more tenable than the dualist view (with its echoes of Platonic forms and Kantian noumena and so forth). What I lack is a clear sense of why Understanding is compelled to posit the inverted world at all.

Perception, section 2 of "Consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit

A. CONSCIOUSNESS (cont.)
II. PERCEPTION: OR THE THING AND DECEPTION

The object, which had been radically particular for sense-certainty has become a thing which unites some set of universal properties. The donut is now a torus, it is golden brown on the outside, it has a specific size and weight, and many other properties as well. Once consciousness transcends sense-certainty it takes universality as a given and perceives the universality of every thing it considers. These properties are, for perception, properties of the thing and they remain properties of it regardless of and unrelated to the subject who discerns them (§113).

But this concept of the object will also collapse (§§115-7). The reason why is that all that perception can get hold of is these properties, and not the thing in which they inhere. The properties cannot be the thing itself (being a torus is true of both the donut and an inner tube) and yet for perception what else is the thing but the unity of these properties?

Perception then has to tun to the subject and see if the object can be maintained somehow by finding where it is that the subject, the perceptual knower, has been in error. Here perception has recourse to the idea of primary and secondary properties in hopes that while some are shared that one might be revealed that is inarguably only of this unique particular thing (§119). But this endeavor also fails as every property, by virtue of its universality, cannot be the one true and absolute property of this particular thing. To assume that there are primary properties that cannot be perceived is a self-refuting claim as it situates these properties outside of perception and there is then nothing for these properties to be attributed to. A second attempt is made to ground this concept of the object; now perception attempts to claim that the object is a One that unites all these properties in just this singular fashion and coherent fashion in the perception of the subject (§119). Here though we are very close to where we were with sense-certainty trying to delimit truth to only this relation of this I looking at this object. The problem here is that we must cut this One (donut) off totally from all others such that it is what it is utterly in being what it is (making it a thing with properties that somehow does not have properties) and yet we cannot but perceive that there are properties shared. The properties of a thing allow us both to recognize it as distinct and to differentiate it from others and we cannot close off either side of these determinations. So the subject of perception must maintain that the object is a One that unites the Many (properties) coherently, that is without dissolving into a mere collection of properties without any one-ness to be found. The third attempt to solve this problem claims that the internal differences in the object have been misrecognized, they are not essential to the object but appear only when it is compared to others and thus are relational issues (§124). This is what Hegel has in mind in §123 where he says that the unity of the object is for perception “disturbed by other things.”

But this attempt to make otherness inessential fails. Hegel summarizes the failure of this last attempt in §128 where he writes “the object is in one and the same respect the opposite of itself: it is for itself, insofar as it is for another, and, it is for another, insofar as it is for itself.” Which is to say that the thing cannot be what it is unless it is distinguished from other things, its otherness from them is part of what constitutes it. This might be stated negatively as well by saying that strict being-for-self is self-refuting as it denies otherness, and if the thing’s others are negated as other then it loses all distinction and independence as a thing unto itself (§126). As for perception the object and the knowing subject are mutual others, the results reached here invalidate both the concept of the object and that of the subject once again driving the progress of spirit onward yet again...

Sense-Certainty, section 1 of "Consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit

A. CONSCIOUSNESS
I. SENSE-CERTAINTY: OR THE 'THIS' AND 'MEANING'

Sense-certainty first situates truth in the object to be known. This donut right here, right now. Hegel focuses not so much on the object known as the designation of it as this object found here and right now, showing that the idea of a “this” always requires that it be here & now, but that all three terms betray the absolutely particular immediacy that they are thought to mean when uttered. Hegel gives examples (night & day, tree & house) but reminds us in §97 that “language is more truthful” as we cannot operate in language without universals. We are compelled to recognize that this, like now, and here are all universals, terms used to point at a particular, but which cannot themselves be reduced to any particular and which thus embody something of the “negative in general” (§96) in that by transcending the particular they also negate it. What I claimed as an is has become a was, and my claim, though spoken with the conviction of its particular truth has lost any grasp of particularity by being shown to depend upon universal considerations.

When the object fails to anchor the truth for sense-certainty, it turns back upon itself as subject, assured that this I that knows is at least certain of itself. But I, like this, is a shifter - it points to a particular concrete subject when spoken by such a subject. Here self-referential certainty my sense of myself as knower is found to depend on universals whose full scope is denied by sense-certainty trying to maintain its faith only in the here and now of near infinite particularity as immediate truth.

Once the subject’s certainty has collapsed, truth is looked for in the relation of subject to object. Truth was “expelled from the object” and “driven back to the ‘I’” (§100) but there was no certainty assured there either. Truth then must be right here in the now in which I as subject know the donut as object if I “stick firmly to one immediate relation” (§104). Surely this relation is unique, immediate and particular whether object and subject are dependent upon universals or not. But this simply restages the same problem for sense-certainty as this relation can only be one of pointing and thus a reiteration of this in a new guise. Also notable is that while refuting the object and the subject in nonetheless maintains them within its new claim about relation which also fails.

Sense-certainty can only maintain itself by denying time, process,  and mediation (language for instance). But in this third moment it becomes clear that the supposed truths of sense-certainty presupposed a universality without realizing it, that the various heres, nows and thises were each denoting only “a mediated simplicity, or a universality” (§98). As such a new concept of subject and knower are required...

The "Introduction" to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

§§73-7 are concerned with knowledge, specifically as “apparent knowledge.” Hegel replays many philosophical perspectives here without naming them as such. What he finds faulty with the ways that knowledge has been conceived are these:... Whether knowledge is an instrument for relating to the world, or a medium through which we understand the world, then the world in either case must have a different character than knowledge. There is then always a gap of sorts between knower and world, or better said, between knowing and the object to be known. This would be a sort of basic “realism” that he is criticizing. The real problem here (which is a consequence of the dualism implied) is that if we cannot really know the object but only what our medium or instrument can reveal of it, then we must also ask whether we have any direct access to the medium or instrument as well. Thus there is an infinite regress involved in thinking about knowledge in this way. This epistemological problem “goes all the way down.” This is most clearly given in §74. If we assume subject/object dualism this epistemological swamp is unavoidable. Modern philosophy (think Descartes) falls into this trap by assuming that it knows the mind better than it knows the world, that is, that we can know our thoughts directly (rather than inferring them) but that outside of the mind there is great uncertainty. Such a way of starting out that reaches this impasse every time (thus Kant’s phenomena/noumena divide for instance). The consequence of Hegel’s thought here is that epistemology alone can never allow us to reach the absolute. Epistemology is stuck in a neurotic quandry, it wants to know before it can know.

In §76 Hegel begins to give his solution to this problem which is science or better ‘systematic science’ (to use the German, there can be no real Wissen that is not Wissenschaft). Where philosophy had hitherto tended to divide sharply ideas from appearances, Hegel recognizes that philosophy and science must begin from appearances and that the distinction between knowledge and appearance is internal to the world of appearances itself. Science though, gets better, it corrects itself and does arrive at ways of distinguishing appearance from reality - and, as will be thematic throughout this book - this discovering of error is crucial to moving forward and moving forward will allow us to discover truths which will themselves be temporal (not timeless).

§78 (and after) give us “natural consciousness” which we must understand not as ‘common sense’ but as a form of knowing which is presumed to be ahistorical and asocial and which anchors our basic sense of our self as situated, it is our stance toward the world in its immediacy and seeming sufficiency. We try to sustain this, to prove it to ourselves as an adequate knowledge of the objects it knows. There is an erotics here too as our attachment (cathexis) to these ideas sustains us as such. That we find that our concept of knowing does not prove adequate to our concept of the object of our knowing is what leads to the “despair” Hegel mentions repeatedly (akin to when a quilting point ceases to quilt and our fantasy collapses).

While Hegel throughout requires skepticism, he faults Descartes and the Empiricists (it seems) for assuming that they can know their own minds. This too must be doubted. So the progress of the Phenomenology is both bildung and via negativa. It is positively accumulative and insistently negativizing.

Hegel is also parting ways with logic as it has been thought since Aristotle (and still is generally). That is, if a theory is found to be contradictory, for the average logician, this means it is fundamentally wrong. But Hegel in this instance is working more like how a natural scientist works in assuming that every theory will face exceptions and find internal contradictions, but the scientist does not discard everything, rather he tries to correct the theory so that it still explains what it had explained, but now accounts for the variance and provides an explanation of why the preceding version of the account failed to do so. The new account that is produced to solve the issues in the previous account is seen (though only in retrospect) as necessary. It is easy to overdetermine this ‘necessity’ if one doesn’t abandon the logic that Hegel is distancing himself from. That is, if in version 1 of the theory contradictions are discovered, and version 2 resolves them, there is nothing which requires that there might not be other versions which might do so as well, as such version 2 is not necessary in a logical sense, only sufficient. What Hegel seems to be saying is that version 2, while merely sufficient at the time as a solution to the problem, is then built upon until at last the end is reached, and from that vantage it will have become necessary. In Bernstein’s audio lectures he quotes Gillian Rose as having said that “Going forward the Phenomenology is a gamble and retrospectively it is a necessity.” (This is not unlike beginning a sentence, where the punctuation will retroactively constitute what it will have meant.)

§80, here we get some idea, at least formally speaking, of what the “end” toward which knowledge progresses must mean. “...where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion.” Until such a point is reached, there will be no “satisfaction.”

§81-9 are concerned then with the problem of the criterion of truth and how Hegel overcomes it. This was foreshadowed in the “knowing before you can know” above. Hegel solves this problem not by providing an answer but by reframing the question. The dialectical method will be the solution to this false problem. Hegel suggests that all consciousness is minimally self-consciousness, and all self-consciousness requires that I can distinguish myself from the objects I know, so, every form of consciousness has inbuilt within it a concept of knowing and a concept of the object that such knowing requires and an idea about how these two are related. The way the Phenomenology progresses then is by each form of consciousness being driven to despair by realizing that its concept of the object and knowing are inadequate and providing a better concept of each. The dialectical method is thus both how it is that we reach this despair and how we emerge from it.

To conclude with the Introduction we should note that what is unique in Hegel’s thought relative to virtually all philosophy before him, is that rather than seeing appearances as the obstacle to knowledge of essence or Idea or whatever, he makes it the only access we can ever have that could get us there.

Is there a DISSERTATION in here somewhere?

The time is fast approaching when I will need to have a topic for a dissertation and I can at this moment only admit to my uncertainty about what that topic will be. I had entertained the idea, prior to returning from Germany, that it would concern itself with 'discourse' in some sense - this on account of my thesis having been on Lacan's theory of discourse, the prospect at that time of working more with discourse ala Laclau, and because I had tentatively explored having Angermüller as the Mainz-member for my dissertation committee. But, while I retain interest in Lacan's thought about this matter, I have too many disputes with Laclau's (to my mind totalizing) tendencies in that regard and while what Angermüller does with discourse is intriguing, I cannot see myself developing or adapting his approach to my areas of interest.

The thought then emerges that I should foreground those areas of attention and interest in my ruminations on this problem. Here, I can at least say something about my hopes. I want to develop some sort of theoretical model or collection of concepts that will be applicable with whatever situational modifications to; poetry (of the sort that I care about); fiction (and here a canonical, if modern or contemporary author seems a smart choice); film (not Lynch or Hitchcock but something cool still), and; art (possibly performance art in some sense, though object art is also a viable option).

& I then wonder if my interest in the body might be of help in that. My interests here are all over the map (from sound poetry to fashion, the body "overwritten with signifiers" to the voice as object), and that is both energizing and somewhat discouraging. There is a body of scholarship on the "body" that is of a size already that it would take years to begin to feel I had a good grasp on the debates, issues and theories already out there. Some narrowing and pruning would have to be done to even consider this as a reasonable possibility in the time remaining to me to complete a PhD, and the question must be asked as well; do I want to use the entire time I have to do that or might it not be better to just get the damned dissertation done? 

So, in a very lame attempt to narrow the field, while retaining the body and adding other areas of extant interest and curiosity, I have the following possible knot of things out of which to derive a central question (or questions) around which to structure a book (which is how I prefer to think of the diss for a variety of reasons). 

Language Embodied / Embodied Language 

• What psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan preeminently, have to contribute to understanding the body's imbrication in language. 
• Voice, a unique site of interface between the two, particularly at its more extreme points or edges - sound poetry, glossolalia, aphasias, psychosis as well as in modes which diminish the sense of subjective engagement as with routinized and depersonalized speech or parapraxes as discussed by Freud and others.
• Voice as object.
• Speech (parole) vs Langue, as well as Speech as semiosis (ala Peirce).

It seems to me that this offers at least the potential to allow for some discussion of art (if I limit to performance art or sound art that uses voice), film (obviously, though the devil will be in the details), fiction (this is less obvious, perhaps there are pioneering studies to be made of author's reading their work? the text-heavy and disembodied nature of most fiction is harder to envision in this daydream I am having), and, without any difficulty poetry (the biggest challenge here perhaps being that I've tended to avoid writing about the stuff I love the most, not wanting to link it to the dynamics of the academic economy).