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.
