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...