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...