Freedom of self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness, from "Self-Consciousness" The Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY

B. Freedom of self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness (§§197-230)

Hegel begins by telling us that the dialectical progress that we readers saw in the slave is not something that the slave recognizes within himself (§197) but that this modality of slave-self-consciousness has an historical instantiation in Stoicism (§198). Stoic consciousness entails that only conscious thought abstracted from all aspects of our natural being (desires, animal functions, etc) is essential, all the rest is chaff (§§198-9). The stoic-consciousness treats this as freedom, but it is not, it is only the idea of freedom and one that is unable to pronounce authoritatively on truth or goodness because nothing external to consciousness can matter to it. The best it can do is to judge something as reasonable, a substitute which may be “uplifting” but is ultimately facile and “tedious” (§200). Stoicism “is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness” (§201).

“Scepticism is the realization of that of which Stoicism was only the Notion, and is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is” (§202). That sounds pretty good, but as always, will be found to not be enough. Sceptical-consciousness is a thorough-going “negative attitude toward otherness, to desire and work” (§202), this is a change from the Stoic’s mere disregard of it all as inessential. The skeptic experiences the freedom of thought as pure negativity but is still mired in the world and perforce must have beliefs about it. Hegel sees these beliefs as diverse and confused (§205). The sceptical-consciousness knows itself as dual (master and slave within itself) “which is essential in the Notion of Spirit” but is not yet unified (§206).

The unity of these aspects emerges in the Unhappy Consciousness which is “a single consciousness” that is not, to begin with “explicitly aware that this is its essential nature” (§207). The Unhappy Consciousness regards these two aspects as “Unchangeable (...) essential Being” and “Changeable” as “unessential” (§208). The Unhappy Consciousness is caught in a loop, it takes itself to be merely changeable being and sees the unchangeable as “an Alien Being” and “yet it is itself a simple, hence unchangeable, consciousness. This loop this is then when “one opposite does not come to rest in its opposite, but in it only produces itself afresh as an opposite”(§208). The dialectic which allows an escape from this vicious circle works like this; 1st the Unhappy Consciousness is opposed to the Unchangeable which simply sustains the conflict unless we move to the 2nd moment in which it learns that “individuality belongs to the Unchangeable itself” and thirdly it recognizes itself, in all it unique particularity as individual in the Unchangeable and thus in the mode of Spirit (§210). The unhappy consciousness is at this moment very close to what will have been its goal (when the book is done) but it fails to see it as such, these determinations are essential in Hegel’s view but this form of consciousness sees them as wholly contingent and the resultant form as “an opaque sensuous unit” (§212) dependent upon some impossibly remote past when an unchangeable individual was a concrete reality, that is it cannot face “the pure formless Unchangeable” and can only come into any relation with the “Unchangeable in its embodied or incarnate form” - i.e., Christ (§213). The Unhappy Consciousness has attained to both “pure thinking and particular individuality” but cannot reconcile the two and is instead stuck between these two positions unable to see that they are united and that this unity “is its own self” (§216). Its thinking is only “a movement towards thinking” which is “no more than the chaotic jingling of bells, or a mist of warm incense, a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion” (§217). It is the devotional attitude that seems the only possible embodiment the Unchangeable as other than itself and never anywhere present which makes it explicitly unhappy. It more everyday terms, it holds itself to a standard that it can only comprehend as impossible of attainment.

Master & Slave, from "Self-Consciousness" The Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY

A. Independence and dependence of self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage (§§178-96)
I am unsure what I have to add to what is already known about this very famous dialectical moment. Hegel opens with “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (§178). This is a crux of the issue, and is also the problem for those two beings who will emerge from this as master and slave. Each sees in the other a free subjectivity and thus what is needed to recognize their self as also being a free subjectivity. But the freedom of this other must be tested. At §186 Hegel reminds us that self-consciousness is “simple being-for-self” which must therefore exclude what is not itself. When two such (proto?)self-consciousnesses encounter one another each is “certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth” (§186). But this meeting is due to be conflictual because self-consciousness’s own “presentation of itself” (self-concept?) requires that it show “itself as the pure negation of its objective mode” (§187) that is, that it is not attached to life (recall that self-consciousness sees all that is external as irrelevant to its constitution when this chapter opened). Each then must prove to the other that life is not more valuable than their own free subjectivity. But when it gets down to it, one relents and submits to the mastery of the other. But, this “trial by death, however, does away with the truth that was supposed to have issued from it” (§188). The slave’s recognition is not enough, because the slave is not a free subject independent of the world of mere appearances. The master does not recognize the slave and recognition must be mutual. They “exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another” (§189). That these two are nonetheless two that are one is something that is foreclosed by both of them (§189) The master never has his self-consciousness recognized as he wished to have it be (§192) but the slave, by virtue of his labors for the master and his belief in the master as master embodies in the slave the “truth of pure negativity and being-for-self” that comes from the fear of death (§194). In time the slave overcomes the otherness of things upon which he labors and is able to create and learn from this process such that his self-consciousness is no longer opposed to this otherness (as it was to the otherness of the master) and as such the slave’s self-consciousness is more fully self-consciousness as a consequence of his servitude (§195-6).

The Truth of Self-Certainty, from Self-Consciousness, Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY (§§166-77)

This opening summation of where we have come to and overview of where this chapter will take us is very dense in content. What I take to the be most salient points are that throughout the stages of consciousness, the truth was always located outside the subject in the object. But with the appearance of infinity at the close of the last section, everything changes. Self-consciousness now is both subject as knower and its own object as what is known. It is only with self-consciousness that, for the first time, “the object corresponds to the concept” (§166). Self-consciousness depends upon an internal division (not unlike psyche & soma) which will be canceled later. That is, to take myself as the object of my knowledge, I insist upon this division, but when self-consciousness does this “what it distinguishes from itself is only itself as itself, the difference, as otherness, is immediately superseded for it” with the result that self-consciousness is initially only “the motionless tautology of: ‘I am I’” (§167). In the first moment of this internal division “self-consciousness is in the form of consciousness” and thus grasps this via sense-certain, perception and understanding, but in the second moment self-consciousness unifies itself as subject and object and relegates the external world to mere appearance (§167). Truth then, is internal to self-consciousness at this stage. In §168 Hegel tells us that taking the subject as object is the same as taking life as object, an object of “immediate desire” a “living thing” (§168). Life is a perpetual flux of becoming for which consciousness’ various concepts of the object were inadequate. Life is the object now and at the same time it is “a negative element” that is “desire” (§168). Life is thus the negative of self-consciousness itself, or consciousness and self-conscious opposed. With desire now as motive force, self-consciousness cannot find truth in an external object of dead matter, instead it requires another self-consciousness to mirror it back to itself. Here the effect of desire upon self-consciousness means that selfhood will be “an absolutely restless infinity” (§169) which we can see in Lacan’s notion of desire very clearly (though “desire” is not strictly equivalent for the two). As desirous beings we eat, drink, etc satisfying our desires directly and assert our individuality and agency in this process and doing so we also deny or disavow our absolute dependance upon the world as “the universal substance” of life (§171). That was simple desire or animal desire perhaps, but we also desire recognition and thus we require other self-consciousnesses (as we will see below).

The I of self-consciousness takes itself to be the absolute end of all activities and it is the measure of its world; the objects in the world are only what they are for desire, for this I, beyond that they are nothing (here I mean mere objects, not other subjects). Desire then is self as negativity relating to its world. But a “self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness” (§177) and it is not a self-consciousness without this other, so the recognition component of desire is crucial to show why it is only at this point in the book that we enter history per se.

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.