Heidegger, Hegel, & the Completion of Western Metaphysics
Part 4

4,859 words

Portrait of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Parts 1-3 here

Alpha and Omega

In the last installment, I introduced readers to Hegelian dialectic, to Hegel’s “objective idealism,” and to the major dialectical transitions in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The text consists of three principal divisions, which form a dialectical triad: “Consciousness,” “Self-Consciousness,” and “Reason.” In this entry, we will consider the argument of the Phenomenology in more detail through a discussion of its beginning point, “sense-certainty” (sinnliche Gewissheit). We have already established that the Phenomenology concludes with “absolute knowing.”

In Hegel, the end always returns to the beginning, and the beginning anticipates the end. In The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel writes that “Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle that closes upon itself,” and that “The whole presents itself . . . as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its peculiar elements constitutes the whole Idea – which equally appears in each single one of them.”[1] This means we can expect that in some way absolute knowing is prefigured in sense-certainty. As one of the forms of consciousness that is left behind by the dialectic, sense-certainty aims at something only truly achieved in absolute knowing. Thus, a consideration of the Phenomenology’s beginning can deepen our understanding of its central purpose.

Sense-certainty is the first category of “Consciousness.” As discussed in the last installment, “Consciousness” deals with knowledge of objects where these are uncritically taken by spirit to be fully distinct from the subject. Hegel will argue that absolute knowing, by contrast, involves the overcoming of the distinction between subject and object. It is the realization that objects are not, in fact, fully distinct from spirit – though not in the sense entailed by so-called “subjective idealism.” Each of the forms of “Consciousness” somehow tries and fails at knowledge of objects.

Hegel introduces the chapter on sense-certainty (titled, more fully, “Sense-Certainty: or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’ [Meinen]”) with the following words:

The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself.[2]

What Hegel means by “immediate” (unmittelbar) is “direct.” The opposite of the immediate is the “mediated” (mittelbar), or “indirect.” If I have never met Georg and know of him only through his friend Friedrich, then my knowledge of Georg is “mediated” by Friedrich; it is through or by means of Friedrich and is not direct acquaintance. If I am directly acquainted with Georg then my knowledge of him is “immediate” (just in the sense of not being mediated by another person). These are important concepts for Hegel, which show up again and again in his work. Thus, sense-certainty is direct sensory knowledge of objects. And in the final sentence of the above quotation, when Hegel says that our approach to sense-certainty must be “immediate or receptive,” he means that we must take sense-certainty as it is and see how the concept develops itself as we examine it.

Ordinary persons speaking from the standpoint of the naïve and unphilosophical “natural consciousness” (see the previous installment), are inclined to take sense-certainty not only as the most basic form of knowledge but also as the truest. We tend to believe, in other words, that when we behold an object using the five senses, this is the most basic and authentic way in which something can be known. “Seeing,” as we say, “is believing.” I say I want to “see it with my own eyes.” Hegel argues, however, that sense-certainty not only provides no truth, it is a completely empty, contentless form of false knowledge.

All that sense-certainty conveys is, in effect, “it is.” Hegel writes, “All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being [Sein] of the thing.”[3] So, sense-certainty registers the “being” of things, where this is understood simply to mean their sheer thereness. I train my eyes on this coffee cup to my right; I register, or sense-certainty registers, that it is there; it is. Commenting on this section of the Phenomenology, Heidegger writes that, “The truth of sense-certainty is always this being [das Seiende] which sense-certainty means; and sense-certainty means it, this, as what is extant; it means it, this, which is. The ‘is’ is the statement and the truth of sense-certainty. Sense-certainty states the extantness of what is extant, or to put it in Hegel’s terminology, it states being [Sein].”[4]

We will do well to keep this beginning point of the Phenomenology in mind when we turn to the beginning of the Logic. In that text, the first category is “pure being” (reines Sein), where “being” is understood to convey the pure immediacy of things – in other words, just what sense-certainty experiences in the Phenomenology. This is not, however, Hegel’s answer to the question “what is being?” We do not, in other words, get a true sense of Hegel’s ontology in the first sections of these texts. This is because Hegel will argue in both that the first category is the emptiest and least true.

Both sense-certainty and “pure being” turn out to be empty and contentless. The remainder of the Phenomenology can be read as a series of further attempts to encounter true being, culminating in absolute knowing (which succeeds in this endeavor). Heidegger writes that “the Phenomenology of Spirit begins with the poorest and most untrue shape of consciousness, with ‘sense-certainty,’ and ends with the shape of absolute self-knowing of spirit, i.e., absolute metaphysics.”[5] The Logic has a corresponding structure, and constitutes an ontology: “pure being” is the poorest and emptiest account of being that we could give. The final category of the Logic, Idea, is the richest and truest. But let us stick to the Phenomenology for now and not get ahead of ourselves.

The Critique of Sense-Certainty

Why does Hegel think that, as Heidegger puts it, sense-certainty is the “poorest and most untrue shape of consciousness”? Note that if Hegel is right, he has stood “commonsense” on its head. As noted, commonsense (or natural consciousness) takes sense-certainty to be the truest form of knowing. But what does sense-certainty actually convey? It merely conveys “it is” – which isn’t saying much. You might protest and say “Sense-certainty conveys much more than that. It not only tells us that this here thing ‘is,’ it also tells us that it is a coffee cup, that it is white, that it is ceramic, that it was made in China, etc.” Hegel answers, however, that these are all judgements about this thing that “is,” involving the application of abstract concepts (where a judgement is just any proposition of the form “x is y”). And the moment we make a judgment about the object we immediately move beyond the level of sense-certainty.

For example, if I say “this is a coffee cup” I have moved well beyond the level of bare sensory immediacy or givenness. Now I am speaking in terms of universals: “coffee,” for example. I know that this is a coffee cup even if I can see that there is no coffee in the cup right now. In identifying it as “a coffee cup” I have thus obviously moved beyond the realm of what is immediately available to sense. Calling it “a cup” also takes us beyond sensory immediacy. “Cup” is a universal; it is an idea. I know that there are many other things we could call cups. Indeed, I derived my knowledge of what a cup is from other such objects, long before I encountered the one that now sits to my right. In calling this here thing “a cup,” I am therefore referring beyond it to what does not appear, right now, to sensory awareness.

The same goes for calling it “white”: there are other white things, and I learned to call them white before I saw this cup, and I learned the word “white” from other people. Thus, calling the cup “white” is to refer beyond the cup to an entire social context and to history, including the history of language (how we got from Proto-Germanic *hwītaz to “white”). Ditto saying it is “ceramic” and “made in China”: these too catapult us beyond sensory immediacy; indeed, the latter designation takes us, in our understanding, beyond this here cup and to the other side of the world.

It looks like bare and basic sensory immediacy itself doesn’t convey any real knowledge at all. Knowledge seems to happen in going beyond immediacy. Naïvely, we believe that in sense-certainty we grasp the object – we believe we have it, we know it in the truest and most authentic sense. But just registering the object in its immediacy is not to know it at all. And, as we have seen, the moment we try to say what the thing is – i.e., the moment we actually seem to know something about it – we are carried beyond sensory immediacy. Even calling it “this here thing” is subject to the same problems discussed above (what is a “thing”? Isn’t this a universal as well?).

Indeed, even calling it “this” fails to grasp the object, to bring it into our ken. Right now “this” refers to the coffee cup. A moment from now “this” refers to the spoon I remove from the cup, the new object of sensory immediacy for me. “This” too is a concept, a universal, one with no specificity at all. Suppose I really try to pin the cup down by calling it “this here now.” But “now,” of course, changes. Hegel asks us to put this to the test. Suppose we say, correctly, “Now it is night.” The truth of it, in the moment, is undeniable. But let’s write “Now it is night” somewhere and put it in a safe place. Come back to what we have written eight hours later, and this undeniable “truth” is now completely false.

The result of Hegel’s analysis is that sense-certainty is shown not to provide us with any true knowledge at all. In other words, the direct confrontation with objects in their sensory immediacy on its own conveys no truth. Even the idea of this direct confrontation emerges as murky at best. As we have seen, the moment we try to register this immediacy in thoughts or words we move beyond the immediate and to concepts that mediate our knowledge of things given to the senses. Hegel’s account is relatively clear – but it is also puzzling. Arguing that sense-certainty provides no real knowledge is like shooting ducks in a barrel: it is not that difficult for Hegel to make his case. Thus, we have to ask what the real point of this discussion has been. What is the larger significance of sense-certainty?

To see this, we have to identify what sense-certainty is aiming at. We could, of course, simply say “knowledge,” but let us make matters more explicit. What is it that sense-certainty believes, falsely, that it accomplishes? It believes that it grasps the object (1) directly (in unmediated fashion); (2) truly (it believes it knows the object “as it really is”); and (3) in its individuality – it believes that the objects given in sense are “individuals” and that sense-certainty grasps them in their individuality. All these claims are false. As we have seen, the “direct” grasp of the object in bare sense-certainty is no grasp at all; it is not knowledge. Sense-certainty does not know the object “as it really is,” for to speak of what something is is to go beyond sensed immediacy and to draw on conceptual knowledge. Thus, sense-certainty cannot grasp the object in its sheer individuality either, because all attempts to do so utilize universals and thus transcend the given, individual object.

Though sense-certainty fails to deliver knowledge, it provides us with a sketch in absolutely essential terms of what we are ultimately aiming at in our desire for knowledge. We are aiming at a direct and total grasp of an individual object (where “object” is construed broadly). All consciousness is “oppositional”: it involves a subject confronting an object in its otherness; it involves an object standing opposed to a subject. In seeking knowledge, what subjectivity aims at, in one way or another, is to cancel this opposition between self and an opposing other. This is characteristic of all conscious forms of life, not just of human beings. One way to cancel the opposition of the object is to destroy it – to obliterate it, such that only the subject is left standing. Another is by eating it. Still another is by knowing it.

In all three of these cases, the opposition between subject and object is cancelled by elevating the subject over the object. In both eating and knowing, the object is absorbed into the subject. If I eat the turkey or drink the coffee, it not only isn’t there anymore, it is transformed into myself. (As Feuerbach said, Der Mensch ist was er isst: man is what he eats.) But knowledge is something similar. To truly know the object is to make it no longer other; to subsume it within our concepts. This is another way in which the opposition between subject and object is overcome.

Unlike destroying and eating, when we know the object it is left standing. But its alienness, its otherness is cancelled. Of course, we could respond to this by saying that, in fact, the otherness of the object is merely reduced, not cancelled. We might aim at the overcoming of the subject-object distinction through knowing the object, but the end at which we aim is ever-receding; we never actually get there. This was precisely the position of Fichte – but Hegel rejects this. He holds that complete and total knowledge of an object is possible. To be more specific, he believes that direct, total grasp of an object in its individuality is possible. He believes that it is possible to know an object in such a way that nothing about the object escapes consciousness.

Absolute Knowing as Knowing the Absolute

This will surely seem incredible, and we might respond with the following weighty objection: “Is total knowledge of an object in its individuality even conceivable? After all, objects are objects because they are something distinct from the subject. And this distinctness shows itself in the fact that while aspects of an object become present or known to me, other aspects are always absent or unknown. The object resists efforts to know it totally, just as it resists efforts to manipulate or change it totally. It is this resistance that constitutes, phenomenologically, the objectivity of the object – its being, in other words, a thing separate from me. If an object could become totally present and manipulable it would no longer be an ob-ject at all. It would be experienced as continuous with the subject. The very idea of total knowledge of an object is therefore a contradiction in terms, and inconceivable.”

All of the above is completely correct – but it is not a problem for Hegel. What sense-certainty aims at – primitively and naively – is achieved in absolute knowing, which will be immediate (i.e., unmediated) and total awareness of an object as it really is, in its individuality. What is that object? It is Hegel’s Absolute. We have spoken of absolute knowing several times already in this series. We have said that in absolute knowing the subject-object distinction is overcome; that we come to see the subject in the object, and vice versa. Now we can also state the obvious: absolute knowing means knowing the Absolute.

If you have heard anything at all about Hegel, you have heard that his philosophy has an Absolute. But what is that? Quite simply, it is the whole, which we have discussed already in this series. The whole is everything that exists – literally everything, with nothing left out – considered as a One. As we have said before, the whole is not a heap. It is an organic totality, a systematic whole, that can be understood on analogy with a living organism. Each part of the whole is what it is in relation to all the others and thus the being of each is “founded” on all the others. And the being of the whole is founded on the systematic relationship of its parts.

The whole is an object, because it is the object of our knowledge – absolute knowledge. Further, it is one object – it is a thing or an individual. Why? Because though it is many it is a One of many in just the same way that I, as an organism, am many yet one. (When I leave the room, no one says “there they go” as if I were a heap of organs; they say “one [person] has left.”) And, Hegel will argue, total knowledge of this One is possible. He is not saying that exhaustive knowledge of each and every tadpole and rhododendron is possible. He is saying that knowledge of the whole is possible, of the One. This is knowledge, in other words, of how it all hangs together – what connects every tadpole and rhododendron and makes everything, in short, one.

Further, knowledge of the Absolute will be immediate. In other words, it will be direct and unmediated. Sense-certainty aims at this, of course, and fails. Commonsense will surely balk at this claim on behalf of absolute knowing. “After all,” the objection will go, “this knowledge of the whole sounds like a purely intellectual knowledge, hence it must be thoroughly mediated and indirect – mediated by conceptual understanding.” But Hegel turns this assumption on its head as well.

Natural consciousness unfailingly thinks that direct, immediate knowledge would have to be sensory knowledge. But we have seen that this belief cannot stand up to criticism. Normally, we understand that “conceptual knowledge” involves “applying” concepts (as predicates) to subjects, as when I say “this cup is white,” or “this is a cup.” Absolute knowing, by contrast, is a very special kind of “conceptual knowledge” that does not apply concepts to objects at all, but instead moves within the systematic interconnections of concepts themselves, watching as they display their relationships to philosophical consciousness.

Thus, absolute knowing is a kind of intellectual intuition: a non-sensory form of direct perception, as strange and contradictory as that may sound. Absolute knowing can deliver immediate knowledge of the one, true individual, the Absolute, because there is nothing that could mediate that knowledge. The Absolute is the whole: there is nothing outside of it. Hence there is nothing that exists apart from the Absolute that could mediate our knowledge of it. Knowledge of the Absolute would have to be immediate, or it could be nothing at all.

In every way, therefore, absolute knowing claims to deliver exactly what sense-certainty tries and fails to deliver: the immediate and total grasp of an individual (in this case, the One). Thus, the end of the Phenomenology returns to the beginning. As Heidegger puts it, “the Absolute is already with us, i.e., it is already in the most primitive shape of consciousness, and our cognition is the ray that touches us as the absolute truth.”[6] However, one might respond to the foregoing with a further objection: “This ‘absolute knowledge’ would not be very ‘absolute’ at all. It would purely be knowledge of an abstraction – ‘the One’ – while real, individual beings, tadpoles and rhododendrons, would remain a mystery for it. Basically, we are still where Kant put us: confined to knowing the appearances of things, while what they are in themselves – i.e., what they really are – remains impenetrable. So much for ‘absolute knowing.’”

As we might expect, Hegel has an answer for this as well. The objection speaks from the standpoint of natural consciousness, which is accustomed to thinking of the One as an abstraction, and of tadpoles and rhododendrons as the real individual beings. But, yet again, Hegel completely overturns “commonsense.” For him, the whole, the Absolute, is the one, true individual, and “individuals” like tadpoles and rhododendrons are “abstractions” from the whole. Why? Because, as we have said, they have their being through belonging to the whole, apart from which they are nothing at all (as a hand separated from the body, to use Aristotle’s famous example, is effectively no longer a hand). Thus, even sense-certainty’s conviction that what it confronts is an individual is false.

Further, contra Kant, Hegelian philosophy makes possible knowledge of things as they are in themselves. This follows as a straightforward implication of what has just now been said. Things “as they are in themselves” means, again, things “as they really are” – which means the true being of things. Hegel takes Kant’s claim to imply that the true being of things always remains unknowable to us. But if the universe is a whole and “things,” to repeat, have their being through their belonging to the whole, and we can know the nature of the whole, then we can know the being of all things; we can know what they really are, “in themselves” or in their essential being.

The being of every tadpole and rhododendron just is the whole, or their relationship to the whole; their place within it. There are many ways to express this. We can say that “individual things” are reflections of the whole – or moments, or aspects. But perhaps the best way to put it is to say that individual things are appearances of the whole. Thus, the things we encounter around us are ways in which the whole is appearing to us. Kant is doubly wrong: appearances do not cut us off from being or the inner essence of things. That inner essence is appearing to us all the time, through the rich variety of the world around us. Appearances are not illusory or misleading. What appears in appearance is precisely the being of beings.

Absolute Knowing and Self-Consciousness

We have seen that the end of the Phenomenology returns to the beginning, and delivers what the beginning, sense-certainty, falsely promises. In moving directly from beginning to end, however, we have skipped an enormous amount. The section of the text called “Consciousness,” in which sense-certainty is the first category, is succeeded by “Self-Consciousness,” then by “Reason,” which culminates in absolute knowing. Some of the most famous and widely discussed material in the Phenomenology occurs in “Self-Consciousness,” including the “master-slave dialectic” and Hegel’s discussions of stoicism, skepticism, and the “unhappy consciousness.”

Sadly, we cannot cover everything in a short introduction such as this, so I have focused upon the outcome of the Phenomenology. Those of my readers who are more baffled than anything else by the foregoing discussion of absolute knowing will be pleased to hear that we will return to this topic – in one way or another – again and again. For while the Phenomenology ends with a description of absolute knowing, the actual “work” of absolute knowing takes place in the development of the system Logic-Philosophy of Nature-Philosophy of Spirit. We will turn to Hegel’s Science of Logic in the next installment.

Before leaving the Phenomenology, however, we have one crucial question left to discuss, and it has to do with the relation of the Absolute, as we have described it above, to self-consciousness. A moment ago, we mentioned the chief divisions of the Phenomenology, and how we have given short shrift to the middle one. “Consciousness” as sense-certainty begins the Phenomenology, and “Reason” as absolute knowing ends it. But, as we discussed in an earlier installment, “Reason” is supposed to be a “synthesis” or “reconciliation” of the antitheses “Consciousness” and “Self-Consciousness.”

When we discussed this issue before, we said that in “Reason,” specifically in absolute knowing, we realize that the object – indeed, the “objective world” as a totality – is a reflection of ourselves. In knowing the world we are, in a sense, knowing ourselves. In knowing ourselves we are also knowing the world. “Consciousness” and “Self-Consciousness” coincide in “Reason.” In this installment, however, we said that absolute knowing means knowing an “object,” an individual, called the Absolute, or “the whole.” Some of my readers may not see the connection between these ideas. How is knowing the Absolute simultaneously a self-knowing, a knowing of ourselves in the object? (Other readers, of course, may already have seen the answer to this question.)

In speaking of the Absolute we have said that it is a One that comprises all that exists. Within this one, all is organically connected so that each “part” necessarily depends on the others, and the whole is what it is through the unity of the parts. But what is the principle of this unity? What is responsible for the holism of the whole? The answer to this question, quite simply, is self-consciousness. It is self-consciousness that makes the universe whole. It is self-consciousness, indeed, that makes the world go round (as Aristotle was the first to realize, long before Hegel).

We have seen that the Phenomenology is an account of how all forms of human consciousness as well as culture aim at an absolute self-consciousness. Thus, self-consciousness is the principle that determines all of human spirit in its rich history. Hegel is going to go on to show in his system of philosophy that nature itself is intelligible as a “great chain of being” approximating to self-consciousness. In other words, all forms of material being, living and non-living, are intelligible as “anticipations” of the perfect self-relation, the coincidence of subject and object, to be found in absolute spirit – i.e., true self-consciousness. Thus, it is self-consciousness that is the telos of existence itself, and as the telos – the “that for the sake of which” – self-consciousness is the organizing principle of all of existence, of the whole.

There is thus no disconnect between the idea of absolute knowing as knowledge of the whole, and absolute knowing as absolute self-consciousness. There appears to be a disconnect since the former characterization suggests that absolute knowing knows an “object” called the Absolute (and, indeed, I have spoken that way), and the latter characterization suggests that absolute knowing is knowing ourselves. But these amount to the exact same thing. To know the whole is to know that it is a reflection of ourselves: the world exists so that self-conscious spirit can come to be in it.

Again, all natural forms are approximations to self-conscious spirit (in a manner we will discuss when we turn to the Philosophy of Nature). Thus, self-conscious spirit is the being of the whole. To know the whole is to know ourselves, to see ourselves, as Hegel says “in everything in heaven and on earth.”[7] But we can equally well say that to know ourselves is to know the whole, to see how our existence is the inevitable outcome of the universe itself – the universe come to consciousness of itself.

Knowing the absolute is knowing an “object,” but not in the conventional sense described earlier in which an object always stands “opposed” to a subject. In absolute knowing, the standard “opposition of consciousness” is overcome, and the object coincides with the subject. In absolute knowing our object is the whole, but to know the whole is to know that it has its being in and by means of the coming-to-be within it of subjectivity. Thus, the being of the object, of the whole, is the subject. In knowing the “object” that is the whole, we are knowing ourselves. The whole is, as we discussed earlier, correctly described as an individual (indeed, the one, true individual) but to know the whole is to understand it in terms of its crowning achievement: the development within it of the human individual.

The Absolute is not a static One. Hegel, in the tradition of Heraclitus, is one of the great philosophers of process. The one is continually giving rise to itself in the never-ending cycle of the birth and death of all things. And the absolute knowing that is an organic outgrowth of the nature-process is itself a process, not a static body of ideas that one finds in a book. Human beings are continually striving to know the whole – thus continually recognizing themselves in everything in heaven and on earth. The writing of the Hegelian system is absolute knowing, and our working through it and understanding it (indeed, developing it, for Hegel did think that this was possible, within certain parameters) is absolute knowing. The universe is thus in process, and the knowing of it is in process.

In our next installment, we will enter the process of knowing the universe via Hegel’s Logic.

Notes

[1] Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, Translated by T.F. Geraets et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 39.

[2] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller, 1977), 58. (Henceforth, Miller.)

[3] Miller, 58.

[4] Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 55-56.

[5] Martin Heidegger, Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 93-94

[6] Heidegger, Hegel, 68.

[7] G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1.