To begin with, then, I am aware of the thing as a ‘one’, and have to keep it fixed in this true character as one. If in the course of perceiving, something crops up contradicting that, then I must take it to be due to my reflection. Now, in perception, various different properties also turn up, which seem to be properties of the thing. But the thing is a ‘one’; and we are aware in ourselves that this diversity, by which the thing ceases to be a unity, arises in us. This thing, then, is, in point of fact, merely white to our eyes, also sharp to our tongue, and also cubical to our feeling, and so on. The entire diversity of these aspects comes not from the thing, but from us; and we find them falling apart thus from one another, because the organs they affect are quite distinct (the eye is entirely distinct from the tongue, and so on). We are consequently the universal medium where such elements get dissociated, and exist each by themselves. By the fact, then, that we regard the characteristic of being a universal medium as our reflection, we preserve and maintain the self-sameness and truth of the thing, its being a ‘one’ …
Consciousness has found ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ etc., pass away in the dialectic process of sense-experience, and has, at the stage of perception, arrived at thoughts which it brings together in the first instance as the unconditioned universal. This unconditioned element, if it were taken as inert essence, bare and simple, would itself be nothing but the one-sided extreme of being-for-itself; for the non-essential world would then stand over against it. But if this was how it was related to the latter, it would itself be unessential, and consciousness would not have been disentangled from the deceptions of perception; whereas this universal has turned out to be something that has passed beyond such conditioned, separate existence, and returned to itself.
But this unconditioned universal, which henceforward is the true object of consciousness, is still object of consciousness; consciousness has not yet grasped its principle or notion as such. There is an essential distinction between the two which must be grasped. On the one hand, consciousness is aware that the object has passed from its relation to another back into itself, and thereby become ‘notion’, inherently and in itself; but on the other hand consciousness is not yet the notion explicitly or for itself, and consequently it does not know itself in the reflected object. We (who are analysing an experience) found this object arise through the process of consciousness in such a way that consciousness is implicated and involved in the development of the object … But because in this movement consciousness had as its content merely the objective entity, and not consciousness as such, the result has to be given an objective significance for consciousness. Consciousness, however, still withdraws from what has arisen, so that the latter in objective form is the essential reality for consciousness …
It is understanding to which the concept of Force belongs, that is, properly speaking the principle which supports the different moments in so far as they are different … Force is the unconditioned universal which is in itself just what it is for something else (or that which holds the difference within itself) – for it is nothing else than existence- for-an-other. Hence, for Force to be what it truly is, it has to be completely set free from thought, and put forward as the substantial reality of these differences – that is, first the substance as the entire force existing in and for itself, and then its differences as substantial entities, or as moments subsisting each on its own account. Force as such, force as driven back within itself, is thus by itself an excluding unity, for which the unfolding of the elements or differences is another thing subsisting separately; and thus there are set up two sides, distinct and independent. But force is also the whole, or it remains what, in its very conception it is …
In the kinds of certainty hitherto considered, the truth for consciousness is something other than consciousness itself. The conception of this truth, however, vanishes in the course of our experience of it. What the object immediately was in itself – whether mere being, in sense-certainty, a concrete thing, in perception, or force, in the case of understanding – turns out in truth to be no such thing. But instead, this inherent nature proves to be a way in which it is for another. The abstract conception of the object gives way before the actual concrete object, or the first immediate idea is cancelled in the course of experience. Mere certainty has vanished in favour of truth.
There has now arisen, however, what was not established in the case of these previous relationships, viz. a certainty that is on a par with its truth. For certainty is to itself its own object, and consciousness is to itself the truth. Otherness is, of course, also found there – consciousness makes a distinction. But what is distinguished is of such a kind that consciousness, at the same time, holds there is no distinction made. If we call the movement of knowledge ‘conception’, and knowledge as simple movement of Ego, the ‘object’, we say that not only for us (tracing the process) but likewise for knowledge itself, the object corresponds to the conception. Or if we call ‘conception’ what the object is in itself, and ‘object’ what the object is as object, or for another, it is clear that being ‘in itself’ and being ‘for another’ are here the same. For the inherent being is consciousness; yet it is still just as much that for which the other (what it is ‘in itself’) is. And it is for consciousness that the inherent nature of the object and its ‘being for another’ are one and the same. Ego is the content of the relation, and itself the process of relating. It is Ego itself which is opposed to another and, at the same time, reaches out beyond this other, which other is none the less taken to be only itself.
With self-consciousness, then, we have now passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home. We have to see how the form or attitude of self- consciousness in the first instance appears. When we consider this new form of and type of knowledge, the knowledge of self in its relation to that which preceded, namely the knowledge of another, we find indeed that this latter has vanished, but that its moments have at the same time been preserved. The loss consists in this, that those moments are here present as they are implicitly, as they are in themselves. The being which ‘meaning’ dealt with – particularity [in sense-certainty], and the universality of perception opposed to it, and also the inner region of understanding – these are no longer present as substantial elements, but as moments of self-consciousness, that is, as abstractions or differences which are of no account for consciousness itself – not really differences at all, but elements that ultimately disappear.
Specimen Questions
1 Explain the importance of the idea of a historical process in Hegel’s conception of knowledge.
2 How does Hegel substantiate his distinction between ‘sense-experience’ and ‘perception’?
3 Hegel says that ‘it is for consciousness that the inherent nature of the object and its “being for another” are one and the same’. Explain the steps that have led him to this result.
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind [1807], trans. J. B. Baillie (London: Sonnenschein, 1910). A more recent version is available in paperback as Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
2 For a clear and accessible introduction to this difficult work, see R. Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology (London: Sussex University Press, 1976).
3 Another useful introductory guide is K. R. Westphal’s Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003).
4 A valuable and influential account of Hegel’s thought is C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
5 For a useful collection of essays on all aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, see F. C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University