Consciousness

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge.

Sensuous Certainty

In keeping with the ideas in his Preface and Introduction, Hegel begins in medias res: that is, not by assuming a tabula rasa, nor by establishing a theory of the possibility of knowledge, but instead by examining a ‘common-sense’, intuitive form of knowledge. If knowledge is to be considered as a kind of relationship between the mind and the world, then the most intuitive place to begin is with the most immediate relation between mind and world.

‘Sensuous certainty’ is the name for this relation, for the kind of knowing in which the object is immediate. It is on this ground of immediacy that sensuous certainty claims to have absolute knowledge, and – at first – Hegel finds reasons to praise this claim. Firstly, taking any spatiotemporal thing as its object, sensuous-certainty has no limit as regards its ‘wealth’, since it can take its object from anywhere in the infinite boundaries of space and time, and can furthermore divide any such object into more distinct objects. Moreover, the object apprehended by sensuous-certainty is not only immediate but complete, since nothing is taken away or added to it; instead, it is straightforwardly laid before consciousness as a this which is. In other words, it is apprehended in its pure, simple existence. Now, the consciousness who apprehends the object also holds itself in certainty, as another this which is; consequently, any particular experience of sensuous-certainty takes the form: ‘this I, a singular individual consciousness, knows this object, a singular individual thing’. In the world of sensuous-certainty, there is no causality, no unification, no essences or properties, no relations: there is merely the being of manifold particulars. This is sensuous-certainty’s claim to absolute knowledge.

So, while the strength of sensuous-certainty is in the completeness of its object, its weakness is in the abstractness of its truth, since it expresses nothing but the mere presence of the object and of the consciousness apprehending it. In fact, it is this abstractness and simplicity which reveals to us the dialectic, the self-undermining negativity, within sensuous-certainty. As a singular thing, the object of sensuous-certainty is a this which is here and now. Each of these three terms name the radical particularity of the thing. I have sensuous-certainty now … and yet, as soon as I have named this ‘now’, it is gone: the moment has passed. Likewise, if I face the thing, I can say that it is here, but if I turn around, then while I can still refer to a ‘here’, it is no longer the same ‘here’ in which the object was found. In both of these cases, the Here and Now persevere, while the thing of which I had sensuous-certainty disappears. That which we call ‘now’ is indifferent to whether it is 5:00 PM, 3:00 AM, or any other time. Through every moment, the Now endures; it is mediated through the moment. The moment is a particular expression of the Now, and the location of sensuous-certainty is an expression of the Here. Now and Here are thus universals. ‘Now’ means: not 5:00 PM, not 3:00 AM, not any unique particular moment; as Hegel explains, ‘As little as night and day are its being, it is just as much night and day. … Such a simple is through negation; it is neither this nor that, it is both a not-this and is just as indifferent to being this or that, and such a simple is what we call a universal.’¹

As such, the truth of sensuous-certainty is the opposite of its original truth. At the start, its claim to truth concerned its consistent particularity; now, unintentionally, it concerns an emerging universality. Sensuous-certainty has refuted itself, and language has shown this: ‘In language, we immediately refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the truth of sensuous-certainty, and language only expresses this truth, it is, in that way, not possible at all that we could say what we mean about sensuous being.’² By this, Hegel shows that, just as language necessarily deals only with universals (in ‘this tree’, both the word ‘this’ and ‘tree’ are mediated universals, as explained above), so too does sensuous-certainty itself give rise to universals when it ‘means’ to refer only to particulars. In the very moment, I might ‘know what I mean’ when I refer to this tree; nonetheless, as soon as the words (‘this tree’) are written down, my subjectivity is removed from them, and universality takes its place. Consequently we find that what is persistent in sensuous-certainty’s experience of the This is not the object, but the subject for whom the object is a ‘This’, here and now. ‘Now’ is midnight, or noon, or whenever else, because I name it so; ‘now’ is always my ‘now’. (Incidentally, this notion of language undermining the conscious wish of subjectivity will be famously repeated by Sigmund Freud).

Who is this ‘I’? As the subject that names an object to be a particular This, at a particular here and now, it must too be a particular. There is an ‘I’ for each moment; an ‘I’ for each This that is apprehended. However, this radical particularity can only be realised by comparison – contradistinction – with other radical particulars. From whose standpoint is this comparison carried out? It is precisely through the universal ‘I’ that it is done. In all experience of sensuous-certainty, ‘what does not appears is I as universal, whose [universal] seeing is neither a seeing of the tree nor of this house.’³ As such, the truth of sensuous-certainty has shifted away from the object and on to the subject.

At this point, sensuous-certainty has gone through two dialectical moments that transformed its original position. At first, it made its claim to absolute knowledge by (ostensibly) grasping its object immediately, as a particular ‘this’, in a particular time and space. Sensuous-certainty started with the object because any shape of consciousness (as opposed to self-consciousness) starts off as directed towards something that is not itself. This immediate particularity was negated, however, as the very concepts – ‘This’, ‘Here’, and ‘Now’ – that were supposed to be the guarantors of radical particularity turned out to be universals, defined through negation (the true ‘now’ is always not-now; it can never be named). Thus, following the first dialectical moment, the object (the universal This) became the essential character of sensuous-certainty. Following this, however, it is the universal subject that becomes essential, since there must be an agent of comparison to realise the negativity that constitutes the universal object. That is to say, there must be a subject who – through comparison – realises the true Now as a universal ‘not-now’.

The third and final moment of sensuous-certainty tries for absolute knowledge once again by avoiding comparison and the universals that arise as a consequence of comparison. Instead, this third moment focuses purely on the relation between consciousness and thing. Comparison is avoided by denying time as a process. I no longer ‘say’ now and here (thus universalising them); I merely point to the always-particular This-Here-Now. The unit of experience, therefore, is the immediate unity of the subject-object relation. There is no concern or reference to what comes before or after this relation in its particular moment. The trouble with the ‘pointing’ moment of sensuous-certainty is that, in fact, it never actually grasps its object (i.e., the subject-object relation). As soon as I have pointed to that which is now, it is no longer now anymore. The immediate presence that sensuous-certainty hopes for has not been apprehended. Sensuous-certainty thus enters a dialectical movement once again.

Hegel finds that sensuous-certainty’s pointing has three logical (i.e., not temporal) moments within itself. First, the Now that is pointed to is taken to be the truth, pure and simple. Second, as the Now immediately passes away into the past, the pointed-out-Now is negated: it is not (i.e., it is in the past). Lastly, this negation is itself negated, and we return to the first Now, albeit in a mediated manner. Realising that time is an ever-appearing disappearing; a dialectical unity of appearing and disappearing wherein now is always going away, consciousness returns to the newly-contextualised Now, which is henceforth seen as one moment – one particuklar – amongst many. This sublated Now of the third moment is thus a ‘Now of Nows’: an hour of minutes, a minute of seconds, etc. As Hegel writes, ‘Pointing out is thus itself the movement that declares what the Now in truth is, namely, a result, or a plurality of Nows taken together; and pointing out is the experience that the Now is a universal.’⁴

Reflections on Sensuous Certainty

Sensuous certainty is the beginning for Hegel precisely because it is the beginning for us; as the Introduction states, it is a mistake to make a fuss about how to begin before actually beginning. Fear of erring is already the error itself. By asking if it is even possible for cognition to apprehend the absolute, this fear of error presupposes that cognition stands outside of, or apart from, the absolute (that is, the truth), and yet can still somehow be truthful itself. This is clearly a mistake; as such, Hegel puts issues of method to one side, and simply begins his analysis of experience. As Frederick Beiser writes: ‘The standards, rules, and guidelines appropriate to a subject matter should be the result, not the starting point, of the investigation. So, if Hegel has any methodology at all, it appears to be an anti-methodology, a method to suspend all methods.’⁵ So, the Phenomenology begins with the most familiar, unconceptualised form of experience: immediate certainty of sensuous objects. The language that expresses this experience – at least according to ‘common sense’ – expresses the simple, particular being of these objects. ‘We are in the world that Adam bequeathed to us,’ Harris writes, ‘the world of things with names … this is how our language gets its significance – by referring to objects whose “being” we can confirm by a simple use of the senses.’⁶

It is language that best illuminates the dialectic of sensuous certainty. Language, in naming the ‘immediate’ object of experience, realises before we do that the immediate – ‘what truly is’ – is precisely what is not. As soon as I put a name to this moment, it has passed away and is no longer. The actual truth lies in the universality of the concepts that language employs, and not in the things of experience. As such, the modern skeptics like Hume, who endorse skepticism by accepting immediate certainty of sensuous objects as the only knowable truth, are insufficiently skeptical: they fail to notice that there is nothing universal in immediate objects whatsoever. ‘The experience of the sensible world teaches us that truth is properly to be found in the concepts to which names refer, and that the reference of names to things is only possible in the context of a time and space that are already concepts.’⁷ The immediate object that I am trying (and failing) to name when I say ‘this’ is completely private, because it is particular to my own experience. When I name it, the universal concepts of language snatch all particularity and immediacy out of the question, and all that remains is universal and conceptual. The modern Humean skeptics would therefore be wise to familiarise themselves with the ancient participants of the Eleusinian mysteries who, in their consumption of sensuous things, were assured of their ultimate impermanence. Likewise, even animals – for whom all sensuous things are the objects of an instinctual desire to survive – realise the impermanence of these things. ‘Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they without further ado simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates those revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.’⁸

This is just the first instance of a lesson that the Phenomenology’s protagonist will experience over and over again: namely, the lesson that the world and its objects are slippery, difficult to grasp, and often exist in much greater complexity than the concepts of human thought would assume. Sensuous certainty is naïve to think that its simple, abstract concepts are sufficient to comprehend the world. The downfall of sensuous certainty is thus comparable to Roquentin’s breathless shock in Sartre’s Nausea:

And then, all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It has lost its harmless appearance as an abstract category … All those objects …how can I explain? They embarrassed me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, in a drier, more abstract way, with more reserve.⁹

Like Roquentin, sensuous certainty wants reality to be drier and more abstract. But, as phenomenologists, we have to follow what the things themselves teach us, and not what our order-obsessed minds desire.

By my pointing out this piece of paper, I thus learn from experience what the truth of sensuous-certainty in fact is. I point it out as a Here, which if a Here of other Heres, or which in its own self is a simple ensemble of many Heres, which is to say, is a universal. In that way, I receive it as it is in truth, and instead of knowing what is immediate, I perceive.¹⁰

This is how Hegel concludes the chapter on sensuous certainty. The ‘truth of sensuous-certainty’ contains its untruth; the immediacy of sensuous-certainty’s objects inevitably dissolves as soon as it is acknowledged and, consequently, a new – mediated – claim to absolute knowledge comes on the scene: perception.

Perception

Things fall apart.

Where sensuous certainty claimed to find absolute truth in the particular and the immediate, perception – arising necessarily from the dialectic of sensuous certainty – makes its claim to absolute truth in mediated, simple universals: precisely, things. A thing is a thing with many properties, perceived by a universal subject. The Thing of perception is the result of the sublated This that had its origin in sensuous certainty; as a determine negation, a not-This, the Thing is determined by its mediacy, its universality, and its differentiation. In the Thing, a manifold of properties is unified; ‘many such properties are posited at the same time, and each one is the negative of the other’. The universal (that is, the unified Thing) ‘expresses’ the manifold properties, but the properties themselves are also determined by ‘relating themselves to themselves’, and by ‘permeat[ing] each other in that universality as a simple unity without making contact with each other’. We can consequently say that the Thing is mediated through its properties, and its properties through itself; indeed, Hegel defines ‘thinghood itself’ as ‘a simple togetherness of the many’.¹¹

The properties of a thing are indifferent to one another. A pebble is smooth, and also heavy, but its smoothness makes no difference to its heaviness, and vice versa. How, then, are they part of the same thing? For one, they all ‘are in one simple Here in which they also permeate each other. None has a different Here from the others. Rather, each is everywhere in the same Here as are the others.’¹² Hegel accordingly finds that it is the ‘indifferent Also’ that relates these properties to one another, and allows them to come together as a unified manifold, constituting the thing. (Thus the conclusion of the above paragraph, that thinghood is the ‘togetherness of the many’: thinghood is the Also itself).

Thinghood-as-togetherness is the positive determination of the thing; however, in order to be itself, a thing must also have a negative determination: that is to say, a pebble is only a pebble insofar as it is not a bicycle, not an owl, and so on. The properties of a thing must not only relate to themselves, therefore, but must also oppose one another, to differentiate themselves. As such, the difference of manifold properties within a unified thing ‘does not amount to an indifferent difference but rather to an excluding difference’.¹³ The relation of a property to other properties thus reaches out of the thing that the property belongs to. Hegel thus describes the Thing as a ‘simple medium [which] is not only an Also, an indifferent unity; [but] also a One, an excluding unity’.¹⁴ Negation is a constituent of thinghood.

At this point, Hegel explicates the three moments of the Thing as it is grasped by perception so far. Firstly, it is an ‘indifferent passive universality’; a medium in which multiple properties reside, indifferent to one another, and related merely by an Also. Secondly, it is a negative universality; a ‘One’ which is individuated through negation and exclusion of the other. And lastly, it is also the sum total of its properties, as those properties reveal themselves to be universal in their own right, not only differentiating themselves passively from one another (as Also), but also differentiating themselves negatively from the properties of the Other (i.e., the not-One). This last moment of the Thing is ‘the relation of the first two moments’ since the elements of the Also (that is, the properties) are themselves behaving like the One, insofar as they negatively differentiate themselves (from the properties of the Other).

According to the aspect in which these differences belong to the indifferent medium [i.e., the Thing as a passive universality, as ‘Also’], the differences are themselves universal; each relates itself only to itself, and they do not affect each other. However, according to the aspect, in terms of which they belong to the negative unity [i.e., the Thing as One, differentiated from the Other], they at the same time exclude each other, but necessarily have this opposed relation to the properties, which are at a distance from their Also [i.e., the properties of the Other]. ¹⁵

Just like any shape of consciousness, perception is a claim to absolute truth. The standard of perceptual truth is: have I apprehended the object? If the perceiver’s apprehension is equal to the object itself, and corresponds with it, then the perception is true. Naturally, error is possible insofar as it is possible to misapprehend an object. But importantly, any such error must be because of some untruth on behalf of the perceiver, not the perceived object; in comparing the perceiver’s apprehension with the object, any inequality that shows up must be an ‘untruth of perceiving itself’, and not an untruth of the object, since ‘the object is what is equal to itself’.¹⁶ The German word for perception is Wahrnehmung; the task for the perceiver is as simple as having to take [nehmung] the true [wahr].

At this point, Hegel looks again at the moments spelled out above, capturing them as perception’s dialectical transformation, brought about by its own internal inconsistencies. This transformation is revealed when, on each occasion wherein I try to conceptualise the object of perception, something about the object escapes my conceptualisation. Hegel outlines the dialectic of perception as follows: firstly, I perceive the object as a ‘thing’; as purely One. For instance, I perceive ‘this thing, the book’. However, I also perceive ‘within’ the book several properties: it is heavy, it is green, it is dry, etc. Each of these properties is universal: many objects can possess heaviness, greenness, and so on. As such, grasping the object as purely singular and individual was thus a mistake; and as established in the paragraph above, the mistake must be within me and not the object. I thus revise my comprehension of the object, understanding it in the light of the idea of ‘community’. The object is both (a) a community of properties, and (b) a member of a community of objects with similar properties. So, to continue my example, the book is now understood as (a) the sum total of its properties: its heaviness, greenness, and so on, and also (b) one book amongst many; a member of the community of objects that have pages, contain text, and so on – that is, a community defined by certain properties. But what determines these properties? What makes the book ‘heavy’? It is heavy precisely because it is not light; its heaviness is the exclusion of non-heaviness. As such I perceive the object’s properties as determinate through opposition to (and exclusion of) an Other; consequently, I was mistaken again to conceptualise the object as a community – after all, community is defined primarily by inclusion. If the ‘community’ conceptualisation of the object was a negation of the ‘One’ conceptualisation, then I must negate this negation, and posit the object as an excluding One. As Hegel puts it:

‘I thus in fact did not apprehend the objective essence correctly when I determined it as community with others, or as continuity, and, according to the determinateness of the property, I must in fact break up the continuity into pieces and posit the objective presence as an excluding One’.¹⁷

Yet again, however, I am mistaken. For it is not accurate to understand the thing purely in terms of exclusion; after all, the properties within the thing simply sit indifferently alongside one another. The book’s greenness does not affect its heaviness. As such, the thing is best understood as a ‘communal medium’ in which these properties abide. Now, we never really ‘perceive’ a medium; rather, it is the sensuous properties that come together in that medium that are perceived. Aside from its size, its colour, its position, and so on, what is there left of the book for me to perceive? Consequently, Hegel comes to realise that the truth that perception apprehends ‘is thereby also not a universal medium but rather a singular property for itself’.¹⁸ Here is where a particularly strange moment occurs: if what I am actually perceiving is merely a ‘singular property for itself’, then it is neither a property (because it, being singular, no longer belongs to a One), nor a determinate thing (because, being singular, it has no individuating relations to other things). Thus, the object is a sensuous being of the sort we encountered in sensuous certainty. We have flown away from the ‘thing’, and now only perceive that which we once called a ‘property’ which, now, is nothing but a sensuous this, here, now. The last sentence of §117 captures this confusing phenomenon: ‘I am thus thrown back to the beginning and pulled back into the same cycle which sublates itself both in each moment and as a whole’.

At this point, it might seem as though consciousness has reached an aporia: sensuous certainty collapses under its own logic, and gives way to perception, which itself collapses and reverts back to sensuous certainty. However, Hegel notices that something is different in this newer collapse. Though the result of perception, just like the result of sensuous certainty, is its dissolution, this dissolution nonetheless teaches us something: namely that, in its dissolution, perception becomes self-reflective. With the collapse of perception, ‘consciousness takes cognizance that the untruth, which comes to the fore here, falls within consciousness’.¹⁹

The precise advantage of perception’s ‘reflective turn into itself’ is that consciousness is now aware that perception is not a mere ‘simple apprehension’; that is to say, the perceiver, after self-reflection, is consciously aware of their own perceiving. As Harris writes,

Consciousness is no longer naïve but reflective. At this point in the dialectic of sense-certainty it became the standard of what truly is; but in the dialectic of perception it distinguishes its reflective activity as the source of ‘falsity.’ ²⁰

As is written above, an important (perhaps the most important) moment for perception is the realisation that error can lie only in the perceiver, and not the object. This is the reason that perception is reflective; it realises itself to be, in Harris’s words, ‘the source of falsity’. This reflective realisation is the way that perception escapes the aporia described above.

The crux of the aporia is that, while perception apprehends its object as a One, it is also aware of multiple properties in the object, undermining the One-ness of the object. The object cannot be both one and many; as such, there must be some kind of falsity. But as we have learned, the falsity that we seem to detect in objects must always originate in us; so, Hegel explains that ‘we ourselves are [now] conscious of this diversity through which [the object] ceases to be One as falling within us’.²¹ What this means is that the diversity (i.e., the not-One-ness) of the object is an imposition of our own consciousness, rather than an attribute of the thing perceived. The properties of the thing ‘come undone from each other’, as Hegel puts it, merely because we perceive the thing in multiple diverse moments. Consequently, the thing is One after all; and the diversity we perceive in it – the multiplicity of properties – is attributed to the diversity of our perceiving.

But on the other hand, the thing must surely have a diverse multiplicity of properties, since it is this multiplicity that, through excluding the properties of other objects, individualises the thing and makes it determinate. (Indeed, throughout this chapter, the word ‘determinate’ is near-synonymous with ‘individualised through the exclusion of other properties’). So, if the diverse properties do exist in the thing, after all, it must be the One-ness of the thing that originates in our perception. Thus when we say that a book is green and also heavy, thick and also rectangular, this ‘also’ is the work of consciousness, not of the thing. ‘The positing-into-a-one of these properties belongs only to consciousness’.²² Thus we perceive a thing as unified; nonetheless, perception also remains aware that the properties of the thing in itself’ are separate, and it does this by means of the notion ‘insofar as’: a plant, insofar as it is green, is not tall, and insofar as it is tall, it is not spiky, and so on.

At this point, consciousness has become aware that it has a twofold way of viewing things, as (1) subjectively – that is, as a subjectively posited One – and (2) objectively – that is, taken in itself as a multiplicity of properties. But that the thing can be viewed in such a twofold manner implies that the thing itself is twofold: it exists ‘in a determinate way for the comprehending consciousness’, but also in ‘the way in which it offers itself and is reflected itself back into itself’ – in other words, the thing has its truth as for-consciousness, and ‘in its own self has an opposed truth’.²³ Here is where the distinction between being-for-self and being-for-another first emerge. The question of whether the unity of thinghood should be attributed to the perceiver or the thing itself thus comes to an end in this paragraph, which Harris summarises as follows:

Thus both the thing and consciousness have now taken the roles of the One and the Many. It is not just perceiving, but the thing itself, that shows itself in this doubled way (as being unity and plurality in and for itself). Whichever side it exhibits as true to the apprehending consciousness it has the opposite truth within itself. ²⁴

The Illusion of Perception

Finally we move beyond the issue of the One and the Many, and enter the domain of being-for-itself and being-for-consciousness. Hegel explains that ‘the thing is One, reflected into itself; it is for itself, but it is also for an other, namely, it is an other for itself as it is for an other’.²⁵ That is to say, the thing’s being-for-itself is not solely determined by the essence of the thing’s being-for-itself, but also by the other that is perceiving it. Put another way, the twofold character of the thing – the contradiction between its being-for-itself and being-for-another – ‘is distributed into two objects’; ‘The thing therefore is in and for itself, self-equal, but this unity with itself is disturbed through other things’.²⁶

Understanding the twofold character of the thing gives clarity to the nature of properties: the diversity of properties that the thing possesses doesn’t divide the thing, since such a diversity is merely the diversity of relations that the thing has with other things. This plant is tall in relation to shorter plants; this book is green in relation to blue or red books, and so on. In itself, an object is therefore propertyless and indeterminate. This reveals to us that otherness is essential to indiduality; as Kalkavage has remarked, ‘this is the first step toward the conclusion that community is more real than individuality’.²⁷

At this point, perception’s concept of the thing involves both identity and difference: it is identical with itself, and different from others, and both of these facts determine what the thing actually is. The self-identity of the thing determines how it will be for others, and this being-for-others is what determines the thing’s difference from other things. But let’s look more closely at this relation between identity and difference: uncontroversially, a thing is a thing insofar as it is identical with itself. This is the role of identity within the concept of the thing. But for any x to be identical to itself, it must be determinate (that is, it must be individuated in some way). And we have learned that the thing only becomes determinate through its being-for-another; this is the role of difference within the concept of the thing … as such, the thing is constitutively contradictory: ‘it is for itself insofar as it is for others, and it is for others insofar as it is for itself’.²⁸ As far as the thing of perception is concerned, independence depends on others; independence is not independent. Thus perception comes to an end, as its grasp on sensuous universals turns out to be an illusion – merely a contradictory play of ‘empty abstractions’ (singularity, universality, essence, and so on). Perception is the shape of consciousness most often understood to be ‘common sense’, and yet it completely fails to actually grasp its objects. It is a form of sophistry, since it repeatedly asserts what it had previously asserted to be untrue.

That healthy common sense which takes itself to be solid, real consciousness, is, in perceiving, only the play of these abstractions, and that common sense is the poorest exactly at the point where it means to be the richest. While it is pushed around by these empty essences and is thus thrown out of the arms of one abstraction into the arms of another, and, through its own sophistry, alternately goes to all the trouble of tenaciously clinging to one of them and asserting it to be true, only then to turn around and assert its opposite to be true, and then to set itself against the truth, it says that philosophy only deals with thought-things [Gedankendingen]. ²⁹

Force and the Understanding

Appearance and the Supersensible World

Part A of the Phenomenology, entitled Consciousness, shows the development of universality – that is, the development of that which makes objects thinkable. In sensuous certainty, universality was simply denied; consciousness claimed to have immediate access to its object as a This. But this claim turned out to be untrue, and sensuous certainty gave rise to the sensuous universal – the property – which perception embraced, in its conceptualising of the individual Thing. This, too, turned out to be mistaken, as the individuality that perception held to be true was mere sophistry, and what emerged was a notion of the Thing as being-for-another: a set of relations to other things (other sets of relations). Perception thereby ended in a deadlock between being-for-itself and being-for-another. The unity of this opposition is what gives rise to the understanding, and its object: the unconditioned universal, or, as Hegel refers to it in the title: force. Now since being-for-itself and being-for-another are hereby united, we can no longer make claims about objects as they are for us without also making the same claims about the objects as they are in themselves. Otherwise, we would end up back in the aporia of perception, wherein consciousness seems to falsify the object. So – how does Hegel make sense of this unity, this ‘force’?

Force was a central concept in eighteenth-century physics, with Leibniz and Newton establishing the system of dynamics – that is, the science of force which attempts to find regularity in the apparently chaotic universe: why do objects fall to the ground? Why do the planets move? What keeps me from falling through my chair? – These are central questions of force. Force can therefore be understood as cause and effect, expression and expressed, and so on. It is in this section of the Phenomenology, on force and the understanding, in which objects are first conceptualised as things of force – the appearance of a thing is the appearance of force’s action: a thing, in this sense, is therefore a happening (a th-ing). Note the subtitle of the chapter, Appearance and the Supersensible World: at the stage of understanding, consciousness conceives of things as the appearances of supersensible essences; and the form of these essences is force, or the unconditioned universal. Thus while the chapter on perception characterised the common-sense ‘manifest’ image of objects, the present chapter characterises a ‘scientific’ image, wherein there is something behind what is manifest.³⁰

Because understanding thinks of its world of objects as a manifest image of a non-perceptible, underlying scientific image, it therefore claims that its objects are mere representations. Force is that which underlies these representations; while perception ended up with two representations of the object (being-for-itself and being-for-another, particular and universal), the force of understanding is the ‘metaphysical essence’ of objects ‘whose function is to explain the unity of perceptual experience in terms of its being an experience of particulars having individualized universal properties’.³¹ Understanding is therefore a reflective stage of consciousness, since its knowledge of things in themselves (that is, the things as they are determined by their metaphysical essences, not by the way we represent them) is mediated, relying on our ability to go beyond perceptual experience. Hegel’s name for the metaphysical basis of the understanding’s representations is the unconditioned universal.

To reiterate: since the thing in perception was left split into two parts, being-for-itself and being-for-another, understanding attempts to heal this division by positing the unconditioned universal, which can be understood as the being-as-such of the thing. Expressed in this way, it sounds as though understanding is the ultimate and comprehensive stage of consciousness; however, the fact that hundreds of pages in the Phenomenology remain suggests that that is not the case. What, then, is insufficient in the understanding? Well, to start with, consciousness is not yet aware of itself as being conscious of its object: ‘in this movement consciousness only had the objective essence [that is, the object] and not consciousness as such in its content, the result for consciousness is to be posited [only] in its objective meaning’.³² Despite the fact that the word ‘objective’ might usually signal an exhaustive account for us, for Hegel, consciousness that grasps only objective essence is not complete, since it thereby neglects the subjective – that is, consciousness itself. Only when both objectivity and subjectivity have been united in the same shape of consciousness can consciousness be the complete concept. This will be the concern of the next section in the Phenomenology; for now, we will deal with the intricacies of the understanding.

In contrast to self-certainty and perception, the focus of the understanding – that is, the unconditioned universal – is a thought, rather than a sensuous, empirical, perceivable thing. It is the result of a ‘bringing together of thought’.³³ This is a necessity if perception is to be surpassed, because while perception recognised the independence of things (each thing is a One distinct from others), it fails to recognise the causal dependence of every thing on every other thing, insofar as all things are part of one coherent reality. Perception indeed cannot notice this dependence, because – as Hume famously demonstrated – causation is not a perceptible phenomenon. The understanding posits force as the substance of things so that causation, and all other relations between things, are real, essential parts of reality (as opposed to the imperceptible and unessential elements of perceptual reality which led to the aporia of perception). When things are understood as expressions of force, it is a constitutive feature of them to ‘reach outside’ themselves; thus, the positing force allows the totality of things to constitute an intelligible whole or cosmos. This reaching-outside of things relates to Newton’s Third Law of motion:

To every Action there is always opposed an equal Reaction: or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.³⁴

Just as, according to the Third Law, an object forcing itself upon another is always met with an opposing force, so too is the thing of the understanding asserted (in its independence, and its determinateness) by opposition to other things. Independence thus requires dependence (on these opposite things). In this way, the understanding saves consciousness from the aporia of perception by comprehending the thing’s manifold properties (which, in perception, had led to a contradiction between for-itself and for-another) as expressions of a unified substance (that is, force).

Genuine Force and Expression

As noted above, force is an occurrence; the object of the understanding is thus not static, but always in a kind of process. More precisely, force is the movement wherein ‘those differences [properties, aspects, etc.] which are posited as self-sufficient immediately pass over into their unity, and their unity immediately passes over into an unfolding’.³⁵ That is to say, force is a process of two moments which negate one another: in the first, the manifold elements of the thing are brought together to make a One; in the second moment, the One is expressed (that is, it appears) and thus becomes a Many of manifold appearing qualities. This process, this movement, is exactly the same process that brought about the downfall of perception. The difference here, for the understanding, is that the process is posited as an essential feature of things – that is, as something objective – rather than a confusion on behalf of the perceiver (i.e., as something subjective). As Hegel writes, ‘the movement, which previously turned out to be the self-defeating contradictory concept, therefore here has objective form and is a movement of force’.³⁶

In explaining the movement of force, Hegel gives a name to each side of the movement: ‘genuine force’ [eigentliche Kraft] is the first moment described above, wherein a thing is drawn together to make a One, and ‘expression’ [Äußerung] is the second moment, wherein the thing is expanded into a manifold appearance. But what causes this movement in the first place? Why is force a process? Hegel’s answer is that it is simply in the nature of force to undergo the moments of expression and genuine force. For instance, the force of heat would be meaningless if it did not express itself by making other things hot, and it would be unable to express itself if it was not genuinely hot itself. As Hyppolite remarks, ‘force makes sense only insofar as it manifests itself and poses what is inside itself outside itself’; force is thus ‘the unity of itself and its externalization’.³⁷

The Solicitation & Breakdown(s) of Force

Forces express themselves: that much has been established. But what causes them to express themselves? What causes them to actualise their potentiality? It can be nothing else but another actuality; as far back as Aristotle, it has been understood that actuality is always prior to potentiality. And in the case of force, the actuality that provokes expression is always another force; a force’s ‘expression is represented so that this other approaches it and solicits it’.³⁸ This is all in keeping with Newton’s Third Law: the understanding now witnesses two forces, one of which is soliciting and active, the other of which is solicited and passive. These two forces supply the ‘event’ of force with the action and reaction that constitute it.

However, at this point we have to ask: what solicits the soliciting force? The answer (refer again to Newton’s Law) is the solicited force. As such – confusingly – the soliciting force solicits the solicited force, and vice versa … the two are thus indiscernible.

The one which is soliciting is, for example, posited as a universal medium and, in contrast, the solicited one as the force driven back. However, the former is a universal medium itself only as a result of the other being the force that is driven back; or, the latter is instead the one that is soliciting for the former and is what makes the former into a medium in the first place. The former only has its determinateness through the other, and it is soliciting only insofar as it is solicited by the other. It immediately loses as well this determinateness given to it, for this determinateness passes over into the other, or, instead, it has already passed over into that other.³⁹

Think, for example, of the moment a tennis racket hits a ball. We might be inclined to say that the racket is the active participant in the event of hitting, and that the ball is passive; however, the racket could not hit the ball at all (nor vice versa) if the ball had not solicited the solidity of the racket. Thus the ball, too, can be seen as the active role. Both the racket and the ball have solicited one another; therefore, neither is truly just the agent or just the patient. Consequently, Newton’s Third Law – in describing ‘action and reaction’ – actually ‘expresses the nullity of force’.⁴⁰ Although the understanding wanted to grasp objective truth, and attempted to do so by attributing force to the objects themselves, it turns out that the only sense in which force is actual is in thought; force as substance (as the substance of all things) turns out to be merely a ‘play’ [Spiel] of moments in thought. ‘The realization of force is therefore at the same time the loss of reality’.⁴¹ ‘Active and passive’, ‘form and content’, are ways of emphasising parts of reality in thought; they are not parts or distinctions of reality itself. In this way, consciousness has discovered idealism.

And yet, in its desperation for objectivity, consciousness ignores this idealism, and comes up with another way of attributing force to the real world. Consciousness asserts that force constitutes ‘the true background of things’; the world as it appears to us is thus excused from its contradictions (e.g. between form and content, one and many) insofar as it is merely an appearance of a supersensible Real of force: a world that lies beyond that of our experience.⁴²

That is, over and above the vanishing this-worldliness [Diesseits], there is disclosed an enduring other-worldly beyond [Jenseits], an in-itself which is the first and for that reason incomplete appearance of reason, or the pure element in which the truth has its essence.⁴³

Crucially, the supersensible is ‘disclosed’ ‘over and above’ the world of appearance. Consciousness does not discover it by turning away from appearance; rather, ‘it looks through appearance as through a veil. It sees appearance pointing to a stable being beyond appearance, not realizing that this projected being is itself’.⁴⁴ That is to say, it is consciousness itself that is projected insofar as the ‘categories’ of appearance, to use a Kantian term (for instance, ‘active’ and ‘passive’ in the context of force), are products of thought and not of being.

This Real – the ‘inner’ that Hegel refers to – is a ‘pure other-worldly beyond’ to consciousness: it is the result of a projection of thought, and yet is also entirely beyond the scope of thinking. As such, it is a kind of nothingness, since it is defined only in the negative, as that which does not appear to consciousness – to use another Kantian term, the supersensible is not something that can be intuited. Consciousness has therefore found itself in another trap, wherein experience is concerned only with untrue semblances (appearances), and the Real is merely an unknowable void. Anything that can be experienced is a fiction; for consciousness, ‘daydreams themselves are still better than its emptiness’.⁴⁵

The Law of Force and the Inverted World

Finding itself having to settle with either untruth (on the side of semblance and appearance) or opaque nothingness (on the side of the supersensible Real of force), consciousness tries to save itself by once again refining its position. The ‘other-worldly beyond’ is now posited as law: after all, ‘natural laws’ both govern (that is, determine) the world of experience and yet also stand beyond it. In describing the law of force, it is clear that Hegel has Plato (amongst other philosophers) in mind. Plato is the archetypal philosopher of the beyond: he recognises that truth and essence cannot be found in the world of appearance, since the latter is so constantly in flux:

First, we see (or think we see) the thing that we have just now been calling water condensing and turning to stones and earth. Next, we see this same thing dissolving and dispersing, turning to wind and air, and air, when ignited, turning to fire. …  Now then, since none of these appears ever to remain the same, which one of them can one categorically assert, without embarrassment, to be some particular thing, this one, and not something else? One can’t.⁴⁶

Of course, this is something fundamental to Hegel’s work too; the constant flux of the world is the dialectical character of reality. Now, as described above, consciousness (at this point in its development, at least) is desperate for objectivity and stasis; as such, it looks for a way to ground this flux in something stable. This is precisely the role of the law of force: when consciousness cannot deny that everything is always in flux, and all objects constantly undergo self-cancellation and self-overcoming, ‘it takes the immanent “beyond-ing” of self-cancellation that appearance is and objectifies this essence as a transcendent Beyond’.⁴⁷ Kalkavage’s wording is useful here, because he clarifies that appearance is self-cancellation, by definition. Since the supersensible is fundamentally negative (it is defined by what it is not, by what it cancels out), it is the result of hypostasising the self-cancellation that appearance is identified as. It is for this reason that Hegel writes: ‘The supersensible is therefore appearance as appearance’.⁴⁸

Law, therefore, is objectified flux. It is stabilised instability. As an example, we might think of Heraclitus’s famous saying, that ‘everything gives way and nothing stands fast’ [πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει]: this saying takes the impermanence of appearances, and renders from them a permanent law.⁴⁹ These laws are what govern the in-itself: the supersensible beyond that grounds all appearances. Now, insofar as ‘grounding’ is a relation of two distinct things, the supersensible must be distinct from appearance. But it cannot be distinct merely through a kind of diversity, in the same way that a cat and a dog are distinct, because such diversity allows for no essential relation – and, therefore, no grounding. As such, supersensible and appearance are distinct by the only other possible kind of distinction: through opposition, or inversion. This is how Hegel’s idea of the inverted world comes about. Coming to the conclusion that any object must, in-itself, be the opposite of itself, the understanding is left with no choice but to posit a second supersensible world wherein everything is the precise opposite of the world of appearance. ‘The one is appearance, the other is the in-itself. The one world is as it is for others, whereas the other is as it is for itself, so that, to use the previous examples, what tastes sweet is really, or inwardly in the thing itself, sour’.⁵⁰ All of this is to say: the strategy of the understanding has failed. When stable truth cannot be found in a world of flux, an inner world must be posited, but in the truth of that inner world, all that is found is the opposite of what appears. Consequently, we learn nothing about the objects of experience.

The Infinite

As Kalkavage explains, ‘The perversity of the inverted world is Hegel’s way of showing us that, in truth, there is only one world’.⁵¹ The mistake of the understanding – and the mistake of Plato, Kant, and so on – was to posit essence (or the in-itself) in another world; in actual fact, Hegel explains, things contain their opposites within them. The inverted world contained the un-inverted world, since, for something to be ‘an opposite’, it must include reference to that which it is opposite to; as such, ‘the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time enveloped the other world and has it in itself’.⁵² Now, the only reason that multiple worlds were posited in the first place was because consciousness was desperate to flee contradiction: terrified of the notion that things might contain their opposites, the understanding fractured the object of appearance and shunned its various moments into separate realms.

Now that the concept of consciousness (i.e., the representation of that which is common to the objects of experience) has run its course, the inner difference of things – ‘the reciprocal containment of opposites’ – is finally acknowledged.⁵³ Consciousness has thus arrived at the ‘absolute concept’, which Hegel also calls infinity.

This simple infinity, or the absolute concept, is to be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal bloodstream, which is omnipresent, neither dulled nor interrupted by any difference, which is instead itself both every difference as well as their sublatedness. It is therefore pulsating within itself without setting itself in motion; it is trembling within itself without itself being agitated. It is itself self-equality, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none at all.⁵⁴

It’s no coincidence that Hegel writes about infinity with such animated language – ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘bloodstream’, and so on: life itself is a process of inner difference and self-differentiation. Organic development comes from within as cells divide themselves; living things procreate and eventually die and thus overcome their particularity from within. Furthermore, in observing the movement that is intrinsic to the absolute concept, consciousness recognises itself. The understanding – the highest stage of consciousness – consistently sought for explanation, and as Stephen Houlgate recognises, ‘explanation exhibits the structure of infinity, because it is the movement of drawing a distinction between force and law, and then undermining it again by declaring force to have the same content as its law.’ Thus, when it realises that objects themselves are a kind of activity, namely, the activity of undermining and differentiating themselves, consciousness recognises the very same movement that it is itself. For the first time, consciousness recognises itself.