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The knowledge of being, the being of knowledge seem, at first, to be so fused together that they are impossible to pry apart, almost as if they were one and the same or, as Hegel would say, ‘immediately’ related . And for Hegel, it’s important that we begin here, not with the various senses or theories about how the brain processes them but with the immediacy of a consciousness that exists and is also certain this existence (with the confidence of someone who’s lived on the same island their entire life telling everyone they meet it’s the greatest place on earth).
He advises us, in approaching sensuous certainty, to just to take it in – not to let any preconceptions or prejudices come between it and us, but to just let it do its thing. If you’re familiar with the some of the rationalist, empiricist (or even less speculative) idealist philosophies prevalent in the late 18th early 19th century,1 then you can probably imagine how many of Hegel’s colleagues and countrymen would have reacted after reading in the first chapter that we don’t need to know or think anything at all, we can just let consciousness take us on a journey! Whose consciousness? Take us where? Don’t worry about it!
It’s worth noting this contrast between conceptualizing and apprehending. It’s safe to say for Hegel the concept (der Begriff), is a very special, well.. concept – a special kind of grasping. To conceptualize the object is something quite different from the immediate receptivity of sensuous certainty and the usual ways we grasp or apprehend objects: as such and such a thing with so many properties, useful, valuable or desirable for any number reasons.
Note here, too, that the concept is associated with an alteration which, as we will see, involves the dialectical movement of oppositions that destroy and reconstitute one another in increasingly complex ways. Every alteration contains the tension of identity and difference, of self and an other, ego and alter ego. The other is the altar on which the concept we were barely beginning to grasp gets sacrificed, torn apart and transubstantiated into an even more absolute form of knowing in the name of reason, science, or what Hegel calls religion.
Footnotes
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Hegel’s way of launching his system differs markedly from many of his predecessors and antecedents; perhaps most notably Kant, whose critiques are continually questioned throughout the Phenomenology in a manner that is both manifest and oblique (see Interpretation 93-94). Fichte, whose critique of Kant’s “transcendental unity of apperception”cite influences Hegel’s own, does not, in the latter’s opinion, go far enoughfind. The very idea of ‘science’ as Wissenschaft that Hegel derives from Fichte the dialectical unfolding of the mind qua system, differs radically from more popular conceptions of science as the pursuit of empirical evidences and factual truths. They contrast starkly with the positivist science later formulated by Auguste Compte who explicitly rejected it for its speculative, idealist nature. And we must, of course, mention Marx’s critique which is one of the most trenchant although perhaps not as revolutionary as Marx might have hopedelaborate. ↩