Resource
One might depict sensuous certainty as Midas like figure in that everything it touches, apprehends or, otherwise, grasps is good as gold.1 With the inevitable consequence that these riches are immediately devalued by their very abundance. The wealth of sensuous certainty is, at once, infinitely small and infinitely large – allowing for infinite subdivision and expansion. But is it possible to have a concrete content that is also infinite? A content for which delving in (hineingehen) is the same as spreading out (ausbreitet). There is something rather doubtful this consciousness that presumes ‘simplicity’ (Einfachheit) and ‘purity’ (Reinheit) while also claiming to partake of everything at the same time. It’s difficult to imagine experiencing everything without coming out a little, shall we say, jaded? ran through? And, as Hegel, argues ‘the most veritable wealth of sensuous certainty is the ‘very poorest truth’. All that glitters is not gold. As it turns out, what seemed truest (wahrhafteste) is barely even truth (Wahrheit). This infinite realm is really more like something consciousness gestures towards than something it actually possesses in anything but the most rudimentary and immediate way.
If die Sache of which Hegel speaks is to be regarded as an object, we, the observers, need to bear in mind that consciousness has no concept of what an object even is (insofar as an object is only an object for a subject capable of grasping it, and anything like subjectivity is quite a ways off from here). Die Sache is not even a ‘thing’ per se, which would be much more complex. As Heidegger has demonstrated, there is a whole lot more to a thing (das Ding) than meets the eye or fits squarely in the palm of our mind.2 Die Sache, which Hegel identifies as truth of sensuous certainty and is translated in this text as ‘item’, could also be translated as matter, but not like the stuff of physics and chemistry, more like the stuff of complete triviality – as in the question: ‘what’s the matter’ to which the answer is so often ‘nothing’. For consciousness, the item, die Sache, is really just a ‘this’, a pointing or an index, a vector of consciousness (or a consciousness, in its simplest, abstractest form, as a vector, an index of an index – a pointed at pointing. Because Hegel’s never going to give us a simple, definition, especially if by ‘simple’ we mean ‘static’. In fact, this whole section on sensuous certainty could be read as his best to attempt at simplicity. Horrifying as this may be, especially for new readers, it tells us a great deal about what Hegel means by ‘truth’ – that it is never going to remain fixed or finite – it begins and ends with movement, or rather, does not end, because it is infinite (Unendlich), a being for whom stasis would be death – like a rolling stone.3
Changing gears, Hegel describes what sensuous certainty is not and, in so doing, gives us a little preview of the shapes of consciousness to come. It is not the self-developed (Entwicklung), movement (Bewegung) of thought (Gedanken), (though even here, it’s shaping to be something like this). It’s a not a meaningful reasoning that considers which properties make one thing different from another. And, to state the obvious: because of its immediacy, it lacks the nuance required to mediate between complex oppositions .
Before getting frustrated with sensuous certainty, we need to at least acknowledge what Hegel has been doing throughout this whole summary: setting up a kind of basecamp in the most extreme and barren terrain : even though all sensuous certainty can say is this and I, we are assembling the necessary equipment and vocabulary to track and study the migration of these items in terms of their essences, objects, truths and relations as they begin to mutate into something different, something singular.
Footnotes
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Cf. Hyginus Fabulae §191 and Ovid Midas (Metamorphoses XI) ↩
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Cf. The first of Heidegger’s Bremen published later as ‘Das Ding’, an early formulation of what he will later explore in The Question Concerning Technology and throughout his varying formulations of the the Fourfold in which he seeks to elucidate everything about a ‘thing’ that cannot be reified, appropriated, or made into property. ↩
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Both the Dylan song and this chapter preach the destitution of riches. Interesting to find this line here too, knowing how Hegel felt about the ‘world-historical character of Napoleon: “You used to be so amused / At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.” ↩