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So far Hegel’s really just been describing sensuous certainty from sensuous certainty’s perspective, but here in emphasizing the actuality of sensuous certainty we begin to think it as something more than the immediate, itemized, this’s and I’s that are forgotten from one moment to the next. We can begin to see it as a movement towards a new form of consciousness. While there isn’t any etymological connection between the words Werk and Wirklichkeit in German, it would be difficult to deny that Wirklichkeit (actuality) is always a work in progress for Hegel. When something has actuality it means it has been worked through, worked over, worked on by consciousness. We, the observers, are not actually doing any of this work for consciousness, we’re more like project managers trying to understand why it’s so behind schedule and over budget. Or, better, we are like the audience witnessing the often tragic irony of consciousness and its countless failures to truly know the object, its fate.
Irony would not be bad way to understand what Hegel is describing when he distinguishes the essence of consciousness as pure immediacy, from its actuality as an example, except that Hegel is not talking about our awareness or anticipation as spectators of what’s about to happen unbeknownst to consciousness. As a character or dramatic personage, consciousness is confined to a particular series of events (or narrative), but as an actor or performer its as if, little by little, it gains awareness of the real reality outside the immediacy of the play. But as sensuous certainty, consciousness does not even know itself yet let alone how to act in the role of another, so the figure would need to be stranger still: like a character becoming aware of itself as a character. The irony here would have more to do with consciousness’ ability to transcend the immediacy of its Spiel from within like an act of metatheater, its grasping of its own Beispiel as a breaking of the fourth wall, so to speak. The point is that this theoretical theater we observe emerges entirely from consciousness and that if we want to regard consciousness as an actor, it is no hypocrite (as the ancient Greek term might suggest). It is not playing dumb for us to illustrate a point. It’s decisions and judgments, however flawed, are inevitably its own.
Simply by reflecting on consciousness, in a manner that consciousness will soon be reflecting on itself, we begin to grasp the object not as an immediate this or that, but as the medium out of which all future mediation will spawn like the first life forms on earth bubbling up out of some primordial swamp.