Resource
We may have any number of reasons for doubting consciousness’ ability to start from an immediate grasp of being and somehow differentiate itself from its object, its knowledge from its essence, and pull itself up by its own bootstraps from a thoughtless pointing nobody to an all knowing mind. But this is the thesis, the Idea at work in Hegel’s Idealism. Even if you don’t buy the idea, you can still appreciate the power of the system on which it is based — a system that builds itself from almost nothing through the concentric movements of self-negation.
The necessity of movement is a major difference between Hegel’s phenomenology and Kant’s critiques. While Kant contrasts the serious work of analysis with the dialectical work of explaining where some well intentioned arguments go astray. The movement of this deviation is the very lifeblood of Hegel’s dialectic. Hegel acknowledges no limit to what can be known and, thus, places no limit on the initial object. There is not, as there is in Kant, any transcendental schematism of apperception, a proscribed realm of what can be known, a preinstalled system of categories or judgments, a ‘backroom’ of the mind that functions a priori (before experience).1 Throughout the Phenomenology we see Hegel setting in motion virtually everything that that Kant fixes categorically in place. Rather than insisting on certain ‘transcendental’ concepts serving as a kind of source code of the mind, Hegel seeks to show how the concept gets demolished and rebuilt countless times in a process of determinate negation or sublation.
This is why he seems so confident in saying that ‘the object is’. An immediate relation in the form of a ‘This’ really ain’t much but at least.. at least it is. Thus Hegel sketches this first shape of consciousness, its essence in itself, and its actuality for another. But to prove this we must begin by actually watching sensuous certainty play out.
Footnotes
-
Cf. Derrida’s phantasmatic rendering the ‘back room’ of Plato’s Pharmacy ↩