|
|
Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
07TheDialecticOfTheObject_SenseCertainty.mp3
"click the bottom arrow to listen, or download the mp3 file"
Mp3 PDF file 107_TheDialecticOfTheObject_SenseCertainty.pdf download
http://jumbofiles.com/1r00f8w2k011/107_TheDialecticOfTheObject_SenseCertainty.pdf.html
Text online 107_TheDialecticOfTheObject_SenseCertainty.txt
The dialectic of the object
(Phenomenology, A. Consciousness)
Sense-certainty
The first chapter of the Phenomenology, on Consciousness, opens with a section on 'Sense-Certainty: Or the "This" and "Meaning" '. At the most general level, commentators are agreed about how Hegel intended us to conceive of sense-certainty, namely, as a form of consciousness that thinks the best way to gain knowledge of the world is to experience it directly or intuitively, without applying concepts to it: what Hegel calls 'immediate' rather than 'mediated' knowledge, which involves 'apprehension' rather than 'comprehension' .1
It is clear that Hegel thinks that this is the most elementary and fundamental way we have of thinking about how the mind relates to the world, which is why he begins the Phenomenology here. At the same time, Hegel wishes to bring out how sense-certainty gains its attractiveness by trading on a commitment that appears plausible, but which turns out to be highly problematic, and once this is recognized our attachment to sense-certainty as a paradigm of knowledge will be lost.
What is the deceptively plausible commitment underlying sense- certainty? At this point, there is disagreement among commentators. For some interpreters, the motivation behind sense-certainty is a commitment to epistemic foundationalism, which posits direct intuitive experience as giving us the kind of unshakeable hook-up to the world on which knowledge is built; for others, it is a commitment to empiricism, according to which intuitive knowledge is prior to conceptual knowledge, because empirical concepts are learned and get their meaning by being linked to objects as they are given in experience; and for yet others, it is a commitment to realism, which holds that if the mind is not to distort or create the world, it needs to be in a position to gain access to the world in a passive manner without the mediation of conceptual activity, so the kind of direct experience envisaged by sense-certainty must be fundamental. Thus, some commentators take Hegel's principal target in this chapter to be epistemic foundationalism ; others take it to be concept empiricism ; and others take it to be realism . Now, Hegel certainly associates all these attitudes with sense- certainty in his preliminary characterization of it, saying that it claims to be the 'richest' and 'truest' form of knowledge in so far as it involves merely 'reaching out' to things, without 'omitting anything' from them . However, it is arguable that although the outlook of sense- certainty is indeed foundationalist, empiricist, and realist, there is a yet deeper assumption here that is really Hegel's more fundamental concern. This is the assumption that because it does not use concepts, sense-certainty is in a position to grasp a thing as an individual, without any abstraction from its unique specificity or pure particularity, and that in so doing sense-certainty gives us the most important kind of knowledge, which is of things as concrete, singular entities: for this reason sense-certainty prioritizes the one-to-one relation of direct experience over the generality and abstractness of thought, and so treats apprehension as more fundamental than comprehension. (An account of sense-certainty along these lines can be found in the writings of Hegel's existentialist critics, from Ludwig Feuerbach onwards: see De Nys 1978 for discussion and further references.) This reading of the chapter on sense-certainty fits in with that offered above of the Phenomenology as a whole, according to which the Phenomenology takes us through a series of inadequate standpoints which reveal how our handling of the categories of individual and universal is one-sided. As we shall see as we proceed through the remaining chapters of Consciousness, through Perception and into Force and the Understanding, Hegel tries to show that consciousness' impoverished conception of these two categories consistently leads it into difficulties, thereby bringing out the dialectical limitations in its thinking. Hegel emphasizes that for sense-certainty it is the individuality of the object that is taken to be ontologically fundamental; as he puts it towards the end of the section, sense-certainty holds that 'the existence of external objects, which can be more precisely defined as actual, absolutely singular, wholly personal, individual things, each of them absolutely unlike anything else' has 'absolute certainty and truth' . The aim of this section is then to bring out how sense-certainty's aconceptual view of knowledge appears natural to it because it conceives of individuality in this way, as something an object has apart from universality and particularity; by showing how this conception is problematic, consciousness comes to see how this view of knowledge is mistaken, and that its epistemic paradigm is ill- founded. Sense-certainty adopts its aconceptual view of knowledge because it thinks that it will grasp what constitutes the unique essence of the thing as an individual only if it does not use concepts in knowing that individual; for (sense-certainty holds) concepts can be applied to many different things, and so cannot tell us about the thing qua individual. This unique nature belonging to each entity is traditionally called 'haeccitas' or 'thisness'. In so far as it has this unique nature, the individual is claimed to be irreducible to any shareable qualities and so is said to be ontologically prior to any such qualities, in being what it is in a way that is wholly unlike anything else; it therefore appears to sense-certainty that it can be grasped by the subject or I directly, without any conceptual activity being required:
Consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure 'I'; or I am in it only as a pure 'This', and the object similarly only as a pure 'This'. I, this particular I, am certain of this particular thing, not because I, qua consciousness, in knowing it have developed myself or thought about it in various ways; and also not because the thing of which I am certain, in virtue of a host of distinct qualities, would be in its own self a rich complex of connections, or related in various ways to other things. Neither of these has anything to do with the truth of sense-certainty: here neither I nor the thing has the significance of a complex process of mediation; the 'I' does not have the significance of a manifold imagining or thinking; nor does the 'thing' signify something that has a host of qualities. On the contrary, the thing is, and it is, merely because it is. It is; this is the essential point for sense-knowledge, and this pure being, or this simple immediacy, constitutes its truth. Similarly, certainty as a connection is an immediate pure connection: consciousness is 'I', nothing more, a pure 'This'; the singular consciousness knows a pure 'This', or the single item.
In so far as sense-certainty maintains that the being of the object is constituted by its unique individuality in this way, sense-certainty naturally also holds that knowledge needs to be aconceptual, and that such knowledge is the 'richest' and 'truest': for (it holds) if we bring in concepts, we bring in general terms that can only take us away from knowing the object in its singularity (, 'Empiricism . . . leaves thought no powers except abstraction and formal universality and identity.'). What Hegel sets out to show, however, is that 'in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth' .
Now, as Hegel points out, sense-certainty faces a difficulty straight away, as it is hard to see how sense-certainty can claim to be aware of nothing but the object before it as a singular individual, when it is also aware of itself as a subject having this experience of the object: 'Among the countless differences cropping up here we find in every case that the crucial one is that, in sense-certainty, pure being at once splits up into what we have called the two "Thises", one "This" as "I", and the other "This" as object' . At this stage, however, sense-certainty claims that although consciousness is aware of itself as a subject, the object is independent of it, so that the object is still a self-subsistent and singular individual that can be known immediately:
'But the object is: it is what is true, or it is the essence. It is, regardless of whether it is known or not; and it remains, even if it is not known, whereas there is no knowledge if the object is not there' . Having set up the basic outlook of sense-certainty, Hegel now begins to probe its coherence, by asking 'whether in sense-certainty itself the object is in fact the kind of essence that sense-certainty proclaims it to be' . Hegel's central strategy against sense-certainty is to argue that what sense-certainty grasps in experience is not unique to the individual object, so that apprehension has no advantage over conception in this regard; sense-certainty therefore cannot claim that it is justified in treating the individual as a 'this' over and above its shared properties, so that the epistemic and metaphysical priority of the individual is hereby undermined. Hegel begins his argument by asking sense- certainty what its experience of the object tells us about it: 'It is, then, sense-certainty itself that must be asked: "What is the This?"'. Sense-certainty responds by saying that for it the object is simply present: it exists here-and-now (, 'From Empiricism came the cry: "Stop roaming in empty abstractions, keep your eyes open, lay hold on man and nature as they are here before you, enjoy the present moment" . . . Hence, this instinct seized upon the present, the Here, the This . . .'). However, Hegel proceeds to argue that
'existing here-and-now' is far from unique to the object, as different times and places can come to be 'here and now', and thus so can different things; sense-certainty has therefore failed to acquire knowledge of the object in its singular individuality, but only of a property that can belong to many individuals, and hence is universal:
in this simplicity [Now] is indifferent to what happens in it; just as little as Night and Day are its being, just as much also is it Day and Night; it is not in the least affected by this its other- being. A simple thing of this kind which is through negation, which is neither This nor That, a not-This, and is with equal indifference This as well as That - such a thing we call a universal. So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty . . . The same will be the case with the other form of 'This', with 'Here'. 'Here' is, e.g., the tree. If I turn round, this truth has vanished and is converted into its opposite:
'No tree is here, but a house instead'. 'Here' itself does not vanish; on the contrary, it abides constant in the vanishing of the house, the tree, etc., and is indifferently house or tree. Again, therefore, the 'This' shows itself to be a mediated simplicity, or a universality . . . [S]ense-certainty has demonstrated in its own self that the truth of its object is the universal.
Hegel therefore poses a dilemma for sense-certainty. The first option is that sense-certainty may insist that knowledge of the object requires that we grasp its unique essence; but then it must allow that such knowledge is unattainable because it turns out that nothing we can know about the object is unique to it, if we stick just to sense-certainty. The second option is that sense-certainty may deny that the object has any such unique essence, in which case there is no reason not to use concepts in seeking knowledge, and so no grounds for prioritizing sense-certainty as an epistemic position. Hegel articulates this dilemma most clearly at the end of the section, where he sums up his position against those who assert that 'the reality or being of external things taken as Thises or sense-objects has absolute truth for consciousness':
If they actually wanted to say 'this' bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal. In the actual attempt to say it, it would therefore crumble away; those who started to describe it would not be able to complete the description, but would be compelled to leave it to others, who would themselves finally have to admit to speaking about something which is not. They certainly mean, then, this bit of paper here which is quite different from the bit mentioned above; but they say 'actual things', 'external or sensuous objects', 'absolutely singular entities' and so on; i.e. they say of them only what is universal. Consequently, what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant [but is not actually expressed].
Before reaching this conclusion, however, Hegel allows sense- certainty to try to respond to its initial difficulty, of finding that 'Now' and 'Here' cannot constitute the unique individuating nature it is looking for, as many things can be 'Now' and 'Here'. Sense-certainty's first response is to try and make 'Now' and 'Here' a unique characteristic of this individual, because it is the only thing that is currently present in my experience qua subject. Hegel's response, however, is to point out that other things are present in the experience of other subjects, so there is nothing in this relation to a subject that individuates the object as such: 'I, this "I", see the tree and assert that "Here" as a tree; but another "I" sees the house and maintains that "Here" is not a tree but a house instead. Both truths have the same authentication, viz. the immediacy of seeing, and the certainty and assurance that both have about their knowing; but the one truth vanishes in the other . . . The "I" is merely universal like "Now", "Here", or "This" in general' . In order to avoid this difficulty, sense-certainty then asserts the unique individuality of the object it is experiencing here and now by trying to ignore the existence of any other such subjects, times and places: 'I, this "I", assert then the "Here" as a tree, and do not turn round so that the Here would become for me not a tree; also, I take no notice of the fact that another "I" sees the Here as not a tree, or that I myself at another time take the Here as not-tree, the Now as not- day. On the contrary, I am a pure [act of] intuiting'. The difficulty for sense-certainty at this point, however, is that if it does not acknowledge the existence of other places, times, subjects, and objects, it can only give an ostensive designation of what it means by 'Now', 'Here', 'I', and 'This', by pointing and saying 'Now', and so on: but this act of pointing can at best indicate a punctual present that is no longer present as soon as it is pointed out. If sense-certainty tries to get round this by trying to claim that 'Now' is a plurality of moments and hence extends long enough to be picked out, and 'Here' is a plurality of places likewise, it has been forced to abandon its solipsistic position and accept that the 'Now' can be applied to many times and the 'Here' to many places; it has then failed to avoid the admission that 'Now' and 'Here' are universal, and hence are unable to provide the kind of unique individuation it is looking for . Sense-certainty therefore ends up unable to make good the kind of ontological commitment underpinning its conception of knowledge: as Marcuse has put it, 'Sense-experience has thus itself demonstrated that its real content is not the particular but the universal'. It is sometimes alleged that Hegel is here attacking the metaphysical view that there are individuals at all ('Hegel's answer is abstract: what remains is only the "universal" which is indifferent to everything that exists here and now'); but this seems mistaken, as all Hegel is criticizing is the view that the individual qua individual cannot be conceived or thought about, but only apprehended, because only apprehension transcends what is universal and reaches the individual. Hegel's argument, as we have seen, is that even apprehension does not transcend the universal, for in apprehension we are just aware of the object as a 'this', which does not constitute the object's distinctive particularity, but rather its most abstract and universal character. Assuming rather than denying our capacity to grasp individuals, Hegel therefore concludes that knowledge of individuals cannot require us to go beyond universality in the way sense-certainty supposes. Adopting the method of immanent critique, Hegel has thus brought out how such metaphysical misconceptions can have philosophical consequences that are profoundly distorting; by diagnosing these misconceptions, Hegel hopes that as phenomenological observers we will no longer be tempted to adopt the one-sided epistemology of sense-certainty. As the next section on
'Perception: Or the Thing and Deception' will show, however, while consciousness itself may have learnt to reject sense-certainty, the position it now takes up instead will prove equally problematic, as consciousness responds to the difficulties faced by sense-certainty by attempting to go beyond it in an inadequate way, with a conception of individuality and universality that is still limited.
|
本城市首頁
等級：5
