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15UnhappyConsciousness.mp3
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Unhappy Consciousness
Having shown how the ancient sceptic comes to feel that thought is both all-powerful and powerless, Hegel argues that ‘in Scepticism, consciousness truly experiences itself as internally contradictory’. It is this duality that comes to be realized in what Hegel calls
‘the Unhappy Consciousness’: ‘This new form is, therefore, one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as self-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness of this self-contradictory nature of itself . . . The Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being’. Thus, on the one hand, the Unhappy Consciousness believes that it is unable to transcend the world of changeable appearances, but on the other hand holds that it can only attain satisfaction by so doing: rather than hoping to achieve some measure of tranquillity or ‘unperturbedness’ (ataraxia) by ‘living with appearances’ (as the Sceptic did), the Unhappy Consciousness is therefore painfully aware of the gap that exists between itself as a contingent, finite individual, and a realm of eternal and universal reason, since the Stoic logos has now become an unknowable Beyond. So, whereas the Stoic held that the capacity for rational contemplation belonged to man, it is now seen as a capacity that belongs to ‘an alien Being’ , to a higher form of consciousness which the Unhappy Consciousness now sets above itself. Nonetheless, though the Unhappy Consciousness has ‘projected’ this capacity for rational reflection onto another being that has the kind of eternal and unchangeable nature it lacks, Hegel interprets Christianity (in a clear reference to the Trinity) as an attempt to retain something of the Stoic picture of man’s rational soul as a fragment of the divine logos, while making the sceptic’s apparently unattainable
‘unchangeable’ truth something that could relate to the human. Thus, although ‘the first Unchangeable i.e. God it knows only as the alien Being who passes judgement on the particular individual’, in the Son it still sees that ‘the Unchangeable is a form of individuality like itself’, where ‘the reconciliation of its individuality with the universal’ is symbolized by the Holy Spirit . Nonetheless, although traditional medieval Christianity retains something of the earlier rationalistic framework, it stresses the fragility of the link between God and man, and hence the uncertainty of any such reconciliation coming about. This fragility is symbolized in the apparent contingency of Christ’s birth, on which the hope of reconciliation is founded: ‘The hope of becoming one with it [the Unchangeable] must remain a hope, i.e. without fulfilment and present fruition, for between the hope and the fulfilment there stands precisely the absolute contingency or inflexible indifference which lies in the very assumption of definite form, which was the ground of hope’. Thus, while Christianity in this form is in some respects an advance on Stoicism and Scepticism, in that it has recognized that it is not possible for thought to simply ‘turn its back on individuality’ by abstracting from the contingency, finitude, and suffering of actual existence into a realm of abstract thought, it still ‘has not yet risen to that thinking where consciousness as a particular individuality is reconciled with pure thought itself’: the subject therefore feels that qua individual subject, he is cut off from the rational ground of existence, as ‘pure thought’. Thus, while at the beginning of the chapter with ‘desire’, consciousness wanted to impose its individuality on the world, it has here come round to the opposite (and equally one-sided) perspective, where it now sees its ‘individuality’ as getting in the way of its attempts to achieve harmony with ‘the Unchangeable’. As a result, Hegel argues, although the Christian consciousness in some respects has a conception of this reconciliation, it has a distorted picture of how such reconciliation might occur, in its three ideals of the Christian life, as prayer, work, and penitence. Hegel therefore criticizes each in turn. As one might expect, Hegel is critical of prayer as placing too much emphasis on feeling at the expense of thought and rational reflection: ‘It is only a movement towards thinking, and so is devotion. Its thinking as such is no more than the chaotic jingling of bells, or a mist of warm incense, a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion, which would be the sole, immanent objective mode of thought’. The devotee seeks to find communion with God by virtue of being a ‘pure heart’; but the devotee seeks to demonstrate his purity by declaring that he has not yet found God but is nonetheless still devoted to the search. Devotion is thus ‘the struggle of an enterprise doomed to failure’. Hegel then considers the ideal of work, as the believer tries to serve God through labour. The Unhappy Consciousness now has a contradictory attitude to the world on which it works: on the one hand, anything worldly has no significance, as what matters is the God who stands above it; on the other hand, everything in the world is sanctified as the expression of God’s nature. Likewise, the Unhappy Consciousness also sees its own capacities for labour in a two-fold way: on the one hand if it can create anything using them, it is only because God allows it to do so; on the other hand, it also sees these capacities as God-given, and so divinely ordained. Thus, though work gives the Unhappy Consciousness some sense of its union with the Unchangeable, in another sense it makes it feel more cut off from it:
The fact that the unchangeable consciousness renounces and surrenders its embodied form, while, on the other hand, the particular individual consciousness gives thanks [for the gift], i.e. denies itself the satisfaction of being conscious of its independence, and assigns the essence of its action not to itself but to the beyond, through these two moments of reciprocal self-surrender of both parts, consciousness does, of course, gain a sense of unity with the Unchangeable. But this unity is at the same time affected with division, is again broken within itself, and from it there emerges once more the antithesis of the universal and the individual. The difficulty, Hegel argues, is that Unhappy Consciousness sees that its humility here is false, for while it treats the world and its capacities as gifts from God for which it gives thanks, it also recognizes that these gifts are a source of prideful enjoyment for it: ‘Consciousness feels itself therein as a particular individual, and does not let itself be deceived by its own seeming renunciation, for the truth of the matter is that it has not renounced itself’. From this sense of unworthiness, Hegel moves on to the third ideal of penitence, where the Unhappy Consciousness tries to overcome its hypocrisy: ‘Work and enjoyment thus lose all universal content and significance, for if they had any, they would have an absolute being of their own. Both withdraw into their mere particularity, which consciousness is set upon reducing to nothingness’. In its attempts to purify itself, the Unhappy Consciousness turns on its own body as a source of weakness and spiritual corruption, as standing in the way of its attempts to rise above its mere individuality; but the more it tries to overcome its physical nature, the more the body becomes an obsessive focus of attention:
Consciousness is aware of itself as this actual individual in the animal functions. These are no longer performed naturally and without embarrassment, as matters trifling in themselves which cannot possess any importance or essential significance for Spirit; instead, since it is in them that the enemy reveals itself in his characteristic shape, they are rather the object of serious endeavour, and become precisely matters of the utmost importance. This enemy, however, renews himself in his defeat, and consciousness, in fixing its attention on him, far from freeing itself from him, really remains for ever in contact with him, and for ever sees itself as defiled; and, since at the same time this object of its efforts, instead of being something essential, is of the meanest character, instead of being a universal, is the merest particular, we have here only a personality confined to its own self and its own petty actions, a personality brooding over itself, as wretched as it is impoverished.
In going further in this attempt at reducing its particularity ‘to nothingness’, the Unhappy Consciousness now gives up all freedom of action as well as all earthly goods, and puts them in the hands of a
‘mediator or minister [priest]’, to decide for it how it should act:
This mediator, having a direct relationship with the unchangeable Being, ministers by giving advice on what is right. The action, since it follows upon the decision of someone else, ceases, as regards the doing or the willing of it, to be its own. But there is still left to the unessential consciousness the objective aspect, viz. the fruit of its labour, and its enjoyment. These, therefore, it rejects as well, and just as it renounces its will, so it renounces the actuality it received in work and enjoyment . . . Through these moments of surrender, first of its right to decide for itself, then of its property and enjoyment, and finally through the positive moment of practising what it does not understand, it truly and completely deprives itself of the consciousness of inner and outer freedom, of the actuality in which consciousness exists for itself. It has the certainty of having truly divested itself of its ‘I’, and of having turned its immediate self-consciousness into a Thing, into an objective existence. Hegel says that here the Unhappy Consciousness comes to feel it has achieved genuine self-renunciation, in a way that was not possible through prayer and work. However, although the individual can take a step towards universality by putting himself under the sway of the priest, this is merely a negative loss of self, and so does not really signal the synthesis of universal and individual, as the latter is seen as negated by the former: ‘The surrender of its own will, as a particular will, is not taken by it to be in principle the positive aspect of universal will. Similarly, its giving up of possessions and enjoyment has only the same negative meaning’. At this point, Hegel makes a transition to the next part of the Phenomenology, to ‘Reason’, where the mood suddenly changes, from gloomy religiosity to rationalistic optimism. Hegel makes this transition very quickly, in one paragraph, and it is hard to see how it is has adopted the priest as a mediator, consciousness can now at least conceive of the possibility of blessedness, and thus can come to think that at least in principle its actions might be recognized as those required and ordained by God; it therefore no longer sees itself as inherently out of touch with the rational order that governs the world, even though it still sees such reconciliation as ‘a beyond’, something it is best to treat as a ‘hope’. But once it takes a further step, and gives up thinking of this reconciliation as out of reach, the rationalistic self-confidence we left behind us with the Stoics can return, but this time in a new and more radical form, in which self-consciousness as an individual recognizes itself in the world of objects, and so no longer sets itself outside the rational order qua universal:
‘In this movement it has also become aware of its unity with this universal’. It is this renewed rationalism that forms the topic of the next chapter.
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