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Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
17ObservingReason.mp3
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Text online 117ObservingReason.txt
Observing Reason
Frustrated by the self-imposed limitations of idealistic rationalism, consciousness now takes up a rather different rationalistic stance, one that emerged historically as part of the scientific revolution in post-Renaissance and post-Reformation Europe. In adopting this perspective, consciousness now sees the natural world as accessible to rational inquiry using observation and experimental methods, so that consciousness can come to feel at home in the world through the successful pursuit of scientific knowledge, by which the behaviour of individuals is subsumed under categories or universal laws. Hegel calls this form of consciousness 'Observing Reason':
Previously, its perception and experience of various aspects of the Thing were something that only happened to consciousness; but here, consciousness makes its own observations and experiments. 'Meaning' and 'perceiving', which previously were superseded for us, are now superseded by and for consciousness itself. Reason sets to work to know the truth, to find in the form of a Notion that which, for 'meaning' and 'perceiving', is a Thing; i.e. it seeks to possess in thinghood the consciousness only of itself. Reason now has, therefore, a universal interest in the world, because it is certain of its presence in the world, or that the world present to it is rational. It seeks its 'other', knowing that therein it possesses nothing but itself: it seeks only its own infinitude. As with the previous discussion of idealistic rationalism, Hegel's attitude to scientific rationalism is ambivalent: on the one hand, he is sympathetic to the rationalistic spirit that drives it, but on the other hand he thinks that this spirit here appears in a distorted form, as all the universal categories and laws that it constructs are too abstract and arbitrary. He therefore warns that a certain lack of development in consciousness' self conception at this stage leads it to misunderstand what it means to see itself in the world: 'But even if Reason digs into the very entrails of things and opens every vein in them so that it may gush forth to meet itself, it will not attain this joy [of finding itself present in things]; it must have completed itself inwardly before it can experience the consummation of itself' . Hegel makes clear that one important respect in which scientific rationalism goes astray, is that in trying to overcome the subject-centred outlook of idealism (which reduced the material world to the self), it goes too far in the opposite direction (and so attempts to reduce the self to the material world), so that we have here an equally one-sided position. Hegel therefore considers how Observing Reason views the natural world (in the subsection 'Observation of Nature'), how it views itself as consciousness (in the subsection 'Observation of Self-Consciousness'), and how it views the relation between the two in the connection of mind and body (in the subsection 'Observation of the Relation of Self-Consciousness to its Immediate Actuality'). Throughout this discussion, Hegel's aim is to show that while we must respect the achievements of the natural sciences, we should not exaggerate them, for the scientific outlook still leaves the tension between universality and individuality unresolved; we therefore should not treat scientific models and explanations as if they alone can provide us with a proper way of understanding ourselves and the natural world, as this unresolved tension means that in fact reason must remain unsatisfied by this way of viewing things.
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