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hegel phenomenology of spirit introduction part 1
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hegel_phenomenology_of_spirit_intro_part_1.mp3
73. It is natural to assume that in philosophy, before one gets down to dealing with what really matters, namely, the actual cognition of what there is in truth, it would first be necessary to reach prior agreement about cognition, namely, about whether it is to be viewed either as the instrument with which one takes possession of the absolute, or as the means by which one catches a glimpse of it. There is a certain unease about this which seems in part justified because there are various kinds of cognition, and it could well be that one of them, rather than another, would be better suited to achieving this final end and that a wrong choice among them is thereby possible - in part this unease is justified because cognition is a faculty of a determinate kind and extent, and without a more precise determination of its nature and limits, we might end up grasping vaporous clouds of error instead of entering into the heaven of truth. This unease is even bound to be transformed into the conviction both that the entire project of acquiring what is in-itself for consciousness by way of cognition is, in its very concept, absurd, and that there is a sharp line separating cognition from the absolute. This is so because if we suppose cognition to be the instrument by means of which we take hold of the absolute essence, then it is obvious that if we apply an instrument to something, the application does not in fact leave it be as it is on its own; rather, it sets out to reshape it and change it. Or, if cognition is not an instrument of our activity but is to some extent a passive medium through which the light of the truth reaches us, then here too we do not receive the truth as it is in itself but only as it comes to us through this medium and in the medium. In both cases, we employ a means which immediately engenders the very opposite of its intended purpose, that is, the very absurdity of the enterprise lies our making use of any means at all. To be sure, it seems that this evil stands to be remedied by means of a cognition of the way the instrument works, for such a cognition would make it possible to peel away in the representation the part of the absolute which we receive by virtue of the instrument from that part which belongs to the instrument, and thus we would receive the truth in its purity. However, this improvement would in fact merely bring us back to where we were before. If we once again subtract from the reshaped thing what the instrument has added to it, then the thing - here, the absolute - is once again for us exactly as it was prior to this fully superfluous effort. If we were just supposed to bring the absolute a bit closer to us by means of the instrument and not have the instrument change anything in it at all, perhaps similar to the way we would ensnare a bird on a twig covered in birdlime, then the absolute itself would almost surely cast scorn on this ruse if it were not both in and for itself already there with us and wanted to be there. In that case, cognition itself would merely be a ruse, since all its efforts would only amount to its putting on airs about doing something which is quite different from engendering a merely immediate and thereby trouble-free relation. Or if in the examination and testing of cognition, which we represent as a medium, we learn about the law of its refraction, then it is also equally useless to subtract this refraction from the result, for it is not the refraction of the ray but rather the ray itself by way of which the truth comes into contact with us, and if this is subtracted, then all it would point to would be either a pure direction or an empty location.74. Meanwhile, if the anxiety about falling into error sets up a mistrust of science, which itself is untroubled by those scruples and simply sets itself to its work and actually gets down to cognizing, then it is difficult to see why there should not be instead a mistrust of this mistrust, that is, why there should not be an anxiety over whether the fear of error is not already the error itself. In fact, this fear presupposes that there is something (or, to be precise, a great deal) which is the truth, and it supports its scruples and its deductions on some other basis which is itself in need of examination as to whether it is the truth. It presupposes, that is, representations of cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and it also presupposes a distinction between ourselves and this cognition. However, it above all presupposes that the absolute stands on one side of a divide and cognition on the other, and that cognition exists on its own, that it is separated from the absolute but is still something real. That is, it presupposes that since such a cognition is external to the absolute, it is also indeed external to the truth, but that it is nonetheless itself truthful. The presupposition which calls itself the fear of error thus reveals itself to be more likely the fear of the truth. 75. This conclusion is drawn from the following: The absolute alone is true, that is, it is the true which is alone the absolute. One can reject this conclusion if one distinguishes between a cognition which does not cognize the absolute as science wants to do but which is nonetheless true, and cognition itself, which, although it may be incapable of grasping the absolute, may still be capable of grasping some other truths. However, we gradually come to see that this kind of back and forth blather merely leads to a very murky distinction between an absolute truth and a truth of some other kind; it also leads us to the conclusion that "the absolute," "cognition," etc., are words which presuppose a meaning which is going to require far more work if we are to get at what those meanings are. 76. If instead of worrying ourselves over such useless ways of talking and thinking about cognition, such as those that hold cognition either to be an instrument to take hold of the absolute or a medium through which we catch a glimpse of the truth and so on - which is the direction taken by all these conceptions of cognition as separated from the absolute and of the absolute as separated from cognition - and if instead of worrying about those kinds of excuses which, by presupposing such relations, create the incapacity of science and at the same time also both free us from the hard work of science and enable us to put on the air of a serious and fervent effort - that is, if instead of getting down to the work of actually answering all these questions, we could just basically rid ourselves of all those conceptions, declare them to be contingent and arbitrary and regard them as trick-words, such as "absolute," "cognition," as well as "objective" and "subjective," as well as innumerable other words whose meanings are generally assumed to be well known. The pretence that their meaning is in part generally well known and that in part one is even in possession of their concept is something which itself seems to arise merely in order to spare us the most important thing, which is just to provide this concept. By way of contrast, we might with even more justification simply spare ourselves the trouble of taking any notice at all of those ways of talking and thinking which are themselves supposed to keep science at bay, for they merely constitute a barren appearance of knowledge which itself immediately vanishes once science itself comes on the scene. However, in coming on the scene, science is itself an appearance, and as it comes on the scene, science has not yet itself been worked out in its truth in any extensive way. It makes no difference in this regard whether we think of science as an appearance because it comes on the scene alongside other ways of knowing, or whether we call that other untrue knowledge its appearance. But science must free itself from this semblance, and it can only do so by turning against it. This is so because science cannot discard a non- truthful cognition on the grounds that it is merely a common view of things while at the same time assuring us both that it is itself an entirely different kind of knowledge and that the other kind of knowledge amounts to nothing at all for it. Nor can it appeal to some vague intimation about there being something even better in the common view. By way of that assurance, it declares its power to lie in its being. However, untrue knowledge equally appeals to the same thing, namely, that it exists, and it assures us that in its eyes science amounts to nothing. One merely jejune assurance, however, counts for just as much as another. Still less can science appeal to the better intimations which are supposed to be present in non-truthful cognition and which supposedly point towards science. If it did so, then it would on the one hand be appealing once again either to what merely is, or to itself both in the mode in which it exists in non-truthful cognition, which is to say, to a bad mode of its being and thus to its appearance rather than to the way it exists in and for itself. It is for this reason that the exposition of phenomenal knowledge is supposed to be undertaken here. 77. Now, because this account has merely phenomenal knowledge for its object, it does not seem itself to be science, that is, free and self-moving within its own distinctive shape. But when it is viewed from this standpoint, it can be taken to be the path of natural consciousness which presses forward towards true knowledge, or it can be taken to be the path of the soul as it wanders through the series of the ways it takes shape, as if those shapes were stations laid out for it by its own nature so that it both might purify itself into spirit and, through a complete experience of itself, achieve a cognitive acquaintance of what it is in itself. 78. Natural consciousness will prove to be merely the concept of knowledge, that is, prove to be not real knowledge. However, because to a greater degree it immediately takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative meaning for it, and in its eyes the realization of the concept will count to an even greater degree as the loss of itself, for it is on this path that it loses its truth. This path can accordingly be regarded as the path of doubt, or, more properly, as the path of despair, for what transpires on that path is not what is usually understood as doubt, namely, as an undermining of this or that alleged truth which is then followed by the disappearance of the doubt, and which in turn then returns to the former truth in such a way that what is at stake is taken to be exactly what it was in the first place. Rather, the path is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge, for which the most real is in truth merely the unrealized concept. For that reason, this self-consummating skepticism is also not the kind of skepticism with which a fervent zeal for truth and science imagines it has equipped itself so that it might be over and done with the matter. It is not, that is, the resolve in science that one not to submit oneself to the authority of others' thoughts but instead that one examine everything for oneself, that one follow only one's own conviction, or, even better, that one do everything oneself and take one's own deed alone to be the truth. Rather, the series of its shapes which consciousness runs through on this path is the detailed history of the cultural maturation of consciousness up to the standpoint of science. The former resolve represents cultural maturation simplistically as a resolution which has been immediately carried out. However, in contrast to that untruth, this path is the actual working out of that resolve. To be sure, following one's own conviction is more than submitting oneself to authority, but converting opinions which are held on authority into opinions which are held on the basis of one's own conviction does not necessarily alter the content of those opinions, and it certainly does not thereby replace error with truth. The only difference between abiding by the authority of others or abiding by one's own convictions in a system of opinions and prejudices lies solely in the vanity inherent in the latter. In contrast, in directing itself to the entire range of phenomenal consciousness, skepticism makes spirit for the first time competent to investigate what is the truth, since it manages to elicit a despair about those so-called natural conceptions, thoughts, and opinions. For this despair, it is a matter of indifference as to whether one calls those conceptions one's own or ascribes them to others. Consciousness, which straight away gets down to such an examination, is still filled out and burdened with such conceptions and is for that very reason in fact incapable of accomplishing the task which it wishes to undertake. 79. The completeness of the forms of unreal consciousness will result from the necessity of the progression of and interrelations among the forms themselves. To make this comprehensible, we can in general note at the outset that the account of non-truthful consciousness in its untruth is not a merely negative movement. Natural consciousness generally has that kind of one-sided view of that movement, and a knowledge that makes this one-sidedness into its own essence is one of those shapes of incomplete consciousness which in the overall course of things both belongs to that path and itself shows up on the path. It is the very skepticism which always sees in its results only pure nothingness and which abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is only the determinate shape of the nothingness from which it itself has resulted. However, it is only the nothingness which is taken as the nothingness of that from which it emerges which is in fact the true result. That nothingness is itself thereby determinate and thereby has a content. Skepticism which ends with the abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot progress any further from this point but must instead wait to see whether something new will come along and wait to see what it will be if indeed it is then to toss it too into the same empty abyss. In contrast, when the result is grasped as determinate negation, that is, when it is grasped as it is in truth, then at that point a new form has immediately arisen, and in that negation the transition has been made by virtue of which the progression through the complete series of shapes comes about on its own accord.
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