Half Hour Hegel: The Complete Phenomenology of Spirit (Perception, sec. 119-121)

In this forty-eighth video in the new series on G.W.F. Hegel's great early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, I read and comment on paragraphs 119, 120, and 121 of the text, continuing our study of the second portion of the section "Consciousness," i.e "Perception: Or the Thing and Deception".

In these sections, while still focusing on the Thing and its properties, Hegel is now turning explicitly to consciousness' role in perception. The "indifferent medium", in which the properties of the thing coexist, turns out to involve our sensory organs, and the perceiving subject. It is consciousness that makes it possible for the Thing to assume its multiple aspects and to remain a unity.

In this video series, I will be working through the entire Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph -- for each one, first reading the paragraph, and then commenting on what Hegel is doing, referencing, discussing, etc. in that paragraph.

#Hegel #Phenomenology #Philosophy #Idealism #German #Dialectic #Spirit #Absolute #Knowledge #History

[eatsbugs]

The transition in 119 makes me want to scream a little. It seems like we've reach a point in the text where we find that humans (humanity?) itself is the medium by which reality is perceived, but can be altered infinitely and infinitesimally through the act of being human. Really makes it feel like everything is contingent on this, and really unsettles the ground of logic and experience as (at least for me) it has always been. I'm sure Hegel intended this, but it hurts my brain. Not a complaint, just expressing a summation. Thanks for your dedication.

[Gwyndolin-hkql]

I've been reading Houlgate's introduction to Hegel recently. And I realized how Hegel might not be as hard as I imagined. It really helped me to think more abstractly when reading phenomenology and your video has been another great help when going into details. 😂It still takes lots of efforts, but much easier now.

[GregoryBSadler]

The next video in the series is out -- the fourth lecture on the section "Perception", which is lecture 48 of the entire series so far!

[ChristianReinholdt]

The time of chalk analogies has come to an end.

[ligottifan]

This helped a lot. When I read section 121 I wasn't sure if it was in the ballpark to compare to Kant's 1st Critique but this helped clarify that it was a valid comparison to bring in. Also, the "pushing off" concept has been VERY helpful in understanding the dialectic at the property level. Also, think the answer is both fructose and glucose for non-processed honey. Also :) love the music choice. Bach's my favorite.

[Everyone]

With the whole, consciousness makes the unity of the One thing, would that be similar to Kant unity of apperception. Like it take different sensible experiences with a thing and makes it what it is for consciousness

[ShaneKidd]

If it is left up to consciousness to demarcate your chalk as a thing then it has the power to also includes the hand that holds it or even all of Dr Sadler as a part of its unity. In that case the chalk can have the property of being Dr Sadler, which seems like this gives consciousness the ability to make a thing what it is and so no thing has any certainty beyond a general conscious among a number of consciousnesses agreeing about it.

[alexmorrison]

Wait, you just uploaded a new video for this series. At this point your dedication is enviable. But I think I finally have a question; though I don't think my understanding of Hegel warrants an ability to actually ask an intelligible question. But how would Hegel overcome the problem presented by Theseus' Ship? Would it be apt to say that the ship can be considered a universal and is comprised of wood a sail all those shippy things, and so long as it posses the notion of those things, the specific parts of a ship don't really matter so the problem raised replacing all parts of the ship. Further rebuilding the ship from the old parts doesn't mean we now have two of Theseus' ships because the new ship with old parts is still missing the 'here and now' of the original ship. If this is the case would it be safe to say that a things essence is preserved in the 'here and now'? Or am I just making things up and saying it's Hegelian?

[nateaasland]

would the aristotle thing of ' a should being in a way all things, capable of having a thing and its opposite at the same time' translate into 'Hegelian' as ' the spirit is the power of the negative ' ( idk if i got the quote right). The analogy that comes to mind is from psychoanalysis, that of the analyst ( who, according to lacan is separated by a slight ( minimal? ) difference from the discourse of the pervert, and who is in Lacan's formulae equivalent ( could u sometime do a video on the formal logic that Lacan uses, or point out somewhere/someway I can learn it ? ) ) who does not stick to a consistent position, but by holding to one position and then another, is able to tease out the desires of the analysand. So that, something negative ( allowed to present itself as inconsistent) is required to get at / grasp anything positive ( here i know that I am leaving out a crucial factor -- that what the analyst is getting at is not ( just ? ) something positive, but another subjectivity, the analysand. I don't know how to resolve this. ( just thought Id point that out. Maybe Ill figure it out later, and find out if its a necessary ambiguity to my argument, without which it has no ground, or a temporarily okay simplification ( for the self can be said to have both objective and subjective properties -- no rather, its an antinomy, i think, as a whole ( it can be reasoned to be ) both objective and subjective ( also I think a missing element that would come in handy is something i read from a writer, that fantasy is the weird domain of the 'objectively subjective' ( which i think is related to his/the ( i think its the Deleuzian ) definition of the virtual . but i could be wrong ), in that, paradoxically, one can not know what one actually believes, or, a better way to put it, one can not be aware of the way the world objectively appears to them ( this can tie in to object fetishism ( i am thinking in the marxist sense ), as the author pointed out, whereby the distinction between superstructure and structure gets blurred ( here i am reminded of how this author makes the Pauline ( and somewhat Hegelian ) analysis of law and punishment, whereby one leads to another / a law brings about the desire for new transgressions previously unheard of, and in this way ' no clear dividing line can be made between law and transgression' and the only way out is through another field, that of love. ) --- anyways, i got off path. I was talking about how a key is that fantasy is 'objectively subjective'. And this makes sense in reading freud, in that many of his analysis point out desires that his patients would not admit to, either when they consciously knew, or more interestingly, when they were repressed ( this reminds me of how ' the unconscious has no negative', as freud put it. ( I understand this in terms of the fact that if you bring something up in talk, even if you bring it up as a negative, it still witnesses to the fact that it means something to you. Like a person who says he did not do a crime before even having been convicted. ( 'so that if a patient talks of his dream, and says that whoever the figure was, it was not his mother', the analyst is right to conclude it probably was indeed his mother ( tho this example does not deal with an unconscious knowledge, i don't think, but rather a conscious one of the patient , that it was his mother in the dream ) ( the author said ' this gets more complicated in repressive desublimation, whereby, in a society, the patient would jump straight to the point of saying ' it probably was my mother', in part to accuse himself of all so that he cannot be accused by others, and thereby also not believe his own accusation because it was made, he knows, primarily to force the hand of the other. Tho really it was made to further delude himself and hold off a confession which he himself would believe. This is like ( marxian ) object fetishism in that the does not know what he believes, but his position bears witness to the fact that he does know ( is this the unconscious yet? ), that he is doing it to get these results, the only way ( that he knows ) to get these results involves self-blinding, that nonetheless can never be complete ( i think that makes this 'oedipal' ) , and the fact that self-blinding cannot be complete ( for it does not, as in actual blinding, remove the organ of knowledge, but rather causes a shift in subjective position to provide plausible deniability of a certain knowledge ( as in a man who always solicits attention from others, but who, it turns out, mostly solicits this attention so that after he receives the attention he can shrug and claim that he solicited it anyway, and therefore is not genuine, for his greatest fear is not just lack of attention, but receiving attention, which will make him feel awful/guilty ( as in the lacanian point of how analysands have to pay money not just for economic reasons, but also to avoid the feeling of guilt and shame that comes from being loved for nothing, and totally unaccustomed to this, 'unable to integrate it into their symbolic network' ) this leads me to three things : the term 'che voui', as used by lacan, the distinction between symptom and 'sinthome', which nonetheless are shown in some complicity/togetherness in this passage of mine that lead from mentioning 'symptom', to 'integration into ones symbolic universe ', which ties to 'sinthome', as it is understood as ' a blur', as in Hans Holbein's painting the ambassadors, which Lacan talks of, a painting that includes a blur that must be 'looked awry' at to be understood, which leads to one of the reasons that 'les non-dupes errent' (I'm not sure of spelling and grammar there. ) The third disparate thing I am brought to is an authors critical ( and psychological ) rereading of kant, whereby unlike what he calls the 'crude psychological reading', the primary fear of individuals is not to ( realize that they ) do what they do for 'pathological' (' as kant uses the term' ) reasons, but the greater, primary fear is that they commit a truly free act ( ' in contrast we often sabotage our acts in advance ; two of the freest acts are madness and freedom' ( I would add, we sabotage them because we are afraid of changing our coordinates and want a kind of 'utopia', that is, the ability to imagine a future given the system as such, a future that nonetheless is false for it relies on positing eg capitalism and then necessarily relying on the ambiguity, the un-givenness of the 'conditions of possibility' ( as in, even in daily conversation, one does not say what one means but 'for example if one competes with a friend for a job and wins, the polite thing to do is to offer the friend the job anyways, knowing in advance that the friend will of course not take that offer. So even though the offer is false, it deals with a real tension. ' And to not follow these routines, these paths of reduced anxiety, would humiliate the other person, and thereby lead one to think negatively of oneself. Let me give other examples of things being not fully posited as such. The author talks of a country under imperialism, wherein once a man disobeyed a polices orders, and the police officer did not beat him, as he would have done at times. After that act of 'passive resistance', a tide had shifted. In a certain sense, it had already shifted, the conditions for it had already shifted, but it needed to be 'registered the big other' for the change to know realize itself ( this is a place where lacan is close to hegel in his 'silent weaving of the spirit' whereby all the work of eg separating a rock from the rock it is part of is done; but the work is invisible ; all it needs ' is a tap' and the rock comes free. that tap is the symbolic registration. Thereby, even though something objectively happens in spirit ( I am thinking in marxian terms i.e. parts of capitalism that happen because of all the individuals, that is, that are not caused by some essence of nature, but only by the individuals in intersubjective relation, yet would not have been chosen by any single one of the individuals ( for example low working class wages, which follow the principle that the lowest bidder ( within reason ) -- that is the worker willing to work for the least amount of money -- 'sets' ( though I know he as an individual doesn't set this, and there isn't one individual lowest--willing--bidder ; it is a point found by capitalists )) , and not only would no single individual with the power ( though I just mentioned a single lowest--bidder, this was someone without power ), power given through unification that paradoxically does not remove the fact that he is a single individual, that is, the power that comes from a union, 'collective bidding' ) -- even though something objectively happens in spirit, it requires a subjective marking of the fact for this objective truth to "realize itself", to split from the rock it was part of, to move from 'for itself to in itself " ( if I am using those terms right, that is, if i am not mixing them ) Wow this is my longest post yet, and very stream-of-consciousness. Read at ur own risk.

[nateaasland]

that whole pushing off from one another, the part where you say ' if they fully much off they would be no thing' reminds me of atoms interacting ( from a high school chemistry perspective ) to make a mass of atoms that we understand as such. even a mass of atoms that are all the same has properties that do not belong to any individual atom as such ( 'for itself', i thinking ) yet exist as potentials, such that its like they have all the code written in them ( now i might be approaching Liebnitz' Monads. I heard Heidegger mentioned Schelling was influenced by Monadology -- maybe Hegel was too? ) such that when they interact with each other, they will have the properties we identify with this group of atoms ( this is the 'in itself' I'm thinking ) . ( tell me if I'm getting in itself and for itself switched; also do they apply well to this analogy or not so much? )

[TTFMjock]

Could sense-certainty be described accurately as characteristic of non-articulate perception?  For example, considering a being without language, but that nonetheless possesses senses, and which can navigate its world, (any non-human animal, bats being perhaps an interesting case).  The main 'truth' in its perceptions would be realized in its success in navigating its environment, surviving and thriving, since it senses, but cannot reflect upon this environment.  The bat has no thought of doubting what its sonar projections indicate to it; the world that these projections report to it is constitutes its Absolute, so comprehensively true that it cannot register as a determinate particular, since it would be the Only.  The bat's inability to doubt this 'certainty' (its inability to 'split' this World vis. the Negative) constitutes simultaneously its absolute certainty and the unbridgeable limits of its knowledge.

In this way of thinking, the end of consciousness would occur when the Negative can no longer do its work.  The World has been illuminated by Consciousness so thoroughly that all doubt, all surprise, startlements, etc. have been desiccated in light of the full development of Hegelian Science, which has made all things (including its own nature) as clearly intelligible and beyond dispute as the roundness of the Earth, in which case, humanity would have discovered its Absolute and caught up either to the Divine or the bats.

I hope I have somewhat comprehended what is going on so far.  I sort of felt it click a bit, and hope it isn't illusory, damn negative...