Half Hour Hegel: The Complete Phenomenology of Spirit (Sense Certainty, sec. 98-101)

In this forty-first video in the new series on G.W.F. Hegel's great early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, I read and comment on the ninety-eight, ninety-ninth, hundredth, and hundred-and-first paragraphs of the text, beginning our study of the first portion of the section "Consciousness," i.e "Sense Certainty".

Hegel now turns to discuss the "Here," i.e. spatiality of sense-objects. It turns out again that mediation and negation are involved, and that the Here is a universal. Sense-certainty thus reveals that its essence is pure being, or abstraction.

It turns out that the object of sense is not what is essential, nor is it even the universal as such, but the universal as grasped by the "I", the knowing and sensing subject. We then have to look how the "I" functions in sense-certainty, and again a splitting or duality emerges -- there are multiple "I"s involved.

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

[Mevlinous]

What’s beautiful about this is, this description of unfolding of spirit is not just theoretical. Much of what you have been explaining here has been unfolding in my life. It makes me wonder how Hegel could have possibly had such a clear grasp of all this unless he underwent these changes as well. It’s like your whole consciousness is turned inside out, what was thought to be the outside world, is actually part of you, being the essence. Initially it began as a subject object dichotomy, with a clear inner “observer”, but now the observer is seen to be a lens.

I am going to have to really go through this to truly understand it in its complexity. It’s feeling very right.

[GregoryBSadler]

Some Hegelian dialectic for a Saturday night, continuing the examination of sense-certainty -- moving from the object of sense, to the universal, and then to the perceiving "I". . .  or is it "I"s?

[pdtuck]

I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that the "I" also determines the now, probably because time is made into a convertible unit around the globe so we are all supposed to be in the same "now", we just call it different things. The timezones is a good example, however I also think it looks like relativity theory has come down on the side of Hegel. The "now" for the person orbiting the black hole is fundamentally different for the now of the person on earth, the conversion of time can happen, but only to put it into a common unit. The reality shown would be totally different: the person around the black hole would after a certain period of time age totally differently than the person on earth. You could quantify it in years, but the "now" for each person would be totally different according to their experience.

[QuintessentialQs]

I mostly keep commenting to exteriorize my own thoughts as I go through this book and lecture series.

But I think I am starting to grasp something. It seems like the experience of the night, or the tree are immediate. But, it requires almost no inquiry to show that they are ephemeral and subordinate to the universal, non-sensory experience of the "now" and the "here". And the "now" and the "here" don't exist anywhere outside of consciousness as universals, so it's within consciousness itself that we can have, and confirm, and know from every angle, a "sense certainty", or an experiential certainty of the "now" and the "here", whereas the exterior object is communicated to us mediated by universal.

I am certain there is a "here" and a "now" because I experience them. Unmediated. Those things exist entirely within the sphere of my consciousness. The here and now act as media for particulars, but I can't have the same kind of certainty about those sensory moments that I do about the universal here and now.


This seems to place the bedrock or foundation of knowledge on the ideal, universal, and interior rather than the material or exterior?

[MirMuzafarTalpur]

HERE and NOW are the universal categories. Regardless of One 'I' or Many 'I'.
This is my understanding of me if I am wrong

[psychonaut]

I'd like to realise the implications of Hegel on the therapeutic method.

[jamesdyer]

So, he is saying that consciousness is somewhat like a flicker film....in each frame of an old black and white film there is no motion, it is a still image, but in the totality of those frames flickered in succession, it is what it originally negated: motion. If I try to refer to a feather, I cannot because the feather has already gone into the past and become a thing that was, and a thing that was IS not, therefore the Thing is it's not Not, so it IS....? I LOVE Hegel. In other words, we cannot think outside our I look into the sky and see the moon, it is not the moon, it is my mind's representation of the moon. Something like that? I keep going back through these early chapters of sense-certainty, perception, self consciousness, and then skipping force and the understanding, hoping that I can circumolocute what he was trying to say in that isn't just abstract nonesense, but I can't understand it.

[dantheman]

Is Hegel's treatment of here and its relationship to language a bit analytic? I may be reading too much into it.

[eatsbugs]

Does does Hegel (or the translator) use "immediacy" to mean the temporal notion of something happening now, and the idea of "without mediation?" I get the since that it does, but I want to be sure I'm not muddling up my thinking. Thanks.

[lyndonbailey]

26:00 -27:00 basically every internet argument ever ha!