— A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions Book 49
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2 History With A Purpose
The idea of rule based on an intellectual or spiritual principle signifies the beginning of the growth of the consciousness of freedom that Hegel intends to trace.
Whatever is the result of the habits and customs in which one was brought up is not the result of the use of one’s reason.
My actions, it might be said, are still governed by forces external to my will–the social forces that gave me my habits–even though there is no despot telling me what to do, and the motivation for the action appears to come from within.
Once the objective world is rationally organized, on the other hand, individuals following their consciences will freely choose to act in accordance with the law and morality of the objective world.
3 Freedom And Community
Hegel’s objection to this notion of freedom is that it takes the choices of the individual as the basis from which freedom must begin–how and why these choices are made is a question that those who hold this conception of freedom do not ask. Hegel does ask it, and his answer is that the individual choice, considered in isolation from everything else, is the outcome of arbitrary circumstances. Hence it is not genuinely free.
Others can reveal to you that what you take to be comfort at any stage is discomfort, and these discoveries never come to an
Since we did not choose our desires, we are not free when we act from desire.
This universal form is, Hegel says, simply a principle of consistency or non-contradiction. If we have no point to start from, it cannot get us anywhere.
Hegel’s concern is with freedom in the sense in which we are free when we are able to choose without being coerced either by other human beings or by our natural desires, or by social circumstances.
4 The Odyssey Of Mind
‘phenomenon’ means, in its philosophical use, ‘that of which the senses or the mind directly takes note; an immediate object of perception (as distinguished from substance, or a thing in itself)’.
Phenomenology, then, is the study of the way in which things appear to us.
Thus a phenomenology of mind is really a study of how mind appears to itself.
Hegel himself describes his project as ‘the exposition of knowledge as a phenomenon’ because he sees the development of consciousness as a development toward forms of consciousness that more fully grasp reality, culminating in ‘absolute knowledge’.
For in the case of knowing, what is one to subtract? It would be like subtracting not the difference the water makes to the ray of light, but the ray of light itself.
If we are to doubt everything, why not doubt the claim that we can know nothing?
Kant argued that we can never see reality as it is; for we can only comprehend our experiences within the frameworks of space, time, and causation. Space, time, and causation are not part of reality, but the necessary forms in which we grasp it; therefore we can never know things as they are independently of our knowledge.
To learn to swim we must plunge boldly into the stream; and to obtain knowledge of reality, we must plunge boldly into the stream of consciousness that is the starting point of all we know.
We shall not start with sophisticated doubts, but with a simple form of consciousness that takes itself to be genuine knowledge. This simple form of consciousness will, however, prove itself to be something less than genuine knowledge, and so will develop into another form of consciousness; and this in turn will also prove inadequate and develop into something else, and so the process will continue until we reach true knowledge.
The ‘something’ that is the result of the discovery that a form of consciousness is inadequate is itself a new form of consciousness, namely consciousness aware of the inadequacies of the previous form and forced to adopt a different approach in order to surmount them.
Sense-certainty is aware only of what is now present to it; as Hegel puts it, it is the certainty of the ‘this’, or of the ‘here’ and ‘now’.
I may well think that I know what I mean, even if I cannot put it into words, but in fact this is not knowledge, it is purely subjective, a personal opinion. Opinion is not knowledge.
At the level of perception, consciousness classifies objects according to their universal properties; this proves inadequate, and so at the level of understanding, consciousness imposes its own laws on reality.
The concepts employed in this process–notions like ‘gravity’ and ‘force’–are not things we see existing in reality, but constructs made by our understanding to help us grasp reality.
To be aware of oneself as a self-conscious being, one needs to be able to observe another self-conscious being, to see what self-consciousness is like.
A child growing up in total isolation from all other self-conscious beings would never develop mentally beyond the level of mere consciousness, for self-consciousness grows out of a social life.
In fact self-consciousness is doubly attached to material objects: it is attached to its own living body, and to the living body of the other person from whom it requires acknowledgement.
Hegel gives our natural and socially conditioned desires their place, as he gives traditional political institutions their place; but it is always a place within a hierarchy ordered and controlled by mind.
So-called ‘material objects’ turned out to be not things existing quite independently of consciousness, but constructs of consciousness, involving concepts like ‘property’ and ‘substance’.
Kant, with his notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’ as for ever beyond knowledge, was obviously one of the targets of this criticism. In contrast, Hegel promised that the Phenomenology would reach a point ‘where knowledge is no longer compelled to go beyond itself’, where reality will no longer be an unknowable ‘beyond’, but instead mind will know reality directly and be at one with it.
absolute knowledge is reached when mind realizes that what it seeks to know is itself.
Reality is constituted by mind.
Only when mind awakens to the fact that reality is its own creation can it give up this reaching after the ‘beyond’. Then it understands that there is nothing beyond itself. Then it knows reality as directly and immediately as it knows itself.
We may admit that there can be no knowledge without an intellect that structures the raw information received by the senses.
This essential nature–this ‘universal mind’–is neither an individual mind, nor a collective mind, but simply rational consciousness.
5 Logic And Dialectics
it follows from his absolute idealism that ultimate reality is to be found in what is mental or intellectual, not in what is material. It is to be found, to be specific, in rational thought.
Hegel starts with the most indeterminate, contentless concept of all: being, or bare existence. Pure being, he says, is pure indeterminateness and vacuity. Pure being has in it no object for thought to grasp. It is entirely empty. In fact, it is nothing.
6 Aftermath
Now Feuerbach inverted Hegel. Being is not to be derived from thought, but thought from being. Man does not have his true basis in mind: mind has its true basis in man.