Session 2: Introduction
The first part of the Introduction can be understood to implicitly address three main topics:
Objective Knowledge and Absolute Truth
Newtonian Mechanics and Kantian Idealism
Hegelian Scientific Cognition
Hegel’s starting point here is that before we ask ourselves about objective knowledge, as is common place in the sciences, or absolute truth, as is common place in the world religions, we must ask ourselves about our own cognition. When we use the word cognition, we may also be loosely referring to mind or spirit. The central point is that we need to be self-reflexive (cognitively, mentally, spiritually), when it comes to our own understanding of objective knowledge in the sciences, or absolute truth in the religions.
This is a starting point that still has enormous relevance to contemporary discussions at the frontier of science. Today science is more and more aware of the need to include within itself self-reflexive knowing of itself, and the broadly categorized “mind sciences” do seek to investigate questions about the nature of our own minds in ways that were impossible in Hegel’s time (perhaps in particular fields like neuroscience, neurobiology, artificial intelligence, and so forth). One of the fields that perhaps stands out as of the biggest relevance to these questions of including self-reflexivity into its very gesture towards objective knowledge, could be a field like “4E Cognitive Science”. The “4E” here stands for “embodied, embedded, extended, enacted”. One of the potential questions to ask here is whether or not 4E cognitive science is really interested in the real life of the mind in the same way as, for example, psychoanalysis is interested in the real life of the mind (i.e. what you are dreaming about, all of your intimate struggles, reflections on feelings of impossibility, inadequacy, mortality and finitude)?
In any case, Hegel’s main point is that cognition (mind, spirit) is an entity searching for and caring about objective knowledge (science) and absolute truth (religion). Thus, it makes no sense to think about objective knowledge or absolute truth independent of this very searching or caring of cognition (mind, spirit). There is a cognitive “entity” or better, a “process”, that is actively searching for/caring about, and this very dynamic, for Hegel, needs to be included into the notion of objective knowledge and absolute truth.
To give very concrete examples on this idea, consider two of the biggest historical human movements in pursuit of the deepest objective knowledge of the world, or the deepest absolute truth of reality. On the one hand, consider the quantum physicists searching for new elementary particles and fields with the Large Hadron Collider; on the other hand, consider the Muslim monotheists performing mass rituals at Mecca. The Hegelian question is thinking these very processes as cognitive “searchings” and “carings”, as a part of objective knowledge and absolute truth itself. It is not that the elementary particles and fields “find themselves”, they are found in and through historical cognitive searching and caring. Moreover, the absolute truth of “Allah” or whatever “God entity” is being upheld by a major monotheistic “faith-drive”, i.e. it does not “find itself”, but is rather found in and through historical cognitive searching and caring.
This brings Hegel to the main problem that cognition experiences on its search/care path for knowledge and truth: cognition (mind/spirit) is the type of entity “positing” knowledge and truth. In other words, it is cognition which posits the deepest knowledge of reality to be in the sub-atomic structure of particles and fields; it is cognition which posits the deepest truth of reality to be an all-knowing and all-powerful entity behind/beyond the appearances of the world. In this act of “positing”, cognition can presuppose false or deceptive knowledge and truth. In other words, the very path to objective knowing and absolute truth are marked by endless possibilities of self-deception and false knowing.
Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, we can say that these possibilities of self-deception and false knowing have to do with the cognitive workings and faculty of the understanding. Here very simply reflect on how many people cling strongly to understandings which undermine pursuit of truth. Or alternatively, how many people do not cling to anything as itself a pursuit of truth? In what ways can these very workings of our own cognition prevent us from deepening the path of knowing and truth? For example, could not a physicist cling dogmatically to a certain understanding of particles and fields, or we may even say one day, the existence of particles and fields themselves? On the other hand, could not someone do the exact opposite, and cling to our inability to know anything about particles and fields, as itself another mode of dogmatic knowing? What we are being asked to reflect on here is the process by which our understanding attaches and detaches to notions. We have to think about the very way our own understanding works and functions, so as to prevent self-deception and false knowing.
This is all extraordinarily practical. In the 19th century, classical science framed an objective knowledge which presupposed that the universe was infinite and with no beginning and no end (e.g. “absolute spacetime”). Today we know that this view of the universe is false knowing (not objective knowledge). Today we know that the universe had a beginning, and will likely have an end. Thus, we (think we) know that the universe is extraordinarily old and large, but nonetheless finite.
Or another example: in the 19th century we framed phenomena as wave-like or particle-like as the objective knowledge of classical identity. In other words, we thought we knew that a phenomena could either be particle-like or wave-like, but not both at the same time. Today we (think we) know that phenomena can behave as a paradoxical duality, as particle-like and wave-like at the same time. This is what we now call the difference between classical and quantum identity. The point with both examples from a macro-cosmic and a micro-cosmic view, is just how remarkably different our conception of objective knowledge is depending on the historical era. This points to how, by including the search for/care of objective knowledge by historical cognition into the picture, we have to consider the way what is objective knowledge is itself transforming in relation to our very search and care in history.
The same can be said if we use examples from 19th century philosophy about the absolute truth. In the 19th century, specifically with reference to the predominance of Kantian philosophy, we could say that the absolute truth for-us was framed in terms of transcendental a priori categories of the understanding (i.e. concepts of space and time). In Kantian philosophy, the categories of space and time were basically like eternal categories of our cognition, which structured the way in which we could perceive and understand the world (for more on Kant’s categories, see Session 1: Foreword). Moreover, in Kant’s philosophy, the absolute truth in-itself was thought to be something like an impossible-to-understand or know “noumena” which was beyond/behind phenomena. This relation between our categories and the noumena framed Kant’s antinomies of pure reason, and opened the necessity for faith. However, today the status of Kant’s understanding of absolute truth is itself questionable. The first point would be that many philosophers and scientists are attempting to think about categories independent of space and time, in part motivated by the necessity to think about realities that existed before space and time, since space and time are themselves realities with an origin or a genesis. The second point would be that this very idea of a noumena which is impossible to understand or know beyond/behind phenomena, is itself something that is increasingly questioned. The Hegelian point would be something like this: what is the noumena if not a category of the understanding of the in-itself, posited internal to phenomena?
In any case, for Hegel what is at stake in all this is making objective knowledge and absolute truth historical categories inclusive of our cognition (mind/spirit). Moreover, he claims that the biggest obstacle to this possibility is the “fear of error”. For Hegel, cognition is terrified of its own capacity for error, which leads the understanding to either attach or detach with a dogmatic certainty that will guarantee itself safety… over the truth. Here is a passage pointing in this direction:
“74. To be specific, [the fear of error] takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth.”
There are three main points of interest here:
We have to include our cognition (our minds/spirits) as part of the process of understanding truth
There is no absolute distinction between the truth and our cognition (minds/spirits), they are rather entangled or connected
What we can know of the truth will come from a willingness to make errors/mistakes, to sacrifice ourselves in the process of knowing and truth seeking
This brings us to the second major point in the first part of the introduction: the relation between Newtonian mechanics and Kantian idealism. We cannot understand the Phenomenology of Spirit as a historical work if we do not understand its own historical relation to two major works for the 18th century: Newton’s mechanistic philosophy of nature, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1728), and Kant’s idealist philosophy of mind, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
The first thing to know, which unites both Newton and Kant for Hegel is the presupposition of external mind-independent realities disconnected from the development of historical spirit. For Newton we have the notion of absolute spacetime, and for Kant we have the notion of noumena. You can see the minimal distinctions which separate here, Newton and Kant, in relation to Kant’s movement of absolute space and time to a conceptual reality. However, Kant is not able to get rid of a presupposition for a mind-independent external reality as the absolute truth for knowing, even if it gets more impenetrable and difficult, or even impossible to think. In any case, both of these notions are problematic for Hegel, since such notions would violate the importance of thinking about the very historical cognition that is interested in such realities.
Here we can go deeper on Hegel’s relation with Kant. As already suggested, Kant’s idealism, and the way in which it frames our relationship to absolute truth, in transcendental a priori categories of the understanding, is something deeply questioned in Hegel. While Kant sets up a relation between our categories and the in-itself of truth that produces irreducible antinomies opening the necessity of faith beyond reason, Hegel here thinks there is a slightly different relation at work. In this way Hegel is massively indebted to Kant’s thought, but he also makes sharp and minimal distinctions which change much of Kant’s philosophy.
Ultimately, what Hegel wants to emphasize is a feedback or relation between historical spirit and our notion of objective knowledge and absolute truth. This can be captured in the axiom of the “absolute is substance, but also subject”. In this way subjective knowing and substantial truth need to be constantly understood in a dynamic tension. Such a dynamic tension between objective knowledge and absolute truth is absolutely foreign to the Newtonian and Kantian universes, and where Hegel starts to differentiate himself as a philosopher capable of thinking the historicity of spirit.
Here what is absolutely relevant for our time and our thinking, is this complete vanishing of an absolutely fixed background outside of the subject and its history. In this way there is no more possibility for a fixed belief for the subject to faithfully cling onto outside of itself. Such vanishing of a fixed background is still of supreme importance to the worlds of physics and also social theory. Consider that many physicists today are trying to think how to think a physics of the fundamental, while removing the fixed background of absolute space and time. Consider also that many spiritual teachers or masters of the 20th century, were concerned with the cultivation of spirit, which could not presuppose any fixed point of reference to guarantee a positive outcome. This reflects the basic Hegelian principle that fear of error is fear of the truth itself.
Now deeper into Newtonian mechanics, let us identify precisely what Hegel is taking issue with. As is common place in modern thinking, perhaps reflecting the influence of Hegel’s idealism, is that the notion of absolute space and time presents to us a deterministic picture and mechanistic movement. This prevents the possibility of thinking the real of spiritual freedom. One could say it is a completely closed universe, since the absolute truth is that everything is determined in advance. There is no little gap or opening where a real choice or alternative possibility could appear to itself. In short, there is no real room for subjectivity and the way it experiences the unfolding of its being in history. The notion of absolute spacetime also externalizes both metaphysical notions of infinity and eternity in relation to subjective reality and historical processes. Hegel’s philosophy is totally against the idea of a deterministic mechanism without subject, and Hegel’s philosophy is totally against the idea of infinity and eternity as external to and outside of subjective reality and historical processes.
If we go deeper into Kant’s idealism, not only is Hegel against this notion of the absolute truth as an unknowable mystery behind/beyond phenomenal appearance of real spiritual freedom, but he is also against the consequences for Kant’s metaphysical notions of infinity and eternity. For Kant, due to noumena being essentially “ungraspable”, this means that our notions of infinity and eternity are contradictory (since we cannot clearly point to and describe such objects or realities), and as such, it proves that our reason is limited. Now the way Hegel deals with this dimension of Kant’s thinking is absolutely crucial. For Hegel does not disagree that the notions of infinity and eternity are contradictory, and thus proves the limitation of our reason; however, what Hegel says is that since the idea of noumena is itself a historical appearance internal to phenomena, then infinity and eternity, as contradictions of our experience of time, are the way in which the absolute reveals itself to itself (as a contradiction of time). This has the very big consequence, that the very limitation of our reason, is the power of our reason, and not a reason for having faith in something we can never know or understand. The fact that our reason is itself limited, wrestling with something that can never be completely or totally known or understood, is the paradoxical nature of the absolute (and a key to the type of cognition that Hegel wants us to embody).
In any case, what is at stake in Hegel’s engagement with both Newton and Kant is a maturation of the scientific notion as it relates to the historical development of our cognition, a type of maturation that can let go of mind-independent external realities, and wrestle with the way the truth is here and now. Here is a passage on Hegel’s daring to provide a notion for the absolute in the scientific universe, inclusive of what we are:
“76. The main problem[:] precisely to provide this Notion [of the relationship between cognition and the Absolute]. […] [These Notions] [of a cognition cut off from the Absolute, and an Absolute separated from cognition] are intended to ward off Science itself, and constitute merely an empty appearance of knowing, which vanishes immediately as soon as Science comes on to the scene. But Science, just because it comes on the scene, is itself an appearance: in coming on the scene it is not yet Science in its developed and unfolded truth. […] 77. Natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge […] journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself.”
The three main points of interest here include:
External mind-independent realities disconnected from spiritual historical processes are defences against “real science” (matured)
Science should be understood as a notional appearance (concept/idea) and also understood as a historical process in maturation/development
Natural consciousness is concerned with the truth in-itself and this truth ultimately involves awareness of itself (its own self-becoming)
This brings us to the third and final part of the first part of the introduction: the Hegelian notion of scientific cognition. What is essential to know about Hegel’s science of cognition is that it involves a knowledge that is actively producing and participating in truth of the in-itself. This means that the absolute truth cannot be some conception independent of the subject (and even the very conception of an absolute truth independent of the subject is dependent on the subject, for Hegel). When we think about the deepest historical truth events of either the sciences or religions, these truth events not only involved subjectivity and its knowing, but also represented the way the historical subject had to struggle and fight for the truth as a participatory production. Here two examples that come to mind include the idea of Christ on the cross in Christianity, and the idea of Giordano Bruno sentenced to death for his speculations on the existence of other solar systems.
The main principles to reflect on here include:
For truth to be discovered/revealed there is always an irreducible link to historical subjectivity who participates in/with that truth
The persistence of historical subjectivity means that what we consider to be the truth is inherently destined to become other to itself
This can take us back to the examples used at the beginning of this article in relationship to both quantum physicists searching for the deepest knowing of reality using the Large Hadron Collider, and also the monotheistic Muslims organizing rituals at Mecca around the notion of participating in the deepest absolute reality. In both cases we are dealing with cognitive agents that are attempting to discover truth and also to participate in that truth. In both cases we are dealing with the fact that the absolute truth is always destined to become other to itself. In the case of the quantum physicists and the Large Hadron Collider, the very continuation of the activity leads to the confrontation with unknown dimensions of reality that will retroactively transform our reality. In the case of the monotheistic Muslims, the very ritual performativity of the action itself is designed to confront unknown dimensions of reality that will retroactively transform cognition itself (and thus cognition’s capacity to understand reality).
For Hegel, a science of cognition needs to be able to account for our search and care for knowledge and truth as it relates to the discovery of real freedom. Moreover, for Hegel, this is a natural tendency and process that unfolds within historical cognition. Whether it is the discovery of new objective knowing of reality, or whether it is the cultivation of new subjective capacity for truth, both in the end are aimed at balancing or opening the subject to deeper knowledge and truth of itself, which for Hegel is freedom. Here a science of cognition is forced to confront science itself and its own historicity as embodied in subjectivity, and the facts of what subjectivity is naturally in-itself as a process of discovering itself. How to say this in the clearest possible way?
Whereas, for Newton, the ultimate notion of science could be grounded in absolute spacetime, and for Kant, the ultimate notion of reality could be grounded in noumena, for Hegel, neither of these conceptions could be reconciled with the truth of cognition, and certainly could yet be capable of a proper science of cognition. To be reconciled with the truth of cognition and a proper science of cognition, we have to be reconciled with the facts of historical cognition, which we know from history, points towards the possibility of the appearance of absolute knowers. When we think about examples of such knowers, we often use names like Jesus Christ and Buddha. However, there are many such knowers throughout history: essentially subject’s who have realized freedom inside of themselves. Thus the question emerges: what are the methods of knowing and nature of truth that includes within itself the possibility of an absolute knowing? Moreover, what is a being after absolute knowing? These are the questions that are impossible in Newton and Kant, and which are historically immanent in Hegel.
In this way, there is an insanely practical question that emerges in a universe that understands Hegel's notion of scientific cognition:
What does a society look like that can handle the full maturation and development of the true notion (i.e. absolute knowing), while also recognizing its always-already fractal structure (i.e. consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion)?
This is a very different type of science and a very different type of society, then anything it is possible to think in the Newtonian or Kantian frame of reference.
Here two principles to keep in mind include:
Cognitive understanding develops in logical stages as part of true in-itself independent of external spacetime
Rational knowing of development of cognitive understanding helps us understand truth in-itself
These two principles are ways of framing Hegel’s notion of cognition and the idea, or the aforementioned feedback between subjectivity and substance.
The positive project here, against Newton and Kant, includes the idea that the truth in-itself requires self-active cognition from sensuous immediacy to absolute knowing in order to exist, and thus does not exist outside of this process; and that the truth in-itself is a negativity of itself, that only gains existence as an oscillation which falls away and returns to itself. We could say, from the perspective of Hegel’s science of cognition, that both Newton and Kant had merely fallen away from their self, but had no notion of absolute knowing, and thus no notion of the truth of the notion, either in-itself or for-themselves. Or, if they did have a truth of the notion for-themselves, it was not included within their scientific and philosophical projects, but lay somewhere else (which is interesting to think as a Hegelian history project).
Here we can quote Hegel directly as it relates to this irreducible relationship between the truth in-itself and knowledge for-us, which both fall on the side of the development of historical cognition:
“84. The essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘Notion’, and ‘object’, ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself’, both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating. Consequently, we do not need to import criteria, or to make use of our bright ideas and thoughts during the course of the inquiry; it is precisely when we leave these aside that we succeed in contemplating the matter in hand as it is in and for itself. [/] 85. What consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on. For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth.”
The three main points of interest include:
Knowledge and truth both fall on the side of consciousness (asymmetry), so the whole idea of a truth outside of consciousness misses the point
Finding the truth of the in-itself does not require our “bright ideas” or “big ideas”, it only requires we “look on” (observe our process truthfully)
Hegel places emphasis on abyssal reflection (rather than substantial reflection); and positivity of contradiction/limitation (rather than negativity)
Furthermore:
“85. Since both [knowledge and truth] are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not. The object, it is true, seems only to be for consciousness in the way that consciousness knows it; it seems that consciousness cannot, as it were, get behind the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine what the object is in itself, and hence, too, cannot test its own knowledge by that standard. […] Something is for it and in-itself […] upon this distinction, which is present as a fact, the examination rests.”
The three main points of interest include:
Truthful correspondence is measured by the historical consciousness itself in its truth (no big other outside can tell it the truth)
There is no meaning/sense in thinking about what the truth of the object is independent of the consciousness (you cannot get outside yourself)
The whole examination in the Phenomenology of Spirit rests on the distinctions of in-itself (truth) and for-itself (knowing) (consciousness to absolute knowing)
Now that we have handled Hegel’s approach to objective knowledge and absolute truth, his differences with Newtonian mechanics and Kantian idealism, as well as his own project for a scientific cognition, we can approach the second part of the introduction, which will focus on:
Hegelian Absolute / Thing-in-itself
Absolute Knowledge in the Phenomenal Drama
The first thing to note about the Hegelian Absolute or the Thing-in-itself (in contrast to both Newton and Kant’s conception, is that it involves a knowledge-being relation where:
Reality is in-itself incomplete-becoming (requiring us to think inherent space of potentials)
Our knowledge-work is involved in transforming-determining truth (creativity and consciousness)
These two properties of the Hegelian Absolute are fundamentally absent from both Newton and Kant’s notion of fundamental reality. Both Newton and Kant’s notion of fundamental reality did not include us, i.e. they did not include our own human incompleteness and becoming, and our space of potentials, as inherent to fundamental reality. Furthermore they did not include our very knowing and work processes, constituted as they are by our consciousness and creativity, as part of the transforming determination of truth.
For Hegel, what the absolute truth of reality is involves you, it involves your potential, your creativity, your consciousness, and so forth. What is essential here is that you cannot escape from it, you cannot get out of it. This idea that we can escape from it or get out of it, and view it as if we weren’t there, is implicit in both Newton’s and Kant’s conceptions (they are disembodied… are they the body screaming to get out of itself?). When we think about the absolute truth as either an independent and external space and time, or as a noumenal thing-in-itself that exists independent of us, there is this idea that there is a pre-existing mind independent reality. Here we set up our very self-knowledge, and our very knowledge and work processes, as if they are not a part of the thing-in-itself. Hegel wanted to completely get us out of such thinking. We could say that Hegel’s noumena includes the body itself, inclusive of the totality of the social body, and the way this noumena is always already impressing itself on the mind.
What Hegel positively pushes for is that the absolute truth is here and now, in relation to our knowledge here and now, and that our knowledge also has consequences for it. Moreover, due to this inherent relationality, the absolute truth is not a certain identity that exists in relation to our knowledge at some future time or in some inaccessible place. The absolute truth exists at the very border or limit of our knowing, the unknown dimension of our knowing, and the contradictions of our knowing. This is because it is by actively engaging with the limit, with the unknown, and with the contradiction, one becomes with the absolute truth.
Slavoj Žižek articulates this dimension of knowing as the dimension of the “unknown knowns”, i.e. a “knowledge which does not know itself”. For Žižek this dimension of knowing is what becomes fully mobilized in psychoanalytic work. In psychoanalysis, to really understand your self, you have to fight against your self, you have to push into the knowledge that is unknown to you, where your own self-knowledge is limited, and where you confront self-relating contradictions. This is the noumenal dimension of the self. For Hegel, this is merely a psychological perspective on what he was trying to think in general about life and society. When we fully live, when we are immersed in society, we must be willing to tarry with the limits, the unknown and the contradictions in order to understand the absolute truth as a becoming with our own consciousness and creativity.
What ultimately unfolds here for a dialectical mind is the capacity to be wrong, think again, be wrong, think again, be wrong, think again. We are never completely with the full truth, we never have all the answers, we will never have the explanation which covers the entire field. Because our very becoming is a part of the absolute truth we are bound to be constantly encountering the dimensions where we are wrong, missing, lacking crucial information about ourselves and what to do in the world. This can be crushingly painful and difficult at times. It can be endlessly infuriating and maddening (and indeed, those who pursue truth may go furious and insane with madness). But for Hegel the subject of absolute knowing is the subject that has somehow contained this madness, this strike of lightning, has somehow reconciled him or herself with an absolute truth that is endlessly and paradoxically unfolding in errors and mistakes and contradictions.
On this pathway Hegel is always concerned with the ways we can deceive ourself. On this pathway we are constantly searching for others who can bring an end to our endless confusion, others who can stop the madness and the paradoxicality of existence and give us comfort, security, and certainty. Often times on this pathway we search for gurus, for subjects who know, for subjects who can point the way and give us direction. While we do and will always need teachers, guides, instructors, and various others who can help us come to terms with truth, there is no one guru, or thinker or leader who can help us in the end. We are abyssal and alone in that regard. The absolute truth is not something that can be filled up and reconciled with an other in that regard. The absolute truth is something that keeps us thinking for ourselves.
We can split up what is at stake here in relation to knowledge for us, and being in-itself. When it comes to knowledge for us we must keep our knowledge in a feedback with real historical development in order to maintain truth. What is true is the historicity of the process, not some external, independent reality that already pre-exists our historical process. Here rational knowledge has a deep purpose for conscious work, and that is to maintain/serve historical truth. If rational knowledge becomes disconnected from maintaining and serving historical truth, then it becomes dead and useless. Hegel basically thought that knowing had yet to really reach this level of understanding about itself, it had yet to reach the knowing of life and messiness of life’s truth.
When it comes to being in-itself, we have to think about it has something that involves the work of truthful conscious knowing throughout the historical process. Being in-itself, consequently, is not complete in-itself, but open, full of potential, structured in such a way that it is open to future determination by truthful conscious knowing. What are we to make of being-in-itself? That is a question for the future of conscious knowers, those who are in service to the truth, are in a becoming with the truth of the in-itself. This service to truth should involve higher order social life, families, communities, and organizations that are in service of the truth, inclusive of subjectivity.
But as already stated, such conscious knowers, who are capable of reaching what Hegel calls absolute knowing, are the types of beings who can release false images (certain identities) of the absolute, and this will be experienced as self-deaths. These self deaths open new positive life capacities for perceiving what was formerly negativity, in the form of unknowns and contradictions. What this means for the absolute in-itself is that it becomes through being itself the thing which lacks certain identity (it is itself symmetrical with lack). From this perspective, what we could call “Hegel’s materiality” is the working of the contradictions of positive existence, or the way positive identity lacks. Here in this work between absolute knowing and the absolute being in-itself, there is the possibility for self-discovery and surprise.
Here is a passage from Hegel on the relation between knowledge and truth as self-similar and yet constantly going beyond themselves (i.e. re-discovering and surprising themselves):
“80. But the goal [of absolute knowing] is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is also unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way. Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself.”
What Hegel is emphasizing here includes:
Logical unfolding of the idea/notion involves a fixed goal (absolute knowing) and a serial progression (consciousness to religion)
Absolute knowing is where the notion and the object correspond and there is no more need to go beyond oneself (self-symmetry)
Paradox is that absolute knowing as the notion which corresponds with itself as an object is the type of being that constantly transcends itself
And here is a passage from Hegel on absolute knowing itself:
“89. In pressing forward to its true existence, consciousness will arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien, with what is only for it, and some sort of ‘other’, at a point where appearance becomes identical with essence, so that its exposition will coincide at just this point with the authentic Science of Spirit. And finally, when consciousness itself grasps this its own essence, it will signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself.”
What Hegel emphasizes here includes:
Within the phenomenological drama (consciousness to religion) consciousness is burdened by something alien-other
From the standpoint of absolute knowing this feeling of alien-otherness itself disappears as a semblance and a science of spirit becomes possible
Real spirit science is only possible from standpoint of absolute knowing as a self-similar difference transforming itself without external reference
Now we must focus on the nature of absolute knowing in the phenomenal drama. The absolute from the perspective of the phenomenal drama in-itself (consciousness to religion) is experienced as a series of dramatic ruptures or discontinuous events. In other words, in moving between consciousness and self-consciousness; or between self-consciousness and reason; or between reason and spirit; or between spirit and religion; or between religion and absolute knowing, there are inner experiences of identity as being ruptured and broken apart before seeing new inner logic. The new inner logic does not exist before these ruptures, it is a response to these ruptures. In this way there is no getting out, or escaping the process of self-confrontation with deception.
With that being said, from the point of view of absolute knowing, the picture of the whole process changes. What was once viewed as a series fo discontinuous ruptures is perceived now as a series of continuous events or a logical process. From the point of view of the absolute knowing one can see in retrospect the necessity of the inner logic inherent in the breaks or ruptures. It is simply that while one is going through the process, it is difficult or even impossible to perceive that. Consequently, it is important to have individuals who occupy the position of absolute knowing, or from the Hegelian point of view, the dialectician, to help guide those in the phenomenal drama through the challenges of their particular stage of development. One could even say that society is only really possible if the phenomenal drama is held together in some way by subjects of absolute knowing. These are the teachers and the guides, whom are immune from being turned into gurus, since they are not looking for those in the phenomenal drama to identify with them directly.
Here we have a formal description of the difference between the phenomenal drama and the position of absolute knowing. While the inside of the phenomenal drama is a process of symmetry breaking with certain identity, absolute knowing in-itself is a symmetry with the negative of identity. One can start to see here what is at stake: by moving through the phenomenal drama, one is capable of challenging one’s own self-deceptions as symmetries of a known identity. In thinking the gaps and the cracks of certain identity one is brought to the reality that what one really is, is an identity capable of moving through that negativity. Hegel’s basic claim is that the self is negativity itself.
To put it in perhaps a colloquial description, the subject of absolute knowing can handle the “dark night of the soul” or be the “night of the world” because it is this “dark night itself”, it is this “night of the world itself”. Thus it can handle disturbances or asymmetries from its embodied root and up, which does not say anything specific about ethical behaviour or action, but includes within it the capacity to attach-detach, attach-detach, as movement of the idea itself. This is what Hegel would call the “magical power” of the negative, which is basically the power to withstand the asymmetry of positive identity, and to find a home or a symmetry in the negative of identity.
From Hegel himself on absolute knowing and the phenomenal drama:
“87. From the present viewpoint [...] the new object shows itself to have come about through a reversal of consciousness itself. This way of looking at the matter is something contributed by us, by means of which the succession of experiences through which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression — but it is not known to the consciousness that we are observing. [...] It shows up here like this: since what first appeared as the object sinks for consciousness to the level of its way of knowing it, and since the in-itself becomes a being-for- consciousness of the in-itself, the latter is now the new object.”
What Hegel is emphasizing includes:
Standpoint within phenomenal drama and standpoint in absolute knowing appear as a reversal/inversion of itself (consciousness)
This reversal/inversion is achieved by the work of consciousness in the historical process itself (scientific progression of inner stages)
The truth in-itself becomes historical way-of-knowing in conscious past; whereas the way-of-knowing becomes the truth of being-in-itself
This sets the stage for the rest of the book: the chapters running from Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, and Absolute Knowing. We have now covered not only Hegel’s ideas of objective knowledge/absolute truth, Newtonian mechanics/Kantian idealism, and Hegel’s own scientific cognition; but also Hegel’s ideas of the absolute thing-in-itself and the relation between absolute knowledge and the phenomenal drama.
Next we will dive into the thing-in-itself, starting with Consciousness. Now the journey will really begin.
