Phenomenology of Spirit: Sense Certainty

After outlining the methodology of his project, Hegel begins this analysis of the patterns of consciousness with sense experience. This is because sense experience is what is most immediate and most basic; the truth of sense experience is simply what it is, nothing more, nothing less; its simple fact of existence is all that there is to it.

We at first can make a distinction based on the nature of the experience: the sense-experience itself is seemingly separable from our knowing it, as it as an object would seem to be there whether or not the knower is. Its being is essential, and our knowing of it contingent. In order to discover this being, we must ask ourselves, "What is This?"

Now, normally we can write down a truth, and it stays true. However, with sense-experience, as soon as we write down something like "Now is noon," the Now (a temporal This) has already passed by; the truth is "stale." It is preserved merely in the fact that it now is not, as a negation of the present Now. Further, we notice that we cannot speak about sense-experience directly. The best that we can do is to point out, "This," but the "This" is the most abstract and undetermined of universals. We cannot say what we mean.

Through this, we see that sense experience is not as immediate as we had first assumed. It is, in fact, entirely mediated; the This is preserved through what is not-This, and what we mean is always at odds with what we say.

So, certainty is not found in the object of sense-experience. Next, let us try the subject, the 'I' which has the experience. However, the 'I' (at least phenomenologically at this point) turns out to be another indexical, utterable as a universal but never meaning the concrete 'I' with the experience of the Here and Now.

Therefore, we run into an impasse whether we start from either the subject or the object. Next, let us take the whole of sense experience, rather than simply a specific This, and we'll consider this whole as the essence of sense-experience. As we are taking the whole, we cannot factor out an 'I' or an object. We see that for any This, we first negate it (as right away we are dealing with another This), but then we negate the negation (and I'm not really sure what Hegel means here, but I think it is that we realize that if the This were simply negated, it would simply not be, but it does exist in a certain sense). However, the This is not the same after this double negation; in the first instance it was immediate, but as soon as we had to think about it it became something "reflected back on itself."

As we go through this, we realize that the "true" Now is a plurality of Nows, and this is how it is a universal.

The sense that I make out is that it is the succession, the history of Nows, of Heres, of Is which makes any one of them what they are; there would not be any indexicals if there were not others, but at the same time each one does exist, as part of the plurality of indexicals. The transitoriness is part of the experience, but there would be no transitoriness without others, and so everything is what it is through others and this only exists as (a subjective part of?) a universal. Hegel goes on to say that "the sense-certainty is nothing else but just this history." So, experience is actually the opposite of a universal, and has no being in itself; animals approach particulars appropriately and profoundly by eating them.

At this point, Hegel sees the necessity of stepping beyond the simple apprehension of sense-experience to the perception of it, and that is where I will begin next time.