Hegel Notes: Sense-Certainty
May 16, 2024
This post gathers a few thoughts on the line of argument pursued by Hegel in the opening chapter of the Phenomenology. Here natural consciousness takes its initial form as Sense-Certainty, a minimal knowing envisaged as the pure apprehension of immediate experience unstructured by categories or concepts. I won’t attempt to offer any background, but I hope to give an outline of what I take the overall argument structure to be. One way into this argument is to consider an objection to it raised by Deleuze in this rather amusing lecture snippet. In my view Deleuze’s objection ultimately rests on a shallow interpretation of the argument Hegel is making. This intepretation is not crazy, however—especially given Hegel’s linguistic backflips—and working out a response to it has proved useful in developing my own understanding.
Deleuze makes his point like this. According to Hegel, Sense-Certainty claims its epistemic authority on the grounds that it passively receives only what is most immediate and particular. Since it does nothing to its object, it cannot err. But the concepts offered up by Sense-Certainty as picking out the content of this immediate knowing—demonstratives such as Now, Here, and This— are indifferent to what they pick out, and can in fact be used to pick out any determination of any sensuous manifold. They are in this sense universals themselves, and thus Sense-Certainty contradicts its own claim to grasp pure particularity. Deleuze protests that this line of thought amounts to little more than a cheap trick—it depends on treating demonstrative concepts as if they were common concepts like dog, when in fact these cannot be equated.
Deleuze’s contention that Hegel’s reasoning rests on an equivocation between two very different kind of concept depends in turn, it seems to me, on attributing to Hegel the view that what Sense-Certainty contradicts is its own claim to certainty. An implicit appeal to a common concept would undermine this claim in an obvious way. If I predicate the This with a common concept—not merely This but This dog—then I have acted on the content I grasp. I am no longer just passively receiving; I have brought this sensuous particular under a universal. But in doing so I have at the same time introduced a possibility of error, and with this my claim to certainty is lost. After all it might not be a dog. Yet it is just as clear that nothing analogous is going on with demonstratives. They do not predicate, they merely point. And it is precisely because they do not predicate that we were interested in them in the first place.
However, I think there’s a couple of reasons why this can’t possibly be the argument Hegel is making, or at least not the whole of it. First, if it were then this argument would have already been made by the end of §104, and the second half of the chapter would be redundant. If anything, the new line of argumentation picked up in §105 is testimony to the fact that Hegel well recognises the preceding considerations to be insufficient by themselves.
Second, and more importantly, even if this were a good argument it would not do what Hegel needs it to do. It would not satisfy the criteria, laid out in the Introduction, of producing a determinate negation. It is not enough for Hegel to show that Sense-Certainty contradicts itself by appealing to a universal while claiming only to grasp the particular. Rather, Hegel needs to show us which universal is presupposed by Sense-Certainty and how this presupposition manifests. This universal will turn out to be the object, and it is only on its basis that the passage from Sense-Certainty to Perception can be made intelligible.
Part of the problem here is that at this point in the argument Hegel is not really concerned with certainty, or the possibility of error, at all—that all comes later. Here the concern is the far more fundamental matter of the determinacy of content. Sense-Certainty’s contradiction is not that it cannot take a step without sacrificing its certainty—its epistemic authority over the content it grasps—but that insofar as it passively takes in pure particularity it will fail to grasp any content at all. Or alternatively, that insofar as it does grasp any determinate content it does so only by sneaking a universal in round the back.
In the first half of the chapter it seems to me that Hegel is engaged in something like a preliminary conceptual analysis. The question posed to Sense-Certainty is in effect: can you say what exactly it is that you grasp immediately? The fact that the Now or the Here are indifferent to what they point to does not show that their application introduces a possibility of error, as would the application of a common concept—on this point we can agree with Deleuze. But it does show that the concepts themselves do not fix the content they purport to point to. This is not enough to sublate Sense-Certainty, but it gestures to the shape of the problem.
This helps to explain why in §105, Hegel shifts from conceptual analysis to something more like phenomenology proper. “Since this certainty itself thereby no longer wishes to step forward when we draw attention to a Now that is night, or to an I for which it is night, we step up to it and let ourselves point to the Now that is asserted.” (Hegel, 2018, p. 64) It may not be possible to articulate exactly which particular is pointed to without appeal to a universal, but perhaps this is just a limitation of language. Ultimately, we can only assess the content pointed out by occupying the position of the pointer.
The key argument is made only once this standpoint has been taken up. If we attend to what exactly it is that is pointed out by the Now, we find that it has always already vanished. Insofar as we pick out anything with the Now—that now is daytime, for instance—we do so only in virtue of the prior synthesis into a unity of a whole series of Now’s that necessarily no longer are. It is important to note that this is not an issue of predication. We are not concerned with daytime conceptualised as daytime, only the sensuous unity providing the minimal determination required to distinguish one sensuous Now from another. And this unity of the successive Now’s is, Hegel points out, none other than the object. This object is not a common concept which can be predicated of things, but (in more Kantian terms) a categorial concept. It is the “thinghood” that is the condition of predication.
This necessary interjection of the universal into senuous knowing contradicts Sense-Certainty’s claim to grasp pure particularity, but it does not in itself negate the certainty or even immediacy of senuous knowledge. Indeed, once natural consciousness has explicitly taken up this realisation (made it into its essence, as Hegel would say) in Perception, the new thread to be unspooled will be the contradiction implicit in the notion of an immediately apprehended universal.
References
- Hegel, G. W. F. H. (2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit (T. Pinkard, Tran.). Cambridge.