Hegel Notes: Perception
June 13, 2024
At the beginning of the Perception chapter, consciousness is now in a position to grasp objects in terms of universals: properties that might be shared with other objects. But there is an important constraint on the kind of universality available to it. Hegel articulates this constraint perhaps most clearly in §129, a summary paragraph towards the end of the chapter.
From out of sensuous being, [the object] becomes a universal, but since it emerged from out of the sensuous, this universal is essentially conditioned by the sensuous and is thus not truly self-equal. Rather, it is a universality affected with an opposition, which for that reason is separated into the extremes of singularity and universality, of the One of properties and of the Also of the free-standing matters. (Hegel, 2018, p. 77)
The only universals available to Perception are simple sense-universals like tartness and whiteness. It is important to keep this in mind, as this constraint is doing much of the heavy lifting in the dialectic of this chapter (indeed, it is on the basis of this restriction that Perception claims the authority of ‘common sense’). Perception has no truck with abstractions, or so it claims—in particular it cannot help itself to the kind of abstract, behind-the-scenes relations and entities that define the supersensible world of Force that will be the subject of the next chapter. As can be seen from the quoted snippet, Hegel takes it that this restriction is going to place Perception in a dilemma. Either it will have to reduce the object to a mere coincidence of its properties, or it will be forced to conceptualise the object as something like a ‘bare particular’ which stands entirely independent of qualities it possesses only contingently. Neither of these options, Hegel claims, will be able to ground Perception’s claim to possess determinate knowledge of its object.
As I make it out, the chapter can be split into four key movements. In §111-115, Hegel describes the elements of the object of Perception as it has emerged from Sense-Certainty for us, which is to say as readers of the Phenomenology. In §116-117 we take up the standpoint of Perception itself, running through the dialectic for the first time on a naive, ‘objectivist’ treatment of sense-universals. By this I just mean that when an object is perceived as red, this redness is taken to inhere in the perceived object itself, independently of the perceiving consciousness. The incredibly condensed unravelling of this dialectic in §117 ultimately leads to Perception running afoul of the first horn of the dilemma. This forces Perception to step out of its initial naive objectivism into a more nuanced, subjectivist view of sense-universals—the redness of the object is no longer taken as inhering in the perceived object, but in the consciousness of the perceiver. In this longer second dialectic, which runs from §118 to §128 and ultimately meets the second horn, we begin to gather the raw materials of a reality-appearance distinction which sets the stage for the next chapter. In the final paragraphs (§129-131), we step back into the standpoint of the reader to review the quagmire that Perception has driven itself into with its claim not to overstep sensuous universality.
In the first or ‘objectivist’ dialectic, we are asked to consider how Perception—equipped only with sense-universal—can characterise its object. A second constraint in play here (discussed explicitly in §116) concerns Perception’s criterion of truth in terms of ‘self-equality’, or its claim to grasp the object in its own particular singularity or essence. I think that what Hegel is stressing with this criterion is that Perception picks out its object in the same way that Sense-Certainty did—by pointing. The simple or sensuous universal is that which can be picked out with a demonstrative, and in a sense this is the element of the This which is preserved through its sublation in Sense-Certainty. Perception, still taking itself to inhabit the realm of sensuous immediacy, claims to grasp things as they are, in their particular quiddity and unmediated by abstractions. It is this that will find itself in tension with Perception’s further claim to possess determinate knowledge of its object. (A point stressed again later, in §126: “The necessity of the experience for consciousness is that the thing perishes through the very determinateness which consitutes both its essence and its being-for-itself.” (Hegel, 2018, p. 76)) It seems to me then that Hegel’s general strategy here is to show that sense-universals alone are insufficient to pick out an essential property of an object, i.e. to determine some object as the particular object that it is.
Hegel considers how the object could be picked out by sense-universals taken under both their positive and their negative aspect in turn, corresponding to the inclusive Also and the excluding One repectively. As an Also, the object is regarded as nothing over and above the coincidence of its property-instances.
This salt is a simple Here and is at the same time manifold; it is white and also tart, also cubically shaped, also of a particular weight, etc. All of these many properties are in one simple Here in which they also permeate each other. None has a different Here from the others. Rather, each is everywhere in the same Here as the others. At the same time, without being separated by way of the various Heres, they do not affect one another in this permeation; the white does not affect or alter the cubic shape, neither of them affects or alters the tartness, etc. Rather, since each itself is a simple relating-itself-to-itself, it leaves the others at rest and relates itself to them only through the indifferent Also. This Also is therefore the pure universal itself, or the medium, the thinghood keeping them together in that way. (Hegel, 2018, p. 69)
What is the problem here? Much of the commentary I’ve read tries to construe this as a straightforward problem of the one and the many, the idea being that the multiplicity of properties cannot possibly amount to a self-equal unity because they are, well, many and not a one. I don’t find this very convincing, not least because multiplicity and unity are not necessarily in tension—I don’t see any logical problem in the particularity of this unity consisting in the simple being-together of these multiple property instances. More to the point, this kind of reading doesn’t seem to do justice to the emphasis Hegel places on the indifference of these properties to one another even as they permeate the same medium. I think the crucial point here is that the indifference of these properties to one another shows that their coincidence amounts only to a contingent being-together, and therefore lacks the necessity distinctive of identity. No mere coincidence of sense-universals can ever add up to an essential property.
This element of necessity could only be supplied by the negative dimension of sensuous universality. Hegel points out (most clearly in §114) that while properties may be indifferently different (like the whiteness and tartness coexisting in the salt), they also depend for their determinacy on standing in relations of incompatbility with other properties—part of what it is to say an object is white is to exclude the possibility of its being black. This stronger notion of difference yields the object as an excluding One. Both white and black property-instances may exist in the world, but never in the same (monochrome) object—in this sense the object is determined by its properties as excluding their incompatibles or ‘opposites’, and indeed other objects that bear them. Unlike the inclusion of the Also, the exclusion of the One does have the form of necessity, and so seems a much more promising starting point for retrieving the identity of the object.
In Brandom’s reading of this chapter much is made of the link between determinacy and incompatibility. Essentially, Brandom uses this insight—that the determinacy of property attributions presupposes a modally robust notion of difference as incompability—to argue for the conceptual realism which grounds his whole reading of the Phenomenology (Brandom, 2019, pp. 133-168). While I find Brandom’s argument quite compelling on its own terms, what he doesn’t do is try to provide any account of the actual argument that Hegel is trying to make at this stage of the chapter. And it seems to me that the key thing here is that insofar as these kind of incompatibility relations can pick out the essence of an object, they can do so only extrinsically, or relationally. And while that’s something we might do, it is not a move available to Perception. Because once you start defining objects in terms of the necessary relationships they stand in with respect to others, you have moved into the realm of abstraction and the Understanding. Insofar as Perception claims to grasp the object immediately in its intrinsic essence, the negative dimension of sense-universals can be of no help to it, precisely because this negativity endows them with determinacy only through their relationships to others. This interpretation may help to give us a grip on what Hegel means when he says that Perception’s object perishes in its own determinacy.
In the rest of the chapter, Hegel addresses what happens when Perception abondons its original naive objectivism and embraces a subjectivist account of properties, under which the the various sense universals are envisaged as inhering not in the object but within consciousness itself. The hope of this move is that by rendering the object’s various properties inessential to its identity, Perception can preserve its claim to grasp the object in its singular essence (which is unpacked in terms of this criterion of self-equality). While elements of earlier arguments reappear during the course of this second dialectic, the crucial new argument is that since these sense-universals, which Perception has now reinterpreted as inessential to the object, are all that is available to Perception, it is left in the strange position of having to posit the object as bare particular, devoid of any essential characteristics. And for Hegel, the problem with this it is that this empty abstraction has no determination at all—in this sense, Perception’s claim to grasp the object in its pure singular determinacy (as this particular object) cannot possibly be made good on.
By the end of the chapter, then, Perception’s predicament looks something like this. If it takes sense-universals as essential to the object, then in their positive aspect (i.e. as the simple this) their unity through mere coincidence in a medium fails to provide the necessity distinctive of identity, but in their negative aspect they determine the object only through its relation to others, and so will also fail to pick out the object in its singular or intrinsic identity. But if it takes its sense-universals as falling within consciousness and therefore as inessential to the object, it will be left grasping at the empty abstraction of bare particularity, which similarly fails to capture a singular identity. In its experience, Perception is bounced back between the empty abstractions of pure singularity and simple universality. At the very end of chapter, Hegel suggests that what Perception is grasping at unsuccessfully is a mediating term to bridge this gap, some way of characterising the object through an essential property which is at the same time determinately contentful. We have seen that this cannot be done with simple universals—universals conditioned by the sensuous. What it will require is what Hegel terms the ‘unconditioned’ universal, the kind of concepts that step beyong the this of immediacy and can characterise objects in terms of their abstract relations. This is to step beyond Perception into the realm of the Understanding.
References
- Brandom, R. (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Harvard University Press.
- Hegel, G. W. F. H. (2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit (T. Pinkard, Tran.). Cambridge.