Notes of the 22 October 2014 session

Introduction & A. Consciousness: I. Sense-certainty & II. Perception (46-79)*

Notes by Leif Jerram

Hegel’s Framing of the Question:

We discussed what the basic issue or question was that Hegel was setting out to tackle. We concluded that he was trying to develop a question which rejected the primacy of epistemology and interrogate ‘natural assumptions’ about approaching the world. Instead, he was asking about the nature of the mind as a medium or instrument to approach self and world, while at the same time asking about whether there was any sense to a subject-object dualism. He seems to be pointing to a conclusion where knowledge and the appearance of knowledge are equally important – or possibly the same thing. Ultimately, it seems that Hegel rejected the idea of the mind as a pure method for approaching the world. Instead, the apparatus of perception, the thing perceived and the perceiver must share some sort of overlapping relationship - and possibly that relationship is Hegel’s ‘problem’.

Language, the Universal, and the Particular:

We spent some time discussing the section on language, where he highlights that our words are general, but the things that they refer to are particular. Words try to define something unique and whole unto itself, but are fundamentally and obviously unable to do this. The obvious inability of language to do this is ‘divinely’ useful to us – it corrects a prejudice we hold about what sense-certainty offers us.

Consciousness:

Hegel seems to be operating with two potential meanings for consciousness. In some readings, it seems he means ‘awareness’, while in others he means ‘awareness of our awareness’ – a more ‘formal’ or ‘meta-level’ definition of consciousness. We asked several times whether consciousness ‘of itself’ needed to be a reflexive sort of consciousness. Jaymal helpfully pointed out that this could be because we read an introduction, where consciousness might be more grandly defined, and then a section on the senses, where a narrower definition might be more suitable.

Time and temporality:

It seemed significant that there were several references to time and temporality, and the ‘progress’ of the mind through it. This implies a fundamental impermanence and/or accretiveness about the ‘project’ of producing the conscious mind.

*Page numbers in these notes refer to G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) and its reprints. A document collecting the notes of the reading session is available on the group's dropbox. Please e-mail Marton Ribary (marton.ribary@gmail.com) to join the reading group and gain access to the group's dropbox folder.