The Three Stage Failure of Sense Certainty
In beginning his lengthy phenomenology for identifying the pathway in which Geist will realize itself as Absolute Knowledge, Hegel begins at what many considered the most basic source of all epistemological claims: sensual apprehension or Sense-Certainty. Though the skeptical tradition took this realm as a jumping-off point for making defensible epistemological claims, Hegel sees in the sensual a type of knowledge so general and abstract as to be entirely vacuous. Focusing on the principle that anything known in the Scientific sense must be communicable, through language or its approximations, Hegel shows that whatever the sensual purports to know is inherently incommunicable and therefore cannot represent true knowledge.
An important precondition for Hegel's examination of the sensual is his caveat that sense-certainty must not use complex concepts of any kind to express that which it knows. In this sense, Hegel treats sense-certainty as the realm whose truth is expressed as pure being or ISNESS, as opposed to mediated forms that understand ISNESS in a wider context of meaning (Hegel, 91). By insisting on this limitation, Hegel treats sense-certainty as stripped down to bare assertions of sensual experience, allowing the phenomenologist to examine the sensual based solely on what it is capable of showing us on its own. Indeed, it is this litmus test of self-sufficient communication that sets the stage for Hegel to return sensuality to the universal conceptual framework that supports it once it has been seen to fail in its own right.
In the first stage of his examination of what the sensual might offer in the way of knowledge, Hegel examines the object apprehended by a sensing c...
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...omprehensible knowledge of a particular sort. After derisively comparing those believers in sense-certainty's capabilities of Knowledge to animals and Eleusinian devotees, Hegel returns to his theme of Knowledge as communication through language, insisting that to make a claim about the knowledge contained in sense-certainty is: "not to know what one is saying, to be unaware that one is saying the opposite of what one wants to say" (Hegel, 109). Left with the thingness or being of sense-certainty as an undifferentiated, universal and unintelligible generality, Hegel concludes by abandoning sense-certainty in its own right and moving on to the next level of complexity, namely perception, or thingness as understood the properties that define it.
Bibliography:
WORKS CITED
Hegel, G.W.F.. Phenomenology of Spirit Oxford University Press: New York, 1977.
In sections 190-193 of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Sprit, Hegel looks into the relationship between the lord and the bondsman. In this examination of the relationship, Hegel makes the move to find out what both the lord and bondsman offer to each other in terms of existence and or identity. The formulation that Hegel made in the selected sections is that the bondsman had more to gain in terms of intellectual growth than his lord who becomes intellectually dormant due to the bondsman acting in the likeness of his lord.
(7) Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy in three volumes, vol. 2 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) 97. I made some corrections in the translation of this piece from Hegel.
Hegel proposed that we can better understand ourselves and the world by studying history. In his Philosophy...
...is an account of the birth of self-consciousness through intersubjectivity or the integration within culture. It is a dialectical interpretation that acts, for Hegel, as a form for perceiving the way in which the self comes to know itself through the other and through historical processes. The master/slave dialectic is an early account of intersubjectivity and also a lack of intersubjectivity because it is not based on equal recognition. Self-consciousness, for Hegel, is attained only through the recognition by another independent self. The human world is a world based on recognition, and the human being has within themselves the desire for recognition from other human beings. Hegel proposes that one cannot become a self-conscious individual without seeing oneself in another, and that each individual bases their existence on a world that is founded upon recognition.
Following in the path of Kant and Fichte, Hegel has become one of the most influential philosophers in history. His philosophy has influenced important people, such as Karl Marx, and influential schools of thought, such as the Frankfurt School. This influence rides heavily on the chapter, Master and Slave in his book Phenomenology of Spirit. This chapter examines the relationship between two self-consciousnesses, and the process of self-creating. The relationship between the two self-consciousnesses and the eventual path to ‘acknowledgment’ or recognition of the self is outlined in the first line of the chapter: “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that
...’ new elaboration on the deliberative model of its substantive force; once again confronting it with the Hegelian charge of emptiness and ineffectiveness.
Kung, Hans. The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought As Prolegomena to a Future Christology. T&T Clark, 2001. hard cover.
According to Hegel, the conscious has certain knowledge of itself. It is certain of its own existence. This form of knowledge is immediate and intuitive to the spirit. The conscious spirit is aware of its moral duty. However, it still needs to be convinced of its duty which needs to be universalized and recognized. Moreover, it’s immediate knowing and willing need to be certified and or validated. This validation is only possible in the context of a community of other selves: other moral agents.
John Locke's, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), was first criticized by the philosopher and theologian, John Norris of Bemerton, in his "Cursory Reflections upon a Book Call'd, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding," and appended to his Christian Blessedness or Discourses upon the Beatitudes (1690). Norris's criticisms of Locke prompted three replies, which were only posthumously published. Locke has been viewed, historically, as the winner of this debate; however, new evidence has emerged which suggests that Norris's argument against the foundation of knowledge in sense-perception that the Essay advocated was a valid and worthy critique, which Locke did, in fact, take rather seriously. Charlotte Johnston's "Locke's Examination of Malebranche and John Norris" (1958), has been widely accepted as conclusively showing that Locke's replies were not philosophical, but rather personal in origin; her essay, however, overlooks critical facts that undermine her subjective analysis of Locke's stance in relation to Norris's criticisms of the Essay. This paper provides those facts, revealing the philosophical—not personal—impetus for Locke's replies.
In his book The View From Nowhere (1986), Thomas Nagel discusses the various problems that arise when we consider the contrast between the objective world we inhabit, and are part of, and the inherently subjective way we view that world. Nagel writes that understanding the relationship between these external and internal standpoints is central to solving these problems: 'It is the most fundamental issue about morality, knowledge, freedom, the self, and the relation of mind to the physical world' (p.3). In this essay I will survey the problems that Nagel is referring to, and will echo Nagel's view that this issue is of central importance within philosophy. However, I will also suggest that Nagel is wrong in his emphasis in dealing with the issue.
ABSTRACT: Levinas depicts a pluralism of subjectivity older than consciousness and self-consciousness. He repudiates Heidegger's notion of solitude in order to explore the implications of the Husserlian pure I outside the subject. A hidden Good constitutes the Other in the self: a diremption not at the expense of the unity of the self. Levinas stands with Nietzsche on the side of life which requires and is capable of no justification whatsoever. But for Levinas the totality is ruptured by the thought that there is a unity of self undiminished by its immemorial responsibility for the Other, a unity of self beyond totality. This self containing the Other is the transcendence of the Ego otherwise immanent in Husserl's pure intentionality. Just here Levinas' thought is most perfectly distinguished from Sartre's notion of the transcendence of the Ego as complete exclusion from the immanence of intentionality. The pure I is otherwise than the Hegelian absolute Elastizität: incarnate and inspirited, the "self tight in its own skin." The transubstantiation of Ego to Other has not yet occurred to thought in Levinas, but what does occur here is the altersubstantiation of the I. The Other in the Same is an alteration of essence. It is precisely through thinking the contraction of [the modern] essence [of consciousness] that Levinas thinks otherwise than being, beyond essence, thinks "a thought profounder and 'older' than the cogito." Humanity signifies a "new image" of the Infinite in the preoriginary freedom by which the Self shows the Other mercy.
Hegel describes a way by which one may come to know absolute truth. This process shows a transition from a state of "natural consciousness" (56) to one of complete self-consciousness - which leads to an understanding of the "nature of absolute knowledge itself" (66). By understanding the relation between consciousness and truth, one may come to know the true nature of our existence. Thus, Hegel answers these questions in one bold stroke; he relates them in such a way as to make an infinitely complex and indiscernible universe a unitary whole. This whole is not only total self-consciousness, but also total awareness of absolute reality.
Social scientists often reference Georg Hegel’s work in Phenomenology of Spirit, as he attempts to develop the notion of self and the limits of its autonomy in society. In it, he describes what is often termed the master-slave dialectic. The master-slave dialectic describes the internal, or if taken more literally, the external struggle of recognition between two figures, the master and the slave. Their relationship is at once both reflective and reflexive, as one begins to understand the other as the antithesis of his or herself, giving an identity not only to the other, but also to his or herself. This dialectic places the figures in conflict with one another, where the historically determined means for resolution is the social defeat of
The 'mind-body' problem has troubled philosophers for centuries. This is because no human being has been able to sufficiently explain how the mind actually works and how this mind relates to the body - most importantly to the brain. If this were not true then there would not be such heated debates on the subject. No one objects to the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun because it is empirical fact. However, there is no current explanation on the mind that can be accepted as fact. In 'What is it like to be a bat?', Thomas Nagel does not attempt to solve this 'problem'. Instead, he attempts to reject the reductionist views with his argument on subjectivity. He examines the difficulties of the mind-body problem by investigating the conscious experience of an organism, which is usually ignored by the reductionists. Unfortunately, his arguments contain some flaws but they do shed some light as to why the physicalist view may never be able to solve the mind-body problem.
Consciousness is one of those topics that are in the position of trying to understand one’s own organism with one’s own organism. The topic of consciousness is so elusive that it mirrors child hood games of trying to catch your own shadow. In the World of philosophy, discerning the truth about consciousness is no childish game. Materialist J.J.C Smart and philosopher Thomas Nagel agree that qualia exist, but are diametrically opposed when it comes to what consciousness is. In this paper I will argue for Nagel’s point of view that consciousness falls outside the nucleus of scientific explanation. Physicalism cannot objectively uncover consciousness using scientific methods because consciousness cannot be reduced to material parts. If Smart’s reductionist view points were correct, where as physics can explain all there is to know about everything in the universe, then why does consciousness seem to evade physical laws of investigation? Explaining consciousness provides physicalism with challenges that place limits on scientific knowledge, and what it can uncover about consciousness.