OPULENT NOTHINGNESS
Notes on Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter V, A: “The Certainty and Truth of Reason”
Notes on Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter V, A: “The Certainty and Truth of Reason”
The transition from the Unhappy Consciousness to the emergence of Reason constitutes a structural shift in the situational physical modality of consciousness itself distinct from physical modalities simpliciter, which are eternal and unchanging, determined exclusively by invariable natural laws).
Within the state of Unhappy Consciousness, consciousness maintains a purely negative, oppositional relation to otherness. Its essential being, the In-itself, resides in the immutable Beyond — the exterior, the divine, the absolute object — while the self is experienced as the merely changeable being-there, an entity whose continuation and immediate life must undergo ascetic mortification under situational physical constraints of time and prevailing circumstances. The object is radically alien: something to be fled, renounced, excluded, so that the empty purity of the “I” may remain the sole internal content. Mere life and immediate being are precisely what Unhappy Consciousness targets for extinction within its own sphere.
The manifestation of Reason is the dialectical reversal of this oppositional movement. The very renunciatory act by which Unhappy Consciousness sought the immutable renders self-consciousness universal. What had been absolute exteriority — the negative relation to the object — inverts into the positive certainty that otherness is the self in its otherness. The “I” no longer flees the object; the “I” is the object in its truth. As Hegel states with lapidary force:
“Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality; thus does idealism express its Notion.”
In this inversion the negativity of the exterior object becomes internal positivity. The identity of the “I” as object is now the sole reality and the universal totality. The universal is no longer divided; it has become the unified movement of identity: the Concept individuating itself. The object is the being of the Concept. Self-consciousness is the universal that has become conscious of itself as reality.
This stage marks the first demarcation of subjectivity — not as the Concept individuating itself through the certainty that its own externalization is the positivity of the world, where situational physical modalities enter into relationships with times and situations-at-times that logical modalities and physical modalities simpliciter, by their very natures, do not. The distinction between the universal inward of the self and the universal of the object exterior to the self collapses into their speculative identity. Immediate existence (“mere being”) is sublated; the world is rational because it is the self, and the self is the world in its truth.
Yet this remains only certainty, the preliminary stage of full truth. The idealism expressed here is still immediate and abstract. It must undergo the subsequent dialectical labor: Observing Reason, the actualization of rational self-consciousness, the dialectic of individuality, and the passage into Spirit proper. The Concept will subject this initial certainty to successive humiliations until it achieves what it already is implicitly.
Reason is thus the certainty that the negative relation to otherness has turned into its own opposite. The self, having become universal, now possesses the entire realm of objectivity as its own. Self-consciousness knows itself as the totality of reality. This is the precise speculative point at which the self and the world are identical in their Concept.
- Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977, Chapter V, A.
- Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §249–251. Ibid., §253.
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Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §260.
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For commentary on the Concept and its identity, see Pinkard, Terry, Hegel: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 157–161.
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Houlgate, Stephen, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity, Purdue University Press, 2006, pp. 92–95.
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Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §261.
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Beiser, Frederick C., Hegel, Routledge, 2005, pp. 121–123.
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Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §262–263; see also Pippin, Robert B., Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 86–88.