Ep. 276: Hegel on Perception (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. The Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 276 is something like what is perception? And we read chapters one and two under the overall heading Consciousness of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's phenomenology of Spirit, 1807. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer. Totally deep because I'm like folded back on myself in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Seth: This is Seth Paskin. This here now in Austin, Texas,

0:44 Wes: this is Wes Alwan, in myself by virtue of being for another. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:51 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, conditioned by the sensuous but afflicted with opposition in Midland, Michigan.

0:56 Mark: Those all sound, to various degrees pornographic. I'm only what I am when I display myself to you. H I guess that's like a podcaster thing too. If you podcast enough, you start to feel like that. Let me put it that way.

1:12 Wes: I mean, one man's relatedness is another man's pornography.

1:19 Mark: So this is a continuation kind of from our last one. 275 we discussed Hegel's overall project. Don't think you necessarily need that to understand what we're going to talk about today, which is straight up epistemology. It's the first two steps in his dialectical chain. But I would like to think that this is what we're doing here is largely an illustration of the method that we talked about last time. If you feel like maybe you're not a member and you didn't pay for part two last time or something, you would really like a close reading of every single line in this.

I must recommend Gregory B. Sadler's YouTube series Half Hour Hegel, where he takes 300 half hour episodes to get through the whole book. And just this sense certainty chapter half of what we're trying to do here today takes him three hours. Six full episodes for him. He outlasted me, even listening at double speed as a review.

2:15 Seth: There's actually quite a bit of good content out there for Hegel, but it's all like that. I mean, there's no short form, there's no three minute philosophy. Hegel things.

2:24 Wes: I have a new favorite commentary. Peter Kalkavage's the Logic of Desire I think is by far the best commentary, especially beginners, but also in itself not just for beginners.

2:37 Dylan: Not just in itself.

2:38 Wes: In itself, the best commentary for the other. Right?

2:42 Mark: I did break my rule from last time of not looking at secondary sources and turned back to my copy of in the Spirit of Hegel by Robert C. Solomon, and found his sections of a chapter, I should say, on sense certainty and perception to be very helpful. And I wish that Hegel had spent more time, for instance, talking by name about other philosophers, because I think a lot of what we can do today, if folks that have listened to our series on John Locke, our recent epistemological series on him, this is really addressing a lot of what we talked about there in detail both what we're going to do today and what we're going to do do.

I guess next time we're tentatively going to do one more episode on this book on the next chapter, Force and the Understanding. And that really gets up to the point of kind of finishing Locke's epistemology, talking about powers. But here we're just more talking about confronting directly, supposedly individuals. And then the next step of, well, maybe we can't really do this. Maybe we need concepts for actual perception. We do use universals. We use the names of things as sort of a mediating factor in our perception.

3:48 Seth: The way I've heard it referred to in one of the lectures is he's addressing phenomenologically two, what he calls shapes of consciousness, which would be ways that consciousness can be thought of to access the given, or the true, or the absolute, or the absolute, or probably some other terms. And so he wants to examine these two modes of understanding, if you will, to see whether or not they actually do what they say they can do, which of course you'll know they won't. And in fact, you'll uncover an internal, what he calls negation inside of these things that means that what you think is given, or what you think is true, or what you think you're perceiving or being given isn't actually what you get.

And that in turn then changes the object of what you think you're understanding or consciousness is of, and propels you to a further stage in the understanding. So this first one is sense certainty, which we'll discuss, and it will ultimately turn out to undermine itself and push you towards perception, which of course then we'll examine. And when we do, the third episode will lead us into the next stage, which comes up in force in the understanding. And theoretically we should be able to at least semi directly associate these shapes of consciousness with some kind of philosophical movement or perspective that comes up in the history of philosophy.

So, for example, the chapter on perception will closely associate with what we think of as the empiricist. And it's Good. That we did. Locke pretty recently, sense certainty, I'm a little less clear on.

5:29 Wes: I'm not sure that sense certainty will have as clear a correlation.

5:33 Seth: At one point in the text, he references, I think the ancient skeptics or Stoics or something like that, but I didn't understand the connection.

5:40 Wes: Yeah, I think each shape of consciousness, he's addressing them abstractly. And if you look at commentaries, there will be different opinions about what in the history of philosophy he's alluding to. But I think it helps to know that the direction that he's moving in is towards the importance of the understanding and conceptual knowledge of universals. So he's starting out before that. And Seth, you described the whole dynamic of the dialectic. So each of these shapes of consciousness, right, is a claim to a certain type of knowing. It's a claim that knowledge has a certain shape.

In the case of sense certainty, that shape is entirely non conceptual and associated with ostension pointing. And then in the case of perception, the claimed knowledge is associated with sensuous particulars, with properties inhering in a substrate, that sort of model. And the way they break down is to fail on their own terms. Right. So it's important, given what we discussed in the previous episode, that Hegel wants to think of himself as entering into each of these shapes of consciousness, each of these positions, and then showing how they fail for themselves.

Right. Just being a phenomenological observer and seeing how sense certainty undermines itself so that he's not just some philosopher looking from the outside and saying, here's how I'm going to refute this. Sense certainty will refute itself. That gets a little bit confusing because Hegel does step outside and he's looking at these shapes from the outside and from the inside. And it's not always clear when he's doing that, but that's the general dialectical goal. And just as a general overview, sense certainty, right, is going to undermine itself by illustrating that we can't refer to bare particulars, that we're always using universals, that pointing implicates universality, that there is no such thing as just pointing independent of universality.

There's no such thing as a non conceptual knowing. And then for perception, it's going to turn out that the whole model of a substance or a substrate in which properties inhere is too unstable because it implicates conflicts between manyness and oneness on the one hand, and self identity or individuality and then relatedness on the other. And those conflicts cannot be resolved on perception's.

8:18 Mark: Own terms I found helpful in navigating this, connecting Hegel's dialectic with Kant's antinomies. So the idea of an antinomy to remind folks maybe you don't know this term is there's two sort of models for what you want to explain, and there's just nothing that decides which one is better. And so this is really his whole critique against metaphysics at all. You could ask, for instance, does the universe have a beginning or does it just go on forever? And each one of those options makes a certain sort of sense. You could argue for it, but neither of the arguments is going to be better than the other.

And so, like, as far as the person contemplating this problem goes, what makes sense to you goes back and forth between them. And so what really has to be. If you want to give an account of your global relationship to that problem, right, your relationship to the unknown or the unknowable, then you would have to give some sort of. I've called it like a stable ambiguity before in the context of free will versus determinism. So we just saw that at great length in the Fichte, where he says, yeah, okay, it really seems to make sense that there's this causal network and we're part of it, but it also seems to make sense and be desirable and for some practical purposes, that in fact we are entirely free and there's nothing about our experience that determines either way.

And so it's like our mind just goes back and forth between those. And if you were to just dogmatically assert one or the other of those, you would be making some sort of mistake. And so I feel like if you understand those two examples, I think that you understand what's going on throughout Hegel's phenomenology, that he's always giving something about a picture. And like, initially in sentence, certainty, this, it's just knowing the object. And obviously the object is the thing that's essential. But if you think about it, well, maybe what's essential is the contemplator.

And it sort of goes back and forth and you end up, according to Hegel's, like pushing you towards some sort of synthesis in some new level. And that's one of the things I'm wondering about, is whether you have to push forward to a new level. Or you could, just as we're going through here, be satisfied with saying there's a stable ambiguity here.

10:26 Wes: Yeah, for Kant, there is no movement forward.

10:28 Mark: Right, Exactly.

10:29 Wes: The solution is just to say, well, we can't know the absolute There is no knowledge of the absolute. We only know appearances and we're forever cut off from things in themselves. And those antennomies are directly relevant. Right, because he's dealing with some of the big candidates for absolute knowledge, including God and the human soul and cosmos. So Kant says, yep, that's it. We have the antinomies. This is irresolvable. Knowledge is impossible. Hegel's going to say the whole innovation of the dialectic is to take antinomies and make them dynamic, make them have synthetic outcomes which lead to new antinomies, and keep pushing things forward until we find out that absolute knowledge is possible. After we run through all the previous contradictory stages.

11:15 Dylan: It's a kind of bootstrap method. Right, because he wants to make sure that we're never going outside the box. It has to be that we are going to obtain knowledge of the absolute from within the absolute effectively, and have a foundation that's born from within and that's by this dialectic going back and forth and constant refinement.

11:38 Wes: Yeah.

11:39 Dylan: There are two things that I thought of when I was going through this. One, of course, post dates Hegel, which is this kind of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny kind of thing, where, as Seth was summarizing, these stages also are recapitulating stages of philosophical thought. And so there's something very, very reminiscent of the way in which we often think of evolutionary processes in higher level organisms and that the embryological development of mammals, if you watch it, you look through those stages, you see the stages of evolutionary development in the history of the organism.

There is a history embedded in the current state of the philosophical, cultural development of the organism and the culture that is recapitulated by each of these stages. And I was wondering, there's something developmental, in fact, for an individual human being going through these different stages. Sense certainty and perception force understanding that the access of knowing and the process of refinement and the things that the conscious is working with and the level of abstraction is appropriate to a certain level of education or development of personal spirit.

And then there's a breakthrough and that that process is understood to be educationally, intrinsically dialectic. To me, it's all those circles were going on. Yeah.

13:16 Wes: And then, then of course, as we've mentioned, there's the possibility of a lineup with the history of philosophy. So you get all these different potential parallels, but you bring us to, with the mention of babies. Right. You give us a good rationale for beginning where Hegel begins. Why not Begin with the baby, although not that I'm saying that the baby is in the position of sense certainty. Because in a way, sense certainty at least is the claim to know. Right. Is self contradictory and impossible. But there is some kind of analog there. And it is interesting that in section 90, Hegel does try to.

It seems like he's giving a justification for starting where he does. And there's a few different justifications, but one is that given the project and given. Given our position as phenomenological observers, we want to start with something that is the most primitive or involves the least conceptual apparatus, or it's a claim to knowledge that there's the lowest possibility that it will actually alter its object of knowledge. Remember that that was sort of a preoccupation in our previous. So if we think about what is the possible relationship to the object or a mode of knowing, which has the least interference involved with the object.

Right. And which is the least possibility of

14:36 Dylan: observer the least mediation.

14:38 Mark: Yep.

14:39 Wes: And the least mediation is another way to describe it. Then we would start with sense certainty. So in a way, sense certainty, it's like a way of positing the most uncomplicated relationship one can think of to an object of knowledge. And you can think about it in the same way linguistically as like the most basic unit of linguistic behavior, which I think one could argue is actually pointing.

15:06 Dylan: Yep.

15:07 Mark: Let me just read section 90. Since at the very beginning of. Again, we're on consciousness, number one, sense certainty, or the this and meaning. The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately. Our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself. A knowledge of the immediate or what simply is. And then this is the part, I think that is interesting. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive. We must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it.

So you might think this is the model of like at least how animals. I don't know about babies, but they have a sensory experience and there's a thing there. And maybe baby's actually better because you think an animal, like, I know that that is my food or that is a mate or something like that. But babies, they're still figuring stuff out. And so just that there is being. There are bright colors. I don't even know that they're colors. I can't even call them colors. I can't compare this red to that red. But there is something there. It's being. So that's a place to start, it's of this.

16:12 Wes: I do think the developmental parallels can complicate things, right. Since this mode of knowing is going to turn out to be actually impossible, or it's impossible as a way of knowing things, maybe it exists developmentally at some level, but.

16:27 Mark: Right. The baby, that's before they figured out anything.

16:31 Wes: Yeah, but at the point where we can point, right. So just think of developmentally at the point where an infant can start pointing at things and having joint attention to objects, which involves a whole reflective apparatus, stuff that the Hegel's only going to get to later. Right. It involves mutual recognition. Pointing involves consciousness of another consciousness attending to the same thing that you're attending to and knowing that you're attending, you know that they know that you're attending to it. All that mirror image stuff is going on in a single act of pointing.

And then what Hegel is going to focus on here, of course, is that pointing implicates the use of universals, and he thinks the use of language, or maybe move away from the word pointing, but the whole concept of sense certainty implicates the use of language and universals so that there is no just immediate pointing at a bare particular that's not determined in any way. You could think of this too in terms of the Romantics of his time, right? You want to reject abstraction. And that's one of the ironies of this, is that people might think that they're rejecting abstraction by going to this level when Hegel's going to say no, actually, it's the most abstract.

But you can think of Romantic saying, I just want to commune with nature, man. I want to get back to the rawest of raw experience. And Hegel's going to say, no, actually, that's inherently conceptual. And if you just ignore the fact of its conceptuality, you're being more abstract than me, the philosopher who's trying to acknowledge the conceptual nature of this.

18:02 Dylan: This was one of the interesting keys to him being able to keep himself in the confines of talking about the absolute and being within something, rather than starting from a kind of mass of particulars out of which you then generate universality. He starts with universality. He starts with the very act of getting any kind of particular as an act of implicating, a act of universalizing. So that when I point to a this and I have the two, this is the I and the this that I'm pointing to, that act is all about universals. And there's a number of other universals that come along, all these indexicals but it starts with the manifold or whatever. The absolute is parsed by universals.

18:57 Wes: And.

18:58 Dylan: And then we get down into particulars and we grow the particulars or evolve or refine the particulars out of the absolute over these different stages, as opposed to the other direction, which is the one I think of more often, even in the history of philosophy, where we get focused on particulars. And the idea that. Well, I see that chair there. And there's, of course, all this baggage. And the way Hegel talks about it is refining how much baggage you have when you start with talking about very, very specific particulars.

19:31 Wes: With the particular. We're already at the point of perception, though, right, by the time we can say this chair or that chair.

19:36 Dylan: No, I completely understand that. I'm not talking about Hegel now. We're starting with universals and going towards particulars, and it will be number of steps till we get there.

19:46 Wes: I think you're right, except that the section on sense certainty is reductio. Right. So it starts by positing the possibility that of knowledge without universals, knowledge without thinking, without knowing properties or relations between objects. As he puts it in 91, truth is sheer being. And then we get the result that you're talking about.

20:05 Dylan: Yeah, I guess I'm jumping to his conclusion that the most primary sensory experience is of this. And in order to have a this, you have to have universals. Yeah, I'm jumping to that for sure. Yeah.

20:16 Mark: Can we clarify the different ways in which universals could come in? Because we've talked about objects being universal as we've talked about properties being universal, so that in a normal experience, unless I don't know what a tree is, you know, unless I don't know what the thing that I'm looking at is, then I see that as a tree, as a book, whatever. So obviously I have to have the concept of tree or book. That's not the critique that Hegel's making here.

20:41 Wes: Right.

20:41 Mark: Even just in picking out an object, I have to have. He uses a this. But there's a certain complexity introduced in the pointing process. And the fact that you could. This is what's called an indexical. You've used that term that you could point at various things. There have been critiques of Hegel that just says, well, he doesn't have a way of treating indexicals. Right. He didn't have that term. Whereas what you should do, if you want to talk about what I'm referring to when I say a this, you know, and I'm pointing to a particular tree, then I should take the indexical out of it and try to restate it in some way that different people at different times, in different places could all be talking about that thing.

Well, even that, even if you did that. So I'm not even going to use the word tree. I'm going to try to avoid all. You still have to have the concept of an object, an individual entity, and that itself is a concept, and it's a universal concept.

21:35 Seth: He's got so many moves in these chapters. There's so many different ways, and he uses the term over and over again in these first few chapters about what we're looking for is unmediated. We're looking for something that's unmediated because that's what pure being would be. It would be an unmediated given. And what he's trying to point out in numerous ways is to say, even if you don't get to individual objects like tree or house or whatever, even if you just take the manifold of sensation, even within that it's mediated first. Because at any point in time the manifold of sensation you get is just an instance, and that in two minutes or one second it'll be gone and there'll be a new set of sensations.

So already, even if you don't individuate objects, you have to talk about this is the way I read the part about the now or the here. It's every succeeding moment in time brings you a new manifold of sensation that you have to associate with the here and the now. And that's one way in which it becomes mediated through the universals which are the here and the now. And he makes a point about how they're empty universals to some extent, because there's no necessary relationship between the sensations that roll up to them. Could be anything, right?

The other point he makes is that the here and the now as a sensation only exist for an eye. There's another universal. And I still don't have all the conceptual apparatus I need for time and memory and all that sort of thing. But already it's not just like sensation is given. It has to be given to something, and that something is an I. And then when you bring in the concept of thing, you've got now three different universals that are necessary, so to speak, just to try to account for sensation, which is supposed to be a particular that's given unmediated.

23:26 Wes: So I think that's a good segue if we want to try to run through the sections which I don't think we're not going to obviously get to them if we read large parts of them. So we should probably choose our quotations wisely.

23:39 Seth: I think we should have a competition to see who can find the longest sentence to quote.

23:44 Wes: Yeah, there's some good ones in there, but I think often some of them can be easily summarized. And Seth, as you were mentioning, he kind of foreshadows all of this. In 92 and 93, he's going to really say there's two problems with sense certainty. One is that instancing is going to turn into universality, as we've already described, and one is that the subject object relation seems to imply mediation. And so that seems to undermine the immediacy that sense certainty demands. The mediation here, which he describes in 93, is just that my sense certainty, in a way, relies on the object.

It's dependent on the object, right? In immediacy. The whole meaning of that is to do away with any dependency on anything else. It should just come through itself. And in 93, we see that the mediation. So the way this is thought of initially, although this is going to change, is that there's an essential thing and there's an inessential thing, and the object is essential in the sense that our knowing relies on the object. Right? We don't know anything unless the object is there. The object is essential, and my knowing depends on it. And therefore is the inessential thing.

Right?

24:53 Mark: The object would just be there whether we were looking at it or not.

24:56 Wes: And that's what sets him up for the next line of argument, which is to say, okay, let's accept that for the sake of argument. Let's accept that the object is the essential thing. And now let's see if the object itself is what sense certainty says it is, as he puts it in 94. And then with 95 onwards, we launch into the stuff in terms of this and now and here and so on. So I think we could start with 95, which gives the general sketch in terms of this, and then move on from there.

25:28 Mark: So just a parallel. I mean, we've been skating around whether sense certainty is an actual thing that could be experienced, right? If it's simply a claim that just makes no sense at all, then nobody could possibly experience it. Nobody could be in this situation. Maybe a baby that doesn't have any knowledge at all. But what was helpful to me in looking at the Bob Solomon, the secondary source, was that he strongly claimed that. No, actually, Hegel is arguing against real philosophers, including, like Bertrand Russell, who is a modern early 20th century empiricist.

I think we should actually read him on this soon. His Problems of Philosophy, in a way that should be very familiar to folks that are familiar with empiricism, says our basic form of knowledge is acquaintance. Right. I just directly am aware of this thing and then I can like build concepts on that. I can compare it to other things, and then I can have knowledge of things that I've never seen because I can describe them in terms of these building blocks that come from acquaintance. So it's the given, the. Any philosophy that thinks there is a given.

And we've had whole episodes then, like on Sellars, the myth of the given, that are also like Hegel arguing against these very views. So I think that you could see what the supposed object that Wes is talking about according to sense certainty as just being there is some kind of given that then we take and maybe we do something with.

26:49 Wes: Yeah, you know, I think it is controversial among commentators whether we identify sense certainty with sense data theory, for instance. But I don't think it hurts to try to think of it in those terms, at least initially. And supposedly with sense certainty is we're not applying universals and properties and descriptions and relations and all these things. So in 95, he tries to get at that idea, this unmediated bare particular, using the word this, which is something that's going to break out both spatially and temporally right into a now and a here, but a this is something that we typically think of as just the object of a bare pointing.

And it's the right word because we don't want to think of me communicating with you and saying that cow over there is motley or something like that. We want to avoid all description as much as we can, as unrealistic as that ultimately is. We need to avoid descriptives or at least try, right? And it turns out it's going to fail. But that's what we're trying to do.

27:54 Dylan: I find it incredibly persuasive and appealing as the primary experience of sense certainty as just the generation of an object out of whatever it is that's out there. And that is most clearly just a this. That to me makes complete and utter sense as the mode in which you would have no other descriptors for it. And the observation that that is a. Is fundamentally an abstraction or an application of a universal sounds to me spot on. Well before I even temporally, much less conceptually, before I have a red or a motley or a cow or any of those things I have of this as my interaction with the world out there. I get that. That makes sense to me.

28:43 Mark: What section were you up to?

28:44 Wes: West there you were going through 95. He tells us that this is going to break out into now and here and then. The problem with the now at the end of 95, the problem with the now is that it basically ranges over particulars. It's a universal that ranges over different particular moments. For instance, night and noon. You know, I use the same word. Now it's noon, a little time passed, now it's night. Same word, different moments, universal, referring to two different particulars. And that's, as he puts it, you know, he loves this word indifferent.

It's indifferent to them. It's not naming those moments. It's not George Noon and Betty Night. There's no fixity to the bare particular in question. It's indifferent to their particular content. So it doesn't, to use a term that analytic philosophers like, it doesn't fix the object in particular. It doesn't pick out, sorry, reference, pick out its object. It doesn't successfully all by itself refer. Reference would have to be something more would have to be happening for reference to occur. And as we know, that's going to be an enormous amount of context for any ostension to actually be a reference.

30:01 Dylan: But what does happen is you get leftover. These are all nows. And so he calls it this self preserving now. And I guess you pointed this out earlier, Wes, this is part of his working his way up. It's at the end of 96 that we get that turn to understanding that is in fact the universal that is true of sense certainty. So it is this sequence of particulars, the sequence of nows, the thing that's in common, the self preserving now, ends up being understood as a universal. So at the end of 96, a simple thing of this kind, which is through negation, which is neither this nor that, not this, and is with equal indifference this as well as that. Such a thing we call a universal. And the reason he has that is neither this nor that is this whole idea that, well, it was noon and now it's midnight. All of this sequencing of particular, this is of time are all nows.

31:06 Mark: So what do you actually think of Hegel's argument that my meaning is not what I want it to be? I mean, of course the word, it seems like even in a particular use case of the word this, what I am referring to is not the word this and its universality and all the other things that I could mean by this. I am Meaning that one individual thing. But Hegel just seems to deny this and say, no, no, the truth of what is going on in this whole situation is that what you actually mean is the universal this. And that just seems straightforwardly incorrect.

31:41 Wes: I don't think that's what he's saying. So it is from the standpoint of sense certainty, because sense certainty is making absurd claims, right? So sense certainty wants to do this in an unmediated way. What makes a this refer in our context, in the nonsense certainty context is lots of context, right? We know that we're using these words as universals. We know that in order for you to understand my particular ostension, you have to know something about what's going on in my head. There are all sorts of pragmatics involved. There's a ton of contextual stuff, understanding objects in terms of their relations, in terms of their properties. And once you eliminate all that context, that's when a word like now or this or here can no longer do its work. If you want it to be an unmediated relation, then you're in trouble. That's when the meaning fails.

32:32 Mark: But you might argue that sense certainty as a type of knowledge doesn't claim to be verbal. You said for us to make sense of you making that reference. Well, that's assuming that referring, pointing is a social thing, which of course it is. I see you point and I. And you know, that's your whole reason is pointing is because you're trying to call my attention to something. But you might say, no, the pointing is something added after the fact. This is same like the idea of the Augustinian view of language, that first we have ideas in our heads and then we apply the words to them.

You know, we've had several episodes where we argue against that. But let's just take sense certainty on its own claimed merits that it is irrelevant, that you can't make sense of what I am referring to. I know what I'm referring to. And that's all that sense certainty requires. It is not a communicable form of knowledge. And so maybe we don't want to call it a form knowledge at all, but maybe animals get away with that just fine insofar as they don't point at stuff. In other words, by bringing in concepts at all, by bringing the word this, by bringing in language at all, you're bringing something foreign to sense certainty.

This is not sense certainty failing on its own terms. This is sense certainty failing from the point of view of a more sophisticated epistemology.

33:47 Wes: I understand what you're saying I'm just trying to figure out what I think about that. It's a complicated question because now we're thinking about the possibility of kind of an ostensive relationship to a this without any linguistic component, without any possibility of communicating it. I think those two things are just another way. The argument is that they're just another way of saying that there would be no conceptual component, which is something Hegel also says in an earlier section. That's what we're trying to think about with sense certainty. We're trying to think about an entirely non conceptual knowing, not just the non conceptual relationship to an object, but the idea that that can be a form of knowledge and that I don't know how we arbitrate that prior to the

34:33 Dylan: pointing that's involved in this, that is a communicative act to another being would be that act of pointing as differentiation. That is to myself. And that's what seemed to me to be enough as separating the this out as a particular this in sense certainty as implicating a universal. And it's not even that you have to be thinking about the word this and thinking about it as a universal, but by picking out a being. This is what I take into be saying. The experience of sense certainty is there is a this and an I. And there's those two this is. And you can't have it without that. And that act has embedded in with it a pointing out of it of language in universals. Some level you are bringing it to bear. But it's not as if you are applying it purposefully and say I'm going to apply a universal and I'm going to pick out of this, it's that the act of doing so is doing that.

35:45 Wes: Yeah, I think Mark is questioning whether ostension really does imply a universal. That's Hegel's argument. But if we do away with this whole imaginary scene of someone pointing and using words, I think it's still valid.

36:02 Seth: I mean, I think even if you get away from the ostension component, what Dylan just characterized it as is sufficient. He's got at least three distinct movements here that could potentially undermine this sense certainty claim. And I don't think he needs all of them. And I think what Dylan just characterized to me is sufficient. But in essence, if I'm going to extract from two sections here, beginning of 92, he says when we look carefully at this pure being which constitutes the essence of sense certainty and which sense certainty pronounces to be its truth.

But when we look carefully at this pure Being which constitutes the essence of sense certainty. So the claim of sense certainty is that the immediacy present of this particular sensation is the pure given, the pure being that is this thing, and that somehow you have access to it. The point is, take which path you want. Ostension, the introduction of the I, the fact that the certainty is just one instance of many nows or many years. And what he says is really, if you get over to 97, what we've actually got here, when we universalize this being in general.

So we've just moved from this pure being, this. You guys are probably not looking at my camera, but I'm doing scare quotes, this pure being to being in general. And he's basically saying there has to be some element of being in general in order for particular being to be given in the way that sense certainty says it is. But sense certainty denies that being in general is being employed, and I think there's three or four different arguments there,

37:43 Wes: do you think your objection has been addressed? Because I'm not sure that it really has. I mean, we're restating Hegel's arguments, but

37:50 Mark: the response I had in mind, I got this from Solomon, which is the private language argument, Wittgenstein's private language argument, that you might think that you by yourself pre linguistically could pick out something and say, that's what I mean, you know, I'm not using any words, but I pre verbalizing to myself the meaning of the reference to a particular object. And according to this private language argument thing is that you could not keep track of that.

38:15 Wes: Right.

38:15 Mark: That would sort of work as a momentary thing, but then there would just be, you need some sort of criterion, you need some sort of system which is going to be a socially developed system in order to actually keep track of this going forward. So when we're talking about the here and the now, well, it's a system of placehood and a system of time. And those are things that you would never come up with by yourself. You have to be taught that, you know, if you were merely a creature in a sensory deprivation tank or something, you would never come up with the notion of time necessarily.

38:48 Wes: But those are contingent questions of like psychological development. We can just posit a subject who is fully formed and then wonder what it can do. Wonder if there's a sense certainty component, that it by itself amounts to knowledge.

39:01 Seth: Yeah, let's also take seriously the fact that this is intended to be a phenomenology. He's not trying to build a developmental account which is seven years ago when we did this, that's what I thought he was doing. But I think he intends for us to come at this from the perspective of the subjects that we are right now when confronted with this truth claim, that sense certainty provides pure, unmediated access to true being. And he's going to say no. And, you know, I'm with Dylan on this one. I think there's a number of different ways that you can get at that.

But his point is there's no such thing as unmediated access to pure sensation. And I want to say that this, of all the things, seems to me to be the least controversial. But what we seem to be concerned about, what we're bringing into play as far as concepts or standards that he's going to use to judge that claim. Is that really what we're talking about?

39:56 Wes: I think we should keep Mark's objection in mind as we move forward because it kind of puts Hegel's argument into perspective. I mean, it gives us an idea because obviously, like, for instance, animals don't use language and they point. I think they use some version of concepts. Obviously they can pick out things in the world and.

40:14 Mark: And probably have concepts of time, even if not like systematic.

40:18 Wes: Not great, right? Your dog does not have a great concept of time. That's why it's at the door all day waiting for you and treats the five minutes you're gone as if it were 50 hours or something like that. But we'll see some arguments that I think might as. Seth and Dylan, I think you're both pointing out that as we move forward, we're going to see some arguments that actually might be able to successfully handle Mark's objection.

40:41 Mark: So I don't think that the I, capital I, the subject comes up until section 100 is at least the first time I'm seeing it, that he thinks he's established well enough with the now and the here that for us to have any ostension at all, for us to refer to any particular thing, we have to have a system of time, we have to have a system of place and understand whether we have the word indexicals, whether we know the theory of indexicals, we have to understand what pointing is all about. It's interesting that even in this very basic form of perception, Hegel seems to think that sense certainty implies a direct relationship between me as observer and the object.

Now, me as observer could just be what I refer. What we were talking about in the Schelling episode is just a point, right? I'm not saying the I over time, I'm not distinguishing in any sophisticated way things about me as an individual human being. But there is present in every phenomenological experience of perception this little pole P O L e within it of the subject knowing the things. And this is something that Hegel will then grasp on and said, ha, we're trying to make this as simple as possible, but it's clearly relational. It's clearly you, the I being related to the object.

Whereas you might think we had this discussion long ago in Sartre's transcendence of the ego, where we were positing, I think, wrongly, about Sartre. But you could have this view of knowledge where the simplest kind of knowledge is. You're not aware of yourself at all. You're just aware of the thing that is sort of like your awareness is just a bowl and you have the perception right there, the thing that is being perceived right there in the bowl. And there's no reference to an I at all in there. And Hegel seems to think that, just like Fichte and Schelling and all these other folks that we've looked at recently, that no, for sure, every single time, even in the simplest case, you have a sense of yourself of some sort.

42:43 Wes: Just as far as catching us up on the structure of the argument, because you've moved us ahead a few sections. He's going to say that in 99. He's going to tell us that we were treating the object as the essential thing, but it turned out negation and mediation were essential to it. You know, the this and universality. So now let's say that the relationship between knowing and the object are reversed, right? The object is the unessential thing to certainty, and what's essential to certainty is the fact of my knowing it. So he'll say sense certainty is driven back into the I.

The point is that sense certainty is going to try to a new gambit. Sense certainty is defending itself against these attacks. And the new gambit is to try to index particular nows and heres to fix them to something that is actually persistent or seems persistent at first, right? It's not going to turn out to be that way. And that is the. So if we say that the object is not the essential thing, but it's kind of dependent on me picking it out. And I link the use of now to a particular moment, adhere to a particular place by indexing them to my particular acts of sensing, right?

What we're going to say is I can fix the particular now and here by connecting it to my particular acts of sensing. So we have new this is not nows or heres, but sensings, knowings. And that's the question, does that dynamic,

44:18 Dylan: does that actually work well, doesn't it fail on 103? You summarized this dynamic that we have regarding sense certainty, and up to 102, we're going to use the I to.

44:30 Wes: Well, 103 is a new gambit. 102 is the failure of what's proposed in 101, which is that the I is actually just a universal as well, that ranges over a different sense of particulars, whether new particulars are right or not. Nows are heres, they're seeings, sensings, knowings. So the I is just a universal that persists over those things. So, I mean, in the same way we saw it with the object or the this I might mean a single particular I, but I can't really say it. I applies to different time slices of my identity and it also applies to other people. So it's a doubly problematic universal.

45:12 Dylan: But the end of 101 sounds a little bit like what Mark was referring to as a candidate. Right? The force of its truth lies in the eye and the immediacy of my seeing, hearing and so on. The vanishing of the single now and here that we mean is prevented by the fact that I hold them fast. And then a little bit further down I, this I, see the tree and assert that here is a tree, but another I sees the house and maintains the here is not a tree but a house instead. Both truths have the same authentication, the immediacy of seeing and the certainty and assurance that both have their own knowing.

45:48 Wes: Yeah, both have their own knowing, which is to say the knowing itself is the new immediate particular, the new bare particular.

45:57 Dylan: Yeah, and then in 102, we see how that fails.

46:00 Mark: Let's see how it fails. I think we should not avoid quotes entirely.

46:04 Wes: So, okay, I mean, I gave my summary of 102, but yeah, if you want to dig in, what does not

46:09 Mark: disappear in all this is the I as universal, whose seeing of the tree or of this house, but is a simple seeing, which, though mediated by the negation of this house, etc. Is all the same, simple and indifferent to whatever happens to it, to the house, the tree, etc. The I is merely universal, like now, here, or this. In general, I do indeed mean a single I. But I can say no more what I mean in the case of this I than in the case of now and here. When I say this here, this now or a single item, I am saying all thises, heres, nows, all single items. So your summary was great, Wesley, but this is clarifying a little for me that he does admit that you can mean the single thing.

46:52 Wes: He just.

46:52 Mark: You can't say it. Whereas I think the stronger argument is you can't even mean it.

46:57 Wes: Right. No, that's a very good point. Yeah.

47:00 Mark: Similarly, when I say I, the singular I, I say in general, all I's. Everyone is what I say everyone is I. This singular I. When science is faced with the demand as if it were an acid test, it could not pass that should deduce, construct, find a priori, or however it is put something called this thing or this one man, it is reasonable that this demand should say which this thing or this particular man is meant. But it's impossible to say this. Is he saying something mean about shelling there in that last part?

47:31 Wes: No, I don't think so. But maybe, I mean.

47:34 Mark: Well, because I mean, this whole. We need to derive the self somehow. But I wasn't sure if deriving the self in the way that we were just trying to do, and that's our last Schelling discussion, had anything to do with deriving a priori something called this one man. It might just be a fundamentally different thing.

47:51 Wes: Well, I think the next one is the hardest. He attempts to find an ingenious or sense certainty, tries to find an ingenious way out, which is to say that the essential thing is neither the object nor the I, but that the whole of sense certainty is essential, which I will take to mean in between 1 and 3 and 104, and you guys can see if you think the same thing. But what I think he means by that is that now we are going to take these little subject object slices. So it's just the subject and object as a molecule, let's say. And then we take slices at T1, T2, T3.

We're not going to compare those different dyad slices. We're not going to relate them and say the now has become a new now and all that stuff. They're kind of windowless and monadic, and they're supposed to stand on their own now as bare particulars. So instead of different knowings that were related to each other by adhering in the same eye and the same self, we could just say, well, each temporal slice of a subject, we'll just treat that as its own subject. Let's forget about temporality. And we could say that that little subject object relation at Time T is its own immediate certain thing.

Does that make sense? Am I getting that right?

49:18 Dylan: I think that's what he's saying is the next possibility, the next parry of sense certainty, which doesn't he summarize that as a. I am a pure act of intuiting at the end of 104.

49:31 Wes: Yeah. So he's going to set all this up in 103 to 105 and then 106 is where he's going to break it down.

49:37 Dylan: Yeah, but one way of saying these molecules in 103, I am a pure act of intuiting. I, for my part, stick to the fact that the now is day or the here is a tree. I also do not compare here and now themselves with one another, but stick firmly to one immediate relation, that now is day.

49:58 Wes: So that's what I'm calling the subject object dyad at time T1. To try and transform this into analytic

50:06 Dylan: philosophy, because that only makes it better, is to put subscripts on it, makes it clearer every time.

50:12 Wes: It could be symbolic logic in here. I think that would be even better. Just combine Hegel with symbolic logic, I

50:20 Mark: guess, as a kind of conceptual point. To wrap up part one here with. I'm wondering again about this essentiality. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I felt like that concept of antinomy that I brought up the beginning works really well for. Because if the thing that you're uncertain about, that you keep wafting back and forth about, is not like a matter of fact, but a matter of which part is essential and which part is derived from it, like that's entirely the kind of thing that philosophers disagree about. And likewise being just a perceiving subject.

And you're trying to look at this the way in which, you know. So I'm going to proclaim myself a philosopher of sense certainty. But I'm asking. Well, it seems like sense certainty dictates, as we said, the object is the thing that's essential. If a tree falls in the forest, absolutely makes a sound, it absolutely does all the thing. We can all be dead, there would still be objects up there. This is not a dogmatic dismissal of idealism, but it's saying this is what sense certainty actually tells us. Sense certainty is dogmatic in the way that Schelling was objecting to.

But then when I think a little more about it, I feel like because of these concerns with indexicals and things, that really, it's what we came down to. What's essential is the instant, the momentary relation of Me as a subject to a particular scene. And I don't know, actually, maybe the tree does disappear when I'm not there. But what I can be absolutely certain of is that this one act of perceiving completely happened. And so that is the essential thing. Everything else is going to be derived from that in some way. The existence of an I over time, the existence of the tree over time, and the fact that you can go back and forth in your mind between which of these is essential is completely demonstrating that what we're doing here is interpreting phenomena.

And so the fact that there is an ambiguity, maybe an irresolvable ambiguity in the way that you interpret these phenomena, one interpretation seems just as good as the other one. You know, this is the thing that's supposed to push us forward to the next stage.

52:20 Wes: He breaks down this final gambit in 106 to 108. And some of it is kind of obscure, but I think it's really important. And it's probably the most convincing part of this. The pointing is not actually atomistic, it turns out, right, so as soon as you point at something and say now, that moment has already passed. And a now is really a duration, right? It can be broken down into sub nows. And the same thing with a here. When you point at a here, is it this particular 3 by 5 inch dimension of space, or is it a smaller point within that? Or what's happening when my finger is moving a bit?

There's a below and there's above. But most importantly, and I think that the way to think about this is that even to define a here, even to define some piece of space that is mediated in the sense of context dependent, I have to say what's outside of that space, or I have to define a boundary between it and another. That's the whole point of him talking about, I think, the above and the below and that the here abides in a complex of many years. We don't really get now and here except in the sense that they abide in a larger whole and a larger complex.

They're mediated by context.

53:36 Dylan: That's exactly right. And there are two quotes that I point to. One is at the bottom of 107. The pointing out of the now is thus itself. The movement which expresses that the now is in truth a result or a plurality of now is all taken together. And the pointing out is the experience of learning that now is a universal. So he's gotten to the point where sense certainty has actually been revealed as a process. And then at 109 it is clear that the dialectic of sense certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience. And sense certainty itself is nothing else but just this history. That is why the natural consciousness too is always reaching this result, learning from experience what is true in it, but equally it is always forgetting it and starting the movement all over again.

54:34 Wes: I want to just respond to what you said at 107, which is very illustrative. Previously he was driving the universal because here and now they ranged over different particulars that were divided temporally, divided by time. They were at different moments of time, and then the gambit was get rid of time. We're just going to think about these T1 what's happening at T1. And he's saying even within T1 there's a universal. Why? Because we can collect sub heres into our here or what's outside of the here as a necessary context of the here and the same thing with the now. So the universal appears even if you try to limit yourself to a single moment.

55:19 Mark: Well, I think that's a good place to pause, going out to the soothing sounds of Wes Alwan in the sub nows. And I think this has gotten a good flavor for folks that don't care that much about what Hegel's project, how he actually starts undergoing, putting us through all these dialectical transformations. If you're really interested and you might want to hear, we're going to go on and talk more about the rest of the sections in here and about perception, which is also an interesting chapter

55:53 Wes: and way harder

55:57 Mark: in Part two, I guess.

55:59 Wes: Mark and I completely disagree about that.

56:03 Mark: So you can get that in your supporter feed. It's the next thing. Go get it.