What Simply Is (PS §§90–110)
I am working through the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, “Sense -Certainty,” trying to nail down its meaning with the charity I have previously pledged, plus some thoughts on the Kantian epoch in which we now live and are (perhaps) imprisoned.
The chapter starts with the given, “a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is.” It is not entirely clear to me how naively Hegel expects us to take this in §90, but his talk of “pure being” in §92 does suggest that he might intend us to imagine that “sense-certainty” first appears as an isness that is not yet separated into subject and object. I would like that, from a developmental point of view, but I think — particularly if he has ancient philosophy in mind — that would be too advanced, too proto-Freudian, at this point. I would like to see Hegel produce subject and object out of a primordial awareness that precedes all differentiation, and he might even provide the resources to do so here — by arguing, for example, that such awareness is logically unstable, immediately precipitating a split — but I do not think this is his actual starting point.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been reading and re-reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I have been been engaged–on and off–in some form of mindfulness practice for almost 20 years, which led me to Tolle. What hooked me, however, is how well Tolle’s focus on the “Now” can be brought into dialogue with German Idealism, the only other thing I’ve been engaged with as long as mindfulness.
Tolle, who was born and educated in Germany, would most naturally be classified as a New Age thinker–with the excess mysticism that entails–but there is a certain Teutonic rigor at the core of what he does that I think reflects a Kantian awareness, even as it points to post-Kantian possibilities.
Specifically, Tolle rejects the Kantian notion that we are completely cut off from intuition that is not conditioned by time and space. Rather, Tolle sees the fall into “psychological time” (or Kantian appearance) as something that can be overcome on a psychological and cultural level–a view which also serves as a criticism of the instrumentalist empirical realism that Kant secures with his transcendental idealism in the first Critique.
The cost, of course, is direct access to ourselves. As Kant stipulates in the first Critique “I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself.” For Tolle, this traps us in the slog of time–the source of all pain, according to him–and Hegel didn’t like Kant’s ban on Absolute Knowing any better, writing in Faith & Knowledge that, in Enlightenment philosophies like Kant’s, “the infinite and the finite remain absolutely opposed.” Hegel and Tolle share, I believe, the desire to release empirical consciousness from its Kantian prison, the former via history, the latter via an awakening which is in some sense historical. So this will always be in the back of mind.
What Hegel most likely he has in mind at this point, however, is a straightforward realism. I, this particular person, am aware of this particular thing, and this is the very model of certainty.
He then goes on to show that while sense-certainty intends to lay hold of the particular, first on the objective and then on the subjective side, it can never do so. Why? Hegel makes two different arguments as sense-certainty makes its case.
The first has to do with the fact that even the most irreducible parts of sense-certainty’s arguments are complex. Specifically, the Here and Now (on the side of the object) and the I (on the side of the subject), are indexicals. Their content changes depending on context. What is Here and Now changes based on time and place, and even the I changes, depending on whose it is. For Hegel, a thing that stays the same amid differences is not a particular, but a universal, thus — as the chapter ultimately concludes — sense-certainty thinks it is certain of a particular, but it ends up grasping only universals.
Having been defeated by indexicality, sense-certainty tries a different approach and stipulates that it will hold all this eidetic variation (to crib a term from Husserl) in check and cling to this singular Here, Now, and I. It will hold fast and point to the now of which it is certain. Here, again, the simple now eludes sense-certainty, apparently because of time. As soon as you point out the now, it is no longer. He explains at §107, in a clear exposition of Hegel’s double negation:
First I point out the Now, and it is asserted to be the truth. I point it out, however, as something that has been, or as something cancelled and done away with. I thus annul and pass beyond that first truth and in the second place I now assert as the second truth that it has been, that it is superseded. But, thirdly, what has been is not; I then supersede, cancel, its having been, the fact of its being annulled, the second truth, negate thereby the negation of the Now and return in so doing to the first position: that Now is. The Now and pointing out the Now are thus so constituted that neither the one nor the other is an immediate simple fact, but a process with diverse moments in it.
Now it does seem very clear in the text, and the commentators I have read agree, that the elusiveness of the simple Now is a function of its fleetingness in time. Hegel writes in §106, “The Now is pointed out; this Now. ‘Now’; it has already ceased to be when it is pointed out. The Now that is, is other than the one indicated, and we see that the Now is just this — to be no longer the very time when it is.”
There is, however, something unsatisfying about this account. In particular, this characteristic of the Now sounds accidental. Pointing to the Now before it passes seems only like an impossibility in fact, rather than a necessary impossibility. (In this way, the appeal to time feels like the appeal to writing in the discussion of indexicals, which commentators like Houlgate agree is an illustrative example, inessential to Hegel’s argument.) Now of course Hegel might be being kind to sense-certainty, trying to explain to it in the simplest way possible why its Here, Now, and I are complex rather than simple, but that would just beg the question of what the inability to pick out a single Now is a demonstration of? The fact that we are in time, or the fact that the Now is essentially manifold.
Setting aside the text, and considering Hegel’s project, it almost certainly has to be the latter or The System disappoints before it begins. Can we find a deeper sense in which the simple Now is an impossibility, a priori and analytically?
Let’s try to think of what a Now would look like that did not pass, for example. Is a permanent Now — or an omnipresent Here or an omniscient I — a coherent concept? Well, clearly God is supposed to be all these things, but does God, in fact, experience anything as Now, Here, or I, or — pace Kant — would those categories make no sense to such a consciousness?
It is probably only required, within the context of the Phenomenology, that the concept of the Now necessarily contain reference to other Nows for sense-certainty, whatever the situation with other possible consciousnesses, and one could argue that this is the case, not just in fact, but by virtue of the very concept of the Now, which is precisely the case in his analysis of the Here at §108, where he cannot appeal to time, but nevertheless refers to the necessary contrast with other positions inherent in the simple Here.
The Here pointed out, which I keep hold of, is likewise a this Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and Left.
In other words, Hegel’s writing and time arguments do not seem to demonstrate that the Now and Here are necessarily complex so much as they illustrate the necessary complexity — that is, the necessary reference to things beyond themselves — he takes to be inherent in those concepts.
Interestingly, this works with Tolle’s account as well, since–in centering ourselves in the Now–time does not disappear, but rather we observe it, and you can imagine the observation of the finite (as in meditation) to be a necessary condition for observing infinite, Hegel just takes more seriously the Kantian claim that sense-certainty is carried away by the flow of time in a way that will require the entire Phenomenology to resolve, while Tolle seems to believe we now have, and have always had, the resources necessary to free ourselves from this flow–positing the phenomenal world as a kind of monstrous error.
A side question before moving onto the next chapter. In Kant, transcendental idealism secures empirical realism. Is it then true that all systems of transcendental realism–like Tolle’s or maybe Berkeley’s–issue in empirical idealism? This question will also remain in the back of my mind.
Originally published at milesglorios.us on May 8, 2017.
