Week 2: Section A : Consciousness

Notes on Section A: Kevin Jones

In part A of the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel offers a teleological explanation of the development of the the mind from unreflective consciousness to the self aware subjectivity associated with conceptual thought.  What is important to bear in mind during this section is that Hegel, like Fichte before him, rejects the Aristotlelian claim that objects have essences and Kant's belief that object in-themselves exist in a (noumenal) realm of pure rationality which we experience phenomenally.  The Kantian distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal realms is rejected in Hegel's phenomenology and this dualism is what eventually leads to Hegel's idealism.

When reading Section A I think it is important to keep in mind how Hegel reacts to Kant's dualism, and his conception of epistemology upon which this rests.  This in turn allows a handy way of splitting Hegel's project into two parts: on the one hand, the rejection of mind independent objects in themselves with essential essences leads Hegel to reject Kant's claim that the human mind has a being in itself.  This is a fundamental idea in Kant's transcendental philosophy, for it allows him to assert that we as subjects merely experience our minds empirically, or psychologically, and not noumenally as an object in itself.  The split between the empirical and noumenal realms allows Kant to assert that there exists a transcendental essence to the human mind which is beyond the ever-changing phenomenal realm of experience and the deterministic laws of nature.  It is the noumenal and purely rational faculties of the mind that allow thought to be made possible.  To put it another way, it is the mind as object in itself, that is to say, the mind with an eternal and unchanging essence, which allows the flux of the phenomenal realm to be comprehended.  This is something which Hegel rejects out of hand, because his text is concerned with showing how conceptual thought develops from our experiences with objects encountered in the phenomenal realm.

Kant is famously known for using, and subsequently dropping, the term phenomenology from his philosophical works.  For him there simply cannot be a purely rational explanation for phenomenal experience, because the conditions of possibly that allow rational understanding are independent of the phenomenal realm.  Subjects gradually gain knowledge of things in themselves that they experience in the phenomenal realm through the attainment of some vestige of a rational understanding of their noumenal essence.  However , if we are to, like so many have done, question Kant's legitimacy to postulate the existence of things-in-themselves, this leads to an irresolvable chasm between appearance and the mind independent object.  To put it another way, how can the mind gain knowledge of objects-in-themselves?   Fichte reformulated this dilemmea at the end of his Wissenschafstlehre by asking how the consciousness can break out of its circle in order to gain knowledge of a unknowable thing-in-itself.  Hegel's answer, to put it briefly, is adopt a method which attempts to show how the consciousness gains knowledge of these objects by breaking out of consciousness's bounds by reflecting on itself as object.

As far as I can see, Hegel tactic of adopting the teleological explanation for the rise of consciousness allows him to give an argument that follows a logic of development.  Instead of the accusation that can be made against the Kantian project - that it simply imposes the idea of thing-in-themselves having a noumenal essence which it is the task of rational knowledge to grasp - Hegel can provide a picture of how consciousness reflects on itself and how this reflection allows the gradual development of consciousness to the degree that it enables more complex understandings of our relationships to objects that we experience.  It is this, rather than Kant's belief in an inherent rational capacity of human beings, that allows complex forms of thought that are associated with the conceptual and rational to take place.

A Note on 'Force' or Kraft

The idea of the force is the last point in the chapter and thus for Hegel the highest level of subjectivity that a subject can attain before it becomes self conscious.  Force, or Kraft, is the point at which a subject tries to understand the relationship between the different aspects of the unity of consciousness.  The conscious subject isolates aspects of consciousness and tries to explain them in relation to other aspects of consciousness.  For instance, a table is not explained by articulating the hidden noumenal essence of a table which is hidden to the phenomenal observer, but it explained through its interaction with other objects.  In a more complex way, forces like electricity are explained not by their concealed essences, but by how they interact with other forces around them.  Before this point, the subject's experience is chaotic.  However, once the subject starts to explain things via forces, then the world begins to make sense, and the disparate aspects of experience are out into the unity of consciousness.  Importantly, the placing into unity changes how the disparate aspects of experience are experienced, and this changes the unity of experience, but it doesn't cancel anything out.  Perhaps putting it very crudely, imagine a baby who begins crying when an adult puts their hands over their face.  For the baby, the person's face has vanished from reality.  Us as adults however know that this is not the case, but this knowledge requires a set of beliefs which are relational and understand the movement of the hands in front of the face do not suddenly remove that person from reality.  In fact, we know that there is no such thing as disappearing into a void, but again, this is something that we understand with different forces interacting with one another.

Now, the difficulty with this passage is not helped with the translation of the term Kraft.  In the Baillee and Miller translations of the Phenomenology this word is rendered as 'force' (I'm not sure why Miller has carried on Baillee's  translating Kraft as 'force', perhaps for fear of alienating a whole generation of British Hegelians?).  However, the term can also be rendered 'power' or 'because of''.  Hegel's use of 'Force' can be understood to be a sign of him putting his cards in with Newtionian laws of cause and effect, something he is definitely not doing in this section.  'Power' is especially important to note, because the rather neutral word 'force' can conceal this more nuanced uses of the word kraft: especially the subjective element of it when it is used in such contexts as 'to be in force' or 'to be in control'.