Week 3: Section B : Self consciousness

Notes on Section B - Kevin Jones

In Section B of the Phenomenology, Hegel explores the rise of the self conscious mind and once again offers a teleological explanation for it.  Consciousness, which has arisen from one which believes in the ultimate truth of sense certainty, has experienced self certainty thanks to the objects that it experiences refusing to conform to the assumptions that it makes thanks to inductive thinking.  This then kick starts dialectical thinking, something which Theodore Adorno calls 'the very fibre of thought'.

The dialectic, far from being a simple process which involves a simple resolving of thesis and antithesis into a synthesis, is a form of thinking that takes place when the subject is confronted the uncertainty of their belief in  what they believe to be a certain truth.  This state of doubt then forces the subject to re-understand what they experience(at least as we see in section A), and how they understand it.  This chimeric state of certainty dissolves as the new understanding arises thanks to a reconsideration of the state of which they were previously certain of the truth of.  So the certainty of the truth of the pure externality of object is reconsidered and this resurfaces as an understanding that objects are not ultimately true in the way that they are experienced in, but are perceived from a certain point of view in a certain time, and they may change.  The certainty of reality that is associated with naive realism is then re-understood as being but one moment in a series of moments, that is to say, in time.  Finally, we try to understand the things that we perceive which occur over time as standing in relations to one another, and these relations are understood as forces.  It does not makes to speak of a force in-itself, because something like electricity is not a static phenomenon with an essence, but is created thanks to a series of objects standing in a causal chain to one another.

So the unity of self certainty, and then  the unity of perception are re-understood due to them not quite ringing as ultimately true as they were thought to be.  However, instead of a simple cancelling of the original viewpoint, what occurs in the dialectic is that the truth and falsity of the previous certainty are fed back into the system.  This is something that Hegel calls aufheben or aufgeheben depending on how it is used in the sentence.  This term which is typically translated as 'sublated' means 'to preserve and cancel out', and the quickest way to understand this of being a reunderstanding of what you have already intuited, or beheld.  So when we see a stick in water appearing to be bent, a series of investigations can take place which show that the our perception is not true, and the water is refracting light and thus changing the appearance of the stick.  This means we understand that the stick is not actually being bent by the water, and miraculously coming out straight every time we pull it back out.  What is happening is that our perception is subject to a series of forces which affect the way that we understand these things.  Certain forces like light, and the way it acts when it passes through water are isolated in order to allow them to be understood.  Once they are they are then fed back into the initial unity of perception that originally led us to believe that sticks are literally bent by water.  This crude example hopefully demonstrates how what is familiar is reunderstood and reconsidered rather than being cancelled out, as a simple understanding of the dialectic as being the merging of thesis and anitthesis into a synthesis might imply.

The unifying of forces that are understood in isolation and then reunified into the synthetic unity of subjective experience is perhaps why term 'sublation' has been used as a translation.  This makes sense in one way because understandings of the forces between objects informs our subjectivity.  However, as mentioned, it is important to remember that this synthetic unity was always already there, and is still present in the new synthesis, but understood differently.

This is already covered in section A, and in section B we see how a consciousness which is isolated from another can believe in its own world, that is to say how it perceives the world, as being the only way in which the world can be perceived.  However this certainty is thrown into doubt when the subject experiences another being who acts in a similar way to it.  This connection between the two self conscious being, according to Hegel necessitates that they understand each other as possessing a consciousness which is similar to it.  This means that the original belief of the subject in its own unique absolute perception of the world is questioned because the subject understands that the other has a consciousness like it, and this means that their own consciousness is rendered contingent because he can imagine it differently, he can imagine that the other sees an object from a different, and therefore not their own, point of view.  There is no longer an ultimate and singular way in which the world is perceived, but at least two.

Lordship and Bondship, the next sub section of B is one of the most famous and contentious parts of the book.  It is referred to by some as the 'master - slave relationship', and if you have read people like Foucault, Bataille and Derrida this it probably be more familiar to you by this name (I'm not sure why this is the case, perhaps Hyppolite's translation refers to it in this way).  This relationship is also played upon extensively in Neitzsche's work, especially the in The Genealogy of Morals where he provides a similar teleological account, but without the ontological certainty that comes from Hegel's idealism.  The relationship between the master and slave is born, in Hegel's view, from the fear of one from the other.

A note on the style

Throughout the Phenomenology, Hegel adopts an incredibly abstract style which employs terminology developed by Kant, Fichte and other German idealists writing before him.  He also forges his own terminology, and this is what makes the text so difficult to make sense of at time.  For an English reader this problem is confounded by the inconsistent translations of terms like 'Begriff', 'Bedeutung' and 'Verstehen', although this is something remedied to a large degree by the Miller translation of the text (Miller handily capitalises the 'Notion' when it is used to signal that it is in fact 'Begriff' that is being used by Hegel).

This inaccessibility can be eased by referring to Jean Hyppolite's The Structure and Genesis of Hegel's Phenomenology, mainly because he combines Hegel's thought as outlined in the Phenomenology to his lectures on art and the history of religion.  This is particularly helpful because the text becomes all the more clearer when a reader can see that the highly abstract description of the development of higher forms of consciousness is influenced by Hegel's reading of the history of culture.  The links that can be made between the abstract teleological argument presented and medieval Christian thought and Reason, which Hegel claims arose during the Renaissance, is something that is mad all the more explicit in Hyppolite's reading of the text.