About a year ago I wrote a blog making some comments on Wolfendale’s questioning of the method’s justification, where he concludes that Hegel could not make clear the relation of Science and Natural Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit such that he really showed how from Natural Consciousness we shift to Science. At the time I was curious of the question and open to any critique of it, but I also was wary to hold onto any such critiques until I came to understand things for myself. The time has come to where I feel I can lay my own judgment on this question, and I shall endeavor to make this rather short, for if I attempt any argument it can only rest on what from the reader’s perspective is nothing but assuming Hegel’s success, and I shall indeed do this with only one argument on the way: the method.

Pure reason is the magnet towards itself from Natural Consciousness to philosophic and scientific consciousness. Even in its most estranged form something true and absolute is there as a necessary trace to be grasped and followed into deeper and more complex articulations of forms of consciousness which approach Absolute Knowing. Hegel succeeds and is justified because at the end of the Phenomenology we arrive at the explicit form of what our capacity and true method of knowing has always been: absolute knowledge or self-knowledge. Were we not able of Absolute Knowing, no form of consciousness could ever reflect on itself and correct itself. Were we to not be able to know absolutely, we could never have come to Absolute Knowing.

Absolute Knowing: Science

The Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded in one of its shortest chapters, and in one of the most dense, obscure, and abrupt manners. Written in haste, the very way it is written is imbued by the same urgency and brevity of its historical moment as Hegel rushed to finish it in the midst of war as the city of Jena was under attack by Napoleon. Many take the brevity and seeming lack of the culmination of the work to be a matter of the reality of urgency in war, and while this may be so, it is also not exactly true that the chapter is unfinished in any real sense.

Absolute Knowing is, to paraphrase and use one of Hegel’s most famous phrases in the Preface, the flower bud of the Phenomenology’s investigation, but not the flower itself. It is absolute because it is knowing and knowledge not simply purified of external infection, but verified by its own path and structure as the aim we had searched for all along. Absolute Knowing is: 1) Spirit that knows itself as Spirit (as a concrete instance of it), and 2) knowing that knows itself as knowing, and thus it is necessarily self knowledge. This form of consciousness is also the determinate negation of Natural Consciousness’s assumption of a difference between knower and known, and thus something qualitatively different and beyond its opposition of consciousness and its object. To call the final form of consciousness of the work Absolute Knowing is quite apt, for not only can it account for the knowing of its object, but also for its own knowing of this knowing, i.e it can account for itself and the entire relation and movement. Nothing is beyond Absolute Knowing and it is simple as to why: it knows what all knowing in general is, i.e. it can comprehend all determinate forms of knowing within Natural Consciousness as well as itself. This final point of the Phenomenology, however, is not yet absolute knowing determined in any specific matter; it is only its initial abstract form and nothing more.

The naming of Absolute Knowing has another point of connotation, and Hegel alludes to it in the Preface itself: if the Absolute is graspable it can only be because it has been with us all along. The great revelation of Absolute Knowing is not simply what knowledge truly is, but also that we had always already known absolutely on the way. Only through an absolute knowing, a capacity for self knowledge, could we advance towards the Absolute. In Natural Consciousness the work of Absolute Knowing is unconsciously done, but it is done nonetheless.¹ If Absolute Knowing is the knowing of knowing, the entire Phenomenology is nothing but the relentless advance through this very same relation: knowing came to know itself in every form of consciousness, each time realizing it did more than its assumed framework allowed, each time taking up this implicit excess as its next form. Only through Absolute Knowing could advance possibly be made, how else could it? Where we begin with a form of knowing as our own posited horizon, the only way to ever come to know and transcend its limits is through the engagement of the form of knowing we begin with applied to itself, i.e. the knowing thinks about its knowing of the object and how it is intelligibly possible and in thinking about itself it necessarily crosses its own horizon. Were consciousness unable to make this move of standing back from itself and knowing itself as an object of cognition it could not manage any self-transcendence. Certainly, it is the case that many who are within the horizon of their particular forms of consciousness indeed never perform this self-transcendence, but Spirit as society provides the transcendence through the individuals that do manage the capacity to stand back and make this critique.

Spirit is capable of Absolute Knowing; thus it will naturally achieve the self-transcendence of a finite or erroneous knowing all on its own through nothing but the self-cognition which such forms of consciousness are in their absolute form. After all, from where else could a self-constituted consciousness ever get the content and form for advancement other than from what it gave itself and was capable of recognizing in itself?

Absolute Knowing As Recollection

Of True Falsehood

Hegel speaks of Absolute Knowing as the point in which all prior Spirits are recollected and seen in their truth; thus, the final form of knowing seems as nothing more than the total recollection of the past, i.e. as nothing more than the becoming of Absolute Knowing. This final form of knowing, however, had to crawl out of the layers of assumption which covered it in Natural Consciousness. As the system of Natural Consciousness the logical form of Absolute Knowing is not negated, but rather instantiated in a concrete form: each form of Natural Consciousness is itself a form of absolute knowing in what they do through the movement of self-transcending reflection. There is also the sense in which knowing the forms of knowing of Natural Consciousness is itself a form of Absolute Knowing in that one has the entire system of Natural consciousness and thus its concept (concepts being themselves sub-absolutes in their structure). These forms of Absolute Knowing, however, are not yet a proper positive knowing as Absolute Knowing as such. The proper knowing comes to be as the system of logic where we are no longer mediating knowledge through the presupposition of Natural Consciousness that knowing and known are not one. True Absolute Knowing as such is knowing carried out in its own mode explicitly and consciously, where object and consciousness are not split—it is knowing which is constructed through its own self-recollection as pure thinking.

Against what many Hegel scholars think, the Phenomenology is implicitly reliant on what the Science of Logic itself reveals: true concepts and logics. This is not to say, however, that Hegel is erroneous in any movement and thus fails on his own ground, for he does advance with care and proper conceptual rigor even if he has not fully settled the matter of what the true concepts are. He has at the point of the Phenomenology already grasped how his logic works and properly noticed the logical structures he utilizes; all his advance requires is that the structures are recognized and properly linked regardless of what they are called. Even if Hegel had not worked out part of his Logic already, he could carry on the project of the Phenomenology simply in carrying out the method faithfully. The results of such an inquiry are themselves absolute logical links, however, as phenomena they appear externally as disjointed results.

In the self-transcendence of the forms of Natural Consciousness there is the typical Hegelian peculiarity of sublation, in which what is prior is not destroyed but preserved in being made a moment of something else. This peculiarity is itself a necessary character of Absolute Knowing as such, and as such it is one of the marks of the true nature of Natural Consciousness. In overcoming Sense Certainty and moving to Perception which is its implicit truth we do not thereby throw away Sense Certainty, instead it is carried into the truer consciousness of Perception such that it is only a moment of cognition for the latter. This preservation of each form of consciousness remains up to Absolute Knowing; thus, at the highest point of Natural Consciousness we have a highly concretized form of knowing which incorporates all prior forms of consciousness as participating elements.²

In the Phenomenology truths are discovered, but the truths themselves are related through the false presupposition of Natural Consciousness and not as pure truths themselves, thus we do not have a system of truth as such, but of the necessary truth of falsehood. This is to say: The Phenomenology of Spirit is a science insofar as it shows the necessary immanent link of the ‘false’ forms of consciousness—Natural Consciousness—which mistake the nature of their own knowing. This immanent link is a true link in that it is the link of what each form of consciousness actually is and does regardless of its erroneous aspects, and as such is the truth of this falsehood itself. Each form of Natural Consciousness mistakes itself as Absolute Knowing but always finds an excess within itself for which it cannot account within its categorial boundaries, but Absolute Knowing can in fact account for this excess and thus is capable of intaking it whenever it appears. The recollection of this excess of Natural Consciousness through Absolute Knowing leads to eventually deriving a system of such forms which culminates in a return to its beginning. Absolute Knowing accounts for the excess of Natural Consciousness and its capacities to generate forms which intake these excesses in an unconscious process, but Absolute Knowing then accounts for its own eventual excess in proper Science once we enter the process of the Science of Logic where every concept is an explicit and conscious effort of Absolute Knowing’s self-recollection.

The Phenomenology as the system of Natural Consciousness is and is not a return to its beginning in the sense of later positive portions of the system. It is in that it begins in immediacy and ends in immediacy, yet it isn’t in that the immediacy it ends with is 1) not a simple immediacy, for it is mediated by the whole process of the Phenomenology, 2) not an immediacy that is qualitatively determined as the same one we begin with, i.e. Sense Certainty and Absolute Knowing only share immediacy and are distinct in that the former presupposes the opposition of consciousness and the latter does not. Were we to remain in Natural Consciousness we would shift from Religion to Sense Certainty as the form of immediacy if we refused to let go of the opposition of consciousness to its object, but if we do not we shift to Absolute Knowing as the true immediacy instead.

In the completion of the Phenomenology we have not merely observed the knowing of these forms of consciousness, but also our own cognition therein in the very ways we relate our knowing of the text’s inquiry itself, for we are at once passive observers and active thinkers in relation to the text, caught in its grasp once our own form of consciousness in relation to the text comes up as a form of Natural Consciousness itself; thus we too share in the triumph of Spirit in achieving Absolute Knowing.³

Footnotes

Thanks to Alan Ponikvar for bringing this to mind in a very thoughtful response on the GWF Hegel Society group on FB. “The absolute truth qua absolute is paired with what natural consciousness would if it could – but in fact never does – experience as false. The “breakdown” of natural consciousness is hyperbolic in that it leaves the various modes of consciousness pretty much as they were first found. Nothing really breaks down. In fact, the various absolute truths are sustaining truths. While natural consciousness would view its own knowing as having broken down if it were to see the contradiction of its own knowing as a decisive defect, the fact of the matter is that the contradiction is life-giving. The dialectic that becomes the absolute truth of each mode does for natural consciousness what this consciousness is unable to do for itself. By transforming a contradiction into a dialectic —an absolute divide—the opposition of consciousness becomes an absolute identity in difference.” [Emphasis added]—Ponikvar Ponikvar’s reading of the Phenomenology as involving the reader is not unique, but his way of communicating it is the clearest I have encountered in all my readings. “But we are hit in the face when we find at the beginning of Reason what we are to observe with reason is something Hegel calls Observing Reason. What we ostensibly are doing is what we now are to observe as a mode of natural consciousness. Later, when we observe the back and forth between the beautiful soul and the active consciousness it should not escape our attention that we who do not act are the beautiful soul and natural consciousness is the active consciousness. So, before our grand descent, we already are pictured as having descended. In effect, allegorically we have already to be on the ground in this way preparing the ground for our descent.”