Hegel is often attacked for supposedly having the great hubris to think he could derive the entire world from a rationalist a priori logic. It is strange, however, to find that if one reads his works in proper order and with a careful consideration towards method a strong contradiction to this claim is noticeable in the very way Hegel’s philosophical method works. Hegel boasts of his achievement of absolute knowing and knowledge, but this boast is qualified even if most miss it. Not only is the claim that the world is knowable a priori qualified, but so is the notion of completion.

In the Science of Logic he admits to the unsatisfactory completion of the work, which he claims should be reworked seventy-seven times to be worthy of being properly completed.

Anyone who in our times labors at erecting anew an independent edifice of philosophical sciences may be reminded, thinking of how Plato expounded his, of the story that he reworked his Republic seven times over. . . . A work which, as belonging to the modern world, is confronted by a profounder principle, a more difficult subject matter and a material of greater compass, the unfettered leisure had been afforded of reworking it seven and seventy times over. But the author, in face of the magnitude of the task, had to content himself with what could be made of it in circumstances of external necessity, of the inevitable distraction caused by the magnitude and multitude of contemporary interests.¹

It is clear that Hegel keenly felt the incompleteness of even his most complete works. But if Hegel did not really believe he had finished philosophy what is absolute in his thought? If there is room to learn in the Hegelian system does this perhaps deny the possibility of such a completion? As shall be shown, learning is nothing dangerous to Hegelian philosophy — in fact, it is imperative.

Phenomenology As Learning

Hegel’s first major work is the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in it he puts forth the notion of phenomenology as a method of philosophical science. Phenomenology for Hegel is not phenomenology as it is commonly known these days through Husserl, Heidegger, and others, but it is no less legitimate in using this term name. Phenomenology for Hegel is about experience as learning², such as when we say that someone is experienced in something: an experienced athlete, teacher, artist, et cetera. Why learning? In the Phenomenology of Spirit the object of inquiry is precisely the experience of Spirit coming to scientific knowledge, i.e. the experience of human minds in their coming to absolute knowing, an experience which concretely results in knowing themselves. What is this experience? It is not simply a passive experience of things that simply come and go, but rather it is an experience of learning, of observing the results of thinking (and all other activity) not just in contradictory failure, but also in triumphant result by self-correction. Spirit tests itself through its ‘natural’ forms of consciousness, sees its errors, and progressively corrects itself by recollecting its own process of acting and thinking and taking it as the basis of truth. To be able to learn is to necessarily begin and dwell in error, yet it is also to be capable of transcending error and rising (or digging) into truth. It is for this reason that in the Phenomenology’s Preface we are told that truth and knowledge are only a result of a learning process.

Hegel’s philosophical sciences, including The Science of Logic, are all phenomenological in practice in the sense of accumulating experience, learning through recollection, even if their objects are different. In the Phenomenology of Spirit we have the process of coming to know what knowing and knowledge are through a process of self-correction and removal of falsehoods, these falsehoods being our mistaking the ‘natural’ forms of consciousness as absolute. In the Science of Logic we have the process of coming to know what logic and its concepts are through a construction/deduction in pure abstract thought. As phenomenologies they cannot help but rely on experience, and their method of advance is one of learning through experience and its intellectual recollection. Again and again Hegel reminds us in other works to not rest on our laurels, neither of philosophical dogmatic conceit nor of empirical scientific practical satisfaction. The work of Hegelianism is an endless task of experiential recollection in logical form—one grounded on the experience of conceptual thinking. This recollection, however, is of eternal truths accessed in time and not of any contingent or sensuous experience as such. It is for this reason that Hegel cannot be called a historicist or relativist, for though empirical history is important, it is only important insofar as it has logical validity.

Learning By Experience

How do we learn? It’s a complex question, and there is much empirical scientific work done on this question. Pedagogy certainly has much to say on it, but what of philosophy? One thing is certain: We do not and cannot learn before experiencing what we are to learn from. What if one could have a philosophical pedagogy, one not about the practical contingent experience of learning, but of the necessary and absolute form of learning: learning from oneself? What does the process of learning look like when the object of knowing is posited not as an everyday relative object, but instead is the absolute which contains the very knower? Such a knowing would need to grasp the whole in which it is part and in so doing would have to grasp itself in knowing. How would such a knower come to know itself if it began in a state of error and had nothing but itself to rely on? It would have to learn from its own experience in the act of cognizing.

Sense Certainty

Hegel drives the question in the grand yet abstract scale to the very first possible experience from which the first object of knowledge arises, that seemingly impossible form called sense certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a form of knowing in which the mind experiences an object and simply conceives it as a ‘this’, a ‘here’, or a ‘now’. In sense certainty consciousness believes itself to be rich in content, yet the form of its knowledge is one of complete poverty and undifferentiated abstraction. In leaving the details to the world it has given up all detail in concepts and language; thus, it finds its knowledge incommunicable in the realm of thought. All things are ‘this’, all times are ‘now’, and all places are ‘here’. Truth is for it always changing and unstable as the world of nature changes incessantly, and even with more determinate terms such as trees or hours to determine the ‘this/here/now’ it is incapable of keeping hold of truth insofar as immediate sensibility and presence are the criterion of being and truth, for the world changes even if we plant ourselves in one spot and merely observe.

How can sense certainty overcome this limitation? How can it possibly learn and go beyond itself if it is absolutely this form of knowing? Certainly this is a problem — if one assumes this form is in fact absolute unto itself. Feuerbach accuses Hegel of putting words into the mouth of sense certain consciousness and thus making it do what it in fact need not³, but this is no problem when we rightly see that this sense certainty is nothing but a moment of our own consciousness, a form for which sense certainty is in fact not absolute. We can see the limits of sense certainty and transcend it even if we ever are at such a poverty of knowledge ourselves. The critique of sense certainty is here not external and arbitrary, but immanent in that we rely on nothing but the experience of sense certainty to show its error even if a being limited to sense certainty could not grasp its error.

For us sense certainty was transcended long ago, and to engage its logic and overcome it is merely to bring to the light of intelligibility what we have already practically overcome. Reason compels us to see the contradictions of our claims when we take its standpoint, and in standing back from our thinking and observing it in recollection we see what we actually think in our thinking, taking the actual path of cognition as the truth against the claims of cognition that were made. It is because we are capable of a higher standpoint that in our moment of sense certainty we can notice our contradictions: empty universal concepts incapable of determinacy, the failure to keep hold of truth, and that the immediacy of sense certainty is in fact not immediate due to the mediation of language as well as the implicit determinacy of its concepts.

Being and Nothing

In the beginning of the Science of Logic we see the same process occur, though in less familiar terms, with Being and Nothing. Being that the Science of Logic is the science of the thinking of thinking, the activity of thinking is central to it, however, no recourse is to be made to any concept of experience or thinking at the outset of the inquiry. No logical presupposition is made, but there is no denial that there is an existential experiential presupposition: the activity of thought and its existence as language and all the society and history it entails. We are to think, but we are to come to know what thinking is by experiencing what it does in conceptual abstraction.

The simple immediacy of thought is the concept of Being with no relation, nothing more. It is not the concept of any particular being, of a general type of Being such as the being of thought, or of Being in opposition to anything; it is simply Being as such. It is without determination whatsoever precisely because it is immediate and undifferentiated. In analyzing the concept and attempting to penetrate into its content, i.e. by thinking Being, we only experience the absence of thought. We find total absence in Being’s immediacy — nothing — because it is the content and operative truth of immediacy that it be empty precisely because it is immediacy. Being, that which cannot fail to be present, is revealed to be Nothing, that which is necessarily absent. That is, that in the mere thinking of immediate indeterminate thought as such there is only absence of thought. Immediate thought is empty thinking. Nothing, however, as this absolute absence of content is just immediate and undifferentiated presence when it is itself recollected and transformed into thought. Immediacy, however, is Being; thus, Nothing returns to Being. Being’s immediacy is the immediacy of thought, while Nothing’s immediacy is the immediacy of thinking. In immediate thought there is nothing to think, and in having thought nothing we have the immediacy of thought once again. Being and Nothing are identical in their indeterminacy, and inseparable sides of the same coin of form and content, thought and thinking.

Were Being and Nothing an absolute set of concepts we would be trapped, unable to think anything else than their empty dialectic, but our thinking process is not so limited. We have always gone beyond Being and Nothing, and in looking upon the thinking process in which each supplants the other we find in this entire movement something present which we had not noticed while immersed in the thinking of them. Immanently present in the dialectic of Being and Nothing as a whole movement is a concept form which we have access to in experience, and we term this form Becoming. The immediate movement of Being and Nothing supplanting each other is precisely the concept we know as Becoming. By looking upon past experience we find the basis for immanent development of a new concept, i.e. by recollecting our own thinking of thoughts we construct new thoughts which have unquestionable necessary links to prior ones.