Class 09/31

I was impressed with the general preparedness of the group.

I think the core question today really was "What is consciousness?" Consciousness, the first phenomenal appearance of knowing, seems to have at least a double nature. It is an object known and a knowing. It is a "distinguishing" and a "relating".  Somehow, this double nature proves productive and allows consciousness to go "beyond itself." When it does, we call this process "experience."

The most immediate contrast seems to be between Hegel's account of learning or experience and one wherein some new object is not produced BY consciousness but is instead given TO consciousness. Throughout his writings Hegel emphasizes the need reason has for immanent causes not external causes (in part because an external cause simply begs another question).

At the moment, I am imagining that immanent, dialectical progress is like those illusions that you stare at which become something else just by staring. They become something they already are and the nature of your apprehension changes with the object. Nothing is added, and yet all the relations flip or switch and there is a "new" object/relation to object (always both together!). 

What does "Science" refer to in Hegel's writing?

"Science" comes up frequently in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit (or PhS). It translates "Wissenschaft" and is not an incorrect translation. Still, it can be misleading. What Hegel means by "Wissenschaft" is more like what we call metaphysics than what we call natural science.

The PhS is a ladder to Wissenschaft (cf. 77) and the Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) is the book that the PhS is building up toward. The Science of Logic is neither about what we call science nor about what we call logic. It is pretty much a book of metaphysical inquiry [where Hegel takes the basic categories we use to think about the ultimate causes of things (Being, Essence, Idea) as a path to apprehending the nature of "ultimate reality" or truth.]

As you can glean from the Introduction to the PhS, Science is not phenomenal knowing. That is, it does not have to do with the appearances of things to the senses in space and time. Science has to do with the ultimate and abiding conceptual nature of things, what in studying Plato we call "Eide" or Forms.

That said, the PhS will deal precisely with this phenomenal knowing (to the senses, in space and time) NOT Wissenschaft. The PhS shows how phenomenal knowing leads us to the deeper truth of Wissenschaft by the unstable structure of appearance itself.

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