Hegel and Schopenhauer

I figured this wouldn't be a productive point to bring up in class, but it would make a nice blog post.

It struck me through the chapter that Hegel's Force seems a lot like Schopenhauer's Will (note: I have only experienced Schopenhauer through secondary sources, Dr. Anderson, and Nietzsche, so I might be off). There's an inner secret world (world-as-will), and a world of appearance (world-as-representation), but the thing that observes force and makes it manifest is actually force itself (just as we, for Schopenhauer, are manifestations of the will). Force and its expression are one, just as the will and its appearance are two sides of the same coin. I also don't think it would be unfair to draw a parallel between Schopenhauer's use of "Platonic" Ideas and Hegel's Laws.

I have no doubt that I've misread Hegel, misread Schopenhauer, or perhaps both, but it's an interesting thought.

Unconditioned Universals

In the first paragraph of FatU, Hegel talks about the object of consciousness now being an "unconditioned universal." I'm not quite sure what he's talking about.

He first mentions such a thing back in §129: "From a sensuous being [the object] turned into a universal; but this universal, since it originates in the sensuous, is essentially conditioned by it, and hence is not truly a self-identical universality at all, but one afflicted with an opposition; for this reason the universality splits into the extremes of singular individuality and universality, into the One of the properties, and the Also of 'free matters.' These pure determinatenesses seem to express the essential nature itself, but they are only a 'being-for-self' that is burdened with a 'being-for-another.' Since, however, both are essentially in a single unity, what we now have is unconditioned absolute universality, and consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of the Understanding."

So if we are to understand the unconditioned universal, that paragraph seems like the place to look, but I can't make much sense of it. It seems that since "conditioned" universality has to do with the senses, unconditioned universality must be non-sensuous. And this unconditioned universality somehow comes about by recognizing that being-for-self and being-for-another are part of a unity...

Wait, that makes sense, I think. Unconditioned means that we aren't making a distinction between "for self" and "for another," and thus we are unifying the in-itself and the for-us under one universal.

Any ideas? I kind of thought out loud, so I apologize if this post seemed disorganized.

Sense-Certainty

I'm still a little uncertain of what sense-certainty can be, and I was wondering what any of you might have to say.

My original understanding was that sense-certainty is the immediate and instantaneous awareness of sensual experience. In other words, sense-certainty consists of all the sensual data available (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) at a particular time t. But this can't be right, because some (if not all) of our senses exist in time and not at a particular moment. I am thinking particularly of sound; sound is vibration and thus does not exist in any particular now, and cannot be included in the sensual data available at any time t. I suspect touch operates much the same way, and perhaps the other three, depending on how one looks at them. At any rate, sense-certainty cannot be aggregated sense-data (or something to that effect) at a particular time because sense-data can't be produced in a single moment.

My next guess is that sense-certainty is not any particular kind of sensation, but maybe only our ability to have conscious experience of sensation. Of course, that might be Hegel's point in the first place.

Any thoughts?