The Dialectic of Sense-Certainty
Looking at the very first dialectical exercise in the Phenomenology, in the chapter on “sense certainty,” we find many leads for a Buddhist commentary on this great work. A thorough reflection on this opening scenario and its resonances with Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy would lay the ground for similar studies of other promising chapters in the Phenomenology, in a cumulative refocusing of Hegel’s achievement in a broader horizon. We already meet here the desire for immediacy and security that drives the reflection, and begin to see how the course of the reflection weans the mind away from clinging to illusory certitudes, in painful realization of constantly recurring dualisms until at last a final nondualistic position is established. The initial desire is changed as a result (in this case from empirical particularity to conceptual generality), as it will again and again be transformed and enriched until at last it finds the fulfillment commensurate with its authentic scope.
The narrowness of earlier stages of the phenomenological path is due to the fixated or obsessive character of the desire underpinning them. As Brook Ziporyn notes, Buddhism does not teach detachment from the objects of desire, but cessation of desire itself insofar as it is an unreal and enslaving stance. “The problem is not attachment to what is desired, but attachment to desire.” Desire is neither to be indulged and satisfied nor rejected and suppressed; both tactics only reinforce the grip of desire; rather Buddhism “allows desires to simply be present as desires” (Ziporyn, 7). Yes, the third Noble Truth aims at “the remainderless fading away and ceasing, the giving up, relinquishing, letting go, and rejecting of that same craving” (Saccavibhanga Sutta, Ñāṇamoli/Bodhi, 1099). But this is done in a very Hegelian way: “To let go of something is to let it be itself, to let it do what it does without our interference” (Ziporyn, 8). And what it does in fact, is to deconstruct itself. “When a desire is ‘let go of,’ when it is released from our control, when it is liberated into free fall, what it does is fade away. It mutates through time. It frays, it unravels, it continues to change, like all impermanent things” (20).
Hegel charts a whole range of unhappy consciousnesses hung up on unreal desires, and though when they collapse on their own contradictions it feels like a death, on each occasion consciousness emerges on a happier plane as a result. Helping the fly out of the fly-bottle at every stage (as Wittgenstein would put it), Hegel conducts a therapy of desire that frees the mind for larger, saner, riper, and happier vision. No doubt Buddhism would carry the process further, and free Hegel from his own residual limitations. But Hegel could be used to flesh out Buddhist insight by bringing it to bear on the concrete mind-traps that have been created throughout Western civilization and that continue to grip our minds today. Buddhism brings our enslaving desires to consciousness and thus dismantles them; Hegel traces in the most intimate detail the odyssey of desire that is the motor of Western history, with all its sophisticated machineries of self-deception, so in this respect his work (continued in different keys by Marx and Freud) is near-aligned with Buddhism.
Sense-certainty is the most primitive and abstract form of knowledge, though it advances with the confidence of having immediately grasped reality in its fullness. Though Hegel bills his work as a phenomenology, he is not subject to the phenomenologist’s temptation to glorify the immediately given and to take appearance as the supreme authority in the quest for reality. To be sure, authentic phenomenology overcomes deceptive appearances, those of the “natural attitude” (Husserl) or inauthentic everydayness (Heidegger), with a view to lettting authentic phenomena come to light. But for Hegel the term “phenomenology” does not dictate that reality must manifest ultimately as phenomenon; rather phenomenology is the science of the appearing of logical and ontological realities, which in their most adequate presentation lie beyond phenomenology (hence the minor place to which the entire discipline of phenomenology is consigned in the Encyclopedia). Perhaps from the Hegelian perspective, Buddhism would be seen as intellectually inadequate, in that it cultivates reality as it appears, refining consciousness and attention, whereas very often reality is what does not appear at all, and has to be deduced by the exercise of reason, not contemplative attention. We humans do not see infra-red and ultra-violet rays yet they are every bit as real as the color spectrum we do perceive. Such considerations undercut the privileged status given to rich perception and lived experience in phenomenology. In any case Hegel begins from the phenomenological attitude at its rawest—the conviction that the phenomena I immediately apprehend are reality itself, He obliges this conviction to articulate its implied logic and thus to confute itself. One might say that the glamorous phenomena that give the work its title are all set up only to be undercut or relativized by the application of logic, Far from being a triumph of phenomenality, the “absolute knowing” that emerges at the work’s conclusion is absolute in the sense of being finally released from dependence on phenomena.
Sense-certainty, the first phenomenon offered for investigation, is induced to founder on its contradictions, and in the process pushes the mind to a higher and more sophisticated mode of knowing, namely perception. What exactly does Hegel mean by sense-certainty, and does his identification of it remain the same from beginning to end of the chapter dedicated to it? Is it changing shape in the course of the chapter? Well, in fact self-certainty is only a flimsy fiction, a mental construct, and Hegel tracks its phases skeptically. First is a dialectic of the sensible here and now, the immediate object of awareness, the sense-data or bare particulars, to which empiricists from Locke to Russell devoted so much attention. Then, when the contradictions of that kind of thinking are exposed refuge is taken in the subjective pole, the “I” of Cartesian fame, and this too is exposed as a flimsy fiction. Then sense-certainty as a whole, in a subject-object unity, becomes the focus; this in turn is brought to collapse and we move forward to a more promising scenario, that of “perception” and its object “the thing” and its attributes.
The consciousness of sense certainty is objectified and considered dispassionately and analytically much as in a Buddhist analysis:
Das Wissen, welches zuerst oder unmittelbar unser Gegenstand ist, kann kein anderes sein als dasjenige, welches selbst unmittelbares Wissen, Wissen des Unmittelbaren oder Seienden ist. Wir haben uns ebenso unmittelbar oder aufnehmend zu verhalten, also nichts an ihm, wie es sich darbietet, zu verändern, und von dem Auffassen das Begreifen abzuhalten. (The knowing that is first or immediately our object can be none other than that which is itself immediate knowing, knowing of the immediate or being. We must comport ourselves just as immediately or receptively; thus we must change nothing in it as it presents itself, and must keep our apprehending free of conceiving.) (69.3-9)
Sense-certainty is correlated with the first category of the Logic, namely “being” or an indeterminate immediacy. But as a state of consciousness, or an imagined state of consciousness, it cannot be a pure concept like being, and will not recur as a fundamental reference in later stages. The concept of being in the Logic never involved the deluded sense that it already contained everything, whereas here self-certainty advances in utter delusion. The whole idea of establishing a point of departure for metaphysics dates from Descartes’s cogito, to which British empiricism opposes rival points of departure. The logical point of departure in the pure indeterminacy of being has a stability that the phenomenological point of departure in the construction of sense-certainty lacks. In Nāgārjuna there is no fixed point of departure, since any samsaric item can serve as an occasion to establish emptiness. Hegel needs to construct a system, albeit by means of negative dialectic, so he needs to establish his point of departure carefully. Nāgārjuna has no system-building ambition, but applies his dialectic to dismantling illusory hypostatizations that stand in the way of apprehending emptiness.
The deadpan language in which Hegel expounds the position of sense-certainty pretends to take it at face value as “immediate knowing, knowing of the immediate or being,” but readers alerted by the Logic will know that this language is an indicator of poverty; the immediacy of being is totally indeterminate, so that to know it is to know nothing. But sense-certainty has no suspicion of this inherent lack. Philosophy, it promises, begins with a perfect realization of nonduality: the world, being, is given in all its richness to the knower, in total immediacy and with total certitude. The philosopher may thus repose in beatific enjoyment of the here-and-now knowledge. The labor of the concept is something quite secondary to this immediate givenness of the thing itself, and indeed may seem a superfluous superstructure. There is a play of irony and humor in the way Hegel presents the successive stations of the mind’s odyssey, which he envisages or relives with warm empathy even as he is showing up their blind spots.
The extreme richness of the yield of this immediate knowledge does not threaten its nondual simplicity:
Der konkrete Inhalt der sinnlichen Gewißheit läßt sie unmittelbar als die reichste Erkenntnis, ja als eine Erkenntnis von unendlichem Reichtum erscheinen, für welchen ebensowohl wenn wir im Raume und in der Zeit, als worin er sich ausbreitet, hinaus-, als wenn wir uns ein Stück aus dieser Fülle nehmen, und durch Teilung in dasselbe hineingehen, keine Grenze zu finden ist. Sie erscheint außerdem als die wahrhafteste; denn sie hat von dem Gegenstande noch nichts weggelassen, sondern ihn in seiner ganzen Vollständigkeit vor sich. (The concrete content of sense-certainty lets it immediately appear as the richest knowledge, nay as a knowledge of infinite wealth, for which content no limit is to be found, just as much when we follow it out in its expansion in time and space as when we take a piece form this fulness and enter into it through division. It appears in addition as the most veridical knowledge, since it has not yet left out anything of the object but has it in its entirety before itself.) (69.10-19)
The logical correlative of sense-certainty is the category of being as a mere thereness, as an indeterminate immediacy which might just as well be called nothingness. Indeed it is not even a “thereness,” for the category is so abstract that “there’s no ‘there’ there,” whereas sense-certainty plumps itself in the here and now and claims to be thoroughly “there”; as does Descartes in the Cogito and as will phenomenology. For Husserl or Heidegger or Nishida this initial immediate sense of “being” might seem an ideal object of contemplation. Heidegger notes that “Being is for us the emptiest, most general, most understandable, most usable, most reliable, most forgotten, most said” (GA 6.2:227), while we are less attentive to the contraries of these qualities: being as the richest, as irreducibly singular, resistant to understanding, unthought in its arrival, abyssal, constantly recalled, silent about its essence. Our immediate understanding of being gives us plenty to think about. But for Hegel this immediate phenomenological level is not something worth lingering over; its apparent richness is illusory and its logical poverty must be laid bare:
Diese Gewißheit aber gibt in der Tat sich selbst für die abstrakteste und ärmsten Wahrheit aus. Sie sagt von dem, was sie weiß, nur dies aus: es ist; und ihre Wahrheit enthält allein das Sein der Sache; das Bewußtsein seinerseits ist in dieser Gewißheit nur als reines Ich; oder Ich bin darin nur als reiner Dieser, und der Gegenstand ebenso nur als reines Dieses. (This certainty shows itself in fact to be the poorest and most abstract truth. It says of what it knows only this: it is; and its truth contains only the being of the matter; consciousness on its part is in this certainty only as pure I; or I am therein only as pure this, and the object as well only as pure this.) (69.19-25)
How did Hegel reduce the richness of the deliveries of immediate knowing to the barren abstraction of being? The data are not reflected on and are not grasped in the complexity of their fabric, and neither is the consciousness apprehending them. The nonduality of this I’s rapturous reception of this datum is repeated ad nauseam for each datum in turn; “this” and “this” and “this” are simply given. Of both the subject and the object poles all that is said is that they are. A questioner of Hegel’s system might look critically at this initial step: unlike Husserl, Hegel has no sense of the richness of the “natural attitude” in its confidence encounter with experiential data (see Staiti 2008); instead he subjects its conceptual yield to a drastic critique, already prejudging that only conceptual thinking counts.
Nāgārjuna no doubt shares Hegel’s skepticism about immediate certitude. The solid assurance that “I am going there” is undercut by analysis of the “I,” of “going,” and of “there” (see MMK 2). All three turn out to be flimsy and inconsistent abstractions. But since any assertion lands one in contradictions, one cannot even assert mere “being.” Rather one is pushed back on a realization of the lack of substance of every notion on which one sought to prop oneself up. All one’s talk is unmasked as fabrication (prapañca), as mere convention (saṃvṛti-mātra). But where Hegel pulverizes one position so as to move forward to the next, in a movement of continuous enrichment, in Nāgārjuna the pulverized position in every case brings one face to face with the realization of emptiness. Though there is a certain progression in the targets of analysis, moving from the apparently concrete (“going”) to the avowedly abstract (“time”) and finally to the central teachings of Buddhism itself, there is no progressive dynamic of a Hegelian sort, only a constantly repeated rediscovery of emptiness. Dialectic is constructive and dynamic, progressive and cumulative, in Hegel, but even in Kant it is a rather static dismantling of illusions. For Kant the Enlightenment was about unmasking illusions that imprison the mind; for Hegel it was but one moment in a dynamic history that included the Revolution as well, and these breakthroughs made him think of history as progress of the mind and of freedom. This is the proximate matrix of the dialectic (as it is of the intense cultivation of “development” in Beethoven).
Note that already duality is rearing its ugly head; there is a fly in the amber of the pure initial nonduality; it was too good to be true. For now we have to deal with “I” and the “object,” two poles of the initial sense-certainty. Hegel will soon thematize this:
Ich, dieser, bin dieser Sache nicht darum gewiß, weil Ich als Bewußtsein hiebei mich entwickelte und mannigfaltig den Gedanken bewegte. Auch nicht darum, weil die Sache, deren ich gewiß bin, nach einer Menge unterschiedener Beschaffenheiten eine reiche Beziehung an ihr selbst, oder ein vielfaches Verhalten zu andern wäre. Beides geht die Wahrheit der sinnlichen Gewißheit nichts an; weder Ich noch die Sache hat darin die Bedeutung einer mannigfaltigen Vermittlung; Ich nicht die Bedeutung eines mannigfaltigen Vorstellens oder Denkens, noch die Sache die Bedeutung mannigfaltiger Beschaffenheiten; sondern die Sache ist; und sie ist, nur weil sie ist; sie ist, dies ist dem sinnlichen Wissen das Wesentliche, und dieses reine Sein oder diese einfache Unmittelbarkeit macht ihre Wahrheit aus. Ebenso ist die Gewißheit als Beziehung unmittelbare reine Beziehung; das Bewußtsein ist Ich, weiter nichts, ein reiner Dieser; der Einzelne weiß reines Dieses, oder das Einzelne. (I, this, are certain of this matter not because I as consciousness have developed myself in its regard and set in motion multifarious thought. And also not because the matter of which I am certain is a rich relation in itself according to a set of differentiated qualities, or a plural rapport to others. Neither concern the truth of sense certainty; neither I nor the matter has therein the meaning of a manifold mediation; I have not the meaning of a manifold representing or thinking, nor does the matter have the meaning of manifold qualities; but the matter is; and it is, only because it is; it is, that is the essential for sense certainty, and this pure being or this simple immediacy constitutes its truth. Likewise certainty as relation is an immediate pure relation; consciousness is I, nothing further, a pure this; the individual knows a pure this, or individual.) (69.26-70.5)
One who installs himself in the posture of declaring that being is and there is nothing beside it, in a radical Parmenidism, has to do violence to the mind and stifle its urge to question further. Likewise, one who basks in the wealth of immediate givenness has to forgo questioning that might reveal this wealth as fool’s gold. Both the I and its object are a pure mute isolated “this.” “This” itself is an empty transcendental concept, universally applicable. Rich mediation and differentiation is the mark of true knowledge for Hegel, and ultimately the isolated self is too abstract to be the bearer of such knowledge, which is rather generated in the collective life of the human spirit. Buddhist mindfulness, which focuses on the most limited phenomena perceived by the meditating individual, seems prima facie to be the polar opposite of this epistemology.
The Analytical Gaze
The analytical gaze of Hegel’s “us” (the observer in the double perspective introduced in the Einleitung and kept up throughout these early Chapters) is focused on what is most immediately to hand; the observed likewise is an awareness of what is most immediately to hand. So we have an immediate awareness of an immediate awareness, the former critical and reflective, the latter naive and unreflecting. The analytical awareness has to restrict itself to mere attention to the observed. This is perhaps the most phenomenological moment of Hegel’s phenomenology, a moment of pure observing. The analytical gaze, too, may repose in beatific enjoyment of the immediacy of its knowledge. It takes stock approvingly of the achievement of senese-certainty and ratifies it.
Sense certainty appears as infinite both in macroscopic extent and in microscopic detail. Why does the critical gaze not subscribe to this confidence of immediate experience of having a full grasp of truth? Because it implicitly presupposes a wiser and more disillusioned awareness (it is already shaped by the whole process whereby the position of absolute knowing has been established), which cannot be taken in by any phenomenon presented to it, however vividly it may imagine and reconstruct the attraction of the position analyzed. In the present case, the object of its attention quickly reveals (at least to the observing gaze) how mistaken it was to characterize itself as a full grasp of concrete truth. Knowing only of things that they are, here and now, it may unwisely rest on the laurels of this first, indubitable, epistemic conquest. This puts Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum, and Jacobi’s effort to recall philosophy to the registration of what is, firmly in their places. Would Heidegger’s “miracle of miracles, that beings are” (GA 9:307) equally be dismissed as an abstraction mistakenly taking itself for concrete knowledge? Heidegger’s phenomenology of the presence of being builds on a different kind of attending, that is closer to Zen than Hegel’s. “Intentionality” is the structure that mediates the self-manifestation of the phenomenon (see GA 20:34-63), and this is lucidly analyzed in phenomenological attention; sense-certainty is a more crude immediacy and its analysis dissolves it. Perhaps Hegel rejoins the sophistication of intentionality at a higher stage in this analysis, in the next Chapter on Perception.
Mere attending, in Buddhism, has the effect of dismantling its object, causing it to show up its non-substantive character. Focusing on the object, in meditation, alters its status with no conceptual intervention. In the present case the apparent “infinite wealth” of sense certainty (“eine Erkenntnis von unendlichem Reichtum”) is a target for the reductive gaze that brings out the essential content of this knowledge, a content that turns out to be quite abstract and poor (like the correlative category of “being” at the logical level). Meditation similarly reduces the wealth of the busy world of our perception to a unitary datum, a simple given. The discussion as to whether the “pure experience” Nishida Kitarō talks about at the start of his early work A Study of the Good, should be thought of in terms of William James or of Zen finds its resolution here. For Nishida pure experience means to follow reality without the intrusion of any cogitation of one’s own “自己の細工を捨てて、事実に従うて知るのである” (Knowing means following reality, putting aside all artifices of self) (Nishida, 13), the reduction of everything to pure experience is a simplification and purification of perception, more Zen than Jamesian; or if the content of the experience is originally a Jamesian plethora the experience as brought into focus in its “purity” is a reduced “mere perception,” reduced both in the sense of depleted and in the sense of conducted back to its essential character. For Nishida at the level of pure or direct experience there is not as yet either a subject nor an object; whereas Hegel’s sense-certainty is characterized by a subject pole and an object pole, at first two mute “thises.” But just now the deliveries of immediate cognition seemed infinitely rich. It is the conceptual processing of them that is now the focus. Immediate cognition has no logos. Its only category is being, so it can only assert the being of its objects: this is, and that, and that. Thinking no doubt of Descartes, or at least of a cruder and simpler proto-Descartes, Hegel characterizes the subject as “I” and says it is a mere this, without further determination, and its object is a mere that, nothing more. Even if the object is infinitely rich, it is always apprehended only as a mere this, Both subject and object are isolated, atomistic individual entities, das Einzelne. Nishida’s pure experience does not posit anything like this, reflecting a Buddhist freedom from conceptions of the self as individual and its objects as individual things, conceptions that spontaneously impose themselves as as self-evident for Western philosophers.
Hegel’s analytical gaze zooms in on the logical structure of the phenomenon examined, much as Nāgārjuna’s does. It reduces the phenomenon to its logical essence and thus depletes it. The observing gaze allows the object to reveal its contradictions. Nāgārjuna, too, considers one object after the other, and his dialectic is the self-dismantling of the objects under his gaze. His text could be used as a textbook for meditation, again and again bringing into view the insubstantiality of dharmas, their emptiness. In Zen, the way to liberate thoughts is to let them liberate themselves (as Philippe Turenne remarks).
The analytical gaze in Hegel focuses on phenomena, on experience, and then allows the phenomena to exhibit their inner contradictions. Nāgārjuna is less phenomenological than this, for he seems to focus first on conceptuality, referring to experience only adventitiously. Chapter 1 for example, which is of foundational significance for the whole treatise, takes up concepts of causality, and declares in a tetralemma the logical impossibility of being caused from self, other, both, or neither.
na svato nāpi parato na dvābhyāṃ nāpyahetutaḥ
utpannā jātu vidyante bhāvāḥ kvacana ke cana
(Never are any existing things found to originate from themselves, from something else, from both, or from no cause.) (MMK 1.1)
Some may say that this opening declaration is manifestly incorrect: causality is “from something else”—which is so obvious that no one in India even bothered to advert to and refute Nāgārjuna’s claim; likewise no one held the fourth position, of things arising causelessly (John Powers). But the key word in the sentence is bhāvāh. If bhāvāh really existed they could arise in one of these four ways, but since they don’t the four possibilities all fall equally flat. The “things” that arise in dependent co-origination have a much flimsier mode of existence than anything imagined to be posited by a causal power. In fact, this mode of existence is so flimsy that it self-deconstructs, so that in the ultimate analysis dependent co-origination is non-dependent non-origination. The four conditions discussed in this Chapter: “There are four conditioning causes: A cause (hetu), objects of sensations (alambanam), ‘immediately preceding condition’ (anantaram), and of course the predominant influence (adhipateyam)—there is no fifth” (MMK 1.2), are not a purified Humean form of causation that avoids illicit ontological investments and so is perfectly valid (cf. Garfield); they, too, are shown to be ultimately untenable. It is as empty that conditions make up dependent origination, but because dependent origination is empty it can give rise to nothing really existing, and thus it is a non-origination.
na hi svabhāvo bhāvānāṃ pratyayādiṣu vidyate .
avidyamāne svabhāve parabhāvo na vidyate
(Certainly there is no self-existence of existing things in conditioning causes, etc; and if no self-existence exists, neither does “other-existence.”) (MMK 1.3)
Very little can stand up as ultimately valid under Nāgārjuna’s analytical gaze. Again, in MMK 2, the phenomenon of “going” is approached via a critique of the logic of our notions of going, goer, and stretch gone, which are again shown to be untenable. The analytical gaze focuses less on the experienced phenomenon than on the logical claims it entails, which are subejcted to reductio ad absurdum. Nāgārjuna is less phenomenological than Hegel in that he focuses directly on the logic of svabhavic claims rather than on their experiential basis; but Hegel’s phenomenology also quickly takes a logical turn. If one were to siphon out the strictly experiential matter in the Phenomenology of Spirit it might turn out to be quite scanty.
Ultimate unreality coexists with conventional reality is a paradoxical conjunction. The illusory nature of causality does not prevent the pain one feels when a stone drops on one’s foot, and the empty nature of arguments does not prevent a false thesis from collapsing when exposed to logical refutation. The functioning of dependent origination and of logical debate become in fact more efficacious when liberated from attachment to illusory foundations.
Duality Resurgent
So far Hegel has just insisted on the emptiness and poverty of the initial representation of knowing as a subject this immediately an object this. But soon duality will rear its ugly head, revealing that there was a fly in the ointment of this initial nonduality; it was too good to be true. The first duality is the realization that my sense-certainty is only an example of sense-certainty, doomed to be crowded out by many others even within my own proximate experience:
An dem reinen Sein aber, welches das Wesen dieser Gewißheit ausmacht, und welches sie als ihre Wahrheit aussagt, spielt, wenn wir zusehen, noch vieles andere beiher. Eine wirkliche sinnliche Gewißheit ist nicht nur diese reine Unmittelbarkeit, sondern ein Beispiel derselben. (In the pure being, however, which makes up the essence of this certainty, and which it utters as its truth, there is at play, when we look closely, still much more besides. An actual self-certainty is not only this pure immediacy, but an esample of it.) (70.6-10)
This realization sets off a cascade of distinctions and differentiations that make the insistence on the simple “this” seem hopelessly inadequate:
Unter den unzähligen dabei vorkommenden Unterschieden finden wir allenthalben die Hauptverschiedenheit, daß nämlich in ihr sogleich aus dem reinen Sein die beiden schon genannten Diesen, ein Dieser als Ich, und ein Dieses als Gegenstand herausfallen. (Among the numberless distinctions coming with this we find everywhere the chief distinction, namely that in it immediately both the already named this-es, a this as I and a this as object fall out from pure being. (70.10-14)
Hegel picks out as particularly significant the duality of subject and object poles, which fall out of the initial unity and confront one another:
Reflektieren wir über diesen Unterschied, so ergibt sich, daß weder das eine noch das andere nur unmittelbar, in der sinnlichen Gewißheit ist, sondern zugleich als vermittelt; Ich habe die Gewißheit durch ein anderes, nämlich die Sache; und diese ist ebenso in der Gewißheit durch ein anderes, nämlich durch Ich. (If we reflect on this distinction, it transpires that neither the one nor the other is only immediately in sense-certainty, but also as mediated; I have certainty through another, namely the matter; and this likewise is in certainty through another, namely through I.) (70.14-20)
Neither of them are immediate givens any longer, but they are constituted through one another.
The essence of sense certainty is pure immediacy, but it is dualistically opposed to the variety of its instantiations, and to the mediations that insinuate itself into its fabric, notably that between “I” and “object.” It is the observing gaze that has noted this, pointing to it from outside. Now Hegel will show that sense-certainty itself stumbles on these dualities.
Diesen Unterschied des Wesens und des Beispiels, der Unmittelbarkeit und der Vermittlung, machen nicht nur wir, sondern wir finden ihn an der sinnlichen Gewißheit selbst; und in der Form, wie er an ihr ist, nicht wie wir ihn soeben bestimmten, ist er aufzunehmen. Es ist in ihr eines als das einfache unmittelbar seiende, oder als das Wesen gesetzt, der Gegenstand; das andere aber, als das unwesentliche und vermittelte, welches darin nicht an sich, sondern durch ein anderes ist, Ich, ein Wissen, das den Gegenstand nur darum weiß, weil er ist, und das sein oder auch nicht sein kann. Der Gegenstand aber ist, das Wahre und das Wesen; er ist, gleichgültig dagegen, ob er gewußt wird oder nicht; er bleibt, wenn er auch nicht gewußt wird; das Wissen aber ist nicht, wenn nicht der Gegenstand ist. (It is not only we [sc. the observing gaze] This distinction of the essence and the example, immediacy and mediation, but we find it [inscribed] in self-certainty itself; and it must be taken up in the form in which it is in self-certainty, not as we just determined it. In it there is posited the one, the simple immediate entity, or the essence, the object; but also the other, as the inessential and mediated with is therein not in itself but through another, I, a knowing, that knows the object only because it is, and can be or not be. The object however is, the true and the essence; it is, indifferently to whether it is known or not; it remains even when it is not known; but there is no knowing if there is no object.) (70.21-34)
Getting sense-certainty to explicate itself on its own terms, in contrast to what “we” have observed so far (but is the distinction between the two perspectives practicable?), we find that its first position is to posit the object as secure and lasting, while the subject’s awareness of it is secondary and temporary. Faced with a duality, one can overcome it by making one pole essential and immediate and the other inessential and mediated. Plumping for the object as the privileged pole we treat the subject as epiphenomenal. Sense-certainty does not know what it is doing as it shifts from one pole to the other, unwittingly manifesting the incoherence of its position.
Dialectic of Here and Now
Hegel then concentrates on a dialectical analysis of the object-pole:
Der Gegenstand ist also zu betrachten, ob er in der Tat, in der sinnlichen Gewißheit selbst, als solches Wesen ist, für welches er von ihr ausgegeben wird; ob dieser sein Begriff, Wesen zu sein, dem entspricht, wie er in ihr vorhanden ist. Wir haben zu dem Ende nicht über ihn zu reflektieren und nachzudenken, was er in Wahrheit sein möchte, sondern ihn nur zu betrachten, wie ihn die sinnliche Gewißheit an ihr hat. (The object is thus to be considered in regard to whether in fact it is as such essence in sense-certainty itself, which is what sense-certainty gave it out to be; whether this its concept, to be essence, corresponds to how it is present in sense-certainty. We need not reflect and consider to the end what it may be in truth, but only to contemplate it as sense-certainty has it in itself.) (70.35-71.2)
The claims of sense-certainty are examined exactly as they present themselves. Its claim to grasp the essence, the here and now, is allowed to speak for itself, and as it does so it collapses. The object is here and it is now. But when we focus on here and now they undergo an uncanny transformation; any concrete here or now turns out to be a wraith that we clutch at in vain. What abides in only an abstract form of hereness or nowness, which actually has a negative relationship to whatever concrete content may fill it out at any particular here or now.
The skeptical checking of the deliveries of sense-certainty is no doubt still being carried out from the standpoint of the observer, not produced by a cogitation immanent in sense-certainty itself, for if sense-certainty could grasp the logic of its own dead-ends it would no longer be mere sense-certainty. We need only consider the object as sense-certainty holds it, he says; but to instruct sense-certainty in critical awareness of its own limits one needs to be quite a sophisticated philosopher—more sophisticated than the philosophical defenders of sense-certainty who continue to speak of “raw feels” and other such inventions of the empiricist ideology:
Sie ist also selbst zu fragen: Was ist das Diese? Nehmen wir es in der gedoppelten Gestalt seines Seins, als das Itzt und als das Hier, so wird die Dialektik, die es an ihm hat, eine so verständliche Form erhalten, als es selbst ist. (So sense-certainty itself must be asked: What is the this? If we take the this in the double shape of its being, as the now and the here, the dialectic that it has in itself will take a form just as understandable as it itself is.) (71.3-7)
The dialectic will tumble from one contradiction to another, but this is because proclamations of the solid reality of a here or a now are intrinsically collapsing in their very utterance. Sense-certainty is not a very coherent or intelligible position, so the dialectical demonstration of its contradictions necessitates a bit of rough pedagogical handling from outside:
Auf die Frage: Was ist das Itzt? antworten wir also zum Beispiel: Das Itzt ist die Nacht. Um die Wahrheit dieser sinnlichen Gewißheit zu prüfen, ist ein einfacher Versuch hinreichend. Wir schreiben diese Wahrheit auf; eine Wahrheit kann durch Aufschreiben nicht verlieren; ebensowenig dadurch, daß wir sie aufbewahren. Sehen wir Itzt, diesen Mittag, die aufgeschriebene Wahrheit wieder an, so werden wir sagen müssen, daß sie schal geworden ist. (To the question: What is the now? we answer then for example: The now is night. To test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment suffices. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose by being written down; and just as little by our preserving it. If we look again, now, this midday, at the written truth, then we are obliged to say that it has become hollow.) (71.7-14)
This memorable graphic illustration might obscure the strict necessity of the transcendence of the particular here towards universal hereness. The here and now is mediated by the general: “Absent the mediation of the universal, it turns out that immediacy is like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: there is no ‘there’ there” (Devries, 71); yet up to the end of this chapter “sense-certainty seeks to escape the mediation of the universal by simply ignoring it, by refusing to acknowledge that there are other nows and heres different from the particular immediacy of the moment” (72). In Buddhism attention to the here and now is mediated by the universal, in that an individual phenomenon chosen as focus of attention is only an occasion for apprehending nowness as such, for tasting not the local singular reality of the object meditated on but the nature of reality as such, thusness or suchness, which is the same for all phenomena. Free of the limits of the individual percept, this apprehension would also claim freedom from the universal concept. That is, Hegel’s pedagogy frees the consiousness that clings so desperately to the particular here and now into the universal concept of hereness and nowness; but Buddhism would immediately detect here a shift from one kind of clinging to another. The concept is marked positively by Hegel as a step on the path to freedom, but one that needs further enlargement and embodiment, whereas for Buddhism the concept is marked as delusive from the start, and its dismantling will send one back to the perceptual, but to an enlightened perception of how things are, rather than a fixated perception of how one craves them to be.
The dialectic Hegel is pursuing in these opening pages is primitive because the primitivity of sense-certainty allows nothing more sophisticated. Sense-certainty is interrogated and is imagined to reply: “the now is night”; the passage of a few hours renders this assertion hollow. Affirming here and now reality as the all-sufficient bourne of thought, sense-certainty is easily discomfited:
Das Itzt, welches Nacht ist, wird aufbewahrt, das heißt, es wird behandelt als das, für was es ausgegeben wird, als ein Seiendes; es erweist sich aber vielmehr als ein nicht Seiendes. (The now, which is night, is preserved, that is, it is handled as that which it is given out to be, as a being; but it shows itself rather as not a being.) (71.15-18)
As in Nāgārjuna the quizzing of an apparently well-defined and even trivial object of analysis opens onto radical ontological issues. The logical correlative of this examination of the here and now “this”—as it will be articulated in the opening of the Logic—is that insistence on being, simply being, and nothing more, in its radical indeterminacy is indistinguishable from insistence on nothing. But this very “now” that is a nothing relative to the wished-for beingness of the concrete now, is a new reality with a logic of its own: it is a negative instance, a mediated instance, and it sustains itself and endures as such:
Das Itzt selbst erhält sich wohl, aber als ein solches, das nicht Nacht ist; ebenso erhält es sich gegen den Tag, der es itzt ist, als ein solches, das auch nicht Tag ist; oder als ein Negatives überhaupt. Dieses sich erhaltende Itzt ist daher nicht ein unmittelbares, sondern ein vermitteltes; denn es ist als ein bleibendes und sich erhaltendes dadurch bestimmt, daß anderes, nämlich der Tag und die Nacht, nicht ist. (The now sustains itself to be sure, but as a now that is not night; and equally it sustains itself against the day, that it now is, as a now that is also not day; or as a negative in general. This self-sustaining now is thus not something immediate but something mediated: for it is determined as something abiding and self-sustaining through the fact that another, namely the day and the night, is not.) (71.18-24)
Have we then here a nondual and simple reality in which to repose? A fortress of simplicity that keeps the inessential complexities of different heres and nows at bay, maintaining a perfect indifference over against them? Does the recourse to the general form of the now leave behind any intuition of the particular this, or does Hegel keep on to a thinking of the this in its irreducible particularity, in line with Wilfred Sellars’ claim that “intuitions would be representations of thises and would be conceptual in that peculiar way in which to represent something as a this is conceptual” (1967; quoted in Devries, 67)? For Hegel that “peculiar way” would be “to represent something immediately and as in direct relation to one but within a presupposed background scheme of classification that must itself be considered conceptual and general” (Devries, 73). Phenomenologists resist this pan-conceptualism, not to return to a mere positivism of sense data, but to grasp more integrally how experience is constituted. “Whereas Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic was limited to the a priori forms of space and time, Husserl expanded its field to include elements which, while not fully conceptual elements of the understanding, are also not merely the forms of intuition or the formless fodder taken up in the manifold, but rather possessive of ‘a type of perceptual or aesthetic significance that Kant could only think of as “preconceptual” and therefore “precategorial”’” (Rump, 291, quoting Welton, 298). While early Buddhism tended to an atomistic, positivistic notion of sensory input and its intellectual ordering, Mahāyāna constitutes perception and conception more holistically, in the conviction of the emptiness of all sense data and the flimsiness of all conceptual constructs.
Dabei ist es eben noch so einfach als zuvor, Itzt, und in dieser Einfachheit gleichgültig gegen das, was noch bei ihm herspielt; so wenig die Nacht und der Tag sein Sein ist, ebensowohl ist es auch Tag und Nacht; es ist durch dies sein Anderssein gar nicht affiziert. Ein solches Einfaches, das durch Negation ist, weder dieses noch jenes, ein nicht dieses, und ebenso gleichgültig, auch dieses wie jenes zu sein, nennen wir ein Allgemeines; das Allgemeine ist also in der Tat das Wahre der sinnlichen Gewißheit. (It is still, just as simply as before, now, and in this simplicity indifferent toward what is otherwise in play with it; just as little as day or night is its being, so is it just as well also day or night; it is not at all affected by this its otherness. Such a simple instance, which is through negation, neither this nor that, a not this, and equally indifferent to being this or being that, we call a general instance; the general is thus in effect the truth of sense-certainty.) (71.24-33)
The general is the effective truth of sense-certainty: this is a dialectical breakthrough to a new reality. Note that in Hegel, as in a different way in Heidegger, truth is not the truth-value of a proposition (mere correctness) but the full being or actuality of something. Perhaps for Buddhism too, truth refers to the true existence or thusness of things. All our spoken conventional truths fall short of that, and it is in silent contemplation that we can move in the direction of ultimate truth.
The movement from the initial here to the general form of the here might be described as a movement from being (Sein) to essence (Wesen). At the start of the second part of the Logic Hegel presents an integrated view of essence that contrasts with dualistic accounts of the relation of being and essence. Essence is defined as the truth of being (just as the general is the truth of sense-certainty); being is the immediate but essence denotes what being is “in and for itself.” “Erst indem das Wissen sich aus dem unmittelbaren Sein erinnert, durch diese Vermittlung findet es das Wesen (Only when knowledge recollects itself out of immediate being, does it find through this mediation the essence)” (1934:3). This is not a movement of knowledge that is external to being, but is “the movement of being itself”: “Es zeigte sich an diesem, dass es durch seine Natur sich erinnert und durch dies insichgehen zum Wesen wird (It is shown in this that it recollects itself through its nature and by this self-return becomes essence)” (3). I note that Hegel there says: “Das Erkennen kann überhaupt nicht bei dem mannigfaltigen Dasein, aber auch nicht bei dem Sein, dem reinen Sein, stehenbleiben (Knowing cannot stay with multiple existence but neither can it stay with being, pure being)" (3)—the richness and multiplicity of sense-certainty might have been handled with the category of Dasein rather than summarily placed under that of Sein; indeed Hegel’s treatment of that multiplicity may presuppose the movement described as follows: “Dieses reine Sein, die Negation alles Endlichen, eine Erinnerung und Bewegung voraussetzt, welche das unmittelbare Dasein zum reinen Sein gereinigt hat (This pure being, the negation of everything finite, presupposes a recollection and movement that has purified immediate Dasein to pure being)" (3). In calling the riches of sense-certainty mere being, Hegel already reduced it to its essence, as “die bestimmungslose, einfache Einheit, von der das Bestimmte auf eine äusserliche Weise hinweggenommen worden (the simple unity without determination, from which the determined was taken away in an external manner)" (4). But this reduction remains external and abstractive, and dualistic: “Das Wesen ist auf diese Weise nur Produkt, ein Gemachtes (The essence is in this way only a product, something made)" and the reflection producing it “hebt die Bestimmtheiten des Seins nur hinweg von dem, was als Wesen übrigbleibt (takes the determinations of being away from what remains over as essence)"; this essence is not in and for itself but exists only thanks to the abstracting reflection; it is “tote, leere Bestimmungslosigkeit (dead, empty absence of determinations)" (4).
This first breakthrough from the atomized here to the here as a general form echoes from afar similar effects in Buddhist analysis. The now is not any of its occasional contents; it is neither night nor day but merely a negative in general. Likewise for Nāgārjuna “going” is neither the goer nor its movement nor the path traversed; all are invalidated; yet going somehow goes on. It is not established as anything so solid as Hegel’s general, but rather as a conventional designation. Hegel’s general form of the now can remain and sustain itself only through the non-existence of night and day. In its simplicity it is indifferent to any particular concrete now. This emergence of the ultimate truth of the now has an affinity in its negative aspect with the emergence of the ultimate truth of going as mere convention. There is a kind of ultimacy in its emergence as autonomous over and against particular nows. It emerges as the revelation of their emptiness. The pure form of now is the truth of all particular nows, and it is a negative truth, undercutting the naive self-affirmation of the various nows. This dialectical breakthrough is tinged with ultimacy. But of course in the sliding-scale of Hegel’s dialectic, what appears as ultimate at one level of analysis is revealed as delusive at the next.
In pushing self-certainty to “despair” of sense objects Hegel’s dialectic provides a mild example of what Nāgārjuna does all the time. All the abstract figures of consciousness explored in the early Chapters will come to a similar point of breakdown and make a similar leap to a new level of awareness, but the despair in each case is merely figurative, for the conceptions explored are only philosophical abstractions, not yet having the full weight of socially embodied spirit. Yet one could imagine someone clinging in fixation to some position in the dialectic and refusing to move on to the next stage. Such “unhappy consciousness” (to borrow the name of one position in this early abstract stage) could be the object of affective investment such that mere logic cannot overcome it, just as in Buddhism fixations and reifications are reinforced by affective clinging that makes them difficult to treat.
Hegel expounds the antinomies of sense-certainty in the manner of Pyrrhonian Skepticism. But whereas in Pyrrho, followed by Sextus Empiricus, this results in a suspension of judgment, Hegel can advance to a higher level thanks to the notion of “determinate negation (bestimmte Negation)" (see Düsing 1973:124). The present is neither day nor night nor both nor neither, but a higher and more general conception. Nāgārjuna is closer to ancient skepticism, for his deployment of the tetralemma disables any judgment one makes, and he does not seek higher, general structures, which he would see as a refuge of svabhāva thinking. Hegel finds that all speech implies the general, so that once sense-certainty seeks to articulate itself its atomistic particularity is dissolved in general conceptions of “now” and “here” and “I.” In antiquity this impossibility of speaking the unique particular was seen as a limit, forcing the speaker to resort to a mute pointing; for Hegel, it marks the graduation of thought to a new level of self-confidence, where it “makes things its own” and attains the level of general conceptions (Düsing 1973:127). Nāgārjuna applies his dialectic to general conceptions, too, but always in order to confute their validity. The general is not closer to the true than the empirical particular, but false in a subtler way. An empiricist faith that the entire immediate relation of sense object to sense perception constitutes the true is undercut in Nāgārjuna by the demonstration that neither object nor perception can have any stable identity. Hegel again shows that such a faith cannot stand up or be confirmed on its own terms but must be translated into general conceptions of both poles. Both thinkers overcome the cult of immediacy often espoused by modern empiricists or phenomenologists and also attributed to Zen.
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