110_TheTransitionToSelfConsciousness

The transition to Self-consciousness Having come this far, Hegel is on the threshold of moving into his discussion of self-consciousness, where the focus switches from how consciousness conceives of things in the world, to how it conceives of itself qua subject. It is not entirely clear, however, how this transition from the dialectic of the object to the dialectic of the subject is supposed to come about. On one reading , this transition is to be understood in essentially Kantian terms, in that what happens after the aporia of the inverted world is that consciousness comes to accept that '[t]he essence of appearances, the origin of the unity and order of appearances, is not some beyond, or some law like generalization, but the self-conscious activity of the understanding itself' . This makes the transition from object to subject easy to explain: as the object turns out to be 'constructed' by the subject, it is natural that we should now turn from the former to the latter, and so move from consciousness to self-consciousness. The difficulty, however, is that this reading aligns Hegel's outlook closely to Kant's (a fact Pippin happily acknowledges: cf. Pippin 1989: 131, where he characterizes the chapter on Force as 'the first and most significant stage in [Hegel's] phenomenological justification of idealism'). This makes this reading of the transition contentious, as this Kantian treatment of Hegel is not universally accepted . Moreover, even if it is right that Hegel's claim that at this point 'the Understanding experiences only itself' should be taken in a Kantian spirit (which on a more realist reading is highly contentious), it is hard to see that this explains the transition to self- consciousness: for, as we have seen, at this point Hegel is adopting the standpoint of the 'we' as phenomenological observer, and not of consciousness itself; thus, when he states that we see that the 'Understanding experiences only itself', his implication would seem to be that consciousness itself does not. If this is so, then the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness cannot be explained in Kantian terms, as a realization by consciousness that it somehow determines the world. A more neutral reading is possible, however, where what underpins the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness is not a shift from realism to idealism, but from theory to practice, where in theorizing we have a 'detached' view of the world, and so abstract from our position as subjects in the world, whereas in practical activity we act on the world and so put ourselves as subjects at the centre of things. ( 'Thus, a new journey starts here - the practical journey of self-consciousness that has theoretically "set itself on one side".'). Hegel frequently contrasts the theoretical and practical attitudes in these terms , where in the theoretical attitude we have our focus on the object, while in the practical one we subordinate the object to the subject; if we are supposed to move between these two attitudes at this point of the Phenomenology, this would then explain the shift from consciousness (which, like the theoretical attitude, is object-orientated) to self-consciousness (which, like the practical attitude, is subject-orientated). It certainly seems that it is the theoretical attitude that has predominated in the 'Force and the Understanding' section, and which is apparently brought to grief with the discussion of the inverted world. Hegel's characterization of the theoretical attitude in the Introduction to the second part of the Encyclopedia (his Philosophy of Nature) parallels the dialectic of the Phenomenology thus far, and helps shed some light upon it: In the theoretical approach (a) the initial factor is our withdrawing from natural things, leaving them as they are, and adjusting to them. In doing this we start from our sense- knowledge of nature. If physics were based only on perceptions however, and perceptions were nothing but the evidence of the senses, the activity of a natural scientist would consist only of seeing, smelling, hearing, etc., so that animals would also be physicists . . . (b) In the second relation of things to us, they either acquire the determination of universality for us, or we transform them into something universal. The more thought predominates in ordinary perceptiveness, so much the more does the naturalness, individuality, and immediacy of things vanish away. As thoughts invade the limitless multiformity of nature, its richness is impoverished, its springtimes die, and there is a fading in the play of its colours. That which in nature was noisy with life, falls silent in the quietude of thought; its warm abundance, which shaped itself into a thousand intriguing wonders, withers into arid forms and shapeless generalities, which resemble a dull northern fog. (c) Both these determinations are opposed to both practical ones, and we also find that the theoretical approach is inwardly self- contradictory, for it appears to bring about the precise opposite of what it intends. We want to know the nature that really is, not something which is not, but instead of leaving it alone and accepting it as it is in truth, instead of taking it as given, we make something completely different out of it . . . The theoretical approach begins by checking appetite, it is disinterested, it leaves things to subsist in their own way, and thus immediately displays two aspects, subject and object, the separation of which is fixed on this side and that. Our aim is rather to grasp and comprehend nature however, to make it ours, so that it is not something beyond and alien to us. Much as he does in the Phenomenology, Hegel here portrays the theoretical attitude as a 'stepping back' from practical engagement with the world, in a way that sets the subject to one side; as a result, the world as the subject experiences it is lost, and is replaced by the scientific image put forward by the theorist, in a search for greater 'objectivity'. The lesson of the 'inverted world', however, is that consciousness then comes to feel that the nature of reality is ungraspable, and an apparently insuperable separation occurs between the subject and the object. Faced with this breakdown, consciousness naturally recoils from the theoretical attitude, and moves over to its opposite, the practical attitude. Here the engagement of the subject with the object is much more direct, as the subject once again becomes a being in the world, not just a disinterested spectator of it, so that the world regains its 'colour' once more. Thus, the transition here is what one might expect from the Phenomenology as a via negativa: having found that the scientific theorist's position has ended in incoherence by attempting to view the world in abstraction from how it appears to us as subjects within it, consciousness now sees the world as something that the subject can engage with directly through its practical relation to it, as nothing but a vehicle for its self-expression. Now, in the Philosophy of Nature Hegel makes clear that the practical attitude can also be developed one-sidedly, as consciousness now seeks to 'master' the natural world . Likewise, in the Phenomenology Hegel concludes the Consciousness chapter by warning that in dispensing with the two-tier view of reality adopted by the theoretical attitude, consciousness may find that it has moved over too quickly to a subject-centred conception, in which it attempts to arrive at 'self- consciousness, a reflectedness-into-self, conscious of itself in its otherness' : It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen. But at the same time it is evident that we cannot without more ado go straightaway behind appearance. For this knowledge of what is the truth of appearance as ordinarily conceived, and of its inner being, is itself only a result of a complex movement whereby the modes of consciousness 'meaning', perceiving, and the Understanding, vanish: and it will be equally evident that the cognition of what consciousness knows in knowing itself, requires a still more complex movement, the exposition of which is contained in what follows. It is this 'complex movement' that Hegel now proceeds to trace out.