Philosophy's Continuous Coastline

Last month we investigated the philosophical terms alienation and externalization. For Sartre, subject and object (or self and world) arise in tandem during an externalization of pre-reflexive consciousness. For Hegel, self-development occurs by experiencing the world objectively during externalization (Entäuβerung) or self-alienation (similar to losing oneself in one’s object of inquiry), followed by a return to self. The verb entäuβernmeans “to reverse a state of inwardness,” i.e., to externalize; intensifies the verb äuβern (to say, utter, express, or externalize); and also bears the sense “to renounce, relinquish, divest, dispose, or part with.” Phenomenology is Hegel’s way of thinking about consciousness itself, consistent with his view that Thought is Being.

The translator, A. V. Miller, numbered all 808 paragraphs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes). In one computer-based search of the German text for the sub-string “entäuβer”, 44 instances were found. The first instance, in Miller’s ¶ 229, occurs in a section on the freedom of the self-consciousness to surrender marks of individuality. Through these “moments of surrender,” consciousness itself is said to obtain the certainty, “to have divested itself of its ‘I’” (“seines ‘Ich’ sich entäuβert zu haben”). In so doing, consciousness turns its immediate self-consciousness into a thing or objective existence.

Central to the thought of Hegel was the idea that movements of thought occur in consciousness, be that the consciousness of individuals or the collective, cumulative consciousness of all rational beings. Within consciousness, dialectical thought-pairs occur as thesis and antithesis (e.g., Being and Nothing) and are resolved on a higher plane of insight (or truth or knowledge) as synthesis (e.g., Becoming). “Thought-pairs occurring” is the same as “consciousness externalizing itself as thesis and antithesis.”

Synthesis preserves whatever elements of truth are originally present in thesis and antithesis. Apparent contradictions between thesis and antithesis are cancelled (aufgehoben). But it is axiomatic for Hegel that Thought is Being, because the burden of proof that they are different has never been met. Therefore, the spontaneous process of Thought reaching higher levels of knowledge is the same as Being perfecting its essence and becoming aware of itself. This spontaneous process of consciousness, Thought or Being becoming itself, is the Absolute. Hegel sometimes speaks of the Absolute as rationality in Being and of the Absolute Idea as self-determining Reason.

The Absolute Idea externalizes itself into Nature and Spirit in order to fulfill the self-development (self-unfolding) of consciousness. In other words, Spirit, acting through its individual spirits, investigates Nature and returns to the Absolute Idea with increased knowledge. Spirit, acting through its succession of Zeitgeister, investigates politics, history, art, religion, etc. and likewise returns to the Absolute Idea with increased knowledge. This “returning” is actively experienced: As Hegel remarks in ¶ 802, everything that we know must come before us as lived experience.

The pinnacle of Hegelian philosophy, Absolute Knowing, is the final cause of the development of consciousness. Developmental levels include the sense-certainty of external things; the perception of the external world; the understanding of things and forces indicative of a supersensible realm; self-consciousness leading to inter-subjective alienation; Reason, which is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality; Spirit, which is Reason that is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the word as itself; Religion, which is Spirit aware of itself as Spirit and conscious of self-aware Absolute Being; and Absolute Knowing, which is the grasping of all truth in philosophical form.

Hegel notes in ¶ 808 that History is a conscious process of Spirit externalized or emptied out into Time (an die Zeit entäuβert), creating a languid succession of Zeitgeister bearing knowledge and returning to self-consciousness (the Self). This succession is time-consuming, because the self has to penetrate and to digest the mass of knowledge so returned (“weil das Selbst diesen ganzen Reichtum seiner Substanz zu durchdringen und zu verdauen hat”). Ultimately, the Self knows what it is; withdraws within itself; and devotes itself to the recollection of its lived experiences, “sunk in the night of self-consciousness.” In other words, “the goal, Absolute Knowledge, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of Zeitgeister as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm.”