Western Philosophy. Группа авторов
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Название: Western Philosophy
Автор: Группа авторов
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты
isbn: 9781119165743
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In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Hegel introduces a dynamic and essentially historical perspective into what had hitherto been a supposedly static and timeless framework for understanding the nature of knowledge. Hegel conceives of the world in terms of a progressive movement of Mind or Spirit (Geist) towards full self-realization as self-conscious awareness. Hegel uses the term ‘the Absolute’ to refer to the resulting reality, manifested in culmination of the process towards self-fulfilment: ‘Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is.’ Here and in the first of the extracts that follow, Hegel firmly rejects the notion that knowledge can be constructed from timelessly valid ‘fundamental propositions’ or ‘first principles’, emphasizing instead that knowledge comes about via a process – what he calls a gradual development of knowing or a ‘coming to be of knowledge’. Truth, for Hegel, is the eventual and distant culmination of an arduous and lengthy gestation process undergone by mind or spirit – a process which is, moreover, not a simple linear progression, but a perpetual dialectical struggle.
By the term ‘dialectical’, Hegel means to convey the idea that any given stage in the mind’s ascent to truth is likely to be beset with tensions and paradoxes: for any given thesis, analysis will reveal confusions and contradictions which will generate an antithesis – the opposite of the original thesis. But the confrontation between thesis and antithesis in turn leads to fresh tensions, thus bringing about the formulation of a synthesis, which attempts to resolve the previous contradictions, while incorporating the insights they contained into a new and deeper perspective. But the synthesis will itself then be subject to further dialectical tensions: the process repeats itself endlessly in the upward struggle towards the truth.1
This dynamic process is clearly at work in the account Hegel gives of the actual development of human knowledge. We begin with what he calls sense certainty – the direct and immediate acquaintance, via the senses, with particular objects. But although this may seem a ‘rich’ and fruitful kind of knowledge, it is in fact nothing more than a coming up against a set of raw materials – a mere barrage of uninterpreted impressions. If any genuine cognitive grasp of the world is to be achieved, we must go beyond mere sense-certainty to perception: we must transcend isolated particulars, and apprehend things in a more systematic way, as having universal properties (to put it crudely, we have to go beyond just pointing at some immediately present item, and proceed to make some judgement like ‘here is a yellow, round tennis ball’). Yet here again there will be tensions – for example the tension between our conception of objects as having a unity, and the various quite different properties (yellowness, roundness and so on) which we ascribe to them on the basis of our various modes of conscious awareness (sight, hearing, taste and so on). And so this stage too is transcended, giving way to what Hegel calls understanding, a conception which involves recognizing what Hegel calls ‘Force’ – something with permanent causal powers which underlies the various manifested properties of things. Here we reach something which is ‘completely set free from thought’, and exists ‘in and for itself’ (again, very crudely: the tennis ball has the power to bounce, to resist pressure, to break a window, and so on). Yet even this stage of understanding is now subjected to further analysis which reveals the need for a higher stage of knowledge which Hegel calls self-consciousness: in order to understand objects as having causal powers, we must interact with them as purposive, self-conscious agents. True knowledge of the world is thus available only to self-conscious subjects who are aware of themselves, of their active causal participation in the world around them. With self-consciousness, we have ‘passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home’.
Knowledge is only real and can only be set forth fully in the form of science, in the form of system. Further, a so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true, is yet none the less false, just because and in so far as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle. It is for that reason easily refuted. The refutation consists in bringing out its defective character; and it is defective because it is merely the universal, merely a principle, the beginning. If the refutation is complete and thorough, it is derived and developed from the nature of the principle itself, and not accomplished by bringing in from elsewhere other counter-assurances and chance fancies. It would be strictly the development of the principle, and thus the completion of its deficiency, were it not that it misunderstands its own purport by taking account solely of the negative aspect of what it seeks to do, and is not conscious of the positive character of its process and result. The really positive working out of the beginning is at the same time just as much the very reverse: it is a negative attitude towards the principle we start from. Negative, that is to say, in its one-sided form, which consists in being primarily immediate, a mere purpose. It may therefore be regarded as a refutation of what constitutes the basis of the system; but more correctly it should be looked at as a demonstration that the basis or principle of the system is in point of fact merely its beginning.
That the truth is only realized in the form of system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) – the grandest conception of all, and one which is due to modern times and its religion. Spirit is the only reality. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se. It assumes objective determinate form, and enters into relations with itself – it is externality (otherness) and exists for self. Yet in this determination, and in its otherness, it is still one with itself, it is self-contained and self-complete, in itself and for itself at once. The self-containedness, however, is first something known by us, it is implicit in its nature (an sich); it is spiritual substance. It has to become self-contained for itself, on its own account. It must get knowledge of spirit, and must be conscious of itself as spirit. This means it must be presented to itself as an object, but at the same time straightaway annul and transcend this objective form. It must be its own object in which it finds itself reflected. So far as its spiritual content is produced by its own activity, it is only we, the thinkers, who know spirit to be for itself, to be objective to itself; but in so far as spirit knows itself to be for itself, then this self-production, this pure notion, is the sphere and element in which its objectification takes effect, and where it gets its existential form. In this way it is in its existence aware of itself as an object in which its own self is reflected. Mind which, when thus developed, knows itself to be mind, is science. Science is its realization and the kingdom it sets up for itself is its own native element …
It is this process by which science in general comes about, this gradual development of knowing, that is set forth here in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Knowing, as it is found at the start, mind in its immediate and primitive stage, is without the essential nature of the mind, is sense-consciousness. To get the length of genuine knowledge, or produce the element where science is found – the pure conception of science itself – a long and laborious journey must be undertaken. This process towards science, as regards the content it will bring to light and the forms it will assume in the course of its progress, will not be what is primarily imagined by leading the unscientific consciousness up to the level of science. It will be something different too from establishing and laying the foundations of science; and certainly something else than the sort of ecstatic enthusiasm which starts straight off with absolute knowledge, as if shot out of a pistol, and makes short work of other points of view simply by explaining that it is to take no notice of them …
The knowledge which is at the outset, or immediately, our object, can be nothing else but just that which is immediate knowledge, knowledge of the immediate, of what is. We have, in dealing with it, to proceed, in an immediate way, to accept what is given, not altering anything in it as it is presented before us, and keeping mere apprehension from conceptual comprehension.
The concrete content, which sense-certainty furnishes, makes it at first sight appear to be the richest СКАЧАТЬ