The Science of the Experience of Consciousness
Introduction
1.
It's natural enough in philosophy to think that we first have to agree on how the pursuit of knowledge functions before getting down to the business at hand, i.e. actual knowledge of what in truth is. Is it a question of a tool [Preface §39.11] we deploy to master the absolute or of an instrument through which we catch sight of it? 2Given a variety of distinct approaches to knowledge, one may be more suitable than the others to attain the ultimate goal. How to avoid choosing falsely? Knowledge pursuit involves capabilities of a very special kind and range, and the danger seems tangible that, without precisely determining its nature and limits, clouds of error will result instead of the clear heavens of truth. 3Such anxieties must surely lead to the view that the whole project of acquiring a consciousness of what is in itself through such a process of knowledge is absurd in its very concept right from the start, for a solid boundary falls between knowledge and the absolute. 4If we think of knowledge as a tool with which to subjugate absolute essence, it's immediately obvious that that wouldn't let the latter be for itself, but would reshape it, change it. 5And if the process of acquiring knowledge is not an instrument of our activity, but more like a passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, once again we don't get the truth as it is in itself, but as it is in and through this medium. 6In both cases we make use of a means that immediately produces the opposite of its purpose. What is really absurd here is that we resort to a means at all. 7Then again, perhaps a familiarity with the tool's mode of operation could resolve the difficulty. Such an understanding would make it possible to subtract the tool's contribution from the image of the absolute we acquire with its help leaving us with pure truth. 8Unfortunately, this correction would in fact only bring us back to the point we started from. 9Removing the effect of a tool from something shaped using it renders that thing – here the absolute – no more to us than it was before all the wasted effort. 10If only the absolute could be teased nearer to us with a device that wouldn't change it, like a lime twig to catch a bird. It would surely scoff at such cunning were it not with us in and for itself all along through its own volition. Indeed, a cunning ruse is all this would make of the pursuit of knowledge, expending so much energy just to give itself airs; as if it were doing something so much more than merely establishing an immediate, and hence effortless, link. 11And if examining the knowledge process imagined as a medium reveals its law of refraction, subtracting that factor from the result wouldn't help us either. The process of knowledge lies not in the refraction, for it is the ray itself by which the truth touches us; subtracting that would leave us with nothing but a pure direction or an empty spot.
2.
Science doesn't bother with such worries. It gets down to work actively seeking and finding actual knowledge. One has to wonder, then, why the fear of falling into error produces a mistrust in science rather than a mistrust in this mistrust? Clearly, this fear of error itself is the big mistake. 2The fact is that this attitude makes a lot of assumptions about the truth in spinning out its anxieties and consequences. These assumptions have to be examined first. Is it truth at all the worriers are dealing with? 3Images of knowledge activities are taken for granted with all the talk of tool and medium; there's also the assumed distinction between such knowledge and ourselves; but best of all: the absolute stands on one side while, over on the other side, the knowledge process is something real for itself even though it's quite separate from the absolute. The truth of knowledge is assumed even though it is placed outside the absolute, which puts it outside the truth! At this point, what calls itself fear of error shows its real face: fear of truth.
3.
This is because only the absolute is true, only the truth is absolute. 2This might be rejected by making the distinction that a particular approach to knowledge which does not, like science, seek the absolute can still be true and that even if knowledge in general is incapable of grasping the absolute, it could still maybe find other kinds of truth. 3Clearly, beating about the bush in this way relies upon a murky distinction between an absolute truth and some other variety of truth, while terms like absolute and knowledge presuppose meanings that have yet to be determined.
4.
All these pointless expressions, such as a tool to get a grip on the absolute and a medium through which to view it, derive ultimately from the assumption of a great separation between knowledge and the absolute with fixed images of both. Deducing the impotence of science from the underlying assumptions here is just an excuse to spare oneself the hard work of science while putting on a show of serious commitment and energy. But instead of bothering to respond to all these claims, there's no reason why they should not be simply dismissed as arbitrary conveniences. Nor why the use of words like absolute, knowledge, objective and subjective, and countless more whose meaning is taken as generally familiar, should not be denounced as pure deception. 2Acting as if the meanings are generally familiar and the underlying concept is just part of the repertoire looks more like a ruse to spare oneself the main task, namely, stating that concept. 3Why not rather save oneself the effort of bothering with such images and such language in the first place, for they only serve to keep science at bay? They amount to no more than an empty appearance of knowledge that vanishes into thin air as soon as science takes the stage. 4Of course, when science first emerges it too is but an appearance, not yet demonstrated and disseminated in the fullness of its truth. 5It makes no real difference here whether science is regarded as an appearance because it stands beside others or whether that other untrue knowledge is dubbed a manifestation of science. 6The important thing is that science has to liberate itself from this kind of manifestation we call appearance anyway and it can only do this by turning against it. 7Science cannot peremptorily dismiss an untrue form of knowledge as just a common view of things, assuring us that science itself is a very different kind of knowledge and the other one means nothing to it; neither may it rely on a vague feeling of something better in that other. 8The assurance would be a declaration that science's power lies in its being, in the fact that it is, but the phoney rival relies on exactly the same claim too and declares with just as much assurance that science means nothing to it. One dried-out assurance is worth as much as another! 9Referring to that sense of something better in the phoney knowledge, a veiled pointer to science itself, is even less credible. For one, that would amount to relying again on mere being, mere assertion; and for another, it would mean science referring to itself as it exists in the false rival, i.e. to a bad form of its being, to an appearance once again, rather than to science as it is in and for itself. 10This is why we are undertaking here an account of appearing knowledge, knowledge in its modes of appearance.
5.
The object of this study is only appearing knowledge, so it would seem to be not free science as such, automotive in its own autonomous form. From this standpoint our science can be taken as the pathway of natural consciousness endowed with a drive towards true knowledge or as the soul's path through the series of its patterns, the stations predetermined by its own nature, as it refines itself into spirit/mind by achieving, in the course of a thoroughgoing and comprehensive experience of itself, full awareness of what it in itself is.
6.
Natural consciousness will reveal itself to be just the concept of knowledge, not real knowledge at all. 2Convinced, initially at least, that it is real knowledge, for it this path is negative [Preface §24.7, §38.1]. Realizing the concept is seen by natural consciousness as the loss of itself, for on this path it loses its truth. 3This is why it can be seen as the pathway of doubt, or better: a highway of despair. What happens here is not what is normally understood by the term doubt, pushing and pulling at some accepted truth followed soon enough by the disappearance of the doubt and a safe return to that truth; in the end everything is understood essentially as it was before. 4Here the point is to acquire an insightful awareness of the untruth of appearing knowledge which mistakes what is in truth just unrealized concept for the most emphatic reality of all. 5Now, that also means that this consummate, indeed self-consummating, scepticism is not what the serious enthusiasm for truth and science fancies it has equipped itself with for its project. It is, namely, not that great refusal to submit to the authority of others in science, to examine everything for oneself and only follow one's own judgement, or better, to produce everything oneself and take only one's own results for the truth. 6The series of its patterns passed through on this course in fact constitutes the detailed history of how consciousness educates itself into science. 7Neat and discrete, the great refusal compresses the educational process into something very simple, over and done with in an instant. This path, however, is, against the untruth of the refusal, the actual demonstration. 8Following one's own judgement is certainly an advance over submitting to authority. Nothing, however, is necessarily altered in the content by shifting from opinions based on authority to ones based on independent judgement; nor is error necessarily replaced by truth in that. 9The only difference between holding fast to a system of opinions and assumptions on the authority of others and from independent judgement is the vanity inherent to the latter position. 10Only a scepticism directed against the entire range of appearing consciousness can equip the mind with the skills for the scrutiny required to determine what the truth is. It does that by inspiring despair in the so-called natural images, thoughts and opinions, whether home-grown or borrowed from elsewhere. Any consciousness that jumps right off into the work of scrutiny is initially chock full of, and thoroughly captive to, them; and they are precisely what makes it incapable of accomplishing what it sets out to do.
7.
Necessity in sequencing and interconnections will of itself ensure a complete series of the forms of unreal consciousness. 2To make this clear we can state in advance that, generally speaking, exposing the untruth of untrue consciousness is not an exclusively negative process. 3Natural consciousness clings to that sort of one-sided view of it all. Indeed, the approach to knowledge that takes such one-sidedness as its essence is one of those patterns of incomplete consciousness lying on the course and it will emerge in due course [IV.B. Freedom of self-consciousness (2. Scepticism) §§6-9]. 4It's that scepticism which never sees anything in its result but, well, nothing, and abstracts from the fact – simply forgets – that this is, at the very least, the nothing of that from which it results. 5And here's the rub, for this is exactly what makes that nothingness the true result; its derivation makes it determinate, giving it definition, content. 6The scepticism that ends up empty-handed with just that abstraction nothing cannot move on from there; instead it has to hang around waiting for something new to come along so it can throw that too into the same bottomless pit. 7Grasping the result instead in its truth as determinate negation includes the immediate emergence of a new form through this negation as the mode of transition generating autonomous progress through the complete series of patterns.
8.
The goal too is just as necessary to knowledge as the serial progression [Preface §22]. It is there where knowledge finds itself and no longer needs to go beyond itself, where concept corresponds to object and object to concept. 2Progress towards the goal is thus unstoppable and satisfaction is not found at any station before it. 3Whatever is limited to a natural life is not capable on its own of going beyond its immediate existence; it is driven beyond that by another and being torn out of its existence in this way is its death. 4Consciousness, in contrast, is its own concept for itself and that keeps it constantly reaching beyond whatever is limited and, since such limitation is also inherent to it, beyond itself. Consciousness of any individual particular includes consciousness of what is beyond it, even if, as in the case of spatial intuition, 'beyond' means no more than 'beside'. 5Thus consciousness is itself the source of the force it endures spoiling any limited satisfaction. 6Fear of the truth may recede when it feels this force as it turns to the defence of what is threatened with loss. 7Anxiety finds no peace, however, unless it freezes into mindless inertia – but thought spoils thoughtlessness, its turbulence disrupting passivity – or else it entrenches itself as a sensitivity which assures us it finds everything good after its own fashion. Unfortunately, this assurance too suffers the force of reason, which finds things not to be good precisely to the extent that they are such 'fashions'. 8The fear of truth has other ploys. Another favourite is to hide, from itself too, in a pose suggesting that its own passionate zeal for the truth makes it so difficult – better: impossible! – to accept any other truth than the vanity of staying cleverer than, always one step ahead of, opinions – home-made or second-hand. This vanity knows how to spoil any truth with disdain, returning back into itself, gorging itself fat on its own understanding, which always knows how to shatter every thought revealing only its own dried-out ego replacing all content. This vanity is a satisfaction that must be left to its own devices. Obsessed with its independence, its being for itself, it flees the universal.
9.
After these preliminary and general remarks on the nature and necessity of the progression, we turn now to some observations on the method of demonstration. 2Our concern is the relation of science to appearing knowledge. Our project is an investigation and examination of the reality of the acquisition of knowledge, so the whole undertaking would seem to be impossible without some kind of assumption, without assuming some sort of standard or criterion as fundamental to it. 3Examination consists in applying an accepted standard, checking for correspondence or otherwise with the object under examination, and reaching a decision as to whether it is correct or not from that comparison. The assumption is that the criterion as such, indeed science itself if it is taken as the standard, is the essence or in itself. 4But science is making its first appearance here, so neither it nor anything else has justified itself as the essence, the in itself, and without something of the sort any kind of examination would seem to be impossible.
10.
This objection and how to remove it become clearer when we recall the abstract features of knowledge and truth as we find them in consciousness. 2Consciousness distinguishes something from itself and thereby creates its own link to it, or as we say: something is there for consciousness. Then the definite edge of that link , the something's being for a consciousness, this is knowledge. 3It is, however, still being for another and we distinguish it from being in itself. Things linked into knowledge are also distinguished from it and affirmed as existing independent of the link. This is the in itself and it is commonly called truth. 4We are not concerned here with anything more about these terms, for our object is appearing knowledge, so at first its features will be simply accepted as they immediately present themselves, which is, by and large, how we have described them.
11.
What does all this tell us then about the truth of knowledge? Are we asking here what knowledge is in itself? 2In this study, knowledge is our object, i.e. for us. The in itself emerging in the course of our investigation would therefore represent no more than its being for us. Anything we would claim as knowledge's essence would not be its truth, but only our knowledge of that essence. 3The essence or the criterion would lie in us and what is compared with it and decided upon through this comparison would, it would seem, be under no obligation to recognize the criterion at all.
12.
In fact, the nature of the object we are investigating renders this split, this appearance of division, as well as such assumptions irrelevant. 2Consciousness provides itself with its own standard and the investigation thus amounts to a comparison of consciousness with itself for the distinction that concerns us falls within it. 3Anything in consciousness is for another and this moment of knowledge within it is what gives consciousness an edge, what makes it determinate. Now, that another here is not merely for consciousness, but exists also outside this relation, namely in itself, and this is the moment of truth. 4The criterion thus comes down to what consciousness declares from within to be in itself or true and that's what we have to judge its knowledge against. 5Let's call knowledge the concept and we'll call essence or truth, given being, the object; the test then consists in checking whether concept corresponds to object. 6If instead we call the object's essence or in itself the concept and grasp the object rather as object, namely as it is for another, then the test comes down to seeing whether the object corresponds to its own concept. 7Clearly, the two are the same [IV. Truth of Self-Certainty §1.5,6]. The essential point, which must be retained firmly throughout this entire study, is that these moments: concept, object, being for another, and being in itself all fall within the knowledge we are investigating. This means that we don't need to bring standards to it from elsewhere, nor our own bright ideas, applying them in the investigation. We have to put these aside in order to consider the matter as it is in and for itself.
13.
Concept and object, standard and what is to be tested are all present in consciousness. In another way too additions by us are rendered superfluous. We are also relieved of the work of comparing both sides and thus of the real test itself; for as consciousness examines itself, all that's left to us is simply to look on. 2For consciousness is at once consciousness of its object and consciousness of itself, consciousness of what is true for it and consciousness of its own knowledge thereof. 3Both being for it makes consciousness itself their comparison and it's up to consciousness to determine whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to it or not. 4Now, for consciousness its object appears to be only as it knows it. Consciousness seems incapable of, as it were, getting behind that appearance and determining how the object exists not for it, but in itself, and thus also incapable of testing its knowledge against that. 5But wait! The simple fact that consciousness has knowledge of an object at all brings with it the distinction between the object's in itself and that other moment, knowledge, the object's being for consciousness. 6They're very different things for consciousness and this is the distinction upon which the examination turns. 7If the two don't correspond in the comparison, then consciousness would seem to have to change its knowledge, adjusting it to the object. Now, changing knowledge in fact means that the object too changes for that knowledge; the given knowledge was after all essentially knowledge of the object. As knowledge changes, the object too becomes something else, for it belonged essentially to that knowledge. 8Consciousness becomes aware that what it had formerly taken to be in itself was not so at all, or at best only in itself for it. 9When consciousness finds in its object that its knowledge does not correspond to it, the object too does not come through the test unscathed. The test standard changes as well when the object to which it was supposed to apply flunks the test. Not only knowledge gets tested, but its test standard too.
14.
Dialectic is the word for it. Consciousness executes this dialectical motion within itself, in its knowledge, and in its object, and the emergence into consciousness of the new true object from this motion is what we really mean by the term
experience.
2One moment in this process must be drawn out for special mention. It throws new light on the scientific aspect of this study.
3Consciousness knows
something. This object is essence or
in itself. It is also the
in itself for consciousness and herein lies the ambiguity of its truth.
4We see that consciousness now has two objects. One is the first
in itself. The second is the being
for it, for consciousness, of this
in itself.
5This last appears to be no more than the reflection of consciousness into itself, an image not of the object, but only of consciousness' knowledge of that first
in itself.
6Now, as shown above, this changes the first object for consciousness. It ceases to be the
in itself and consciousness views it now as something which is only that
for it. The being for consciousness of the
in itself is then the truth, which means it is now essence, its object.
7This new object contains the nullity of the first. The second object is the experience of the first.
15.
This account of the course of experience seems to be at odds with what is commonly understood by the term.
2The problem lies in the transition from the first object and the knowledge thereof to the other object, the transition in which the experience is said to be made. In our account, that knowledge of the first object – first
in itself as it is for consciousness – turns out to be the second object.
3The usual process is that the experience of the untruth of an initial concept comes with another object, which we just happen to find external to the investigation. All that happens within us then is pure reception of what is
in and for itself.
4In our account, however, the new object emerges into being through a complete
inversion of consciousness itself.
5This is our own contribution, not available to the consciousness we are investigating, and this perspective on the matter is what raises the series of experiences consciousness goes through to the status of a scientific progression.
6What we have here is really the same situation as that above with scepticism. Namely, the result of any kind of knowledge that turns out to contain falsity can never be allowed to run away into a triumph of nihilism; the result must be grasped as necessarily the negativity of that from which it resulted in order to preserve what was true in the foregoing knowledge.
7This happens here when that first
appearance of the object drops to the level of a knowledge of it for consciousness and the
in itself becomes but a
being for consciousness of that
in itself. With the new object we have a new pattern of consciousness whose essence is distinct from what preceded it.
8This constellation shift is what drives the entire sequence of consciousness patterns with necessity.
9Precisely this necessity – emergence of the new object to consciousness, it knows not how – is for us what happens, as it were, behind its back.
10This brings a moment into its motion which does not emerge to the consciousness caught up in the experience, the moment namely of being
in itself or for us. On the other hand, the content of what emerges to us certainly does exist
for it and we focus rather on its formal aspect, its pure emergence. What has emerged is for it only object; for us it is also motion and becoming, coming into being.
16.
This necessity makes our path to science itself already science and, in terms of its content, we can now formulate it as the science of the experience of consciousness [Preface §36.3].
17.
Consciousness experiences itself and, given its concept, this process comprehends nothing less than its entire system, the whole realm of spirit/mind's truth. That's why this truth's moments, moments of the whole, are patterns of consciousness. This is the definition peculiar to them. Definitely not abstract or pure in that sense, these moments emerge as they are for consciousness or in the form consciousness itself takes in its relation to them. 2By driving itself on to its true existence, consciousness arrives at a point where it lays down the mode of appearance in which it is burdened with things alien to it, that as yet only exist for it. This is the point where appearance and essence meet in identity. This is the point where the demonstration of consciousness falls together with the genuine science of spirit and mind. Finally, grasping its very essence here, consciousness comes to signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself.
