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In standard courses on the theory of knowledge in the ‘analytic’ tradition which today dominates Anglo-American philosophy, it has often been the custom to move swiftly on from Kant to the twentieth century, with only the briefest of passing references to what happened in between. The principal casualty of such an approach is the Hegelian movement, which in fact exerted an enormous influence even in Britain and America during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a notoriously hard writer to understand, and his high-flown and abstract style makes his ideas particularly difficult to summarize, or to present in excerpts. But for any overview of the theory of knowledge that is not to be radically defective, it is essential to make some attempt to come to terms with his unique contribution.

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 kind of knowledge, to be even a knowledge of endless wealth … Besides that, it seems to be the truest, the most authentic knowledge: for it has not as yet lost anything from the object; it has the object before itself in its entirety and completeness. This bare fact of certainty, however, is really the most abstract and the poorest kind of truth. It merely says regarding what it knows: it is; and its truth contains solely the being of the fact it knows …

Immediate certainty does not make the truth its own, for truth is something universal, whereas certainty wants to deal with the This. Perception, on the other hand, takes what exists (for it) to be a universal … It is a universal, and the object is a universal. The principle of universality has arisen and come into being for us, who are tracing the course of experience. And our process of apprehending what perception is, therefore, is no longer a contingent series of acts of apprehension, as is the case with sense-certainty, but a logically necessitated process …

Let us now see what sort of experience consciousness forms in the course of its actual perception. We, who are analysing this process, find this experience already contained in the development (just given) of the object, and of the attitude of consciousness towards it. The experience will be merely the development of the contradictions that appear there … The object which I apprehend presents itself as purely one and single. But in addition, I am aware of the property in it, a property which is universal, thereby transcending the particularity of the object …

To begin with, then, I am aware of the thing as a ‘one’, and have to keep it fixed in this true character as one. If in the course of perceiving, something crops up contradicting that, then I must take it to be due to my reflection. Now, in perception, various different properties also turn up, which seem to be properties of the thing. But the thing is a ‘one’; and we are aware in ourselves that this diversity, by which the thing ceases to be a unity, arises in us. This thing, then, is, in point of fact, merely white to our eyes, also sharp to our tongue, and also cubical to our feeling, and so on. The entire diversity of these aspects comes not from the thing, but from us; and we find them falling apart thus from one another, because the organs they affect are quite distinct (the eye is entirely distinct from the tongue, and so on). We are consequently the universal medium where such elements get dissociated, and exist each by themselves. By the fact, then, that we regard the characteristic of being a universal medium as our reflection, we preserve and maintain the self-sameness and truth of the thing, its being a ‘one’ …

Consciousness has found ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ etc., pass away in the dialectic process of sense-experience, and has, at the stage of perception, arrived at thoughts which it brings together in the first instance as the unconditioned universal. This unconditioned element, if it were taken as inert essence, bare and simple, would itself be nothing but the one-sided extreme of being-for-itself; for the non-essential world would then stand over against it. But if this was how it was related to the latter, it would itself be unessential, and consciousness would not have been disentangled from the deceptions of perception; whereas this universal has turned out to be something that has passed beyond such conditioned, separate existence, and returned to itself.

But this unconditioned universal, which henceforward is the true object of consciousness, is still object of consciousness; consciousness has not yet grasped its principle or notion as such. There is an essential distinction between the two which must be grasped. On the one hand, consciousness is aware that the object has passed from its relation to another back into itself, and thereby become ‘notion’, inherently and in itself; but on the other hand consciousness is not yet the notion explicitly or for itself, and consequently it does not know itself in the reflected object. We (who are analysing an experience) found this object arise through the process of consciousness in such a way that consciousness is implicated and involved in the development of the object … But because in this movement consciousness had as its content merely the objective entity, and not consciousness as such, the result has to be given an objective significance for consciousness. Consciousness, however, still withdraws from what has arisen, so that the latter in objective form is the essential reality for consciousness …

It is understanding to which the concept of Force belongs, that is, properly speaking the principle which supports the different moments in so far as they are different … Force is the unconditioned universal which is in itself just what it is for something else (or that which holds the difference within itself) – for it is nothing else than existence- for-an-other. Hence, for Force to be what it truly is, it has to be completely set free from thought, and put forward as the substantial reality of these differences – that is, first the substance as the entire force existing in and for itself, and then its differences as substantial entities, or as moments subsisting each on its own account. Force as such, force as driven back within itself, is thus by itself an excluding unity, for which the unfolding of the elements or differences is another thing subsisting separately; and thus there are set up two sides, distinct and independent. But force is also the whole, or it remains what, in its very conception it is …

In the kinds of certainty hitherto considered, the truth for consciousness is something other than consciousness itself. The conception of this truth, however, vanishes in the course of our experience of it. What the object immediately was in itself – whether mere being, in sense-certainty, a concrete thing, in perception, or force, in the case of understanding – turns out in truth to be no such thing. But instead, this inherent nature proves to be a way in which it is for another. The abstract conception of the object gives way before the actual concrete object, or the first immediate idea is cancelled in the course of experience. Mere certainty has vanished in favour of truth.

There has now arisen, however, what was not established in the case of these previous relationships, viz. a certainty that is on a par with its truth. For certainty is to itself its own object, and consciousness is to itself the truth. Otherness is, of course, also found there – consciousness makes a distinction. But what is distinguished is of such a kind that consciousness, at the same time, holds there is no distinction made. If we call the movement of knowledge ‘conception’, and knowledge as simple movement of Ego, the ‘object’, we say that not only for us (tracing the process) but likewise for knowledge itself, the object corresponds to the conception. Or if we call ‘conception’ what the object is in itself, and ‘object’ what the object is as object, or for another, it is clear that being ‘in itself’ and being ‘for another’ are here the same. For the inherent being is consciousness; yet it is still just as much that for which the other (what it is ‘in itself’) is. And it is for consciousness that the inherent nature of the object and its ‘being for another’ are one and the same. Ego is the content of the relation, and itself the process of relating. It is Ego itself which is opposed to another and, at the same time, reaches out beyond this other, which other is none the less taken to be only itself.

With self-consciousness, then, we have now passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home. We have to see how the form or attitude of self- consciousness in the first instance appears. When we consider this new form of and type of knowledge, the knowledge of self in its relation to that which preceded, namely the knowledge of another, we find indeed that this latter has vanished, but that its moments have at the same time been preserved. The loss consists in this, that those moments are here present as they are implicitly, as they are in themselves. The being which ‘meaning’ dealt with – particularity [in sense-certainty], and the universality of perception opposed to it, and also the inner region of understanding – these are no longer present as substantial elements, but as moments of self-consciousness, that is, as abstractions or differences which are of no account for consciousness itself – not really differences at all, but elements that ultimately disappear.