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July 20, 2005
We are back to listening to J.M Bernstein's 1994 seminar on Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit held in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
At the moment---Seminar 3---we are dealing with the 'Introduction.' Lots of personal memories are coming back; memories of spending the early 1990s struggling with particular passages, and having to move through the text slowly, line by line as I puzzled my way through the words and the sentences. I recall that despite the torture and slow progress I was excited by the text: what excited me about the 1807 Hegel is the insight that history is formative of consciousness, rather than the Enlightenment's conception of history as the negative removal of illusions/ideology to arrive at truth. I've always felt that The Phenomeology was a rupture or transgression in the philosophical tradition, in that it opened up a way of doing philosophy differently.
In stepping into the movement of the 'Introduction' we are a long way from a conception of social life in which the flourishing and foundering of each is intimately bound up with the flourishing and foundering of all. The 'Introduction' does not mention Hegel's idea that social space is constituted ethically, as a space in which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the structures of interaction governing everyday life.
In Seminar 3 Bernstein explores that the way that Hegel characterises the collapse of one configuration of consciousness determines the rise of another configuration, as we embodied, passionate, desiring beings try to find our own place in the world. This process gives rise to the detailed history of the process of training and educating (Bildung) consciousness itself up to the level of science.
Though we desire to find our place, we cannot get satisfaction, and so our conceptions within a horizon of understanding of a form of life, continually change:
"The progress towards this goal [of knowledge} consequently is without a halt, and at no earlier stage is satisfaction to be found. That which is confined to a life of nature is unable of itself to go beyond its immediate existence; but by something other than itself it is forced beyond that; and to be thus wrenched out of its setting is its death."(138)
We are more than our identity of this form of life because we shape and make the form of life and its normative ordering.We are both inside and outside a form of life and its understandings:
"Consciousness, therefore, suffers this violence at its own hands; it destroys its own limited satisfaction. When feeling of violence, anxiety for the truth may well withdraw, and struggle to preserve for itself that which is in danger of being lost. But it can find no rest."
That's the story or narrative of the Phenomenology Bernstein places a lot of emphasis on interpretation, horizon and meaning that we construct, and which help to constitute the way the world (form of life) is. We interpretatively order this form of life by destroying the given space time ordering of objects just lying there.
What is the procedure/method that guides the form and shape of story:
"...it may also be of further service to make some observations regarding the method of carrying this out. This exposition, viewed as a process of relating science to phenomenal knowledge, and as an inquiry and critical examination into the reality of knowing, does not seem able to be effected without some presupposition which is laid down as an ultimate criterion."
What is the critierion/standard by which we evaluate the different forms of consciousness? It cannot be presupposed as that would do make our journey on the highway of despair an illusory one.
Bernstein says that my concepts, which help shape the particular object of a computer, are generated by consciousness that takes up an intentional way of relating to the object. If consciousness is the intentional relationship between the subject and object, then consciousness has its own form of the relationship, and what it means to have a world. Each form of consciousness stipulates its own criterion of truth and what it is to know that.
Consciousness measures itself against its own standard, and so no standard needs to be presupposed. The new object emerges when there's a failure of correspondence between the form of knowing and the object: there is a failure in its own internal terms. A gap opens up between the form of knowling and the object:
"Hence consciousness comes to find that what formerly to it was the essence is not what is per se, or what was per se was only per se for consciousness. Since, then, in the case of its object consciousness finds its knowledge not corresponding with this object, the object likewise fails to hold out; or the standard for examining is altered when that, whose criterion this standard was to be, does not hold its ground in the course of the examination; and the examination is not only an examination of knowledge, but also of the criterion used in the process."
That is where the 3rd seminar ends. It is abrupt. The next tape is seminar 4, which is on consciousness and sense certainity, and it illustrates the way that sense certainity fails on its own terms, and thsi failure gives rise to a new configuration of consciousness.
The abrupt ending to Seminar 3 is a pity because it is towards the end of the Introduction that Hegel addresses what he understands by experience:
"This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself---on its knowledge as well as on its object--in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely, what is termed Experience."
It is reflective activity living the dialectical twists
This is a dynamic historical understanding, which is very modern as it creates normativity out of itself. Is that not how modernity understands iself? It is self-grounding? It grounds itself on its own contradictions.
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