Category: Hegel IRL

Hegel’s aim in “Phenomenology of Spirit” is to ultimately achieve a sense of absolute knowing by dissecting the role of consciousness (quite meticulously) in the different forms of perception. He also touches on many different angles of knowledge, religion, power dynamics, etc. One of the ways he does this is by highlighting the subjective nature of reality and therefore the deception of human senses, more specifically the deception of certainty. This essay discusses Hegel’s idea of this contrast in a controversial lyric by Megan the Stallion. 

The line “These hoes don’t be mad at Megan, these hoes mad at Megan’s Law” was notoriously received as a jab at fellow rapper Nicki Minaj for her husband’s failure to abide by “Megan’s Law” when he neglected to publicly register as a sex offender. The atrocity itself aside, when I heard the line, I took it completely as a play on words that had no target or direction at anyone. Rappers are known to use their names in unique ways that either bend the mind or evade logic completely, which is why many listeners assumed nothing of the line at all. This is a rather fun example of one of Hegel’s focuses on the distinction of reality based on senses. He declares that there can be a twofold interpretation of the same thing which implies that the object’s (or line in this case) significance relies on determinateness and is not in and of itself a truth. In passage 126 Hegel remarks, “it is posited as the absolute negation relating only itself to itself, but negation relating itself to itself is just the sublation of itself, or it has its essence in an other.” In this line he notes that something that appears self contradicting is merely a subjective object with external perception that truly defines it. Moreover, Hegel argues that during object perception, an idea like this can have “essentially one” meaning and “inessentially many” meanings in relation to outside influence. He concludes by stating that understanding the subjective nature of an idea or object therefore relies not solely on perception but on its context. This is seen very acutely in this now semi-infamous line when its interpretation varied depending on the circumstances of the listener.

Trick birthday candles illustrate the difficulty of capturing the truth of sensuous-certainty through language which is discussed in the passage from The Phenomenology of Spirit below:

To the question: “What is the Now?”, we answer, for example, “The ‘now’ is the night.” In order to put the truth of this sensuous-certainty to the test, a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth. A truth cannot be lost by being written down any more than it can be lost by our preserving it, and if now, this midday, we look at this truth which has been written down, we will have to say that it has become rather stale. (p. 62)

The experiment of writing down the truth shows words fail to capture the immediacy and wealth of the truth. Language may capture a fleeting moment of truth, but it will dissipate with the passage of time, leaving a “stale” remnant of the truth. Trick candles, which defy our attempts to extinguish them, mirror the elusive quality of the truth. While we may momentarily succeed in extinguishing the flames, they inevitably reignite. Capturing the truth with language is like attempting to blow out trick candles– we can try, but both the truth and the candles will leave us unsatisfied with our attempts to make them yield to us.

Furthermore, the deceptive quality of the trick candles, which may initially be mistaken to be regular candles, mirrors sensuous certainty’s misguided presentation of itself. Sensuous-certainty claims that the truth that it offers is direct, unmediated access to the essence of an object. However, once we investigate the supposed truth of sensuous-certainty (i.e., the essence of the object) by language or the candles by blowing on them, we discover both things are not as they initially seem. The issue is that we realize both the candles and the essence of the object are capable of changing their state. This means the essence of the object cannot be sense certainty’s truth, but rather universality is the truth. Both the trick candles and the truth of sensuous-certainty deceive our expectations.

Overall, the cycle of the candles being extinguished and reignited in defiance of our attempts to blow them out represents the dynamic and elusive quality of the truth of sensuous-certainty.

Hegel IRL

95. “What is the Now?”, we answer, for example, “The ‘now’ is the night.” In order to put the truth of this sensuous-certainty to the test, a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth. A truth cannot be lost by being written down any more than it can be lost by our preserving it, and if now, this midday, we look at this truth which has been written down, we will have to say that it has become rather stale.

Real-life example: Sayings such as “cherish the present moment” “focus on the present” and “stay in the present”. All real-life common phrases directing people to take an action toward the present can be the topic of my analysis. For my purposes, the Present and the Present Moment serve the same purpose in meaning.

These real-life examples are Hegelian not because they contain the word Present which is quite similar to the word Now which Hegel speaks directly about, but because these phrases have the potential to cause the same type of confusion that Hegel claims the Now has built into it. The confusion arises from the fact that Present can be somewhat of an ambiguous term. When Hegel says Now he refers to what seems like all night or all day which could also be understood to contain many Nows themselves.  For my purposes, I’ll take Now or the Present to be the thinnest slice of time one can actually conceive of. With this understanding of the Present, it is clear that one cannot manage to do anything aside from observing and being a part of it. This means that cherishing it is not only futile, for enough time doesn’t lapse for one to conjure up a substantial feeling about it, but also unproductive since as soon as you can acknowledge a single moment (slice in time) long enough to act upon it, itself and most likely a couple other moments have past and you are now left to conjure up the mental frame of cherishment about the next present moment you find yourself consciously aware of and the cycle of failure to capture ones aim shall repeat. Without getting into the discussion of what it means to focus, I will take it to be a mental frame as is cherishment, and apply the same reasoning towards it. Any mental action taken toward the present moment will face these issues of futility and unproductivity.

The phrase “stay in the moment” might be the most problematic because one quite literally cannot accomplish the task of the phrase. In one manner of thinking about this phrase, we might say one cannot help but be in the present, for time travel is not real yet so the past and future, which are all the moments aside from the present one, are unavailable to us. Telling me to stay in the present is like telling me to keep being myself. Well, I couldn’t be someone else if I wanted to and if I was being someone else, for example, suppose I am Being Thomas instead of Richie, well, I would Be Thomas, and remaining myself would require me to remain Thomas because, like while I’m Being Thomas I am indeed Thomas. Putting this slight digression aside we can assume that by staying in the present one means something along the lines of keeping your attention or awareness attentive or aware of the present rather than the past or future. This trouble here is still that once one finds themselves aware of a particular moment, they are immediately moved into the preceding one and so on, continuously, forever. These phrases have the best chance to be made sense of if we assume the word Present, as it functions in these phrases, to mean the universal present, which is not any particular Present, but the concept that they all apply to. (The phrase might still be hard or even impossible to make sense of this way, but it’ll be fun to at least ponder this possibility) The Present or the Now is the thing present to our senses and we clearly can’t stay in any one particular slice of time that my senses capture but I can Be in all the presents available to me and all the Presents include many non-Presents relative to each other. By this I mean that when one moment is the true sensuous moment, call this moment Alf, all the others that shall come after it, are not the true Presents while Alf is the Present, but if one ‘stays’, as in remains mindfully aware of each moment one after the other they are closer to staying in the universal Present than they are to any particular Present simply because they stay in contact or application of the universal Present. By doing this they can at least constantly Be ‘Present’. While of course, one cannot actually stay in a concept, it can apply itself to the concept and stay in a mindful mental frame which allows one to do this. If this is how we interpret all three of these phrases then it might be the case that this is a rare instance where we don’t completely fail in saying what we mean. Our language cannot escape referring to the universal and thus not capturing the true sensuous this, however, these phrases aren’t trying to capture the sensuous this they are trying to capture the universal. The phrases might still fail in saying what they mean so far as what they mean is unintelligible but at least here, what they say is also unintelligible.

97. “We thereby of course do not represent to ourselves the universal This or being as such, but we express the universal; or, in this sensuous-certainty we do not at all say what we mean. However, as we see, language is the more truthful. In language, we immediately refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the truth of sensuous-certainty, and language only expresses this truth, it is, in that way, not possible at all that we could say what we mean about sensuous being.”

In Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”, in immediate self-consciousness, the “I” is the absolute object. It is “absolute mediation” and has self-sufficiency “as its essential moment”. It is through the “dissolution of that simple unity” that brings forth the experience by which we arrive at the two constructing shapes of consciousness. In this clip from HBO’s series “Game of Thrones”, we witness King Joffrey speak of his desire to server his future wife, Sansa, her father’s head at a wedding feast. When met with criticism, Joffrey validates his authority and makes threats. This is met by defense of the King by others who fear the reprisals if they were not to condemn any statements made against Joffrey’s desires. This clip does a great job at conveying Hegel’s dialectic.

To begin, King Joffrey embodies the master, whose consciousness existing “for-itself”. He mediates this by being completely dependent on another consciousness, in order to present himself as the “immediate relation of being-for-itself”. We see this when Joffrey stating “everyone is mine to torment”. Furthermore making threats to his uncle when faced with retaliation. As Hegel had explained, when it comes to the consciousness of the master, it is one of “mediation”, meaning that the consciousness is through itself only through its complete reliance on another whose self-sufficiency is conveyed by “thing hood”. The servile consciousness is subordinate to that of the master, in a manner that is negative and “sublates the thing”. The master takes advantage of this and uses the servant in order to consume it, rather than work for it.
In the case of the servant, the anxiety brought about its entire essence is what allows for “self-sufficient consciousness existing for itself” but only as though servitude. We can see this in the clip by the manner in which the “Grand Maester” (The old bearded man) reacts to the uncle’s statement. He goes on to condemn his actions and quickly sides with King Joffrey. This speaking out occurred AFTER the king made threats. This clearly brought about fear to the Grand Maester, leading him to express his thoughts in defense. It is through work (submission/submitting to the desires of the master) by which the servant comes to “an intuition of self-sufficient being as its own self”. Through the activity of the servant and the negative meaning of fear, he becomes an existent being who possesses pure being-for-itself.

I felt as though this clip was great in conveying the clear contrast in the consciousness of the master and servant. King Joffrey’s exhibiting of the traits in which he relies on his subordinates, embodies Hegel’s notion by which the master mediates through another consciousness; thinghood. We further see the fear playing a role in the Grand Maester’s submission to, and working to, fulfill the desires of King Joffrey and it is by this means he attains self-sufficient consciousness.

In the intricate tapestry of Hegelian thought, the mirror emerges as a compelling metaphor for the philosophical notion of universality which is deeply embedded in the self’s relation to the world. The passage “‘I’ is a universal and the object is a universal” (64) from Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” suggests a profound kinship between the subject and the object, hinting at a shared fundamental essence that transcends individual differences. This notion of universality is further enriched by the assertion “In essence, the object is the same as the movement” (67), which implies that the essence of an object is bound up with the process of its continual becoming within the consciousness of the subject.

A mirror, a simple yet profound object in our daily lives, aptly embodies Hegel’s concepts. When we look into a mirror, we see more than our physical appearance; we see the universal ‘I’. The reflection is not our subjective experiences, but a facet of our existence that becomes a universal symbol and is recognizable to all who perceive it. This is a manifestation of not only our identity but the common experience of self-recognition, epitomizing Hegel’s idea of universality where the individual’s reflection becomes a shared human symbol. Moreover, the mirror’s reflection also serves as a universal object. It captures the universal act of reflection, where every individual’s encounter with their image in the mirror goes beyond personal identity and resonates with the universal nature of human reflection. Thus, the mirror serves as a unique object that mirrors our universal capacity for self-perception.

In Hegel’s dialectic, the mirror transcends its function as a static reflector; it becomes integral to a dynamic interplay of recognition and self-exploration. The act of reflection is more than physical—it’s a cognitive journey of seeing, understanding, and connecting with oneself. Hegel’s idea that the essence of an object is its continuous becoming is clear here: our reflection only truly exists as we perceive it, alive and responsive to our every move. This ongoing interaction is not just a passive observation but an active engagement, a dance of awareness where the ‘I’ meets its image, leading us toward deeper self-consciousness. Through this process, we grasp our consciousness, a universal experience rooted in the act of reflective perception.

§20. “The true is the whole. However, the whole is only the essence completing itself through its own development. This much must be said of the absolute: It is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth. Its nature consists just in this: to be actual, to be subject, or, to be the becoming-of-itself”.

The growth of a seed into a tree illustrates the notion of becoming and the process through which the seed comes to be what it is fully meant to be. 

Essentially, the process of a seed growing into a tree represents a sort of completeness, or “the whole”. The seed itself, in its beginning stages, has the potential to become a tree, but it is only through the process of growing, which entails absorbing nutrients and energy, that it will eventually be realized as a whole tree. There is a non-linear natural process that occurs that ultimately results in the “absolute”, which highlights the “the true is the whole” idea that Hegel presents; in this sense, the whole (the tree) can only be acknowledged and appreciated once it has fully gone through its own development. Though the seed always had the potential to become a tree, it was only actualized once the becoming of itself was complete. 

This ultimately connects to Hegel abstract ideas because similarly, truth is something that is revealed over time through developmental processes, as the tree is something that is only acknowledged once it is fully developed.