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.
The analogy you used of trick candles definitely illustrates the concept of an ever changing “here” and “now”. Like you said, they show how our initial attempts to extinguish them mirror our struggles to grasp the present truth. Just as trick candles defy our efforts to put out their flames, the truth of sensuous-certainty eludes our attempts to pin it down. Your comparison captures the essence of the dilemma Hegel was talking about in the passage, it highlights the deceptive nature of both language/sensory perception. I don’t actually understand how trick candles work and I have yet to see any in this lifetime but it works perfectly here.
Greetings Marta, I found your blog post to be quite well-written and interesting! If I may digress a tad in mentioning an etymological tidbit, the terms candle and candid are cognates, both deriving from Latin candeō (“to burn bright/white”). [The Latin term is also cognate with the Armenian խանդ (xand, “to burn with intense emotion”) and the Ancient Greek κάνδαρος (kándaros, “burning coal”).]
I find it somewhat amusing that a trick candle is not exactly candid in the contemporary sense of “truthful”, but rather on the contrary [in that the phrase “trick candle” is actually an etymological oxymoron, as the word “trick” ultimately derives from Latin trīcō (“to cheat/deceive”) cognate with “treachery” through a French intermediary]. This instance of semantic narrowing (bright > white > pure > good > sincere) reflects our sociolinguistic (classificatory) tendency to equate objective characteristics as we perceive them to be indicative of subjective traits. In that it is a perception distortion, it is functionally akin to the halo effect, wherein a disheveled appearance is equated to a lack of positive attributes, and a tidy appearance is equated to a host of positive attributes.
This very example reminds me of a riddle I had encountered a decade ago: You find yourself on a business trip in dire need of a haircut. The town has but two barbers who handle all haircuts. The first boasts a tidy appearance with a haircut as elegant and sleek as his shop with not a single strand of hair out of place, whilst the second’s hair is as disheveled and grotesque as his shop with bits of hair coating every single surface. Which one do you go to? At first glance, naturally the first, right? Well, not unless you want your hair to be absolutely ruined. Why so? It may be mustered that the barbers cut each other’s hair. Therefore, the first barber is responsible for the second’s haircut and vice versa. More importantly, the hair strewn across the floor would be indicative of business, though unsightly. Yet, even these conclusions are conjectural at best. Don’t judge a book (solely) by its cover, yet a picture is worth a thousand words. At the very least, as Hegel might have quipped, the riddle —and phenomena relevant thereto— serves as a reminder to be venturesome in ascertaining the truth.