Hegel's "Unhappy Consciousness" (Part Two)

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Introduction to Close Reads

0:46This is Close Reads. A philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwan. And I'm Mark Lintzenmeier.

0:55Let us continue in Hegel's Phenomenology, the Unhappy Consciousness section. We were just starting on section 210, which in the PDF that I'm looking at that I will link folks to is the bottom of PDF page 164 or document page 127 in the Miller translation, which we have definitely moved to. All right. 210. In this movement, however,

Consciousness and Individuality

1:20consciousness experiences just this emergence of individuality in the unchangeable. And of the unchangeable in individuality. Consciousness becomes aware of individuality in general in the unchangeable. And at the same time of its own individuality in the latter. For the truth of this movement is just the oneness of this dual consciousness. This unity, however, is the first instance, becomes for it one in which the difference of both is still the dominant feature.

1:53So let me just, I understand the latter half of that, right? Because the truth of the movement is always the oneness of the two things, right? And yet if you look at the oneness, you see the two movements still in it, right? That's just every single step of his phenomenology.

The Unchangeable

2:12But what is, we know what individuality is. Do we know what the unchangeable is at all? I see it is mentioned in both of the previous two sections. What was it in the, let's look at what it was in the other translation. So I think we are debating about. Yeah, it was the unchangeable as well. Yeah, whether it was the flow of sensations, right? That would be the changeable as opposed to me, the unchangeable looking at it. Or maybe I, as the Cartesian, you know, things with phenomena, that's the changeable.

2:44And then the thing in itself is the unchangeable, the true being behind it.

God and the Unchangeable

2:48So those were at least two different possible interpretations of the changeable. Yeah. So we have a, you know, we have a few candidates historically in philosophy. One is the forms. Because I think he's, he's always thinking about the one and the many, the problem of the one and the many and the related problem of the, of the individual and the universal. And he's going to be talking a lot about individuality here. You know, what, one of the themes of the book is that when you think you've found individuality

3:18or particularity, and I think those two things are supposed to be different in Hegel, but we'll talk about that another time. But when you think you've found it, you've really found the universal. That's the way the whole book begins. And that process repeats itself. And then the whole dialectic in a way is towards this unification of particular in general, or one and many. So here, yeah, the unchangeable sounds a lot like a version of the absolute, but it could

3:49be, so things in themselves, like the candidates for things in themselves are generally souls or God or the universe as a whole.

Metaphysical Objects

3:58Those are the primary metaphysical objects, at least in Kant. So is the unchangeable God? Is it, is it the noumenal self, which I think is probably what the track we are on last time?

4:13Consciousness becomes aware of its individuality in general in the, in the unchangeable. So to say I'm a, I'm an individual, right? Is to use this general term. Um, I am one of the class of individuals. And so I, I don't, you know, there's a weird way in which I, I am, I'm individuality, individual through generality. And the general, you know, Fichtum made a lot out of this very general consciousness or

4:45ego, which becomes God. So my, right, my individual consciousness may be it's, it's thing in itself. This may ultimately can only be grounded in some general abstract consciousness. Well, he wouldn't like the word abstract, but some general consciousness. I don't know. So we know that that is definitely going to come up later in the book.

Self-Consciousness and Spirit

5:08At this point, we've achieved self-consciousness in recognizing the other through the master slave dialectic as an independent self-consciousness. We were having some problems with, uh, stoicism and skepticism where we were considering maybe that I am the only essential thing and everything else either doesn't matter to me from a values perspective or is even, uh, unknowable to me, says the skeptic. And here I know it was the, the, uh, master and slave brought into one consciousness.

5:45So I'm not aware there's some sort of other locus of, of potential subjectivity. And we know where this is going to end because we already together in close reads, read the reason section, which is at Fichtian, I am the world, right? That I am Fichtian idealism. So somehow that is going to be a solution to what's right now happening, which is my uneasiness. I think, you know, very comparable since this is in the same section as a skeptic, the skepticism

6:18and the stoicism section, my uneasiness with the rest of existence. So is it the case that I am a flittering, changing thing faced with the block of the world that is basically static, or is it that the world is a flowing mass and I, as a, as a point of consciousness and the only static thing, right? Everything revolves around me and in typical Hegelian fashion, well, you can see it both ways, right? In fact, since I'm conceiving the, the external world as a self-consciousness, I can imaginatively

6:54project myself into that. And in fact, since these are both really things in my head, it's not even just imagining. It's not like imagining I'm imagining I'm that rock with a point of view. I can, I can literally identify with either side of the equation since they're both in my head.

7:13All right, well, let's keep, let's keep going.

The Unity of Consciousness

7:18This unity, however, in the first instance, instance becomes for it one in which the difference of both sides is still the dominant feature. Thus, there exists for consciousness three different ways in which the individuality is linked with the unchangeable. Firstly, it again appears to itself as opposed to the unchangeable. All right. So that's like consciousness in flux, stream of consciousness versus outer things in themselves, or at least some aspect of them. Sure.

7:48Maybe the forms or whatever. And is thrown back to the beginning of the struggle, which is throughout the element in which the whole relationship subsists. Secondly, consciousness learns that individuality belongs to the unchangeable itself. Like maybe the noumenal self, so that it assumes the form of individuality into which the entire mode of existence passes.

8:12Thirdly, it finds its own self as this particular individual in the unchangeable. So the first unchangeable, it knows only as the alien being who passes judgment on the particular individual. Sounds very God-like. Yeah. How could it be an unchangeable? I mean, yeah, it has to be God because clearly it's passing judgment. It's doing something. It is changing. Yeah.

8:42Well, okay. So you're just getting into a basic theological problem, right? Yeah. An alien being who passes judgment on the particular individual. Since secondly, the unchangeable is a form of individuality like itself, consciousness becomes, thirdly, spirit and experiences the joy of finding itself therein and becomes aware of the reconciliation of individuality with the universal. So this sounds like reconciliation, you know, you start out, well, I think we're vaguely aware

9:18of this progression towards a certain form of Christianity which reconciles the individual with God, with the alien God by giving us a third term, Jesus, who bridges the gap. But it sounded in the beginning of this, it's almost like we start with the forms or something like that. And then we find out that we are, ultimately we find out that we are also unchangeable metaphysical objects, I guess. And the joy of that, right?

9:50It's like saying we are in the image of God or something like that at the point of spirit, the joy of finding itself therein. But where we relate to God as the unchangeable, we find out that we are unchangeable at some point. We are numinal things in themselves, substantial selves. Thirdly, it finds its own self as the particular individual in the unchangeable. That sounds a little bit like Spinozan modes as well. Yeah, I'm right. That's ficties. I am, as you were saying, the numinal self.

10:22And the numinal self is a mode in a larger numinal self. Yeah. It is strange to me why unchangeable got brought up in the first place, right? Going back to 208, which we read three times, since it is only to begin with only the immediate unity of the two and takes them to be not the same, but opposites.

The Unhappy Consciousness

10:43One of them, namely the simple unchangeable, it takes to be the essential being, but the other, the protein changeable, it takes to be unessential. The two are for the unhappy consciousness alien to each other. Okay. So, right. That introduction, there's no, you know, why is it unchangeable? Let me just go back one more forward. 207. This unhappy, inwardly disrupted consciousness, since it's essentially contradictory nature is for it a single consciousness, must forever have present in the one consciousness, the other also.

11:14Thus, it is driven out of each in turn in the very moment when it imagines successfully attained to a peaceful unity, its true return into itself or its reconciliation with itself will, however, display the notion of spirit that has become, there's nothing here that would tell us why the other has to be an unchangeable. Well, the other is, the other is God, right? We would expect the theological tradition is that God is unchangeable. He is not a creature of becoming. He is pure being, becoming, implying growth and decay and all that.

11:49But it's not stated as God here. And I don't think he can do that at this point in the dialectic. Isn't, but isn't unhappy consciousness all about a certain relationship to God? Isn't that the whole, but how can he bring in, he has to somehow say that then we're not talking about your, your garden variety, Judeo-Christian God just imported wholesale from what you learned at church. We're talking about something fundamental about the phenomenology of consciousness, which

12:20we've seen in other. Which manifests itself in history, but right. He was talking at a certain point about asceticism and things that sounded very, like a certain version of medieval Christianity, which may be. Yes. We're absolutely for sure going to get to that. And you're absolutely right. But I'm just trying to get what is the logic that allows us, because I thought stoicism and skepticism was basically an epistemological. And as I said last time, a, a living, a problem of how to live in the face of a basic rupture

12:54between me and the world, which ultimately we want to heal this rupture. We want to, we want to see that I am. Yeah. But, but how does he, so he's, he's got to say, let me look, read a little of 206 in skepticism. Consciousness truly experiences itself as internally contradictory. From this experience emerges a new form of consciousness, which brings together the two thoughts, which skepticism holds apart. Skepticism's lack of thought about itself must all, must vanish because in fact, is one consciousness, which create, which contains these two modes.

13:28The new form is therefore one, which knows that it is dual consciousness. Okay. Again, there's nothing about what the two sides actually are. Oh, oh, in stoicism, self-consciousness is a simple freedom of itself and skepticism. This freedom becomes a reality, negates the other side of determined existence, but really duplicates itself and now knows itself to be a duality. Consequently, the duplication, which formerly was divided between two individuals, the Lord and the bondsman is now lodged into one. So this is all setting up the duplication of self-consciousness within itself, which is

13:59essential in the notion of spirit is thus here before us, but not yet in its unity. Unhappy, the unhappy consciousness is the consciousness of itself as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being. Yeah. I haven't answered my question. So we are, I mean, this sounds more like, right, early modern skepticism. This is where I was confused about, is he talking about Kant and early modern Hume and early modern skepticism? But yeah, we do, we get to a point where we can have faith in God and we can't know God.

14:29I think that's one of the problems. That's one of the divisions, right? In Kant, it's like, oh, well, we're screwed. Can't really know God. We just have faith in them. And the other duality is we are material beings and spiritual beings at the same time. That's another, right? So we are contradictory being in that sense. What are the other senses in which we might be a contradictory being? I guess just the whole general problem of our individuality being predicated on the consciousness

15:04of others, right? Or I'm supposed to be a thing in myself, an individual, separate, right? But that separateness is just a product of being related in a certain way. I think that's a fundamental contradiction. So we know this, this is where this is going to go. And maybe this is a, just to reveal to listeners, we have now thoroughly immersed ourselves in reading the later than here spirit chapter, which this is, according to some commentators,

15:36a direct sequel to, right? That the stuff on knowledge in between is sort of going back to the epistemological in a way that, you know, is, is not dealing, the existential is supposed to lead you straight to the ethical. So we're still dealing here in the existential. And, you know, some of this sounds very much like Kierkegaardian sort of, as you said, moaning about, or, or, you know, what, why do we think Ecclesiastes is a form of existentialism? Because it is about being a lone person in the world faced with massive forces that we

16:13couldn't possibly understand. My only question was just like, why call it the unchangeable when you don't know that it is the platonic forms or the Cartesian God or something like that? Is he really committed to the idea? And, uh, uh, I mean, I think Plato was committed to the idea that right there in our experience is the difference between the changeable, the things that we see, the phenomenon and the unchangeable that they refer to. So is he saying that at least at this little stage of the dialectic, that is actually part

16:45of our experience of the world. Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind here is that, that for him, it seems like spirit does unfold historically, right? He wants to get over the idea of God as merely this unchangeable alien being. So there is a movement to God ultimately. So this may be just the way unhappy consciousness conceives of God.

The Incarnate Unchangeable

17:11Or conceives of the mass of the universe that is not it. Yeah. I mean, again, there are lots of different, yeah. Well, there's a few different candidates. If I, if I'm a floating, scared. There's world, there's God, and then there's self. I've, I've just become self-conscious and I'm, I'm faced with my own dread of my freedom and my choices and things. And there is a monolith before me that I should realize that I'm only able to think these crazy isolated things because I am fundamentally using resources from it, right?

17:47I'm using a public language. I'm, uh, biologically connected to these people. I'm emotionally dependent on these people. And ultimately it is going to be, as we know, spirit, it's other people is the way I'm saying it. Not, not some alien faceless.

18:06He's not even calling it God. God would be too nice. God would be too, too, uh, friendly. Like God loves you, but just the unchangeable does the unchangeable love you. It's an aspect of God or the platonic force. Yeah, you're having me thinking now about the fact that in Spinoza, the world thing in itself converges with the God thing in itself and the individual spirit, you know, the individual consciousness thing in itself. So you just have one big nature equals God, the big whale, and then the barnacles on it

18:42are modes of spirit and modes of materiality. So you could say that it is somehow unchangeable, even though it has these modes that clearly show changes. I mean, again, this is just a fundamental. It's the unchangeable substance underneath the changing properties. Yes. There you go. All right. Sorry for that. Uh, rewind. No, no, that's good. This is, it's helpful. So we're, did we, did you get, I've forgotten what we were talking about. Did we get to the end of two 10? Yeah. Okay.

19:13Then I'll read to 11 here. What is set forth here as the mode and relationship of the unchangeable has appeared as the experience through which the divided self-consciousness passes in its wretchedness. Now this experience is true is not its own one-sided movement for it is itself the unchangeable consciousness. And this consequently is at the same time, a particular individual consciousness too. And the movement is just as much a movement of the unchangeable consciousness. Which makes its appearance in that movement as much as the other.

19:46For this movement runs through these moments. First, the unchangeable is opposed to individuality in general. Then being itself an individual, it is opposed to another individual. Do you understand how, why he's insisting that the unchangeable has individuality within it and it is, it is itself an individual. Is that just because we're thinking of it as the noumenal self as basically, you know, souls?

20:13Yeah. And I think the opposition to another individual is the master-slave moment. So the unchangeable as opposed to individual, that's God and individual or world and individual being itself an individual, right? So then consciousness as opposed to another consciousness. And finally, it is one with it. One with the unchangeable, one with God or world or another consciousness? Hmm. I mean, we know, we know master-slave ends in reciprocity.

20:46So I didn't conceive of that as oneness exactly. Well, I liked your pointing at, I was, I was picturing it as the lonely self and its perception of the outside world, but you're, you're saying the, the, the unchangeable could be the noumenal self. This makes a little more sense to me, especially since we know that we're going to say, oh, actually the noumenal self is, you know, the, the Spinozian God is the, the, the, the Fichtian is the connection to the matrix.

21:18So that it is, it is, that is why I can identify right now with myself as Humean point flitting among the, the buzz and confusion, or as this ultimately unchangeable soul that has some properties that change. And that is one in the same with identifying as the, with the rest of the universe. So it's, it's the unchangeable as opposed to individuality. Hey, it just seems like it's, it's everything. Oh, but then actually it is individual.

21:48It's me. It's my, my soul. And then I realized that my flittingness and my soul are actually one thing. That at least sort of makes sense to me.

22:00Yeah. It's really, you know, helpful of him to use this word, like unchangeable, which, which sounds like a lot like the absolute, right? Where are all these different candidates, right? Forms or Aristotelian substance under properties or noumenal soul or world or God. But, you know, I mean, it's just like, I mean, even matter, right? Even, even that's supposed, that's a candidate for the absolute or for the unchangeable. Hey man, we're all stardust.

22:30Yeah. But, you know, yeah, but, but whatever the smallest particle is or string, well, maybe it's the law, you know, the scientific law that can be the only chain unchangeable thing. I don't know. But there's, you know, science, science is one major, we, we forget that, but it's one major candidate, right? These scientific objects are, if you're a materialist and you don't believe in any of this other gobbledygook, then that's your absolute. That's where the buck stops. And then, you know, that's where the, all explanations terminate.

23:02You're making a really good case to me for why he's using the term unchangeable is because it is generic between all these things. And he's trying to talk in a very abstract way about just being versus becoming in our personal experience, right? Our wretchedness of I am the becoming being, but, but am I also the unchangeable fixed being? Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. You could think about it. Yeah. We often think about it in modern terms, in terms of emergence, right?

23:33This relationship between these two realms, I'm a macro object, but I'm also just a bunch of particles, but yeah. So this, this dynamic can play out in many, many different ways. And maybe that's part of the force section that he's getting at, you know, because that the scientific candidate, anyway.

23:54All right. Let me just finish the paragraph, but this reflection so far as it is made by us is here premature for what has come before us so far is only unchangeableness as unchangeableness of consciousness, which for that reason is not genuine unchangeableness, but one still burdened with an antithesis, not the unchangeable in and for itself. We do not know therefore how the latter will behave here. We know only that for consciousness, which is our object here, the determinations indicated

24:26above appear in the unchangeable. So yeah, that's what I was going to say. Well, I think he, he maybe is saying, Hey, this is premature because it does sound like he's getting to God, that he's getting to things that will, you know, have to show up later in the, in the book, but the unchangeable, the unchangeableness of consciousness. So what do we think that is, is it just that when you conceive of, I know we've already said

24:58this, but like, what is the, the, the human point? In other words, my consciousness is just a point of view, a window onto the world. Is that changeable because the phenomena are changeable and it seems to dance among them or is it the window? The window is unchangeable. Everything around it changes. Is that all we're talking about here? Maybe we don't even have to go to noumena and God. If he, if he really is just saying that there's something ambiguous about the Humean point that

25:29was being abused by skepticism and stoicism to say the rest of the world is inessential or unknowable. Yeah. To say there's a same window, right? We have to get into Lockean personal identity. And that's one way to, to crack this nut, right? Which is if you don't want to be a rationalist and you don't want to talk about noumenal selves as being the unchangeable substantial thing underneath consciousness, the flux of consciousness. You can talk in terms of memory. You can talk, you can talk in terms of things internal to consciousness, consciousness having

26:04its unchangeable this in the sense of a persistent personal identity internal to it. And the relationship to memory for Locke is very important. And there was something similar in Parfit. Right. Although actually Parfit was a bit more of a skeptic ultimately, but he, but he, he stated the Lockean position very, very clearly if listeners want to listen to our Parfit episode. Well, I think you're, I mean, I think you're pointing at a great Hegelian sort of bait and switch that you, you thought that, Hey, look, I'm just the stable window.

26:37I'm, I have no parts, but wait, you have parts over time. How do you know that the window at T1 and the window at T2 are the same thing? You have to rely on the contents of the window, which is memories. You have to remember you have to, unless there's just some sort of primal feeling of continuity, but then like, well, then you go to sleep and you wake up, you have periods of unconsciousness. How do you know that you yesterday was you today? So that's a, and Hegel, Hegel would be absolutely right there with you pointing out that what

27:08you thought was simple is in fact complex. Yeah. And I think Locke, right. He, he addresses, I mean, I, I forget people will have to listen to that episode, but it right, right. He, he doesn't think the substantial new, you know, this idea of this substantial numeral self actually does the, actually works, right. It doesn't really ground personal identity in the way that we want. So the unchangeableness, as we think of it internal, the consciousness, you know, I don't think he thinks it's coherent to try to connect that to an unchangeable substance.

27:41Yeah. So that's a, that's a good point. You know, the Hegelian bait and switch. We, we think it might be some kind of simple explanation like that, but it doesn't work out and that's too abstract and universal and we need something more concrete. Go to 12. All right. For this reason, therefore, the unchangeable consciousness also retains in its very form, the basic character of dividedness and being for self in contrast to the individual consciousness.

28:11Cons. Yeah. I don't get the distinction. The unchangeable consciousness versus the individual consciousness.

28:23Unless the unchangeable consciousness is the personal identity self and the individual consciousness is the substantial rationalist, you know, substance self. That's, that's a huge speculation. But that or vice versa, but yeah, but sure. Let's keep going. Consequently, for the latter, the fact that the unchangeable receives the form of individuality is only a contingent happening.

28:54Just as it is for the individual consciousness. Hey, you know, that unchangeable has received the form of individuality. That's just, that could have, it didn't have to happen.

29:07Yeah. Again, what is, what does that mean? I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm here wondering about my, uh, wondering about the thing in itself. I'm wondering about that, that massive, all that is not me. And, uh, Hey, you know what? It's, it seems like actually that is an individual. It seems like that I could be, could be one of the things as a numinal self in that, that numinal block there. Uh, so yeah, I guess, I guess from that point of view, it could be that the numinal block

29:40didn't have any individuality. In fact, that's what I was trying to argue that it shouldn't at all. It doesn't make sense for it to have individuality, but since clearly I do perceive this as a possibility, I guess it's, it is. Yeah. Okay. Sorry to interrupt. I mean, the other, the other thing here is this reminds me of my, the criticism of Kant on contingency, right? You can talk about the categories and the kind of the categories. There's another candidate for the unchangeable, right? As in Aristotle, um, Kant and perhaps even in, in Hegel, right?

30:16Conceptual structure turns out to be back, you know, ontological structure. The two converge, the categories of the mind just are the categories of the world. So in Kant, where does individuality come from? Where do contingent facts come from? We can say, yes, the cat must be spatiotemporal and causal and all these things, but why this particular cat? Well, that's contingency. That's a contingent happening. So the fact that this unchangeable receives the form of individuality is only contingent happening. So, you know, the fact that the categories get, get, um, instantiated, the fact that the

30:50forms and get instantiated, why, why would they ever get instantiated? That's just a contingent happening. We got a whole argument in Plotinus about like, why would God become individual things if all is one? Oh, well, you know, he really wants to realize himself. I mean, this is, this is kind of what Hegel's picture has to come. Yeah. And I think, you know, my vague idea of what happens in Hegel, well, something similar to where you get a positing, right?

31:21Where the individual kind of falls out of the universal or the, um, the form somehow. But anyway, just as it also merely finds itself opposed to it, the individual and the, all right. And the unchangeable, yeah. Whatever you pronounce referring to. Just as, as it also merely finds itself opposed to it, so that the relation seems to result from its own nature. The unchangeable receives the form of individuality. It, the unchangeable, I suppose, finds itself opposed to it, individuality.

31:59So, universal and individual. Well, and maybe this, this seeing the unchangeable as an individual is actually, we could just still see it, not as me detecting my individual soul among other souls, which is what I was thinking about before, but as just saying, I'm an individual, I'm faced with something and I can identify that qua something as an individual. Like, is it, is it as simple as that? But by realize like, look, maybe this, this, this mass that I'm encountering is not in fact

32:31an individual. It's just the fact that I'm a self-conscious being reflecting on it and saying, this is different from me. Therefore, I am one. You are two. You are number two, the rest of the world. An individual.

32:45It sounds like a movement towards Aristotle, right? Where the form is part of the nature of the thing. The fact that a, you could say that a being is a, is a being, it's a unity that we can carve out from nature. You could say, why is that? Well, the form came down and put itself on matter and created that. But for Aristotle, it's the nature of the thing that makes it a real individual. But then it wouldn't seem, it wouldn't seem like it comes from our nature, right?

33:20The unchangeable receives the form of it. I'm thinking of the unchangeable as like an external object now. But it seems like you're making the opposite point of what he's trying to say here is that at least in this moment, it seems to me that by imposing individuality on, on the other, that it's just me doing it. It's just, I could do it. I could not do it. That's its contingent. Yeah. It actually is a real thought of my nature. So it's not the forms living in the thing. I think that obviously will come up. It's us constructing reality. That's the alternative. I guess. So it could be one of two opposite things at this moment.

33:55Either it's reality constructing itself or us constructing reality. Yeah. I don't know. That finally, it does find itself in the unchangeable, appears to it to be brought about partly, no doubt, by itself. Okay. Maybe you're right. Or to take place because it is itself an individual. But this unity, both as regards its origin and the fact that it is, appears partly due to the unchangeable.

34:25And the antithesis persists within the unity, this unity itself. In fact, through the unchangeable, assuming a definite form, the moment of the beyond not only persists, but really is more firmly established. For if the beyond seems to have been brought closer to the individual consciousness through the form of an actuality that is individual, it henceforth, on the other hand, confronts him as an opaque, sensuous unit with all the obstinacy of what is actual.

35:00The hope of becoming one with it must remain a hope that is without fulfillment and present fruition. For between the hope and its fulfillment, there stands precisely the absolute contingency or inflexible indifference, which lies in the very assumption of definite form. Yeah, he really does seem to be talking about this thing, which really interests me, which has the ground of hope. But the nature of this immediately present unit, through the actual existence in which it has closed itself, it necessarily follows that in the world of time, it has vanished.

35:36And that in space, it had a remote existence and remains utterly remote. What is this thing that you're so interested in that you think you see here? Well, the problem of contingency and form, you know, so it did sound, so now through the form of actuality that is in, the beyond seems to be brought closer to the individual consciousness through a form of actuality that is individual. So when we encounter individuals in the world and say, okay, that's a real mind-independent

36:14individual, then this unchangeable, right? The unchangeable assumes this definite form, the cat, and we seem to come into contact, right? If we're coming into contact with essences in the world, then in a sense, we are bridging that gap to the beyond. And on the other hand, it confronts them as an opaque, sensuous unit. This sounded like, I think you were making a vague kind of allusion to Kripke earlier,

36:45right? With all the opaques, the opaque, sensuous unit is like, okay, well, we know it is something, but what's its essence? You know, is it H2O2O? Is it something else? Is it what's underneath the form of the cat? And it confronts us with the obstinacy of what is actual. So, but I, you know, I don't want to become one with the cat, but hope is one with it. I'm following you. But it's one with the form, right? But it's one with the beyond part, the in itself part, the God part, the noumenal part.

37:16Yeah. So why am I, I guess that explains why I'm only seeing myself as a hope. It's becoming one in the sense of knowing, sorry, in the sense of just knowing the thing in itself, but go ahead. Right. Because I like your, if he's going to say that it becomes, it has become an actual sensual individual before us. Why would I even think that? Why would I hope that I am in it? That I am, that I am part of it. Well, I mean, we hope that we can know it and, you know, not just be representationalists

37:50or phenomenal, phenomenalists, you know, and which even Aristotle was arguing against those people, Pythagoras, right? In the law of non-contradiction section. But yeah, we want to be able to, this is, you know, again, everything I'm saying is all far-flung speculation. But the way to make sense of this to me is to think of becoming one, right? In one sense, becoming one ultimately is about unity with the Christian God. But perhaps at this point, it's just about thinking that we can know independent things.

38:24Well, I know that's where we're going because with idealism, it comes down to, I can only know things because I am in some sense one with them, because I am part of a system that is, and I think you can even have a materialist take, again, in opposition to Graham Harmon, where this is, that the thing I'm trying to know is a thing in itself, and I'm a thing in it myself, and ne'er can they actually touch. No, if you are an idealist or a old-fashioned physicalist who thinks that things can actually

38:55touch, then you think that there is a system, let's call it nature. Obviously, he uses nature a lot of places in here, and he doesn't use it here. I'm not sure why he is calling the object the unchangeable in one place, the self-consciousness in another place, mere nature in another place. I mean, it seems like it's a matter of how much self-conscious stuff, right? Because you started saying another person, but then you switched it to cat, and then it

39:25could be a rock. What are we really talking about when I'm saying- Yeah, it's cat, rock, person, God, Adam, this, that, the other, yeah. I mean, going with my earlier interpretation that, no, it's actually, I'm still considering not the individual cats and rocks, but I'm considering the experienced other, but it's, it, just by being in an attitude of perception to me, then I am bringing it, I'm individualizing

39:57it, so this is, this is very weird, and I'm not sure if this is right, but I'm just picturing, so you're, I'm confronting, you, you have come, you've brought your cat, you've brought your coat, you've brought your rocks, you've brought your other things, but still, in saying that you, the unit that I'm confronting is still the entirety of the perceptual experience, which I then posit as having opacity in that it has these different parts, but it seems like I could know a lot about it, it seems like I'm part of the same world as it, that

40:31I should, as you say, be able to know that you are not the cat, and the, you know, and the cats are cats, and all these things about it, that I want to be a member of this, this living world, but yet there's still a little part of me that still feels like it can break off and transcend, and is not a part of it, I don't know if that helps, I mean, it does, you're making me, yeah, one aspect of this is the opacity of other minds, right, and the

41:01wanting to cross that bridge, right, so we want to know objects, but we want to get into the heads of other people, and there's an, yeah, the opacity there is we can't, you know, it's kind of a leap of faith to say that there are other minds.

41:20I mean, does the point that I was trying to make about the unchangeable assuming a definite form, you were just interpreting that as assuming the form of cat, I'm just saying the form could be the form of that experience, a very complicated form. Yeah, yeah, that's what it does for Kant, right, yeah, the appearance, yep, so when we, when we say the appearance is, we get a particular object for Kant, that's, you know, and he wants

41:50to, ooh, we can have objective knowledge of it, even though it's just an appearance, it's not a thing in itself, but the, the category, if it's unchangeable, you know, that's the version of the platonic form that instantiates itself, puts a definite form there into the appearance, stamps itself, and then the beyond gets closer to the individual in that sense, right, if we're to the individual consciousness, yeah, the beyond being in this case, the categories, but yeah, go ahead. It would be weird if, I mean, I like this Kantian interpretation of it, but it would be weird

42:24if seeing my whole unit, my whole experience as a unit, in other words, an individual, but the Kantian categories themselves include individuality, so the fact that, right, that those are two different level layers at which individuality is coming in, in other words, experience at time T, that is an individual, but then also within experience at time T is the form of individuality, which is an unchangeable, that is thereby slicing things into the West and the cat, and this

43:00cat is an instance of all other cats, et cetera, et cetera. And this, this is the big weak point in Kant, right, that you got causality and individuality, and causality seems to be the relationship between things in themselves and our minds, so how can you say causality is just in the mind? And then once you say things in themselves, you're already using the category of individuality. So saying we can just shove all this stuff into the mind doesn't work. And my point is that to say there's contingency at all, we need form coming in from the outside.

43:35In a way, the skeptic is just worried that, right, causality can't come in through the senses, at least in, you know, a way that we can be objectively certain about it, right? Kant, I mean, Hume's just succession, but they, I think they're worried in more generally that form can't come in, structure can't come in. So we're just stamping space and time and every other category end of things. But if there's going to be contingency, like the cat being on the mat or not being on the mat, that data has to be structured. There must be something formal about the data, the manifold that's coming in.

44:07That's the, my point. I think I'm just, and that's, I think I'm just recapitulating a point that was probably made very, very quickly after Kant wrote the critique so that Hegel's definitely aware of it.

The Threefold Relation

44:182.13. If at first the mere notion of the divided consciousness was characterized by the effort to set aside its particular individuality and to become the unchangeable consciousness, its efforts from now on are directed rather to setting aside its relation with the pure formless unchangeable and to coming in relation only with the unchangeable in its embodied or incarnate form. For the oneness of the particular individual with the unchangeable is henceforth the essence and the object for this consciousness.

44:49Just as in the mere notion of it, the formless abstract unchangeable was the essential object. And now the relation of this absolute dividedness of the notion is now what it has to turn away from. The initially external relation to the incarnate unchangeable as an alien reality has to be transformed into a relation in which it becomes absolutely one with it.

45:12We have the word incarnate. That's new. That's a clue.

45:19So setting aside its relationship with the pure formless unchangeable and coming into relation with the embodied or incarnate, the unchangeable in its embodied or incarnate form. That sounds like a move from the platonic, but it can't be formless unchangeable if it's platonic. What the hell is the formless unchangeable? Anyway. The unchangeable that was not yet incarnate. I mean. Yes. Okay.

45:46The universe has just taken as an absolute other that I'm trying to turn away from and deny the existence of or whatever.

45:57So the formless unchangeable, it could just be being in general. Right. Yeah. Before we even get to platonic forms. I don't know. But okay. Coming into relation with the unchangeable as it's embodied in an incarnate form. So we get, it sounds like we get material or phenomenal objects here. So my, maybe my intuition about right. Coming into contact with the unchangeable is the essences of things of. You know, the sensuously experienced things is, is correct.

46:28Yep. For the oneness of the particular individual with the unchangeable is henceforth the essence and the object for this consciousness. Yeah. I don't. Oneness to me can only be knowledge to make sense of it. Yeah. Let's, let's keep going with that interpretation. And that's the essence and the object for this consciousness. So the object meaning its goal perhaps, right? That it's somehow we're focused on oneness. Right.

46:59And, and as you pointed out, one of the ways that we could be one is through knowledge. And you'd think knowledge would be involved in any case. If we want to take this purely, like we've already entered the Christian dark night of the soul. And I want to be one with God that, that there was this pure, formless, unchangeable that seemed to be not a part of me, something that is over there. And, but now I'm really just concerned about my personal relationship with God. As they would say in those commercials, what were those commercials for? Just going to church?

47:30Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah.

47:33No. Oh, okay. I don't know if I've seen them. There, there were, when we were kids, they were, there was, you know, the most important thing to me is my personal relationship with God. Is that what turned you on to Christianity? Is that? No, I thought that was very strange. You were religious when you were younger because your parents were religious? Not really. I, I was, uh, indoctrinated a little bit. I went to Bible camp for social reasons, like a friend of mine was going and it was like a more severe kind of Christianity than I was actually brought up in.

48:06So then I got interested in my own. And this is sort of what made me a philosopher is like, I'm, I'm going to read the Bible straight through myself. I'm going to really grapple with this. And so by the time I got to confirmation a few years later, so this was like Bible camp was maybe sixth and seventh, fifth, fifth and sixth grade. And then eighth grade is, is a confirmation. And that I was able to like think rationally and say, you know, actually my, my, so you went, my interest, in other words, you went from the formless abstract, unchangeable as

48:40your central object to the incarnate. And then in the end, the initial, initially external relation to the incarnate, unchangeable as an alien reality has to be transformed into relation, which it becomes absolutely one with it, which I guess our provisional interpretation could only mean knowledge at this point. Sure. Especially if it's incarnate. I mean, although incarnate will also be Jesus. I don't know. How do I, I mean, I guess I eat his body. I, I, I drink, I use, I drink his blood.

49:12I'm becoming. Yeah. That's a very good point. No, he could be talking about transubstantiation. He could be talking about any number of things at any given time and simultaneously. You know the, okay. So, so when you're, when you're eating the body and the bread, you should probably like micro, cause you don't want to like be pissing out Jesus. Like you, you want to just keep all that Jesus in you. So micro dosing Jesus, a little piece of wafer dipped in a tiny bit of wine every morning.

49:43So you just do not have any excretions. Purity. Yeah. Purity. Let's purify myself of this body. Well, I mean, is it polite if you're about to have sex with someone to eat a lot of Jesus and then like your, the excreta in this, the ejaculation is, contains a lot of Jesus is what I'm saying. Like you didn't know lady that I just hooked up with that.

50:14You're taking this to new levels of grossness here. That I, that I would be giving you so much Jesus. I could take it further, but I'm not going to. Okay. All right. Does this mean we're done for today? Different sorts of communion. Let's read two, two, 14 looks so short. Yeah. Read two, 14. Yeah. So the movement in which the unessential consciousness strives to attain this oneness is itself threefold in accordance with the threefold relation this consciousness will have with its incarnate beyond.

50:47First, as pure consciousness. Second, as a particular individual who approaches the actual world in the forms of desire and work. Third, and third, as consciousness that is aware of its own being for self. Ooh, this sounds like we're getting all the different threads that we were speculating about. We have now to see how these three modes of its being are present and determined in that general relationship. So threefold, it gets the oneness threefold through, all right, number one.

51:21Okay. I don't know. As pure consciousness. So I guess I, yeah, I, I, the unchangeable is undifferentiated. It's not identified as an individual, but I'm just trying to, or maybe it is as an individual, but I'm still just trying to relate to it in, in thought. So my oneness, the, the first version of my oneness comes about as my being also pure consciousness, ego, and its full abstractness. Yes. Right. As undifferent or so a way of being God, God is ego, you know, the fictian idea.

51:53So the second version of oneness is through desire and work. All right. Yeah. So I desire and I take in the world I eat. So I think it's appropriate that we're talking about eating or do other things that you, you were bringing up. And then I work on the world. I put myself into the world. That was very important in the master slave. And then third, although, so this isn't not a knowledge relationship we're getting here to the world, desire and work, or maybe desire, man by nature desires to know, which is what

52:27I was thinking about. Yeah. So desire. Yeah. No knowledge is among the, yeah. Third is consciousness that it's aware of its own being for self. And that sounds a little bit like the Lockean identity version, but maybe not. But yeah. How is, how is the Lockean identity version mean that I am one with the unchangeable? Because the unchangeable is the persistent identity underneath the changing consciousness. Okay. A consciousness that is aware of its own being for self. I mean, what, what other possible, can we think of any other possible interpretations

53:00of that? I'm just trying to remember the Locke here. Does Locke actually, you know, cause we know Locke thinks that even though substance is something you can't actually perceive. He says, we just have to posit that there is a substance, right? Because it doesn't, the bundle of qualities thing doesn't make sense. So likewise, I was sort of thinking about his theory of, of personal identity as, as almost human. In other words, that there is this, you know, we feel over time, I remember things that

53:34I was happening yesterday and, and, and yesterday, I remember things that were happening the day before. So even though I don't have one feeling of unity of my whole self, there is a chain that we can put together and say, this is sort of how we socially construct a self. And it's not our, it's not an arbitrary social construction. Like it is built into our biology and the way we deal with each other, but it is still something that is basically surface level. But if his position is, is what I just described as his substance as, then actually this continuity of memory points to the fact that there actually has to be a thing, an unchangeable, a substance,

54:08a personal substance. Yeah. Locke rejects that though. Hmm. Like I said, he doesn't think that the substance is necessary or that it even works very well. And he's not a skeptic about the self, you know, like Hume. Right. So it is supposed to be a more empiricist grounding than, you know, the Cartesian rational substance. But, but why, why is it threefold relation to its incarnate beyond? That's confusing.

54:39Pure consciousness is incarnate beyond. The desire in work, that makes sense.

54:46Consciousness that is aware of its own being for self, that's, that's a relation to incarnate beyond. Well, incarnate may be in the sense of instantiated, right? Instantiation as an individual, but yeah. It seems like you were trying to say, these are three ways in which we are unified. But the way this, this paragraph starts is we try to a chain. We strive to a chain oneness in a movement. So the movement is threefold in accordance with a three role of relationship to the incarnate

55:19beyond. Okay. So actually maybe the latter part justifies the way that you were putting it as here's a taxonomy of ways that we are. If it was just merely, these are the steps, then the first one as pure consciousness could be not actually effective at all. Like this is our first try just as pure consciousness. I just want to be one with the world. Oh, nope. I can't do it. Second, as particular desire and work. Well, let me get, let me get out of my philosopher's chair and start doing things. Hey, look at me engaging in work.

55:50I mean, that, that actually is accomplishing something, but it's only when I really realize that I have been in this metabolistic relationship with the world, going out and doing things and creating things which thereby create me. And I realized that, Hey, I'm a self. That is the way that you actually get in touch, that you actually are one, right? You can't be a romantic for the romantic would be step one. I just think about God and I'm one with guy. Make the leap.

56:21I mean, does that seem better? Awareness of its own being for self, I think is that's got to be master, slave, rest and the movement to reciprocity, right? Self-consciousness. Sorry if I'm just ignoring what you just said, but thinking out loud. Yeah. And so incarnate. Yeah. It sounds a lot like maybe just instantiated. But we find a beyond in the other. We find a beyond in the reflection or how does desire, right?

56:52Because desire for Hegel is all about, you know, we go and we take in and destroy the things that are outside of us. Well, or is desire just how the notion is trying to realize itself so that you're right. The first steps are we, the way that I put this when I was just teaching this to students is that, you know, what do we want? Do we want to just kill everybody else and be the only thing alive? Well, we might think we want that.

57:22That's the first moment of desire. But what desire actually wants is the full fruition of it wants a human being that will not be merely subsumed and sublated. It wants to be have this thing that can stand before it independently and therefore feed something that I didn't even know that I wanted. So the question is, is desire just the first moment of that or desire actually, is there like the sophisticated, the higher order desire? Is that part of desire?

57:53Right. Yeah. So desire is knowledge as a form, one higher order form of desire. So that makes sense, right? If I'm finding essences and then work, right? I make an art object and it reminds me of Lacan's mirror stage, right? I look, I say, look, look, I'm just flux and, but then I do make this beautiful thing, which looks static and formed and structured. And I say, look, there's me and I am also unified. And so to the extent that I get any, anything, any kind of relationship to something that's

58:27more persistent and stable in the world of becoming, whether it's essences or an art object or something like that, then I become more actualized as, as well. I become more of a persistent essence, right? That's the, in a way that's partly the Kantian stage, the knowledge stage, or you could say Aristotelian as well. But we have to move beyond that to the social. That's why I was thinking that the third is more about our relationship to other consciousnesses. And we could become aware of ourselves through that.

59:00So it kind of matches his earlier progression in the book. Yeah, I like that. So I'm looking forward so that we have about eight and a half pages left in unhappy consciousness. And we have done one, two, three, three and a half pages. I think the, I think if we want to keep going, it'll, it'll go faster because we have, we don't have to rethink all this stuff quite so much.

59:29That's the hope. That's the hope. That's the Hegelian hope. But it would be nice to actually get through the end of unhappy consciousness. It is only nine pages. So yeah, two, two more sessions, three more sessions. This is really, yeah, no, I love this. Who needs a crossword puzzle when you've got Hegel? And I think it's, it's fun that this really points out our different ways of working through things. Just that I'm, I'm, I'm always trying to just like come up with some diagram, this pointing

1:00:02at this and this is a blob over here and it's very vague. Whereas I feel like you're, you're always trying to come up with like, what is the past philosopher? What is the idea that I already have on my plate that I, and we should do both of these things. Like you gotta, you gotta do both. So I feel like, but I, but I wonder, you know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to listen to you, but then is that interfering with my visualization and you're trying to listen to me, but does that seem irrelevant to what you're coming up with? Like, so I don't know if we're working, let's try to figure out how to work, how to, how to

1:00:36synthesize these. Yeah. I'm, I think part of the problem is, you know, yeah, I'm trying to listen to what you're saying, but I'm also, it's so complicated. I'm trying to think through what he's saying. I don't think, I think it's less of a problem on other. Oh, definitely. With other texts. Definitely. Yeah. And my, my, um, this is the only way I can even remotely try to understand this is just by making associations to the history of philosophy, but, but I also do think he's talking about the history of philosophy. He is. He obviously is. And now we've, we've given, so did you read the, you said you read the secondary literature

1:01:09on this section in particular? No. Okay. Maybe a little bit of skimming. I mean, we know that it has to do with medieval Christianity and we know he's going to talk about asceticism and we, you know, we know what this is about in general, both of us, but, uh, don't maybe not the, uh, right. This is, this is still a question. Is it, is, is the minute by minute, like, are there really this many steps? Does he really need this much text to make these points? Is, is the, is, is he repeating himself a lot or are these actually more and more moments?

1:01:45I feel like he's repeating himself a lot because he knows he's using really crazy words. That's, that's the most charitable. Otherwise it's just, I know, I think we were talking about this offline that, that, uh, you know, can you just say what you, what your point is? Can you just not, can you just not use this language of this disappearing into the other thing because it's just not necessary. Just take it as a given that we understand that there are ambiguities. Just say, say clearly what the ambiguities are. Yeah.

1:02:18I mean, he, he could speak at a high, right. He wants to speak at this high level of abstraction. And maybe the point is that we're supposed to give the different interpretations of each