Chapter 3
Following the Path of Despair to a Bacchanalian Revel
The Emergence of the New, True Object
I. The Emergence of the Second Object
The greatest hermeneutic challenge in reading the Introduction lies in the three paragraphs that precede the final one ([PG 85], [PG 86], and [PG 87]). For here Hegel makes two claims that are surprising enough to be worth quoting at length. The first is introduced with the observation, which we have put ourselves in a position to understand, that in the experience of error the subject (“consciousness”)
is consciousness of what to it is the true, and consciousness of its knowledge of this truth. Since both are for consciousness, consciousness itself is their comparison; whether its knowledge of the object corresponds or fails to correspond with this object will be a matter for consciousness itself. [PG 85]
The subject assesses the material compatibility of its commitments, exercising its critical rational task responsibility as a judger. Where an incompatibility is found, a choice must be made. One commitment can still be endorsed as presenting how things really are, in themselves. But then others must be unmasked as mere appearances. They are now implicitly or practically treated (“to it”) as presenting only how things are for consciousness. (Recall here the crucial distinction, which Hegel marks grammatically, as pointed out in Chapter 2, between what things are implicitly, “to” consciousness [“ihm”], and what they are explicitly, “for” consciousness.) In the example from the previous chapter, seeing its behavior when the half-immersed stick is fully removed from the water, the subject discards her commitment to its being bent, and substitutes a commitment to its being straight.
It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that the consciousness that is the subject of this experience “is their comparison.”
Something is to it the in-itself, but the knowledge or the being of the object for consciousness is to it still another moment. It is upon this differentiation, which exists and is present at hand, that the examination [Prüfung] is grounded. And if, in this comparison, the two moments do not correspond, then it seems that consciousness will have to alter its knowledge in order to bring it into accord with the object. [PG 85]
That is, after the discordance has been repaired and material compatibility restored, the appearance, what things are for consciousness, should, as far as consciousness is concerned (“to consciousness”), have been brought in line with the reality, what things are in-themselves.
But that is not how Hegel wants us to understand what happens in such experience:
In the alteration of the knowledge, however, the object itself becomes to consciousness something which has in fact been altered as well. For the knowledge which existed was essentially a knowledge of the object: with change in the knowledge, the object also becomes an other, since it was an essential part of this knowledge. Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what had been to it the in-itself is not in itself, or, what was in itself was so only for consciousness. When therefore consciousness finds its knowledge not corresponding with its object, the object itself will also give way. In other words, the standard [Maßstab] of the examination is changed if that whose standard it was supposed to be fails to endure the course of the examination. Thus the examination is not only an examination of knowledge, but also of the standard used in the examination itself. [PG 85]
This is very odd. Why should we think that, when a commitment a subject took to express how things really are (the commitment that expresses to it what things are in themselves) is revealed as expressing merely how things are for consciousness, the reality changes? When I realize that the stick I took to be bent is really straight, my view of the stick changes, but the stick itself does not. That I took it to be bent is not, in our ordinary way of thinking, an essential feature of the stick (the reality). Surely the contrary claim does not follow from what one might justifiably claim: that its object, the stick, was an essential feature of the appearance, the stick-as-bent. The stick serves as a standard for assessments of the correctness of my commitments as to its shape. In what sense does that standard change when I realize that my shape-commitment does not measure up to the standard, that it gets things wrong? Hegel’s claim here seems extravagant and perverse. He offers the argument:
For the knowledge which existed was essentially [wesentlich] a knowledge of the object: with change in the knowledge, the object also becomes an other, since it was an essential part of this knowledge.
This argument appears to trade on an obviously unwarranted slide. Even if we grant that what it is a claim about (what it represents) is essential to the identity of the claim—so that altering the represented object would alter the content of the claim—it just does not follow that the content of the claim is correspondingly essential to the identity of the represented object—so that altering the content of the claim alters the object. “Being essential to” is not in general a symmetrical relation. So, for instance, we might think that the identity of my parents is essential to my identity. Anyone with different people as parents would be someone different from me; it is not possible for me to have had different people as parents. But when we look at the converse, it does seem possible that my parents might never have had any children, or had only some of the children they did, not including me. Essentiality of origin of humans does not entail essentiality of offspring. It is easy to see Hegel here as engaging in a sleight of hand, attempting to smuggle in unobserved an implausible idealism that makes what is thought about it essential to the identity of what is thought about. But, as we shall see, that would be to misunderstand the claim he is making.
The second surprising claim is introduced as part of an account of the basic structure of experience, in the distinctive technical sense Hegel introduces here:
This dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises on its self—on its knowledge as well as its object—is, in so far as the new, true object emerges to consciousness as the result of it, precisely that which is called experience. [PG 86]
The challenge posed by the earlier passage is echoed here. How are we to understand the “movement” that consciousness “exercises” on the object of its knowledge? The key question will turn out to be this: when commitment to the stick as bent is discarded and replaced by commitment to the stick as straight, what exactly is the “new, true object”? Answering this question correctly is integral to understanding the sense in which, on Hegel’s account, the representational purport of conceptually contentful commitments is itself something to consciousness, implicit in its own process of experience. In order to understand the justification for saying that the experience of error changes not only how the subject is committed to things being (the stick is taken to be straight, not bent)—that is, “consciousness’s knowledge”—but also the object of that knowledge, the essential point to realize is that the “new, true object” that “emerges to consciousness” is not the straight stick. (After all, it didn’t change; it was straight all along.)
Hegel describes the experience like this:
Consciousness knows something, and this object is the essence or the in-itself. But this object is also the in-itself for consciousness; and hence the ambiguity of this truth comes into play. We see that consciousness now has two objects; one is the first in-itself and the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself. The latter seems at first to be merely the reflection of consciousness into its self, a representation, not of an object, but only of its knowledge of the first object. But, as already indicated, the first object comes to be altered for consciousness in this very process; it ceases to be the in-itself and becomes to consciousness an object which is the in-itself only for it. And therefore it follows that this, the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself, is the true, which is to say that this true is the essence or consciousness’ new object. This new object contains the annihilation of the first; it is the experience constituted through that first object. [PG 86]
The first thing to notice is that the first object is described as the “first in-itself.” That implies that there is (at least) another in-itself. But there is only one real stick (and it is straight). The key to understanding this is that what is at issue here is the role something can play in experience. The role in question is being an in-itself to consciousness. To be an in-itself to consciousness is to be what consciousness practically takes or treats as real. At the beginning of the experience, the subject in question endorses the claim that the stick is bent. That is what the subject takes to be real. That bent-stick commitment expresses the first in-itself to consciousness: how it initially takes things really, objectively, to be. The second in-itself to consciousness is expressed by the later straight-stick endorsement.
What, then, is the second object being talked about in this passage? It is not the straight stick (which is the second in-itself to consciousness). Hegel says here the second object is the “being-for-consciousness” of the first in-itself. What does that mean? When he introduces the movement of experience in the previous paragraph, Hegel says:
Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what had been to it the in-itself is not in itself, or, what was in itself was so only for consciousness. [PG 85]
What the subject discovers is that what it had taken to express the way things really are (the stick is bent) actually expresses only an appearance. The role the bent-stick representation plays for consciousness, what it is to consciousness, has changed. It “becomes to consciousness an object which is the in-itself only for it.” The “new, true object” is the bent-stick representation revealed as erroneous, as a misrepresentation of what is now to the subject the way things really are: a straight stick. This representing is “true,” not in the sense of representing how things really are, but in the sense that what it is now to consciousness is what it really is: a mere appearance, a misrepresenting. That is why “[t]his new object contains the annihilation of the first; it is the experience constituted through that first object.”
This is the sense in which “[i]n the alteration of the knowledge … the object itself becomes to consciousness something which has in fact been altered as well.” What alters is the status of the bent-stick representing, what it is to consciousness. It had enjoyed the status of being to consciousness what the stick is in itself. But now its status has changed to being to consciousness only what the stick was for consciousness: an appearance. Understanding that the two “objects” are the bent-stick representation when it was endorsed and the bent-stick representation when it is no longer endorsed, we are now in a position to see that on our first reading we misunderstood “knowledge of the object” in the following argument:
For the knowledge which existed was essentially a knowledge of the object: with change in the knowledge, the object also becomes an other, since it was an essential part of this knowledge.
What is knowledge to consciousness is what is endorsed, what the subject practically or implicitly takes to be how things really are. What has, to consciousness, the status of knowledge changes in the course of the experience, from being the stick as bent to being the stick as straight. That was knowledge of the object not in the sense in which a representing is of something represented, but in the sense that the status (being to consciousness knowledge) was possessed or exhibited by the object (the bent-stick representation). That the status was possessed by that object (that conceptual content) is indeed essential to that knowing [“denn das vorhandene Wissen war wesentlich ein Wissen von dem Gegenstande”]. When the status attaches to something else, a straight-stick representation, it is in a straightforward sense a different knowing. What object (here, crucially, in the sense of what conceptual content) the status attaches to is essential to its being that knowing. Altering the knowing, by endorsing a different, incompatible content, alters the status of the original content, and so alters the “object” associated with the original knowing: its status changes from being a conceptual content that is endorsed to being one that is rejected. (Hegel could have avoided confusion here either by not introducing this new sense of “object of knowledge”—as referring to a candidate knowing’s conceptual content, rather than to what that content represents—or by explaining it when he does.)
So read, the claim that was originally surprising is no longer surprising. The second surprising claim is one that Hegel himself flags as such:
In this presentation of the course of experience, there is a moment in virtue of which it does not seem to be in agreement with the ordinary use of the term “experience.” This moment is the transition from the first object and the knowledge of that object to the other object. Although it is said that the experience is made in this other object, here the transition has been presented in such a way that the knowledge of the first object, or the being-for-consciousness of the first in-itself, is seen to become the second object itself. By contrast, it usually seems that we somehow discover another object in a manner quite accidental and extraneous, and that we experience in it the untruth of our first Concept. What would fall to us, on this ordinary view of experience, is therefore simply the pure apprehension of what exists in and for itself. From the viewpoint of the present investigation, however, the new object shows itself as having come into being through an inversion of consciousness itself. [PG 87]
Here Hegel is explicitly acknowledging that there is a danger of being misled by the way he has described the experience of error. He explicitly confirms the reading we have been considering: the second (“new, true”) object is the “being-for-consciousness of the first in-itself.” The “inversion of consciousness” is the change in status of the “stick is bent” propositional conceptual content from being endorsed (as reality) to being rejected (as mere appearance). His surprising claim is that this element of experience—the unmasking of what one had taken to present reality as it is in itself as in fact a mere appearance, a representation that is a misrepresentation—is the centrally important one, not the new perception that leads one to endorse the claim that the stick is straight. That new “object”—that is, conceptual content we are led to endorse—indeed prompts the experience of error. But if we focus on the event that contingently occasions the process that is the experience, he is saying, we will miss what is necessary and essential to that process.
This new way of thinking about experience that he is recommending is really the major point of the whole Introduction. It makes possible the sort of narrative that occupies the rest of the Phenomenology. Focusing on the distinctive “inversion of consciousness” by which what was to the subject the way things are in themselves is unmasked as merely how things were for consciousness is what will give us, Hegel’s readers, a phenomenological insight that is not part of the experience of error of the phenomenal consciousness we are considering. The passage quoted earlier continues:
This way of observing the subject matter is our contribution; it does not exist for the consciousness which we observe. But when viewed in this way the sequence of experiences constituted by consciousness is raised to the level of a scientific progression. [PG 87]
This shift of perspective is what makes possible the “science of the experience of consciousness” [PG 87]—the working title with which Hegel began the project of writing what would become the Phenomenology. The particular commitments, acknowledgments of whose material incompatibility initiates a process of experience, are contingent. What is necessary about that process is the acknowledgment of error, and the subsequent disillusionment it leads to. What is necessary is “the movement which is cognition—the transforming of that in-itself into that which is for itself,” as Hegel says at the very end of the book. [PG 802] At this point in our story, we understand what that movement is, but not yet why it is the key to the science of the experience of consciousness. That is the topic of the final section of this chapter.
II. From Skepticism to Truth through Determinate Negation
Hegel tells us that the key to understanding the significance of the change in perspective he is urging is to think through the significance for the threat of skepticism of the role of what is made explicit in experience by the concept of determinate negation. The penultimate paragraph of the Introduction continues:
As a matter of fact, the circumstance which guides this way of observing is the same as the one previously discussed with regard to the relationship between the present inquiry and skepticism: In every case the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge must not be allowed to dissolve into an empty nothingness but must of necessity be grasped as the nothingness of that whose result it is, a result which contains what is true in the previous knowledge. Within the present context, this circumstance manifests itself as follows: When that which at first appeared as the object sinks to the level of being to consciousness a knowledge of the object, and when the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself, then this is the new object. [PG 87]
We have put ourselves in a position to understand this final sentence, about how the change of normative status a judgeable content undergoes when the subject withdraws a previous endorsement (the “inversion of consciousness”) is intelligible as the emergence of a new object. What does this have to do with the attitude we should take toward skepticism?
The issue arises because of the expository trajectory we have traversed. In Chapter 1, I claimed that we should read the opening of the Introduction as concerned that epistemological skepticism not be forced on us already by our semantics. The more specific diagnosis is that skepticism will be forced on us if we construe the relation between appearance and reality as one in which conceptually contentful representings confront nonconceptually structured representeds across what then looms as a gulf of intelligibility. I claimed further that Hegel’s proposed therapy (gestured at in the Introduction, and developed in the Consciousness chapters) is to identify conceptual contentfulness with determinateness, and to understand determinateness in terms of negation. This is appealing to the Spinozist principle Omnis determinatio est negatio. The kind of negation in question, determinate negation, corresponds to Aristotelian contraries, not Aristotelian contradictories, which would be understood in terms of formal or abstract negation. The determinateness of a thought or state of affairs (predicate or property) is a matter of its modally robust exclusion of other thoughts or states of affairs, those it is materially incompatible with.
This conception allows Hegel to endorse another central Spinozist doctrine: “[T]he order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas.” For this notion of determinateness applies equally to things and thoughts, representeds and representings. No gulf of intelligibility is excavated between appearance and reality. Determinate thoughts and determinate states of affairs are, as determinate, both conceptually contentful, and hence in principle intelligible. Epistemological skepticism is not built into this semantics at the outset.
In this context, there is no reason not to construe the semantic relation between appearance and reality in representational terms. But understanding conceptual content in terms of the concept of determinate negation does not just allow such a representational construal. In Hegel’s hands it makes possible a constructive analysis of the representational dimension it finds to be implicit in conceptual content.1 Hegel combines this fundamental aspect of Spinoza’s thought (the structural isomorphism of the order and connection of things and ideas, construed in terms of relations of determinate negation) with a Kantian idea that Spinoza did not have. For Spinoza did not appreciate the distinctive normative character of the “order and connection of ideas,” which distinguishes it from the order and connection of things. Hegel’s synthesis of Spinoza with Kant depends on Kant’s grounding of semantics in pragmatics: his account of what one must do in order to take responsibility for a judgeable conceptual content.
In Chapter 2, I rehearsed how Hegel’s account of the experience of error—what he makes of Kant’s critical integrative task responsibility in synthesizing a constellation of commitments that has the rational unity distinctive of apperception—underwrites an implicit, practical grasp of representational purport. Downstream from Kant, Hegel’s conception of determinate negation accordingly incorporates an essentially dynamic element. It arises out of the crucial residual asymmetry between the order and connection of ideas and that of things. It is impossible for one object simultaneously to exhibit materially incompatible properties (or for two incompatible states of affairs to obtain), while it is only inappropriate for one subject simultaneously to endorse materially incompatible commitments. Representings are articulated by deontic normative relations of inclusion and exclusion, while representeds are articulated by alethic modal ones. Finding oneself with materially incompatible commitments obliges one to do something, to revise those commitments so as to remove the incoherence. It is only in terms of that obligation to repair that we can understand what it is to take or treat two objective properties or states of affairs as incompatible in the alethic modal sense. Understanding the representational dimension of conceptual content—the relation and connection between the deontic and alethic limbs of the cognitive-practical constellation of subjective and objective—requires understanding how the experience of error, articulated in normative terms, is intelligible as the (re)presentation of objective alethic modal relations of incompatibility. Unlike Spinoza’s, Hegel’s concept of determinate negation is Janus-faced, displaying subjective and objective aspects that are complementary in the sense of being reciprocally sense-dependent.2 On the side of the subject, the normative significance of negation is pragmatic: it yields an obligation to movement, change, development. Determinate negation (material incompatibility) mediates the relation between pragmatics and semantics—as well as the relation between the expressive and the representational dimensions of intentionality, on the semantic side.
But the revelation that the semantogenic core of experience is the experience of error, that its essence consists in the unmasking of something as not real, but as mere appearance, seems to raise once more the specter of skepticism. If error is the necessary form of experience, if what one implicitly discovers in experience is always the incorrectness and inadequacy of one’s knowledge or understanding, then why is not skepticism the right conclusion to draw? Why has not Hegel’s own concept of experience shown itself as the “path of despair”?
Hegel wants to understand the relation between the two “objects,” the “first in-itself” and the “being-for-consciousness of the in-itself” as one of negation. “This new object contains the nothingness [Nichtigkeit] of the first, it is what experience has made of it.” [PG 86] The key point is that skepticism results from taking the sense in which the second object is negation of the first to be formal or abstract negation, rather than determinate negation. Doing that is “allowing the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge” to “dissolve into an empty nothingness.” The sense in which the second object “contains the nothingness of the first” is not that “[t]he stick is bent” is succeeded by “[t]he stick is not bent.” It is that it is succeeded by the realization that “[t]he stick is bent” is not saying how things really are. It is an appearance of, a misrepresentation of a straight stick. That is the materially incompatible commitment for which the bent-stick representation was discarded, changing the normative status of the discarded one. The original commitment is not revealed by its incorrectness to be merely an appearance (wholly misleading)—but to be the appearance of a reality. It is genuinely an appearance of that reality: a way that reality shows up for consciousness. It is wrong, but it is not simply wrong. It is a path to the truth.
When Hegel says that “the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge” must “be grasped as the nothingness of that whose result it is, a result which contains what is true in the previous knowledge,” this is so in a double sense. First, the original take on things is not simply canceled, leaving a void—as a bare contradiction of it would do. It is replaced by a contrary, substantive commitment—one that is materially, not merely formally, incompatible with it. Something positive has been learned: the stick is straight. Second, the transition from the original object to the second, true object is a change of status from a propositional attitude ascribable to the subject de dicto to one ascribable (also) de re. Whereas before we, and the subject, could say “S believes that the stick is bent,” after the experience of error and the rejection of the original endorsement in favor of a materially contrary one, the very same attitude is ascribable as “S believes of a straight stick that it is bent.” That is the point of the analysis of representational purport and its uptake in terms of the experience of error, introduced in Chapter 2. The transformation of status is a rejection of a prior endorsement, but it is not just a rejection of it. In an important sense, it is an enrichment of its content, as it becomes to the subject a claim about something. The representational dimension of its conceptual content (that it is about something, the appearance of something, that the content is a representing) becomes manifest—albeit by its being revealed as a misrepresenting of what is represented.
As we saw in Chapter 1, the unintelligibility of this representational dimension is characteristic of the semantically rooted epistemological skepticism Hegel diagnoses in the opening paragraphs of the Introduction. It is no surprise at this point, then, to learn that skepticism’s characteristic defect is a failure to appreciate the role of determinate negation in understanding the extraction of positive consequences from the experience of error.
[T]he presentation of untrue consciousness in its untruth is not a merely negative movement, as natural consciousness one-sidedly views it. And a mode of knowledge which makes this one-sidedness its basic principle is … the skepticism which sees in every result only pure nothingness and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is determinate, that it is the nothingness of that from which it results. In fact, it is only when nothingness is taken as the nothingness of what it comes from that it is the true result; for then nothingness itself is a determinate nothingness and has a content. The skepticism which ends up with the abstraction of nothingness, or with emptiness, cannot proceed any further but must wait and see whether anything new presents itself to it, and what this is, in order to cast it into the same abysmal void. But if, on the contrary, the result is comprehended as it truly is, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen. [PG 79]
Only from the point of view he is recommending can we make sense of the fact that in each experience of error something positive is learned. One of the pieces of the puzzle—and of Hegel’s solution—that I hope to have added here is the understanding of how the representational dimension of conceptual content, no less than the expressive dimension, becomes intelligible in terms of the essential constitutive role determinate negation plays in the process of experience.
Nonetheless, we can ask: Why doesn’t Hegel’s account of experience as the experience of error, as the unmasking of what we took to reality as appearance, as the revelation of what was to subjects the way things are in themselves as merely how they are for consciousness, provide exactly the premise needed for a fallibilist metainduction? The fallibilist metainduction is the inference that starts with the observation that every belief we have had or judgment we have made has eventually turned out to be false, at least in detail, and concludes that every belief or judgment we ever will or even could have will similarly eventually be found wanting—if we but subject it to sufficient critical scrutiny. Early on in the Introduction, Hegel tells us that this skeptical conclusion is a natural one for those who have not learned the lessons he is teaching us:
Natural consciousness will show itself to be merely the Concept of knowledge, or unreal knowledge. But since it immediately takes itself to be real knowledge, this pathway has a negative significance for it, and what is actually the realization of the Concept is for it rather the loss and destruction of its self: for on this road it loses its truth. The road may thus be viewed as the path of doubt, or, more properly, as the path of despair.… [T]his road is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge. [PG 78]
What one needs to learn to see that this is the wrong conclusion is the central semantic significance of the experience of error for the intelligibility of the representational dimension of conceptual content. But to understand the positive significance of the unmasking of commitments as determinately mistaken, as misrepresentations since corrected, a substantive new conception of truth is required. That conception is developed in the body of the Phenomenology, and only hinted at in the introductory material. It is foreshadowed, however, already in the Preface.
Truth … includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True.…
Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is in itself, and constitutes actuality and the movement of the life of truth. [PG 47]
Instead of thinking of truth as an achievable state or status, Hegel wants us to think of it as characteristic of a process: the process of experience, in which appearances “arise and pass away.” They arise as appearances taken as veridical: ways things are for consciousness that are endorsed as how they are in themselves. When they are found to be materially incompatible with other commitments in the experience of error, some are rejected—a transformation of status that is the arising of the “second, true object,” the appearance as a misrepresentation, becoming to consciousness only how things are for consciousness. This process of weighing the credentials of competing commitments to determine which should be retained and which altered so as to remove local material incompatibilities is the process by which we find out (more about) how things really are.
The passage continues with a famous image:
The True is thus a Bacchanalian revel, with not a member sober; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose.3
The revel is the restless elbowing of commitments discovered to be incompatible. Those that “drop out” are those that undergo the transformation of experience and are rejected in order to maintain the rational homeostasis that Hegel identifies as a state of “simple repose.” The party continues its movement and development, because the place of those that fall away is immediately taken by other commitments.
III. Recollection and the Science of the Experience of Consciousness
This axial passage from the Preface continues in a way that introduces three themes with which I want to end:
Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent.
In the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence, is preserved as something that recollects itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is just as immediately existence. [PG 47]
First, the truth-process, whose structure is that of the experience of error, is the process by which conceptual contents develop and are determined. It is not just the process by which judgments are selected, but also the process by which concepts evolve. It is the process in and through which more and more of how the world really is, what is actually materially incompatible with what in the objective alethic sense becomes incorporated in material incompatibilities deontically acknowledged by subjects. For one’s response to the acknowledged incompatibility of two commitments one finds oneself with often is to adjust one’s commitments concerning what is incompatible with what (and so what follows from what). If my initial concept of an acid obliges me to apply it to any liquid that tastes sour, and applying it commits me to that liquid turning litmus paper red, I might respond to a sour liquid that turns litmus paper blue (and the incompatibility of those two color commitments) not by rejecting either the perceptual judgment of sourness or the perceptual judgment of blue, but by revising the norms articulating my concept. I might, for instance, take it that only clear liquids that taste sour are acids, or that cloudy acids don’t turn litmus paper red. It is because and insofar as they inherit the results of many such experiences of error that the conceptual contents subjects acknowledge and deploy track the objective modal conceptual articulation of the world as well as they do. That is why the experience of error is a truth process.
The second point is that Hegel’s invocation of recollection [Erinnerung], to which he returns at the very end of the Phenomenology, is a gesture at the third phase of the experience of error. We have already considered the first two: acknowledging the material incompatibility of some of one’s commitments and revising one’s commitments (including those concerning what is incompatible with what) so as to repair the discordance. What Hegel calls “recollection” is a subsequent rational reconstruction of the extended process of experience that has led to one’s current constellation of commitments. What is reconstructed is a sequence of episodes, each of which exhibits the three-phase structure of acknowledgment, repair, and recollection of materially incompatible commitments one has endorsed. From the actual process of past experience the recollector selects a trajectory that is exhibited as expressively progressive—that is, as having the form of a gradual, cumulative revelation of how things really are (according to the recollector). It is a Whiggish story (characteristic of old-fashioned histories of science) of how the way things are in themselves came to be the way they veridically appeared for consciousness. That in this way the past is constantly turned into a history (differently with each tripartite episode of experience) is how Hegel understands reason as retrospectively “giving contingency the form of necessity.”
The third point is that the recollection phase of experience is a crucial element in what Hegel calls (in [PG 87]) the science of the experience of consciousness. So far in these chapters on the Introduction I have talked a lot about the experience of consciousness, but not officially about the science of the experience of consciousness. This might well have led to some puzzlement. Why am I talking about the role in experience of mundane concepts such as bent stick and straight stick when the book Hegel is introducing us to focuses exclusively on concepts such as consciousness, self-consciousness, and agency (that is, cognitive authority, the social institution of authority, and practical authority)? Why have I been discussing the development of constellations of judgments and concepts when Hegel is concerned, at least in the second half of the Introduction, as in the Phenomenology, with the development of “shapes of consciousness”? Such questions, while understandable, are misplaced. Though I have not explicitly been talking about it, what I have been doing is an exercise of the “science of the experience of consciousness.” For that “science” is the explicit, self-conscious understanding of the “experience of consciousness.”
I take it that any understanding of Hegel (or Kant) must start with what he has to teach us about ordinary, ground-level empirical and practical experience—for him (as for Kant) a matter of applying what he calls “determinate concepts.” These are concepts like stick and straight, blue and sour. What he calls “speculative” or “logical” concepts are theoretical philosophical metaconcepts whose distinctive expressive role it is to make explicit features of the conceptual contents and use (the semantics and pragmatics) of those ground-level concepts. The Phenomenology is a story about the development of those higher-level concepts in terms of which his readers (“phenomenological consciousness”) can be brought to comprehend discursive activity in general (“phenomenal consciousness”). The measure of our understanding of what he has to say on that topic lies principally in the sense we can use those metaconcepts to make of the whole constellation of conceptually articulated normative practice and institutions Hegel calls “Spirit.” That is why I have started my story with what I take it he wants us ultimately to understand about the “experience of consciousness.” This methodological approach is what in the Introduction to this work I called the strategy of “semantic descent.”
It is only when we are clear about the relations between the story about the use and content of ground-level concepts and the metaconcepts Hegel uses to explain those uses and contents that we can consider what it is to render the development of either kind of concept in scientific terms, in Hegel’s sense of that term. To do that is to tell a certain kind of retrospective, rationally reconstructive story about their development—one that displays an expressively progressive history, made out of the past. This is the third phase of the process of experience, which is initiated by the acknowledgment of the material incompatibility of some commitments, proceeds through the local and temporary resolution of that incoherence by relinquishing or modifying some commitments (including those concerning what is materially incompatible with or a consequence of what) while retaining others, and culminates in comprehending the experience by situating it as the current culmination of a process in which previous commitments show up as ever more revelatory (but still ultimately inadequate) appearances for consciousness of what (one now takes it) things are in themselves. The capstone of Hegel’s account (at the end of the Reason chapter, and further at the end of the Spirit chapter) will be to show us how this recollective, retrospective rationally reconstructive, etiological phase of the process of experience means that such experience is at once both the (further) determining of the content of concepts (whether determinate or philosophical), in the sense of the expressive dimension of conceptual content (“that”-intentionality) that is articulated by relations of determinate negation, and the discerning of referents (Bedeutungen, what things are in themselves) that are represented by such senses (Sinne, what things are for consciousness) along the representational dimension of conceptual content (“of”-intentionality), as articulated by the process that is the experience of error, normatively governed by relations of determinate negation.4 This notion of retrospective recollective rationality is one of Hegel’s deepest and most original ideas. Unpacking it and showing how it ties together all the various strands in Hegel’s story is one of the principal tasks of the rest of this book.
Hegel thinks that the only form a theoretical comprehension of the conceptual and representational content of a concept can take is such a genealogy of a process of experience by which it is determined. This is true whether what is being addressed is a constellation of concepts-and-commitments at the metalevel of scientific self-consciousness, or at the ground-level of empirical consciousness. That is why he assimilates them in the Preface passage we have been considering:
Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent.
A proper metalevel account of the experience of consciousness is a science of the experience of (ground-level) consciousness. The Phenomenology recounts the experience of the science of the experience of consciousness: the process by which metaconcepts he takes to be adequate to comprehend explicitly the process of experience are themselves developed and determined. We see Hegel asserting that the experience of error as here described is also the mechanism whereby new “shapes of consciousness” arise, in a passage we are now in a position to appreciate:
When that which at first appeared as the object sinks to the level of being to consciousness a knowledge of the object, and when the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself, then this is the new object. And with this new object a new Shape of consciousness also makes its appearance, a Shape to which the essence is something different from that which was the essence to the preceding Shape. It is this circumstance which guides the entire succession of the Shapes of consciousness in its necessity. But it is this necessity alone—or the emergence of the new object, presenting itself to consciousness without the latter’s knowing how this happens to it—which occurs for us, as it were, behind its back. A moment which is both in-itself and for-us is thereby introduced into the movement of consciousness, a moment which does not present itself for the consciousness engaged in the experience itself. But the content of what we see emerging exists for it, and we comprehend only the formal aspect of what emerges or its pure emerging. For consciousness, what has emerged exists only as an object; for us, it exists at once as movement and becoming.
This, then, is the necessity in virtue of which the present road toward science is itself already a science. And, in accordance with its content, it may be called the science of the experience of consciousness. [PG 87]
In these three chapters I have focused on what Hegel will have to say about the semantics and pragmatics of the concepts deployed and determined through base-level experience, by way of preparation for understanding the course of the experience of metalevel self-consciousness that he recollects for us in the body of the Phenomenology. This is the hermeneutic strategy that in my Introduction I called “semantic descent.” It begins to articulate a semantic reading of Hegel’s book. Chapter 1 introduced the basic criteria of adequacy on an account of the relations between the subjective and the objective poles of the intentional nexus that Hegel begins by putting in place. An adequate semantics must support an acceptable epistemology. Hegel’s own response is a nonpsychological conception of the conceptual, according to which to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other similarly contentful items. This way of thinking about conceptual content supports bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism. This is the view that conceptual content shows up in two different forms, which are distinguished by the modality of the relations of incompatibility and consequence. Determinate objective states of affairs are conceptually contentful in standing to one another in alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessitation. Determinate subjective thoughts express the same conceptual contents by standing to one another in deontic modal relations of normative preclusion and consequential commitment. Chapter 2 introduced Hegel’s pragmatist idea that the representational purport of what things are for consciousness is to be understood in terms of the process and practice that is the experience of error. This chapter then looked more closely at the fine structure of the process of experience. To the first two phases of an episode of experience—the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments and the repair of that incompatibility—it added the retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of the process. All these aspects of the use of concepts are needed to understand how the representational dimension of conceptual contentfulness is instituted by the process of determining their contents by applying concepts in experience. The Consciousness chapters of the Phenomenology go on to deepen this pragmatist semantic story by showing how it emerges from purely epistemological concerns, as those concerns are gradually sharpened into their proper semantic form in the philosophy of science.