A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

The Sense Certainty chapter is an investigation into the epistemic authority of what Hegel calls “immediacy” [Unmittelbarkeit]. The distinction between immediacy and mediation is a central one in Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary. Though it has many species and ramifications, the idea he generalizes from is to be found in specifically epistemic immediacy. We can think of his terminology as anchored in Kant’s usage: All certainty is either mediated or not mediated, that is, it either requires proof or is neither susceptible nor in need of any proof. There may be ever so much in our cognition that is mediately certain only, that is only through proof, yet there must also be something indemonstrable or immediately certain, and all our cognition must start from immediately certain propositions.³ Kant is distinguishing between knowledge or belief that is the result of inference and what we come to know or believe noninferentially. The paradigm (though not the only species) of noninferentially acquired belief is observational judgments, in which subjects respond directly to perceptible states of affairs for instance, the visible redness of an apple-by coming to believe that the apple is red. It is the kind of epistemic authority distinctive of such episodes that Hegel analyzes under the rubric of “immediate sense certainty.” Kant finds it natural to talk about inference (whose most robust, knowledge-securing variety he calls “proof”) in terms of “mediation” because he is thinking of the role of the middle terms in classical syllogisms (for him, the very form of inference), which secure the inferential connections between premises and conclusions. “Certainties” that is, commitments-arrived at by reasoning are accordingly denominated “mediated.” Those with a noninferential provenance, by contrast, are called “immediate.”

Pure independence is a Bad Idea.

The struggle that transforms the second-order desire implicit in desire as such into a commitment the Master existentially identifies with inevitably results when two such desirers confront one another. “In the way that they immediately make their appearance, they exist for each other in the way ordinary objects do,” because they are “self-sufficient shapes, sunk in the being of life.” [PG 186] Desiring that everything be in itself what it is for oneself includes desiring that everyone be in themselves what they are for one. Subjects cannot show up as other subjects from the point of view of this desire, because what things are for them cannot make any difference to what things are in themselves. A kind of orectic solipsism is enforced: each sovereign subject confronts a world consisting of what for it are only objects, not other subjects.

This analysis encourages us to inquire into the activity that corresponds to the second-order desire that everything be in itself just whatever it is for the desirer. What stands to that desire as eating stands to hunger? I think the answer Hegel offers is that that activity is engaging in a life-and-death struggle with any and every other subject of that same desire. That is struggling to make the other be in itself what it is for the sovereign desirer: an object for whom and in whom only the sovereign desirer’s desires are efficacious. What makes the second-order desire for immediate constitutive power the motive for the struggle? It becomes so when it confronts, and so conflicts with, another such desire: the second-order desire of another desirer. Here two questions arise: why does confrontation with another such desirer lead inevitably to conflict, and why does such conflict matter more than any other conflict of desires of two different desirers? The independence of consciousness construing itself as purely independent is not practically compatible with the existence of other beings that are in- dependent in the same sense. The insistence on being a constitutive subject (a sovereign desiring taker) precludes the recognition of others as being subjects in the sense one is oneself. This is imperial rather than pluralistic inde- pendence. For according to this practical self-conception, everything else must depend upon the attitudes of the sovereign subject. This ultimately unworkable demand follows inexorably from the self-concept by which purely independent consciousness understands and defines itself (unto death). If a self-consciousness took itself to be just a taker rather than a constitutive taker, something things are for without the additional commitment that what things are in themselves must be just whatever they are for that taker, then that consciousness could be what it takes itself to be compatibly with others taking, and correctly taking, themselves to be subjects of the same kind (and with objects retaining some independence in the form of resistance to desire). But for a consciousness conceiving itself as constitutive, this is not possible.