Science of Knowledge

^'76' But we do not need to concern ourselves with useless ideas and expressions.

Instead of being troubled with such things, they may be straightway rejected as arbitrary ideas that are deceptive.

• They even ward off science by making a mere empty show of knowledge which at once vanishes when science comes on the scene.

But science, in the very fact that it comes on the scene, is itself a phenomenon.

• Its “coming on the scene” is not yet itself carried out in all the length and breadth of its truth.

It does not matter that science is the phenomenon because it appears alongside another kind of knowledge.

Science, however, must liberate itself from this phenomenality.

• It can only do so by turning against it.

Science cannot simply:

• reject a form of knowledge which is not true, and
• treat this as a common view of things, and then
• assure us that itself is an entirely different kind of knowledge, and holds the other to be of no account at all.

Nor can it appeal to the fact that in this other there are presages of a better.

By giving that assurance it would declare its force and value to lie in its bare existence.

But the untrue knowledge appeals likewise to the fact that it is, and assures us that to it science is nothing.

One barren assurance, however, is of just as much value as another.

This is why we shall here undertake the exposition of knowledge as a phenomenon.

The Pathway to Knowledge

^'77' This exposition only has phenomenal knowledge as its object.

The exposition itself is not a science, free, self-moving in the shape proper to itself.

It is a pathway of the natural consciousness which is pressing forward to true knowledge.

• It is the path of the soul traversing the series of its own forms of embodiment
  • It is like stages appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may possess the clearness of spiritual life when, through the complete experience of its own self, it arrives at the knowledge of what it is in itself.

^'78' Natural consciousness will prove itself to be only knowledge in principle or not real knowledge.

It immediately takes itself to be the real and genuine knowledge.

This pathway has a negative significance for consciousness because being on this path makes phenomenal knowledge lose its own truth.

• The path gives us conscious insight into the untruth of the phenomenal knowledge

• Because of that, the road is seen as the path of doubt or highway of despair.

Skepticism

⁷⁹ Consciousness traverses on this road through a series of shapes.

• It is the detailed history of the process of training consciousness onto the level of science.

The end goal is to be a science, abstract intention, or untruth.

• This pathway, on the other hand, is, is the actual carrying out of that process of development.

To follow one’s own conviction is certainly more than to hand oneself over to authority.

But by the conversion of opinion held on authority into opinion held out of personal conviction, the content of what is held is not necessarily altered, and truth has not thereby taken the place of error.

If we stick to a system of opinion and prejudice resting on the authority of others, or upon personal conviction, the one differs from the other merely in the conceit which animates the latter.

On the contrary, skepticism directed to the whole phenomenal consciousness makes mind qualified to test what truth is.

• It brings about a despair on our natural views, thoughts, and opinions.
• It does not matter to whom those natural views belong.

The completeness of the forms of unreal consciousness will be brought about precisely through the necessity of the advance and the necessity of their connection with one another.

The exposition of untrue consciousness in its untruth is not a merely negative process.

• The natural consciousness generally adopts such a one-sided view of it.
• A kind of knowledge makes this one-sidedness its essence.
  • It is one of those shapes assumed by incomplete consciousness which falls into the course of the inquiry itself and will come before us there.

This is the view of scepticism.

• It only sees pure nothingness in the result.
• It abstracts from the fact that this nothing is determinate, is the nothing of that out of which it comes as a result.

Nothing, however, is only, in fact, the true result, when taken as the nothing of what it comes from; it is thus itself a determinate nothing, and has a content.

The scepticism which ends with the abstraction “nothing” or “emptiness” can advance from this not a step farther.

• It must wait and see whether there is possibly anything new offered, and what that is — in order to cast it into the same abysmal void.

When once, on the other hand, the result is apprehended, as it truly is, as determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen.

In the negation, the transition is made by which the progress through the complete succession of forms comes about of itself.