Hegelian Dialectics

^'86' Consciousness executes this dialectic process on itself, on:

• its knowledge, and
• its object

The result is the emergence of a new and true object called “experience”.

Consciousness knows something. This something is the essence or is per se.

• This object, however, is also the per se, the inherent reality, for consciousness. Hence comes ambiguity of this truth.

Consciousness has now 2 objects:

1. The initial perception
2. The existence of that perception

The last object appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself. It is an idea not of an object, but solely of its knowledge of that first object.

But by that very process, the first object is altered. It ceases to be the initial perception, and becomes consciously something which is initial perception only for consciousness.

Consequently, the real perception is truth for consciousness. It is the essential reality, or the object which consciousness has.

This new object contains the nothingness of the first; the new object is the experience concerning that first object.

^'87' In this treatment of the course of experience, there is an element in virtue which does not seem to agree with normal virtues.

The transition from the first object and the knowledge of it to the other object, in regard to which we say we have had experience, was so stated that the knowledge of the first object, the existence for consciousness of the first ens per se, is itself to be the second object.

But it usually seems that we learn by experience the untruth of our first notion by appealing to some other object which we may happen to find casually and externally; so that, in general, what we have is merely the bare and simple apprehension of what is in and for itself.

On the view above given, however, the new object is seen to have come about by a transformation or conversion of consciousness itself. This way of looking at the matter is our doing, what we contribute; by its means the series of experiences through which consciousness passes is lifted into a scientifically constituted sequence, but this does not exist for the consciousness we contemplate and consider.

We have here, however, the same sort of circumstance, again, of which we spoke a short time ago when dealing with the relation of this exposition to scepticism, viz. that the result which at any time comes about in the case of an untrue mode of knowledge cannot possibly collapse into an empty nothing, but must necessarily be taken as the negation of that of which it is a result — a result which contains what truth the preceding mode of knowledge has in it.

In the present instance the position takes this form: since what at first appeared as object is reduced, when it passes into consciousness, to what knowledge takes it to be, and the implicit nature, the real in itself, becomes what this entity per se, is for consciousness; this latter is the new object, whereupon there appears also a new mode or embodiment of consciousness, of which the essence is something other than that of the preceding mode.

It is this circumstance which carries forward the whole succession of the modes or attitudes of consciousness in their own necessity.

It is only this necessity, this origination of the new object — which offers itself to consciousness without consciousness knowing how it comes by it — that to us, who watch the process, is to be seen going on, so to say, behind its back.

Thereby there enters into its process a moment of being per se, or of being for us, which is not expressly presented to that consciousness which is in the grip of experience itself.

The content, however, of what we see arising, exists for it, and we lay hold of and comprehend merely its formal character, i.e. its bare origination; for it, what has thus arisen has merely the character of object, while, for us, it appears at the same time as a process and coming into being.

^'88' In virtue of that necessity, this pathway to science is itself eo ipso science.

• In regards to its content, it is Science of the Experience of Consciousness.

^'89' The experience which consciousness has of itself can, by its essential principle, embrace the entire system of consciousness, the whole realm of the truth of mind.

In it, the moments of truth are set forth in the specific and peculiar character that they here possess — i.e. not as abstract pure moments, but as they are for consciousness, or as consciousness itself appears in its relation to them, and in virtue of which they are moments of the whole, are embodiments or modes of consciousness.

In pressing forward to its true form of existence, consciousness will come to a point at which it lays aside its semblance of being hampered with what is foreign to it, with what is only for it and exists as an other.

It will reach a position where appearance becomes identified with essence, where, in consequence, its exposition coincides with just this very point, this very stage of the science proper of mind. And, finally, when it grasps this its own essence, it will connote the nature of absolute knowledge itself.