Certainty of Perceptions

by Hegel

*Superphysics Note: We replace ‘Sense Certainty’ with ‘Perception’

1. The Object of Perceptions

⁹⁰ Immediate knowledge is the knowledge of the immediate, of what is.

With immediate knowledge, we immediately accept what is given. We do not alter anything in it.

⁹¹ Our senses give us concrete and sure content.

• This gives us an impression that it is the richest and truest kind of knowledge.

This is because it seems that the knowledge that we get from our senses has not yet dropped anything from its object.

• It has the object before itself in its entirety and completeness.

This bare fact of sureness , however:

• is really the most abstract and poor kind of truth
• merely says regarding what it knows: it exists.

Its only truth is that this sureness was sensed.

In this case, consciousness takes the shape merely of pure Ego.

• ‘I’ in such a case am merely qua pure ‘This’.
• The object likewise is merely qua pure ‘This’.

The conscious, sensing I, is certain of this fact before me. But this is not because:

• that consciousness has developed a connection with it, or

• the relation of that thing was unrelated to other things.

This sensing ‘I’:

• does not contain or imply a manifold of ideas
• does not think about the multiplicity of qualities of the thing

Instead, this sensing ‘I’ merely says that the thing or the fact exists.

Existence is the essential point for sense-knowledge.

• The truth in sense-knowledge is the simple immediacy of the existence of something.

In the same way, the certainty “of” something is an immediate pure relation.

Consciousness is I* – nothing more, a pure this.

The individual consciousness knows a pure this, or knows what is individual.

⁹² But, when we look closely, there is much more implied in that bare pure being.

A concrete actual certainty of sense is not merely this pure immediacy.

• It is but an example, an instance, of that immediacy.