Chapter 5 introduction

If one finds it necessary in philosophy to understand knowledge itself, that is to say, the instrument by which one grasps the Absolute, or the It is a natural idea to examine first the means by which one observes the Absolute.Such an idea or consideration is obviously justified, on the one hand, because there can be various kinds of knowledge, some kinds may be more suitable for our ultimate purpose than others, and it is therefore possible Making a wrong choice among them is also because, on the other hand, since cognition is a kind of faculty belonging to a certain kind and having a certain range, if its nature and boundaries are not determined more precisely, it will be grasped through it. Yes, it may be dark clouds of error instead of the blue sky of truth.This idea must even become a belief that the whole method of obtaining for consciousness that which exists in itself by knowing is contradictory in its conception, that there is an existence between knowledge and the Absolute. There is a clear line between the two.For if cognition is the tool we use to possess the absolute essence, then we can immediately see that using a tool on a thing does not keep the thing in its original form, but changes the shape of the thing.Or, if knowledge is not a tool for our activities, but a passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then we do not acquire things as they exist in themselves. is what it looks like in the medium.In both cases, the means we use produce something contrary to the end for which it was intended; or rather, it is unreasonable for us to use the means to achieve the end.Yes, it seems that this unfavorable situation can be remedied through our understanding of the role of tools, because after recognizing the role of tools, it is possible for us to incorporate the ideas about the absolute that we have acquired through tools into tools. That part is drawn out of the result to obtain the pure truth about the Absolute.But this remedy, in fact, can only lead us back to where we were.For if we transform something with a tool, and then cancel the change made by the tool from the changed thing, then the thing—absolute here—is not much to us. Little reverted back to what it was before this unnecessary trouble.Or, if Absolute is not changed by tools, but is only attracted to us, just like a bird is attracted by a glue stick, then if Absolute is not already there and willing to be near us, it must be Laugh at such a trick; for in this case knowledge is a trick.why?For knowing, through its multifaceted labors, pretends that its efforts are far from merely producing immediate and therefore effortless relations.Or, if we study our cognition of imagining it as a medium, so as to recognize the law of refraction of light by this medium, and then extract the refraction of light from the result, then the refraction is removed in this way For knowledge is not the refraction of light, knowledge is light itself, which brings us into contact with truth, and if the light is withdrawn, then what remains to guide us is not only a pure The direction or the place of emptiness?

At the same time, if this fear of being wrong is a distrust of a science which, quite without it, goes straight to work and actually realizes knowledge, we do not understand why it should not be the other way around. This kind of mistrust takes the form of distrust, that is, why isn't this fear of making a mistake itself a mistake?In fact this scruple consists in assuming something, indeed many things, to be true, on the basis of which many considerations and inferences are drawn; It's not the truth, but it should be checked first.Rather, it presupposes the idea of ​​knowledge as an instrument and medium, it also presupposes a difference between ourselves and this knowledge, and it presupposes above all that the Absolute is on the side and knowledge is on the side. On the other hand, knowledge is for itself and unrelated to the Absolute, but it is a real thing. In other words, although knowledge is outside the Absolute, and of course outside the truth, it still has truth—such An assumption that makes people feel that the so-called fear of error is actually a fear of the truth.

We come to this conclusion because only the absolute is true, or only the truth is absolute.Those who disagree with this conclusion may, of course, make this distinction, insisting that a kind of knowledge does not know the Absolute as science wishes, but still know it, and that knowledge in general, though incapable of grasping the Absolute, can The ability to grasp other kinds of truth.However, we will see in the end that those who make such arguments are based on a vague distinction between an absolute truth and a truth of a different nature; Words like Absolute and Knowing presuppose a meaning which should be sought now.

We don't have to worry about such useless concepts and sayings that regard cognition as a tool to grasp the absolute or a medium by which we rely on a glimpse of the truth (it can be said that everything about the absolute is not related to the absolute). The idea of ​​cognition and the idea of ​​the absolute not related to cognition, both come down to the relationship of tools and media, etc.); and we need not pay attention to the excuses that people who are not capable of engaging in science start from assuming that Just as there are excuses found in some relationships to avoid the toil of scientific research and at the same time to pretend to be serious and diligent; are to be dismissed as accidental and arbitrary notions, and even to use such words as Absolute, Knowing, Objective and Subjective, and countless others whose meanings are assumed to be familiar to all, can be considered a deception.For to pretend that their meaning is well known and that everyone himself has a conception of them, etc., seems rather a trick to evade its main task, that is, to dispense with the provision of such concepts. task.In fact, on the contrary, another kind of work should be said to be more reason to be dispensed with, that is, we need not pay attention to those concepts and statements that can fundamentally negate science, because these concepts and statements only constitute an empty theory. The phenomenon of knowledge, when science appears, the phenomenon of empty knowledge will disappear immediately.However, science in the process of emerging is itself still a phenomenon; the emergence of science is not the real, realized and unfolded science itself.So it makes no difference whether we conceive science as a phenomenon because it is juxtaposed with another kind of knowledge, or call that other unreal knowledge a phenomenon of science.But science, after all, has to get rid of this phenomenon; and it can do this only by turning around and facing it.Because if science wants to abandon or refute a kind of knowledge that is not the truth, saying that it is a vulgar view of things, it cannot rely entirely on asserting that it is knowledge of a completely different nature. It seems worthless, etc.; nor can it be entirely conjectured that in this untrue knowledge itself there is a sign of a better knowledge.If it only asserts, then science is tantamount to declaring that its own value and power lie in its existence, but false knowledge is precisely to appeal to its existence and assert that science is worthless in its eyes; An assertion can only have exactly as much value as another assertion.We say that science cannot rely on the conjecture of a better knowledge, assuming that it exists in unreal knowledge and here indicates true science, because if this is the case, then on the one hand, science is also the same. Appeals to a naked being, and on the other hand, it appeals to itself, not as it exists in and for itself, but rather in unreal knowledge, that is, Its a bad way of being, its phenomenon.

For this reason we should here state the knowledge which is manifesting itself as phenomena. Now, since this statement has as its object only knowledge which is appearing as phenomena, it does not itself seem to be a free science developing and moving in its own shape; It may be regarded as the path of the developing natural consciousness towards true knowledge, or the path of the soul; on this path the soul passes through the series of stations predestined for it by its own nature, i.e. goes through its own series of form, thereby purifying itself and becoming spirit; For the soul, having experienced itself fully or completely, realizes its own freedom.

Natural consciousness will prove itself to be only the concept of knowledge or unreal knowledge.But since it regards itself directly as the knowledge of reality, this path has a negative meaning for it, and the actualization of the concept is for it rather its own destruction; has lost its truth. This path may therefore be regarded as one of doubt, or rather of despair; for what is happening here is not the usual so-called doubt; After the shaking, the doubt disappears again and the original truth reappears, so that at last things are back to what they were before the doubt.On the contrary, the doubt here is a conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge. For this kind of doubt, only really unrealized concepts are the most real things.Nor is this radical skepticism, therefore, such a determination as the serious seeker of truth and of science thinks he has, namely, the determination not to follow the ideas of others in science on the basis of authority, the determination to examine everything for himself and To obey only one's own convictions, or better to say, to resolve to produce everything for one's own self and to admit only the truthfulness of one's own actions.The series of forms that consciousness has experienced on this road can be said to be a detailed history of the development of consciousness itself towards science.The above resolution presents this process of development in the simple manner of resolution as something immediately completed and realized; but, contrary to this unreality, this path of doubt is a reality the formation process.It is true that it is better to obey one's own convictions than to obey the authority of others, but changing from an opinion of authority to an opinion of self-confidence does not necessarily change the content of the opinion, although the source of the opinion changes. Truth does not necessarily appear in the wrong place.If we cling to a system of opinions and prejudices, it makes no difference whether the opinions come from the authority of others or from our own confidence, the only difference being that opinions in the latter form are more of a vanity character.On the contrary, it is only through a skepticism which casts doubt on the whole sphere of consciousness which appears as phenomena, and only through such skepticism can the mind become adept at recognizing truth, since it no longer looks to so-called natural ideas, thoughts and opinions, be they own or someone else's.As for the consciousness that simply wants to identify and examine, since it is itself still full and entangled with these natural concepts, thoughts, and opinions, it is actually incapable of doing what it wants to do.

The various forms of unreal consciousness develop themselves into a complete form system due to the inevitability of sequential advancement and interrelated inevitability among them.To make this clear, we may briefly point out that the statement of unreal consciousness as unreal is not a purely negative movement.Generally speaking, the view that natural consciousness takes on such statements is such a one-sided view; and a knowledge, if it has this one-sidedness as its essence, is one of the modes of incomplete consciousness, which is This form of consciousness is engaged in the process of formation and development and will manifest itself in the process.

For this one-sided view is skepticism, which always sees the result as pure nothingness, and does not notice at all that this nothingness is a specific nothingness, which is the object of that which comes from the result. nothingness [or negation].But in fact, if the nothingness is the nothingness of what the effect comes from, it is simply the real result; it is thus itself a definite nothingness, it has a content.Skepticism, which ends in nothingness or empty abstraction, cannot proceed beyond this abstraction; it must wait to see if something new appears in order to throw itself into the same abyss of emptiness. to go.On the contrary, when the result is understood as it really is, as a specific negation, new forms appear at once, and the negation becomes a transition; process, it will appear automatically.

Goals are as necessary to knowledge as the sequence of developmental processes; The goal is that place where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where it finds itself, where the concept corresponds to the object, and the object corresponds to the concept.The developmental process towards this goal is thus inexhaustible and irresistible, not satisfied with any passing past the goal.That which is confined to living a natural life cannot by itself transcend its immediate actual existence; but it will be forced beyond itself by another power which is forced beyond itself. That is its death.But consciousness itself is its own concept, so it is directly the transcendence of the limit, and since this limit belongs to itself, it is the transcendence of itself; with individual existence, there is also the other side in consciousness , even if this other side exists only beside the limit, as in spatial intuition.Consciousness, therefore, feels this violence emanating from itself, which must corrupt its whole limited satisfaction.When consciousness feels this violence, fearful consciousness may well recoil in fear of the truth, trying to preserve that which it is in danger of eradicating.

But the fearful consciousness cannot be quiet: in the first place, although it wants to dwell in thoughtless laziness, its thoughts offend this thoughtlessness, its restlessness disturbs it. Laziness; and secondly, though it has consolidated itself into a mood under which it is convinced that everything is good in its own kind, so is the consciousness of this certainty. Violence is felt in the sense that it feels violence from the side of reason, because reason just thinks that something is bad because it is only a genus.Or, on the other hand, the consciousness that fears the truth may well deceive itself under the guise that it is, after all, wiser than any thought it has invented or learned from others; As if to say that it is precisely because of the ardent desire for truth that it is difficult, or even impossible, to find other truths, but only the truths obtained by the vanity consciousness; - corrupting one by one, and thus withdrawing into itself, intoxicated by its own understanding, that is, by that understanding which disintegrates all thought without deriving from it all its content but only its naked self,— —This vanity is a kind of satisfaction, which must be left alone, because it escapes the universal and pursues only being for itself.

We have spoken in general terms for the time being about the mode and necessity of progress, and it may be of some use now to say something about the method of systematic representation.Since this kind of statement is conceived as an action of science to deal with phenomenal knowledge and a kind of investigation and examination of the reality of cognition, it is obviously impossible to make an assumption and establish a standard as a basis for it.For examination consists in the use of some recognized measure, in the production of equality or inequality between the thing examined and the measure, in order to decide whether it is right or wrong; If science is the measure, it is admitted as essence or thing-in-itself when examined.But here science has just come into being, so that neither science itself nor any other measure has yet proved itself to be an essence or something in itself; and without such a thing the examination is clearly impossible. This is a contradiction.This contradiction and its resolution will appear more precisely if we notice what the abstract determinations of knowledge and the abstract determinations of truth are in consciousness.For consciousness is what distinguishes itself from something and at the same time is related to it; or, in popular terms, that is, there is something that is conscious; A conscious being, this particular aspect, is knowledge.But we distinguish being-in-itself from this being-as-other; likewise, being in relation to knowledge is distinguished from it and is posited as also existing outside of this relation, This aspect of this being-in-itself is called truth.What is the real content of these determinations is irrelevant to us here, because since knowledge which appears as appearance is the object of our discussion, their determinations are first accepted as they directly appear to us. and they appear to us just as we have just said. If we now come to study the truth of knowledge, it is as if we were to study the existence of knowledge itself.But in this investigation knowledge is our object, it exists for us; and then knowledge in itself becomes knowledge's existence for us; thing, would not be its truth but merely our knowledge of it.The essence or the measure will be in us, and that which is to be compared with the measure and determined by this comparison does not necessarily recognize the measure. But this separation, or this separation and presumption, is overcome by the nature of the object of our study.Consciousness itself provides its own measure, and the investigation is therefore a comparison of consciousness with itself; for the distinction made above does not lie outside consciousness.Consciousness in itself is consciousness for another consciousness, or it generally has in itself the determination of the moment of knowledge; is, and also exists outside of this connection, and is also in itself, that is to say, the moment of truth.That which is declared by consciousness as in-itself or truth within itself is, therefore, the measure by which consciousness itself establishes the measure against which it measures its knowledge.If we call knowledge a concept, and essence or truth a being or object, then what is called examination is to see whether the concept corresponds to the object.But if, on the other hand, we call the essence or the in-itself of the object a concept and on the other hand understand the concept as an object as an object, that is, as his, then the examination is to see whether the object conforms to the its own concept.Obviously, these two processes are the same thing.But it is of essential importance that we must keep in mind throughout the course of our investigation that the concept and the object, for its being and being-in-itself, are both moments within the very knowledge we are dealing with. We need therefore not carry our scales with us, nor employ our ideas and thoughts in our investigations: since we leave these things aside, we are able to examine things as they are in themselves and for themselves. But insofar as the concept and the object, the measure and the measured, are already present in consciousness itself, not only is any extra action on our part superfluous, but we also do not need to compare them at all. and seriously examine them; and in this respect, too, since consciousness is itself examining itself, there is nothing left for us to do but simply stand by and watch.For consciousness is on the one hand consciousness of the object, and on the other hand consciousness of itself; it is consciousness of that which is truth to it, and of its knowledge of this truth.Since both are for consciousness, consciousness itself is their comparison; whether its knowledge of an object corresponds to this object or not is for the same consciousness. It is true that for consciousness, the object is just as it is recognized by consciousness. It seems impossible for consciousness to see the true face of the object that is not consciousness or its own existence, so it is impossible to examine it according to the object. knowledge.But the very fact that consciousness has knowledge of an object in general already reveals the difference: one moment is something that lies outside consciousness, while the other moment is knowledge, or the object. for the existence of consciousness.On the basis of this ready-made difference, a comparative examination can be carried out.If in this comparison the two sides do not agree, then consciousness must alter its knowledge in order to conform it to the object; It is said that the knowledge that exists at the ready is originally a kind of knowledge about the object: with the change of knowledge, the object becomes another object, because it belongs to this knowledge in essence. Consciousness thus discovers that what it thought to be a thing-in-itself is not really in-itself, or that it discovers that a thing-in-itself is only in-itself for it [consciousness].When consciousness finds in its object that its knowledge does not correspond to this object, the object itself fails, in other words, when the thing measured by the measure fails to stand in the examination, the scale used by the examination itself fails. change; and the test is not only a test of knowledge, but also a test of the scale of the test. This dialectical movement of consciousness over itself—both over its knowledge and over its objects—is precisely what is called experience, in so far as it produces new real objects for consciousness. that kind of thing.Here we should point out more precisely a moment in the movement just mentioned, so that we may shed a new light on the scientific aspect of the following statement. Consciousness knows something, and this thing, this object is the essence or the in-itself; but it is also the in-itself for consciousness; thus a double meaning arises in this truth.We see that consciousness now has two objects, one object is the first in-itself, and the other is the existence of this in-itself as consciousness.The latter appears at first to be only the reflection of consciousness on itself, not a representation of the object but of consciousness's knowledge of the former.But as we pointed out earlier, the former object changes itself in motion; it is no longer in-itself, it is realized as an in-itself only for consciousness; The existence of consciousness is the real thing, but this is equivalent to saying that this self-conscious existence is the essence, or in other words, it is the object of consciousness.This new object contains the negation of the first; the new object is the experience of the first. In this account of the course of our experience there is a moment which seems to make the experience here at odds with experience as it is commonly understood.Here the transition from the first kind of object and from knowledge of it to another kind of object, that is, to what one calls experience, is said to be: knowledge of the first kind of object , that is, the first kind of being-in-itself being conscious becomes itself an object of the second kind.On the contrary, it is usually understood as if we experience the unreality of our first object from some other object, which we accidentally find from outside. objects; and thus in the last analysis our objects are nothing but the mere apprehension of that which is in itself and for itself.But according to the above-mentioned view, the emergence of new objects is obviously changed through a transformation of consciousness itself.It is our extra way of looking at things like this, by which the series of experiences which consciousness passes through becomes a scientific development; consciousness.But our situation here is the same as we said earlier when we discussed the relationship of this statement to skepticism, that is, any result from a knowledge that is not true It does not become nothing but must be understood as a negation of that which produced the result; every time the result contains the truth contained in previous knowledge.This situation appears here in this way: since what first appeared before consciousness as an object is reduced to a knowledge of this object, and since it has become a being in itself as consciousness, it has become a new object, and thus a new ideology with a different essence than before.This situation allows the whole series of ideologies to develop according to their necessity.But this inevitability, or the appearance of the new object—the appearance of the new object before consciousness without being aware of it—appears to us as something that happens secretly behind consciousness.There is thus a moment in the movement of consciousness, being-in-itself or being-for-us, which is for us, [we who study the process of consciousness, know that it occurs,] and not for consciousness. Yes, [consciousness is unaware of its presence,] because consciousness is preoccupied with experiencing itself.But the content of this being that appears for us is for consciousness, and we have additionally grasped its form, its pure appearance; so far as it is for consciousness, this new appearance Or what is new is only an object, and in so far as it is for us it is at the same time a movement of formation. Because of this necessity, the path to science is already science itself, and in its content a science of the experience of consciousness. Consciousness's experience of itself is conceptually capable of completely encompassing the whole system of consciousness, that is, the whole realm of spiritual truth; not as abstract, pure moments, but as moments of consciousness, or in other words consciousness itself emerges in its own relation to these moments; for this reason the moments of the whole are the moments of consciousness. form.Consciousness, in its approach to its true being, will reach a point where it will lose what it appears to be from the outside, as if it were always following something foreign, that is, always entangled with what exists for it [consciousness] and what exists as an other; at this point appearance is essence; and precisely at this point the statement of consciousness is tantamount to the true science of the mind. ; and finally, when consciousness grasps this essence of itself, it will itself signify the essence of Absolute Knowledge.