As we have most likely all discovered by now, Hegel uses the dialectic as his method for discovering truth. Throughout the phenomenology consciousness continually encounters a problem and uses one extreme to attempt to solve his problem, or answer a question. Then when that attempt fails he quickly jumps to the other spectrum and uses that extreme to answer the same question. What consciousness eventually finds is that the answer to his problem/question can only be solve by synthesizing the two concepts into one new concept.
During sense certainty the struggle for consciousness is in trying to identify a common object. At first, he attempts to do this by using only the singularity but not allowing himself to relate to any universal concepts. When this method fails to truly capture what consciousness means to convey, he switches to only using universal concepts without making reference to any type of individually of an object. Eventually consciousness learns that only through meshing these two concepts can he truly explain what he means and convey what he intends. This is the dialectic as it is played out in sense certainty.
Now, my qualm with the phenomenology is not with the dialectic itself, but in how it is presented. In my experience through life I have thought and I cant say that I can see the dialectic in many things in my life. I don’t see it in the way I approach the world, or the decisions I make. I have thought about this, and so I thought about how we see consciousness. Even thought I don’t remember or cant recall distinctly the dialectic in my life, I do see it in children, much like the place consciousness begins, and I recognize it there. But children when they for instance are playing with a toy, and then their parent takes it away, they are confused. They start to cry and are scared that their toy is gone forever. But, the child is not in any position to understand the complexity of what is at work, or recognize the changes it itself is undergoing really. This made me question myself, and wonder, “Am I just the same as the child? Moving through the dialectical process, but not recognizing or understanding it?” It seems to me that I might be just like the child. I might be coming up against new challenges, and attempting to solve them just by moving from one extreme to the next, until I synthesize the two and find an answer. This is a very difficult dilemma for me, because I don’t know if I will be able to recognize this change in myself. However, I will continue to attempt to try.
Don't you think Hegel would want you to sit back and let consciousness work out the kinks itself? Of course, letting your mind be challenged in those thought experiments is crucial, but Hegel might just say that mind will work itself out with time. Hegel also supports the mind as fluid, so I think you shouldn't worry about recognizing the change in yourself as something dramatic like a light switch. Maybe you should think of the changes your mind will encur like the slow knitting of a sweater. Tedious and systematic with a high chance of mistake or roadblock, but eventually you will realize you are warm, clothed in your own self-consciousness.
ReplyDeleteAllie's right. The dialectic process is one of gradual movement. Though it is certainly possible to make dramatic idealogical changes overnight, it seems likely that even those "overnight" changes are really the result of a much more gradual process of understanding. Maybe one day you just stop eating meat, but that doesn't mean that you started thinking that meat was bad at the moment of the change—more likely, you thought about it for a while, weighed the pros and cons, and came to a decision that you then enacted.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to be careful thinking about the dialectic as a battle of extremes. Yes you could totally read the Phenomenology that way, but it seems to me that this gradual movement towards absolute truth is nuanced one and hard to identify as such. Maybe we could ask whether one individual consciousness's apprehension of the world will yield any kind of absolute truth (you know, really real)? It seems as looking within ourselves for dramatic change might be another step in the dialectic, in which through reflecting on one's own consciousness, one necessarily must reconsider the world in a different way. But I'm just guessing here.
ReplyDeleteTo an extent, I agree with Allie that the dialectic process is a natural one that simply happens regardless of our awareness. When we encounter a problem, we seem to form and reform theses based on what we experience until we reach one that works. In the sense that this is simply what we do, Hegel's work is descriptive. However, isn't there some prescriptive element in this as well? If we could identify where we were in the dialectic process, it seems we could minimize the number of experiments we would have to perform. This could save time and energy. For instance, after one thesis failed, we could resist the instinct that tells us to try another one that lies at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instead we could only consider (rather than test) that thesis and then try to find a third that is a mean between the two extremes.
ReplyDeleteIn real life, however, you usually don't have the opportunity to try more than one thesis. If we fail once, we may never know what the right way was because we will never have another chance at the same choice. But maybe it's not about making all the right choices as much as it is about learning from mistakes and applying what you have learned to new opportunities.
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