Sense - (Un)Certainty

Hegel has made an incredible argument in the sense-certainty chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. He has challenged the immediacy of what we perceive as inherently immediate, concluding that everything is mediated by the synthesis of subject and object. Without subjects, objects would have no place in reality, and vice versa. The co-dependence between subject and object makes immediacy impossible.

We spent a fair amount of time in class discussing the importance of seeing how everything is positive and negative at the same time, and how this plays into our understanding of particular and universal truths. Hegel uses the example of "Now that is Night" to illustrate this idea, an example that has its flaws, but allows us to see his point. Let us uncover a few important points behind this example. The object Now is either Night or Day, without failure; there is no other option on the continuum of Night/Day. Surely Now is Night at one moment while it equally is Day during another. When Now is Night, it is not Day, and when Now is Day, it is not Night. All of these points result in the conclusion that Now is neither Day nor Night, is both Day and Night, and is not-Day and not-Night. This can be called a universal because we reach these conclusions through negation. As Hegel says at the end of 96, "It is thus the universal that is, in fact, the truth of sense-certainty."

What's more is our language does not allow us to speak of particulars in the way that we think we can. We can never say the particular that we mean to say. If I were to ask you what time it was, you could give me an answer that satisfies my curiosity, but by saying "It is one o'clock", you have committed an error. It may be close to one o'clock, but it is impossible to point to "one o'clock" because as soon as you begin to, it is gone. Additionally, any positive affirmation is also a negation. By saying it is one o'clock, you are also saying that it is not any of the other possible times.