Re-reading Hegel:
Meaning and Subjectivity in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
WILLIAM J. URBAN
The Language of Meaning: The This of Sense-Certainty
To appreciate Hegel’s accomplishment in conceiving the modern subject, we must first briefly consider two key thinkers which precede him. Descartes procedure of systematic doubt in the Meditations leads him to contract absolute certainty to the punctum of ‘I think,’ thereby opening up the hypothesis of an Evil Genius Other manipulating the subject’s experience of reality. But this brief insight into how our ontological universe is not entirely consistent is quickly disavowed, cogito is reduced to res cogitans, and the Cartesian universe is confined to the epistemological field with its problem of how to grasp clear and distinct representations. It is only in the Critique of Pure Reason that cogito is articulated for-itself, thereby bringing it for the first time to its full notion. Together with the critique of the Cartesian position in the Paralogisms, Kant’s notion of the transcendental subject of apperception indicates his awareness of ‘the topological discord between the form “I think” and the substance which thinks’ and of the further impossibility of ever filling out this subject qua logical construction with intuited experiential data. (Žižek 1993: 13) The problem is that Kant is not always consistent in maintaining how ‘this lack of intuited content is constitutive of the I... which is why he again and again yields to the temptation of conceiving of the relationship between the I of pure apperception and the I of self-experience as the relationship between a Thing-in-itself and an experiential phenomenon.’ (ibid 14) With Hegel, however, the uncertainty in Kant’s texts becomes at once clarified, for Hegel reflectively inverts into a positive ontological determination what Kant (mis)perceives as an epistemological obstacle, that is, the ‘unknowableness’ of the subject qua Thing. In a word, the subject ‘is’ a non-substantial void. (Žižek 1996: 124) This is precisely why for Hegel the finite historical subject, as such, must forever lack access to any external measuring rod guaranteeing its access to the in-itself or truth, whether that be ‘the a priori categorial framework of transcendental reflection, or... the phenomenological notion of Lebenswelt (life-world) as the always-already presupposed foundation of our reasoning... [These] all are false attempts to break the vicious circle of what Hegel called “experience”’ in the Introduction to the Phenomenology. (Žižek 1993: 20–1) We now turn to the first experience of consciousness that Hegel stages for us.
But it might already be going too far to call Hegel’s opening move an ‘experience of consciousness,’ for Hegel certainly portrays sense as a primordial state which seems to precede all others, the certainty of which can scarcely be attributable to a subject in the proper sense.5 That is, sense-certainty appears to precede the very formation of the subject and if we are to come to terms with this paradox, we are obliged to elicit our most modern sensibilities in order to grasp ‘one of Hegel’s most striking and original moves’ which concerns the fact that ‘the only phenomenon which can in any way be structurally placed in relationship to this sensory plenitude turns out... to be language itself.’ (Jameson 2010: 35) As per the subtitle to this chapter, on the one hand there is the ‘This’ which describes the always particular here to which sense-certainty is experientially fastened; on the other hand ‘Meaning’6 is the intention of consciousness to signify the here via language which diverts the content of its particular experience through universal linguistic form. The problem is that as soon as consciousness attempts to carry out this intention, a gap emerges between ‘what we mean to say’ and what we actually say, as ‘it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.’ (§97) Hence, it would appear that as linguistic articulation channels particular immediacy into universal mediation, a gulf emerges between the sensuous thing and the word, resulting in a ‘loss’ of the former. After all, as Hegel says, ‘the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language,’ thereby indicating how the process of representation in seeking to fix something outside of its perception of the world fails to succeed in reflecting fully any thing outside of itself. (§110)
But that is precisely the point. The temporal aspect to this process, which Hegel himself addresses in §95-6, begins to frustrate the easy, commonsensical notion of a supposedly pre-existing, sensuous meaning-laden thing which the universal advent of the word is said to fail to capture. Of course, consciousness as sense-certainty fails to articulate a ‘now’ just as surely as any immediate this or here, so what consciousness actually conveys through signifying the singularity of a unique now is entirely indifferent to the supposed unique moment prior to the articulated ‘now.’ But Hegel cautions that ‘language, as we see, is the more truthful;... the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses the true [content] alone.’ (§97) Herein lies Hegel’s crucial point: while for phenomenal consciousness, ‘the dialectical process goes from immediate unity through alienation to final synthesis,’ for ‘dialectics proper, on the contrary, form has precedence over content: the first signifier is empty, a zero-signifier, pure “form,” an empty promise of a meaning-to-come; it is only on a second occasion that the frame of this process is gradually filled in with content.’ (Žižek 2006a: 234) So it is definitely not the case that ‘the unique experience of the individual subject (sense-perception, the feeling of the here-and-now, the consciousness of some incomparable individuality)’ offers up a pre-linguistic stumbling block to conscious thought;7 rather, in this chapter Hegel describes how this unique experience ‘turns around into its opposite, into what is most empty and abstract, as it emerges into the universal medium of language.’ (Jameson 2003: 38n1)
In other words, with the articulated signifier ‘this-here-now,’ the symbolic order is thereby introduced whose very structure ‘involves the illusion of predestination... the loop of “transference:” for Meaning to emerge, it must be presupposed as already given.’ (Žižek 1996: 142) Consciousness becomes entangled in the self-referentiality or reflectivity of meaning due to a ‘logical temporality: by means of the signifier of this reflective meaning, i.e., of the signifier which “means” only the presence of meaning, we are able as it were to “overtake” ourselves and, in an anticipatory move, establish our identity not in some positive content but in a pure self-referential signifying form alluding to a meaning-to-come.’ (Žižek 1993: 78) Simply put, we are dealing with the futur antérieur of meaning by which what is yet to come is presented as already given so that meaning never directly ‘is’ but merely ‘will have been.’ The key idea to grasp is that consciousness’ undecidability with regard to its intent-to-mean and the (in)adequacy of the word to represent sense-certainty itself converts into an exceptional signifier. That is, the anticipatory, presupposed future coordination of signified and signifier is itself an experience which happens at the level of the signifier, not the signified. That is why Hegel says ‘language is the more truthful.’ We could say here that the ‘”signifier falls into the signified,” the act of enunciation falls into the enunciated, the sign of the thing falls into the thing itself’8 and by saying so we thus unearth the elemental Hegelian procedure used throughout the Phenomenology. (Žižek 2009b: 128)
Again we arrive at the fact that for Hegel, the criterion for truth is absolutely immanent so that a proposition is demonstrated as inaccurate not by comparing it with the thing as it is in-itself, but rather by comparing this enunciated proposition with itself, i.e., with its own process of enunciation. This first chapter is a prime demonstration of this method: consciousness intends to articulate the particular immediacy it experiences, yet this sense-certainty is subverted by means of a reference to the universal dimension contained in its very act of enunciating ‘This-Here-Now.’ Hegel is comparing the subject’s intended meaning with what the subject effectively said. The important thing to note is how Hegel (the author) is the one who stages for us (his readers) this primordial subject who utters ‘This-Here-Now’ before its sensuous object, and he repeats this same method with all the figures of consciousness we meet along the ‘Stations of the Cross’ of his text. (§77) The consciousness of sense-certainty is but the first in a series to come and the discord we see between the enunciated position and the act of enunciation is precisely the very impetus of the entire dialectical process throughout the text. (Žižek 1992b: 26n28) Of course, the terms will dramatically change at each station. Nevertheless, we could say that from the point of view of this first figure of consciousness, each subsequent figure attempts to fill out the anticipatory yet empty promise of a meaning-to-come which consciousness first established for itself in this initial chapter.
But equally important to note is that Hegel could not effect this method if the subject was not, in fact, itself already in primordial discord. Above we noted how Hegel’s dialectical process is other than how phenomenal consciousness conceives it (i.e., with its starting point of immediate unity through alienation to a final synthesis). For us, however, ‘the dialectical process proper begins with alienation, its first gesture of “positing” is that of alienation.’ (Žižek 2006a: 234) Here we are looking at the same process as we did above, but now with respect to the subject of the signifier which ensures that every immediacy is always already mediated: even at the Phenomenology’s starting point of sense-certainty there is an implicit reflexivity which obligates the subject to move beyond the direct fixation of an immediate this-here-now because – simultaneous with his fixation – he takes himself as the one who is transfixed on this sensuous immediacy. Only through this discord ‘can he compare the two aspects of the relationship, the in-itself and his relationship to it, and become aware of the inconsistency of his position.’ (Žižek 1998: 273n24)
We thus arrive back at what Kant had in mind with his notion of transcendental apperception, with how self-consciousness accompanies every act of being conscious of something. However, we need to be careful here, for this has nothing to do with the subject’s self-transparency but instead involves the subject’s radical splitting. Empirically, it is simply not true that whenever I am conscious of some sensuous immediacy, I am also conscious of the fact that I am conscious of this sensuous immediacy. Yet Kant is clear how it ‘must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.’ (Kant: B131–2) Now, Allison follows most interpreters in attempting to resolve this deadlock by emphasizing how actual accompaniment is not necessary, for all that is needed is the possibility of every conscious act of mine to be rendered self-conscious. (Allison 2004: 165) But this is simply not strong enough, for as the dialectical movement of Hegel’s text shows, transcendental apperception cannot be an act which never effectively happens. Rather, it must be the case that the subject’s ‘self-awareness is as it were the actuality of its own possibility’ so that ‘what “haunts” the subject is his inaccessible noumenal Self, the “Thing that thinks,” an object in which the subject would fully “encounter himself.”’ (Žižek 2009b: 110) We will encounter this object again below in some of its other guises.
For now, we note how again we arrive at an exceptional signifier, but this time defined as that which must re-present the subject or hold his place within the structured totality of phenomenal sensations, a totality which can never yield up a phenomenal self-experience. (ibid) The ambiguity surrounding the fundamental problem which concerns Hegel here – namely, how consciousness is singular (i.e., a mere part of the enframed content of sensuous experience) yet simultaneously the universal frame of its sensuous world (i.e., a subject to language) – is felt whenever the question ‘Is Hegel’s opening move of sense-certainty really possible?’ is raised in our minds. The response must be an emphatic ‘Yes’ once we recognize how this possibility actualizes itself, becoming fact through the very act of framing this question. More specifically, the question must be reflected into itself so that the questioner conceives how an epistemological failure thereby becomes an ontological success, taking note how such a possibility has actual, truthful effects due to a signifier which provides the minimal distance necessary to compare the in-itself and his relationship to it. Once the subject identifies with this signifier, a full awareness of the inconsistency constitutive of his initial questioning position will be reached. Hegel’s lesson for his readers is how we must not overlook our own subjective position as we read him, for the in-itself embodied in his text is always for us.9
The lesson of this first chapter can also be taken up in terms of the subject’s capacity for freedom qua spontaneity in the German Idealist sense. Rather than in the everyday meaning of the word where we are free only when we surrender ourselves to the immediacy of our sensory impulses, Hegel here fully applies a logic extracted from Kant’s practical philosophy to indicate how every immediacy is always already mediated. So when the subject directly immerses himself in a sensuous activity, this immersion is always grounded in an implicit act of immersing himself, just like for Kant where causes motivate the subject only insofar as he reflexively accepts to be determined by them.10 That is why for ‘the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit, immediate experience is itself a kind of false or partial consciousness; it will yield up its truth only when it is dialectically mediated, when its latent manifold relations with the whole have been patiently uncovered.’ (Eagleton: 184) As we saw, this mediation involves the subject including himself in the content, thereby admitting the falsity of his very position of enunciation – a case which has the effect of truth and what Hegel himself in the Introduction (§78) and in the first chapter on Meaning (§109) calls despairing (Verzweiflung) as opposed to simple doubt (Zweifel). (Žižek 2001a: 15–6) But as Jameson argues, this language problem in Hegel should not be taken in a negative sense. Certainly the specific contradiction carried from this first chapter onward between the individual speaker and the universality of language ‘is a tension which can scarcely be resolved.’ And Hegel ‘often dramatizes it as a sacrifice of the self, an emptying out (kenosis), an eclipse of individual subjectivity to the benefit of the universal of language.’ But as long as we recognize ‘the degree to which Hegel himself understands his own position as a return to objectivity in the face of a rising tide of subjectivism (Jacobi, Schleiermacher, the Romantics, not to speak of the overestimation of the I in Fichte and Schelling), this surrender of the self no doubt often has a positive emphasis.’ (Jameson 2010: 43) We of course have argued more strongly that Hegel’s subject ‘is’ a non-substantial void. So the active assumption of this void would be of the highest order for the subject and would consequently place the hermeneutical phenomenologist, with his preoccupation with substantial meaning, also in line with those thinkers Hegel implicitly opposes.
With freedom comes responsibility and thus the subject cannot bemoan the incapacity of language, of its failure to fully represent sensuous immediacy but rather must acknowledge how the language it is entwined with sets an intention it has no intention of keeping. In fact, language is constitutively incapable of keeping it. Hegel’s figuration of consciousness as sense-certainty is therefore ‘much more than a mere gloss on “shifters,” that is to say, on words such as “here,” “now,” and “I,” which purport to render immediacy while being so empty of content as to house any momentary referent for which they are used: they cannot mean what they say.’ (ibid 40) By the end of this chapter, consciousness has taken a small step toward responsibility for itself, having learned to measure its language internally by its own failure to achieve the very standard it has set for itself.11 We now turn to examine another figure of consciousness, that of the understanding.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
