In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness evolves into “Reason” – a mode of thought that considers everything that is, including itself, to be determined by rationality.
This concerns the introductory material of C.AA.V “The certainty and truth of reason”, §231-243.
The unchanging certainty of reason
Before this point, the ascent of consciousness had progressed into self-consciousness, passing through its stages of the lord/bondsman, stoicism, skepticism, and then unhappy consciousness. The last of those steps involved an individual for whom reality (qua totality of its own experiences) is a dichotomy of its own transient and ever-changing being, and an essential unchanging being. This individual consciousness sought to relate its changing self to that unchanging essence, yearning for it, and devoting itself to it (incl. by acts of religious worship and practise).
But in this object, in which it finds that its own action and being, as being that of this particular consciousness, are being and action in themselves, there has arisen for consciousness the idea of Reason, of the certainty that, in its particular individuality, it has being absolutely in itself, or is all reality. [231]
That source of lawfulness – the unchanging principle from that which I am can be determined, and in relation to which, my being and actions can be given measure – exists within myself. At the stage of unhappy consciousness, I had separated them because I perceived that I was all thought but I couldn’t square the fact that I was the mutable thoughts with the thought of an essence within me. But now I can see that this “object” of my person, contains both my expressions of will as “actions”, but also the axioms of which my will is an expression (i.e. my “being”). There is some sort of schema or law that determines the relation of my action and being, and that is a rational relation; everything is determined by Reason.
Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all reality[.] [233]
Just as I am an expression of Reason, so too is the world, and in that sense the world from my rational perspective is entirely determined without anything being added from without. I am “all reality” because my experiences are coherent with my rational being. Or, to use an analogy: I am run by a software called Reason that translates my essence (or being) into action; my consciousness is made up of thoughts that include thoughts of myself and of changing perceptions, but those perception and the behaviour of whatever is perceived is also run by the Reason software; I am run by a software called Reason, which is the code determining the contents of my perception, whether that be the behaviour of myself, or the behaviour of things.
In order that this phenomenology not appear absurd, we (the readers) can peek forward to the next subsection, wherein the activities of a scientific worldview are described. Science is a philosophy which presumes that there is a single principle underlying everything, including humanity, and that principle is a rational one.
Confirming the truth of reason
The self-certainty of reason means that I perceive the world as taking the form of my reason. This is the categories of the world. For Aristotle a category was just the form of an object. But for me, now, categories are the form that reality takes in accordance with reason, and so it follows that category is also based on the idea that self-consciousness and being (of things) have the same essence.
Consciousness, however, as essence is this whole process itself, of passing out of itself as simple category into a singular individual, into the object, and of contemplating this process in the object, nullifying the object as distinct (from it), appropriating it as its own, and proclaiming itself as this certainty of being all reality, of being both itself and its object. [237]
This means that to be conscious is to experience the process of perceiving myself as a determination of reason, and perceiving the object as it is (due to reason), and perceiving the reason that underlies this object – thus returning back to myself, as the origin of the reason.
One way of looking at this is the thought experiment of the tinted glasses. This thought experiment has a man for whom the entire world appears red, and he believes that this is because everything is in fact red, not realizing that the redness derives from the colour of his tinted glasses. This is analogous to what Hegel is describing, except that in Hegel there is no difference between myself (i.e. the wearer) and the glasses. The glasses are like reason, in that they determine the tint of everything, and they are also like reason in that I can become witness to the glasses by reflecting on it – i.e. the thought that the tint of everything is (effectively) a reflection (or demonstration) of the glasses.
The motivation of observing reason
The rest concerns the introductory material of C.AA.V.A “Observing Reason”, §240-243
The next step for this level of consciousness is to find confirmation of this truth; I want to find in my experiences signs of the reason that underlies the contents of those experiences. The first effort in this direction is (taken in the next subsection of the text) by a sort of empirical scientist who seeks to discover the lawfulness of things.
Reason sets to work to know the truth, to find in the form of a Notion that which, for ‘meaning’ and ‘perceiving’ , is a Thing; i.e. it seeks to possess in thinghood the consciousness only of itself. Reason now has, therefore, a universal interest in the world, because it is certain of its presence in the world, or that the world present to it is rational. It seeks its ‘other’, knowing that therein it possesses nothing else but itself: it seeks only its own infinitude. [240]
Hegel sometimes slips between phenomenology and psychology, as when he explains that although men may say that they research the world in order to understand it, they actually are desiring to find themselves within the world. And Hegel (arguably) “proves” this by pointing out that in exploring the sensuous world, men analyse it in their own terms: as concepts.
In any case, I want to experience the truth of my own mode of experience (i.e. Reason). This I can do by discovering things that prove their dependence on my consciousness. When I achieve this I will have demonstrated my “own infinitude”, that is, that there is no limit to what can exist in the substrate of my rational thought.
