When Hegel refers to “absolute knowledge,” he does not mean knowing everything absolutely or knowing absolutely everything; rather, it is knowledge of something for what this thing really is: its absolute identity.
Famous is Hegel’s use of the biblical Adam for explaining the significance of naming in our apprehension of meaning of our reality: “The first act, by which Adam established his lordship over the animals, is this, that he gave them a name, i.e., he nullified them as beings on their own account, and made them into ideal [entities] (Hegel, 1979, p. 221). Simply put, in order to create knowledge of our world, things in their singularity are to be annihilated and replaced by universal concepts. More dramatically put, Hegel seems to say that words kill the very things that they name. However, for Hegel the singularity of things must be sacrificed to the reflective concepts that are constitutive of the knowledge that we build. Reflection distances and separates us from the concrete particularity and the immediacy of our experience. Through reflection, consciousness can step back and take distance from experience and from itself, and thus reflection becomes self-conscious.
Hegel first examines sense-experience, as the simplest form of consciousness. Through sense-experience we come to know things in a manner that gives us access to sense certainty of this or that in the here and now. Hegel’s notion of sense certainty is a significant and challenging precursor for phenomenological inquiry. “Sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge; for it has yet omitted nothing from the object, but has the object before it in its perfect entirety” (Hegel, 1979, p. 91). For example, I take a bite into an apple I just took from the fruit bowl. Sense certainty is a direct awareness of what is present to us, unmediated by language, conceptual categories, or prior thoughts. Right now, I experience holding and biting into the skin and flesh of the apple. But how can I capture this momentary experience of sense certainty of biting into the apple? The problem is that when we try to capture this primitive sense-experience in words, we inevitably generalize it. When we speak about the things that happen to us or that we do from moment to moment, then we need to express a particularity and yet language can only speak in universals. The purely momentary experience has now been changed into something else—words. All we can really say is that this moment of eating the apple merely “is,” says Hegel. At this passive perceptive level of momentary immediacy, “consciousness” is purely existence in all its rich primordial complexity. Consciousness is not yet reflective and active; consciousness does not yet focus on anything—consciousness is simply “being” itself.
Hegel argues that though this experiential moment of biting into the apple is immediate (and that means unmediated by concepts or reflective thinking), this moment of existence is nevertheless mediated: it is mediated by the thing of the moment (the apple, the biting, the tasting, the swallowing) and it is mediated by the “I” who experiences the moment.
Selected Readings:
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). The Phenomenology of Mind. New York: Humanities Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1979). System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy). (H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox, eds. and transl.) Albany, NY: SUNY Press.