91

[R Srivatsan]

91. The way we understand what knowledge is, i.e., as a correct, certain account of the truth of the object, the truth is the object in its abundant richness.  So sense certain knowledge is presumed to be the richest kind of knowledge.  Whether we reach out into space and time and see them extensively, or we divide the object up and look at its minuscule details.  S-C is the truest knowledge because it has not omitted anything from the object.

But as we shall see, Hegel says, sense certainty is in fact the poorest kind of knowledge. In other words, the way we imagine sense certainty, as the immediate truth of the object, it cannot provide us with the riches we imagine.  In other words, immediate knowledge is no knowledge.  Knowledge is mediation.

All that sense certainty, the way it is modeled is able to say is, 'it exists'.  Nothing more.  The truth of sense certainty is only the being of the thing.  The bare fact of existence alone.

quote

Consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure'I'; or I am in it only as a pure 'This" and the object similarly only as a pure 'This', I, this particular I, am certain of this particular thing, not because I, qua consciousness, in knowing it have developed myself or thought about it in various

ways; and also not because' the thing of which I am certain, in virtue of a host of distinct qualities, would be in its own self a rich complex of connections, or related in various ways to other things.

end quote

If I rigorously adhere to the form of sense certain consciousness, the subject is the pure I (not one instance or application of a general I, or of an I which exists in time and in experience) and the object is the pure this.  This I is not a developed subject, nor the thing a developed object -- both these would require mediation and comparison, difference.  The only thing sense certainty allows is this I looking at this thing.

In other words, the richness of an object is something that develops in the object through thought, mediation and relation.  An immediate object is an unmediated, shapeless , unstructured, unarticulated object that simply exists.

There is no possibility of complexity, the certainty is also bare, as is also the I.  A simple, momentary I, looks at a simple momentary thing and says, 'this exists'.  

Nothing further is possible at this initial level.

Srivats

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R Srivatsan
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