Misunderstanding the Understanding Self-relating contradiction in Hegel’s Phenomenology

The role of contradiction in the third section of the Phenomenology, “Force and the Understanding”, is often not engaged with to the proper extent. The first two chapters and their antinomies are usually the main focus: the contradictions that inhere in indexicals such as the Here and the Now in the chapter on sense-certainty, and the mutual exclusivity of properties of objects of perception in the second chapter. The third chapter is neglected for two major reasons. First, it is taken at face value as an investigation of nomological laws, when it is really an explication of a conceptual realm of pure relationality. Second, Hegel’s framing of each chapter’s form of consciousness as being the “truth of” the previous form is misconstrued to mean that one form provides building blocks for the next, when the logical dependence is really the reverse. This pair of misconstruals has the unfortunate effect of oversimplifying the nature of contradiction in the understanding, and thus the whole of the first three chapters; and it even causes the contradiction inhering in the understanding’s pure relationality to be absent from some discussions of the contradictions of consciousness. In our reading, this trio of chapters offers a holistic account of consciousness divorced from self-consciousness (and reason) which begins with the pure relationality of the understanding, whose contradictoriness accounts for the contrariety (not necessarily contradictoriness) of perception and sense-certainty. Explicating this shows why it is necessary that the logical system in which we account for consciousness, and Geist as a whole, must be capable of ‘thinking contradiction’, not mere contrariety.

If the third chapter is not immediately an account of the development of nomological laws of force, what does it do to get there? Instead of Hegel’s somewhat less clear examples of gravitation, magnetism, and electricity, let us consider an interpretive example furnished by Michael Inwood in his commentary.

Two opposing forces are like the extremes of a syllogism. A balloon, e.g., is the middle term. It retains its size and shape owing to the interplay between the air pressure within the balloon (which tends to expand the balloon so as to become equal to the pressure of the air outside) and the elasticity of the material from which the balloon is made (which tends to contract the balloon).¹

The balloon is the copula in a syllogism; the point at which the expressing and soliciting forces interact. The problem with copulas is that they are easy to forget; they disappear, after all, in the conclusion of the syllogism. Here, however, when the syllogism plays out, we find that, the force’s opposite “is really its own self.”²² Ibid., 60 ¶139. What is the balloon, then? It is a mediating moment, empty and meaningless in itself, that is merely the appearance of the unity of force, which is the reality. The objectivity of the balloon is the effect of the play of forces; it is not an isolated element which is “played with” by opposing forcing. The mental image of the balloon is the one proper to Hegel’s account of force and the understanding; the mental image of billiard balls bouncing around a table—each a unitary object merely moved (affected, as opposed to effected) by the play of forces—does not enter into it. This is not to say that the latter is not explicable in terms of the relationality of force, or indeed through nomological laws; merely that our conception of what the understanding is ‘dealing with’ should start with this picture of dynamic relationality, not with interacting objects or even universal laws.

This account of the balloon must be taken both concretely and abstractly. Literally, the balloon achieves and maintains its subsistence (its size and shape, in Hegel’s example) in the play of the self-same force of air pressure. At the same time, the balloon is an empty place triangulated by the play of forces. Relations of force are thus pure relations, whose extremes are simply the force itself. To refer to Kant’s third judgement of the category of relation, there is no objective agent or patient. Or put another way, the community of agent and patient is fully realized for Hegel in the unity of force, not reified in or requiring the description of any object(s).

The balloon, however, is merely an interpretation. The closest thing to such a material example in Hegel’s own words is his discussion of the poles of a magnet and the two electrodes constituting a diode. We see here a concretization of the unity of force as an object, in contrast to the less overt constitution of the balloon from the unity of force. These, too, must be taken both concretely and abstractly. Here, the objectivity of the magnet is again the effect of the play of magnetic force. The paradox of the magnet seeming to directly embody magnetic force does have an advantage compared to the balloon: we can more clearly see the absolute gap between its materiality and its forceful effectivity. This is demonstrated by the fact that no matter how you divide a magnet, the remainders will always still have both north and south pole. Its materiality does not determine the parameters of the relations of force it embodies. Rather, there is something excessive within the magnet—namely, its magnetism—which cannot be found in the magnet, yet is nonetheless detectable in its effects.

A term from psychoanalysis will help us take the next step. Jacques Lacan has a name for that which is within oneself yet unobservable from within: ‘intimate exteriority or “extimacy,”.’³³ Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 139. This is to say that the core of the subject has its reality on the outside of the subject. In psychoanalytic practice, uncovering this excessive, extimate element is only possible in the transference. The transference is a relation of mutual self-reflection between analyst and analysand. Per the name, the analysand ‘transfers’ something (unconscious desire) from themselves into the subjectivity of the analysand. From this position, the analyst then returns the analysand’s own message back to them, which serves to make external some intimate element of the unconscious within the subject. Though this is described in the asymmetrical relation of analyst and analysand, there is in truth no distinction: the relation is fully mutual, and only the exigence of clinical practice dictates a directionality to it. Just as the analysand projects something from themselves onto the analyst, the analyst returning the message is yet another exteriorization of the analyst’s own unconscious desire. Indeed, Lacan defines the analyst as nothing more than one whose desire is oriented in such a way that their participation in the transference pushes them to continue the process, differentiating and upsetting the unconscious desire it unearths.⁴⁴ Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 276. Desire is thus the force, the transference is the copula, and analyst and analysand are the extremes of the syllogism.

This is, in fact, no mere analogy between psychoanalysis and Hegel’s understanding. Psychoanalytic practice is, rather, simply another example of the dynamic played out by the understanding. We must recognize that the nomological laws of air pressure, magnetism, and electricity are merely well-developed (conscious) concretizations of the pure relationality which Hegel calls ‘force’. The facticity of force plays out in exactly the same way as psychoanalytic transference.

Force was posited as a One, and its essence, self-expression, was posited as an Other, approaching it from outside. But this must be retracted: force is rather itself this universal medium of the subsistence of the moments as matters; or force has expressed itself, and what was supposed to be the other soliciting it is really force itself. So now it exists as the medium of the unfolded matters.⁵

Here, we see that force posits itself as Other. Its reality is the unity of moments internal to it, and thus the unity with its opposite; yet these moments only come to be in their appearance as “approaching it from outside.” That is, in order to be effective—to realize its intimate truth, the excessive element that makes it function yet cannot be detected internally—force must exteriorize this intimacy and have that extimacy reflected back into itself, first as Other, to then become, in truth, force itself. This is the reality of force, its internal dynamic which allows it to produce effective objects. This is the same procedure the analysand undertakes: positing as Other its own interior, in order to reappropriate it as itself. And its effective objectivity appears as the vanishing middle term, the extimate element made conscious as the momentary play between the extremes of force: the triangulation of the balloon’s empty surface or the absent center of the magnet.

We can tell that Hegel is aware that this is no mere analogy not only when he equates the dynamic with perception as such (“It is clear in general that this movement is nothing other than the movement of perceiving”—this will become important momentarily), but most importantly when he describes the relation between “the interior of things” and the understanding:

Our object is thus from now on the syllogism which has for its extremes the interior of things and the understanding, and for its middle term, appearance; but the movement of this syllogism gives the further determination of what the understanding discerns in the interior through the middle term, and provides the experience that the understanding gains of this relationship of syllogistic interconnectedness.⁶

It is in fact the same exteriorizing self-relation, now played out as understanding-interior/interior-understanding, which gives rise to appearance as such—that is, appearance is the excessive element which cannot be located in the thing itself, yet is nonetheless effective. As in the case of the transference relation, only convention gives priority to one side or the other. Hence Hegel’s injunction in the preface to the Phenomenology that substance and subject are ultimately to be equated:

The disparity occurring in consciousness between the I and the substance that is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general. … Now if this negative appears initially as a disparity between the I and the object, it is just as much the disparity between the substance and itself. What seems to proceed outside substance, what seems to be an activity directed against it, is its own doing, and substance shows itself to be essentially subject.⁷

The distinction between the thing’s interior on one side and the understanding on the other is that it is a self-contradiction which stretches itself out into a pure relation; from unified force to differentiated extremes. The polarities of force conceived as nomological laws are a rather special and superficial example. With that in mind, and seeing this pure relationality as the basic dynamic of the understanding, we can now see that this dynamic of self-contradiction is in fact the ultimate truth of consciousness. We must take care to understand exactly what “the truth of” something is, which requires us to make sense of the first 3 chapters as a whole.

The first chapter presents a form of consciousness named sense-certainty, and characterized by its reliance on indexicals (here, now, this, and even I) and its specious presumption of a richness of knowledge inhering in that which is pointed out. It displays a contradiction, as each indexical is defined by its opposite: here is simultaneously not-here. The second chapter presents perception as the taking-up of objects in which multifarious properties inhere. These properties are likewise defined in terms of their opposites, and the object cannot be taken as a unified whole (unified opposites) without perception further falling into contradiction. This leads to the third and final chapter under the heading of “Consciousness”, which presents the understanding as essentially a relational triangulator which peers into the thing precisely in a motion of self-contradiction. It is here revealed that the elusive thing is nothing but one end of a pure relation, which is really a self-relation, of interior and understanding, giving rise to appearance as such.

At the transitions between each form, Hegel notes that the succeeding form is “the truth of” the previous form. It is important not to interpret this in a ‘building block’ or progressive model, where the ingredients of sense-certainty feed into perception which transmogrifies them into a more complex, richer object; and these objects of perception are then fed into the understanding which makes them into objects for forces to act upon. Rather, the logical priority runs in reverse to the chapter order, and is reductive, not progressive or accumulative. The pure relationality of the understanding is the basis of (pre-self-conscious) consciousness; this complex self-contradictory dynamic reduces itself into a simpler, static manifold of objects which are unifying mediums of contrary properties; which reduce themselves in turn into simple, empty indexicals.

To find contradiction in Hegel, we can do better than looking at the contrariety of the properties of objects of perception. That might display properties defined by their opposites, and even objects composed of contraries, but does not display a situation where something is not equal to itself, where \(A=A \wedge A \neq A\). This is exactly the case, however, with subject and substance in the self-othering dynamic at work in the understanding. “I differentiate myself from myself, and in this it is immediately for me that what is differentiated is not differentiated. I, the like-named, repel myself from myself; but what is differentiated, posited as unlike, is immediately, now that it is differentiated, no difference for me.”⁸⁸ Ibid., 71 ¶164. This basic identity-of-difference is precisely the dynamic of consciousness as seen in force and the pure relationality that underlies it.

The relevance of this insight in different notions of logic can be illustrated with two different problems. First, the problem of a typical pseudo-syllogism: “All circles are figures. Peter draws a circle. Peter draws a figure.” We describe the situation in two different registers: the logical classification of objects; and the drawing of such objects. The working of the understanding bridges these two levels. First, the understanding, whose dynamic is fundamentally processual in the manner of the “play” of forces, triangulates an empty location which is the \(A\) drawn by Peter: “Peter draws \(A\).” We could say, to simplify, that \(A\) then becomes an object of perception. Perception takes up objects with multifarious properties. Here, “\(A\) is a circle,” or “\(A\) has the property of circularity.” There is then only a logical question of a standard syllogism: “All circles are figures. \(A\) is a circle. \(A\) is a figure.” It is beyond our scope to pinpoint where in consciousness (or more properly, where in reason and/or spirit) this logical syllogism is cognized, but this description shows that the objects of thought which are cognized in this particular way—which we might claim, for example, corresponds to Aristotelian term logic, but it makes no matter—are second-order constructs. Their contradictory reality is observable from the perspective of the understanding, not perception; perception is here concerned with the definition of properties mediated through their opposites, not with the self-contradiction of consciousness that gives rise to its objects.

A second illustrative example likewise hinges on the positivity of the understanding (which is, of course, the negation of a negation on the basis of its self-contradiction). An initial version of this problem is that described by Sellars in terms of a necktie that is green in electric lighting and blue in daylight.⁹⁹ Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 37. Should we say that the necktie “is” blue, or green? It is easy to replace this issue with whether it merely “looks” blue or green (in different circumstances). An historical example is the picture that went viral of a dress that looks blue and black to some viewers, and white and gold to others.¹⁰¹⁰ “The Dress.” Like Sellars’ example, how the dress is perceived depends on the lighting conditions of the viewer. How should we interpret this phenomenon? Essentially, we simply have to remember that the self-relationality of consciousness stretches itself into two poles, an interior and the understanding. This moment of pure relationality has, as an effect, appearance as such. A manifold of appearance is then collapsed into an object of perception. Is this object blue or green? It would seem that it can change moment-to-moment as the self-relation of the understanding continuously changes in the processual dynamic which Hegel calls the play of forces. At one moment, the understanding produces a green appearance, at another a blue appearance. Are these contradictory appearances collapsed into the same perceptual object, or should we think of two different perceptual objects at different moments in time, as with indexicals in sense-certainty?

There is one supposed answer to this question which we must reject before we can move on. This is the idea that each moment of perception offers a “perspective”, a point of view which sees things a certain way, and that our job is to take cognizance of these different perceptions and combine them into a more holistic perspective. Hegel dismisses this when discussing the problem of relativistic morality in the Encyclopedia logic, and it is no coincidence that this problem is taken up in similar terms under the heading “supersensible world” in chapter 3 of the Phenomenology.

If a soldier runs away from a battle in order to save his life, then he acts in a manner that is contrary to his duty, but it must not be maintained that the ground that determined him to act in this manner was not sufficient, for otherwise he would have remained at his post. Furthermore, it must then also be said that just as, on the one hand, all grounds suffice, so, on the other hand, no ground as such suffices and, indeed, precisely because, as already noted above, the ground still has no content determinate in and for itself and, hence, is not active on its own and productive.¹¹

In other words, accumulating various grounds with which to make determinate judgements does not work. This is for the same reason as graph theory’s observation that the inverse of a fully connected graph is a fully disconnected graph; and similarly, if a vertex is connected to every other vertex in the graph, it may as well be connected to none of them. If a theory (such as that holistic one which encompasses all perspectival judgements on a problem) can explain anything, or judge something any possible way, than it can explain nothing and judge nothing. How can we avoid this trap when discussing the contrariety of perceptual objects, and so answer the question of whether they can be the same object?

At this point, it is helpful to take an observation from cybernetic theory that further determines the dynamics of consciousness. Any viable complex organized system, so long as it exists, must determine its own boundary with the environment. It does this implicitly in the operation of its organs, which can be conceived of as input-output processes, as can the organism overall. These process-organs cannot “look behind” themselves to see in full fidelity the variety of their input; all they can do is modulate that variety, either attenuating or amplifying it as befits the role of the organ relative to its neighbors. In this process, varied sensations are attenuated into simpler representations (intuition), and a simple memorial association is amplified and pushed through stores of more complex representations (reproductive imagination). Importantly, the functional operation of modulation can take such forms as bifurcation and joining—splitting an input into several outputs, or combining multiple inputs into one output.

Returning to our examples of contradictory experiences, we can turn to an optical illusion which is independent of contextual conditions such as lighting. Here, it is the case that the same sensations become for consciousness one and then the other representation—first two faces, then a wine goblet, then two faces again. This moment of awareness coincides with the production of a perceptual object. Again, this production is not building upon rudiments provided by sense-certainty, but arises from triangulations made by the understanding. This amounts to variety attenuations operating on the processual play of forces—not contradictions but time-bound contrarieties. The example of the oscillation of the optical illusion shows that these perceptual objects, and the concomitant sensously-certain objects that can be indexed, are not simultaneously faces-and-goblet; they are at one time faces, at another goblet. The combination of these contraries into one conceptual object does not belong to sense-certainty, perception, or even understanding.

The continuation of Hegel’s investigation would show the capacity for “thinking” such contrariety resides in on a different explanatory level. This is to say, the contrariety of objects is not for consciousness in itself, but becomes a concept in the domain of a different form of Geist; or that awareness of the optical illusion requires, at least, self-consciousness, but the internal ontological contradiction of consciousness ultimately glimpsed in the understanding makes possible, behind its own back, the contrariety of moments of perception. The ontological contradiction of consciousness similarly is not yet for consciousness. This is why it is for us, the phenomenological observer, to strive “to think the pure exchange [of interior and understanding], or the opposition within itself, the contradiction.”¹²¹² Hegel, Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit, 69 ¶160. In order to be able to think this, the logic which we bring to bear on Geist (or any phenomenon) must be capable of thinking contradiction, of thinking the identity of identity and difference, the identity of a thing with its opposite.