/lit/ - Literature

reading this rn as well. the foreword is going to be way easier than the main text. read the commentary in the back along with the front matter. it is like a "answer key" to what he is saying

If you're considering reading this, don't do less than 10 or 20 paragraphs in one sitting, otherwise it becomes so fragmented that you won't understand what he's even talking about. I'm in the consciousness section, here is an abridged exegesis of that section up to paragraph ~140. I'm posting mostly in hope that if you've understood this part, then you can correct flaws in my attempt to understand it.

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> We experience consciousness, but it's vague what "consciousness" and "experience" are.
> In this work we'll first set out to more exactly examine consciousness.
> Doing this is going to be a really delicate ordeal: it is our consciousness that informs us about reality, so the first thing we have to do is get a clear picture for how consciousness comes to understand real things.
> We have to do that first because consciousness itself is a real thing.
(Even the fuck hats who say "lmao consciousness is not a real thing tho" have, in saying this, just made an assertion about consciousness. So even they have to go through this explanation to develop a complete understanding of what they're saying doesn't exist.)

Here we go. First the "sense-certaintist" says
> When I experience my senses, I interpret those senses to be from a real Thing. And by this I have apprehended the real Thing.
Hegel says:
> This is a bad, limited view: you're actually lying in your last sentence. You never *really* apprehended any real, actual Thing, you just supposed a Thing using your senses and then supposed you were right about it. Even worse, what if your senses about the Thing change? And once you get your senses, they happened in the past, and when you reason about them, all you'll be able to say is about the Thing back then, when you received those senses. So if you took this view, consciousness would never be able to say anything about itself as it is, only as you sensed it.
Next the "perceptionist" says
> Ok fine, I'll just say I percieve a real Thing, instead of saying that is the real Thing itself.
Hegel:
> Then all your consciousness ever has to work with are its own internal supposings, perceptions and pontifications. You're basically the same as the last one except you're just admitting anything you say is not necessarily true. How then would such a consciousness be able to say with certainty anything about anything, let alone itself?

Next Hegel is going to try with a more sophisticated approach in the "Force and Understanding" section I haven't gotten through yet. "Force" here has esoteric meaning. It's a construction which (he claims) can be used give consciousness an airtight way of accessing reality:

Force is the active part that drives the following back-and-forth chain of reasoning:
> Realize that a collection of senses can be understood as coming from a Thing
> Realize that a real Thing would provide a collection of senses to consciousness

>>15593914
In the Miller translation there's a paragraph-by-paragraph "commentary" by Findlay which is really basically just an answer key for what he's saying in each paragraph, just written in normal concise English.

phenomenology recoloring attempts