"Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.[NOTE 6]
The dialectic of sense certainty begins with a prohibition: "In apprehending it [the object], we must refrain from trying to comprehend it" (¶90). Baillie's translation is helpful in that it gives the German in parentheses: "and keeping mere apprehension (Auffassen) free from conceptual comprehension (Begreifen)."[NOTE 7] Though it is not apparent at this point, it will become clear by the time we have reached the end of this paper, that these two words form the primal diremption, the first splitting of the egg of the Concept (Begriff) as it comes out of itself.
In the chapter on "Sense-Certainty," Hegel is not arguing against particularity (minute particulars) as such, but against sense-certainty's belief that it has access to the immediate plenitude of sense particulars. He shows that this shape of consciousness gives only the empty illusion of immediacy which is the poorest kind of knowledge. One cannot simply point out particulars without simultaneously invoking universals. As we shall see in the unfolding of the Concept, the awareness and attention paid to particulars is a necessary stage in the development of the "science of the experience of consciousness." Sense knowledge must be thought through "something else" and thus is mediated: "I have this certainty through something else, viz. the thing; and it, similarly, is in sense-certainty through something else, viz. through the 'I'" (¶92). The particular should not somehow be inflated or filled up beyond its means because it will then only reveal its emptiness. Conversely, what should occur ideally, and this is the work of speculative idealism, is that the universal should permeate and work through particulars to achieve singularity.
At the outset of the dialectic, we have not yet entered into the process of mediation and negation; we are only concerning with being, not yet with not being: "the thing is, and it is, merely because it is" (¶90). When we look more closely into the position of sense-certainty we find that being splits between "two 'Thises': 'This' as 'I' and 'This' as object" (¶92). Then Hegel interrogates sense-certainty in order to draw out its implicit truth:
'What is the This?' If we take the 'This' in the twofold shape of its being, as 'Now' and as 'Here', the dialectic it has in it will receive a form as intelligible as the 'This' itself is. To the question: 'What is Now?', let us answer, e.g. 'Now is Night.' In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice. We will write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything by our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale (¶95).
This passage has received so much commentary[NOTE 8] that I will merely point out that already at this stage of its development the Phenomenology inscribes itself under the sign of writing: "This intrication of loss and preservation makes writing, the first argument of the Phenomenology of Spirit, into the privileged formula for the dialectical procedure in general" (Hamacher 209). For the purposes of my argument, I want to examine how Hegel's sentences themselves enact the meanings they are trying to get across.[NOTE 9] Hegel's tortuous sentences bind and constrict, tautly weave neither ground nor substrate (and the experience of reading Hegel becomes an index of one's ability to endure groundlessness), but a web between the material and the ideal. The writing itself is the web: the twists and turns of the argument and its rhetorical positionings; the shuttlecock passing to and fro (between being and not-being) in the process of weaving is the writing instrument inscribing a space in which these ideas can exist. I quote this particular example (¶96) in full in order to appreciate the balancing act between "is" and "is not" that Hegel achieves in writing:
The Now that is Night is preserved, i.e. it is treated as what it professes to be, as something that is; but it proves itself to be, on the contrary, something that is not. The Now does indeed preserve itself, but as something that is not Night; equally, it preserves itself in the face of the Day that it now is, as something that also is not Day, in other words, as a negative in general. This self-preserving Now is, therefore, not immediate but mediated; for it is determined as a permanent and self-preserving Now through the fact that something else, viz. Day and Night, is not. As so determined, it is still just as simply Now as before, and in this simplicity is indifferent to what happens in it; just as little as Night and Day are its being, just as much also is it Day and Night; it is not in the least affected by this its other-being. A simple thing of this kind which is through negation, which is neither This nor That, a not-This, and is with equal indifference This as well as That -- such a thing we call a universal. So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty.
I count seventeen forms of the verb "to be" in the positive form of being and eight with negations attached. Regardless of whether the count is exact, the point is that one can't read this passage without having to reread it and thus enact the notion of mediation and negation through the process of trying to understand it. Butler nicely describes this experience of negation in Hegel's text:
We think we know at any given textual moment what negation "is" and what it does, only to find out by following the course of its action, indeed, by reading it, that our former convictions were unfounded. It is the term, in other words, that constantly undermines our own knowingness. The language we thought was reporting on the reality of negation turns out to take part in the activity itself, to have its own negating function and, indeed, to be subject to negation itself. The language of the text thus exhibits its own rhetoricity, and we find that the question of logic and that of rhetoric are indissociable from each other. (Butler ix)"
The point is precisely that even when he seems to be working against a notion of the materiality of inscriptions Hegel is cognizant of the fact that these traces belie such a position. It is impossible not to be infected by the language of negation because it is built into the structure of language itself. This idea crops up repeatedly in the chapter on sense-certainty because language always proves Hegel's point: (¶97) "We do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say. But language, as we see is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say; (¶110) Language "has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all."
Hegel then runs through the same dialectic with the 'Here': " 'Here' is, e.g., the tree. If I turn around, this truth has vanished and is converted into its opposite" (¶98). It doesn't matter what I see now, only that I no longer see the tree for it has vanished in its immediacy. "'Here' itself does not vanish; on the contrary is abides constant in the vanishing of the house, the tree, etc." Again, the knowledge of the sense-object has vanished into its truth as mediated. Now, the relation between knowing and object are reversed and "the certainty is now located in knowing, which was previously the unessential moment. It's truth is in the object as my object, or is in its being mine [Meinen]; it is because I know it" (¶100). Since the 'I' is the essential element, the pun on meinen as signifying both "mine" and "meaning" comes into play. Verene notes that this is not only a pun but an irony: "Hegel's irony here is also involved in the sense that what is asserted as objective meaning or meinen to be in the now and here is really only a meaning as it is in the I as knowing, as mein."[NOTE 10]
After Hegel repeats the steps of the dialectic from the side of the 'I', his conclusion is that "the 'I' is merely universal like 'Now', 'Here', or 'This' in general" (¶102). The knowledge of sense-certainty repeatedly fails the "acid test" of particularity because it can only utter the "truth" of the particular which is not a particular but a universal: "it is reasonable that the demand should say which 'this thing', or which 'this particular man' is meant; but it is impossible to say this" (¶102). In short, sense-certainty cannot live up to its claim to express the particular; it cannot say this, because it cannot say 'this'.
A transition occurs at this point as "we' enter into the dialectic, notably through the deictic act of "pointing:" "Since, then, this certainty will no longer come forth to us when we direct its attention to a Now that is night, or to an 'I' to whom it is night, we will approach it and let ourselves point to the Now that is asserted" (¶105). And now that "we" are here, the dialectical process passing through 'Now', 'Here' and 'This' begins again, this time with the additional element of temporality: "The Now is pointed to, this Now. 'Now'; it has already ceased to be in the act of pointing to it. The Now that is, is another Now than the one pointed to, and we see that the Now is just this: to be no more just when it is" (¶105). As always in sense-certainty, we are concerned with "being," but the 'Now' that is pointed to "has already ceased to be." The immediate shift between the 'Now' and the not-now is less like the swing of a pendulum and more like one of those cheap, three-dimensional novelty cards that flip between two distinct scenes as one's glance is tilted back and forth. The point of this example is that it is impossible to locate the pure shift, the pure transition between the two distinct scenes (two now points); we are confined to a vicious sequence: this now, this not-now; now this, now not-this, etc. "The pointing-out of the Now is thus itself the movement which expresses what the Now is in truth, viz. a result, or the plurality of Nows all taken together; and the pointing-out is the experience of learning that Now is a universal" (¶107).
Now we move to the second instance of the dialectic of the 'Here': "The Here pointed out, to which I hold fast, is similarly a this here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and Left" (¶108). One should keep in mind that prepositions are always important in Hegel, for things stand in relation to, or come into being, or are mediated through one another. The subject (the 'I' which 'holds fast') is subject to the same prepositions (in the act of pointing-out) which locate the Here in relation to other Heres. The passage continues: "The Here, which was supposed to have been pointed out, vanishes in other Heres, but these likewise vanish. What is pointed out, held fast, and abides is a negative This, which is negative only when the heres are taken as they should be, but, in being so taken, they supersede themselves; what abides is a simple complex of many Heres." The single, particular Here vanishes in relation to other Heres, but each of these particularities vanishes in its truth which is the universal.
I am particularly interested in the notion of the "negative This" (which should recall the "not-this" of ¶96). That is, how does Hegel formulate this as a concept in order to grasp something that is not? We must take into account this notion of what I will term negative deixis. If deixis is the act of pointing to something, then negative deixis is the act of pointing to something that is not -- a not-this.[NOTE 11] But I would like to push this even further in order to get at the reflexive aspect of the pointing function. The pointing function which points to itself is a sign with an external, sensuous existence. Beyond this pointing to itself as an instance of discourse, it points to something else, some other object, function, or meaning. That is, instead of pointing at "this" thing or "that" object, as is the case in the consciousness of "sense-certainty," or even pointing at something as a "not-this," the pointing function becomes a sign of itself and points toward, away from or beyond itself; away from any particular "this," and toward something other -- neither this, nor that.
As we approach the end of the chapter on "Sense-certainty" we will focus our analysis on two specific passages: the seemingly offhand mention of the "Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus" and the famous example of "this bit of paper." At first glance, Hegel appears simply to be having some fun at the expense of empirical philosophy, but insofar as the entire dialectic of this chapter has set out to prove the insubstantiality of sense-certainty's claims to the reality of sense-objects, Hegel's tactic here is consistent with the structure of his argument.[NOTE 12] And yet, beneath the humor of this passage, Hegel is able to smuggle into the first chapter of the Phenomenology one of his major metaphorical and conceptual obsessions -- assimilation and digestion.
Even the animals are not shut out from this wisdom but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up. And all Nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things. (¶109)
Thus, we learn about the insubstantiality of sense objects quite literally by digesting and incorporating their "substance." "Those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects" point to sensory evidence that, since it has been "eaten," no longer exists as evidence for their claims. We should always remember that Hegel's particular examples about particulars are never, at any moment, beyond the grasp of his conceptualization of writing. As Hamacher states, "The paradigm of writing and reading is not the only one which Hegel employs for the demonstration of the immediate 'self'-negation of the sensuous this but it does contain the programmatic model for all the others" (Hamacher 214). The question remains as to which aspect of the sense particular is obliterated and which is maintained after it has been sublated. As we follow the itinerary of consciousness into the next chapter on "Perception" we receive a provisional answer, but as always so much depends upon how the concept of Aufhebung is read:
The This is, therefore, established as not This, or as something superseded; and hence not as Nothing, but as a determinate Nothing, the Nothing of a content, viz. of the This. Consequently, the sense-element is still present, but not in the way it was supposed to be in [the position of] immediate certainty: not as the singular item that is 'meant', but as a universal, or as that which will be defined as a property. Supersession [Aufhebung] exhibits its true twofold meaning which we have seen in the negative: it is at once a negating and a preserving. Our Nothing, as the Nothing of the This, preserves its immediacy and is itself sensuous, but it is a universal immediacy. (¶113)
Hegel seems clear enough when he says that "the sense element is still present," but this sensuous presence is no longer a "singular item" but a universal. In order for "this" to make sense, the "not This" has to be figured as a determinate Nothing.[NOTE 13] And I have been pointing to the fact that the prototypical example of this "determinate Nothing" would be writing; a writing which leaves traces behind it of the sense objects which have disappeared (or been eaten). According to Hamacher: "Consumption, like inscription, is sublation," and
writing and reading are both operations which immediately destroy given being and preserve the universal they thereby produce from that destruction. Reading and writing are, like nature and cult, ontophageous and chronophageous. . . .As bread and wine or as the inscription of now-points, being presents itself as retentional trace, one which is not merely cancelled and written off, but obliterated and written out by a reading which always also functions as consumption. The This crumbles away, decays, ferments, in the process of digestive assimilation. (Hamacher 220)
We will return to this idea in our analysis of the Lord's Supper. For now, it is enough to note the linguistic parallels with the nature and function of digestion. My point is that Hegel is indefatigably aware of the material differences present in writing. The material makes a difference, just as difference is inscribed in the material. The differences are "material" in a legal sense, and they also quite literally become material differences in the way these differences are expressed. At any rate, returning to the final section of sense certainty, what I mean, in this case, is this bit of paper:[NOTE 14]
They mean 'this' bit of paper on which I am writing -- or rather have written -- 'this'; but what they mean is not what they say. If they actually wanted to say 'this' bit of paper [Stück Papier] which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal. In the actual attempt to say it, it would therefore crumble away; those who started to describe it would not be able to complete the description, but would be compelled to leave it to others, who would themselves finally have to admit to speaking about something which is not. They certainly mean, then, this bit of paper here which is quite different from the bit mentioned above; but they say 'actual things', 'external or sensuous objects', 'absolutely singular entities' [Wesen] and so on; i.e. they say of them only what is universal.(¶110)
The materiality that I mentioned above is certainly in effect here as Hegel refers to his own writing on the page that he is writing. Because of the fact that the "sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language" the question arises as to what exactly is lost in the exchange between the sense particular and the universal. This problem will be further examined when we analyze the notions of "appearance" and "metaphor" later in this essay. Simply put, any interpretation of Hegel's writing depends upon where one stands on the question of sense particulars. I am suggesting that Hegel's writing itself, as exemplified in passages such as the above, enacts a kind of twisting, imbricated textuality which belies a superficial reading which would attempt to show that minute particulars are inconsequential in his system. Indeed, Hegel's "poetics" perform a balancing act which highlights his own rhetoricity and, if nothing else, it shows that "this" is not "nothing" but an intricately determined nothing, in fact, "the" nothing explicated out of the very structure of language. This is not so much equivocation as it is an interlacing of language between the two poles of absence and presence which weaves what is not there into a network of signification. Let us pick up the quotation again at the point where it includes a note directly referring to language:
But if I want to help out language -- which has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all -- by pointing out this bit of paper, experience teaches me what the truth of sense-certainty in fact is: I point it out as a 'Here', which is a Here of other Heres, or is in its own self a 'simple togetherness of many Heres'; i.e. it is a universal.
As we have seen from our reading of the chapter on sense certainty, Hegel's dialectical argument is doggedly persistent and he ends with one last "pointing out" to nail down his point. But what is it about language that makes it "divine"? Perhaps if it is capable of "directly reversing the meaning of what is said," then it would be capable of making the absent present and thus performing a "divine" function. But if we stick to the rhetorical function of language, then its "divine" function could be seen as initiating a sequence of linguistic and tropological interventions: to point to something that is not there (deixis); to say the opposite of what it means (irony); to make something into something else (metaphor). Let us look at some of the particular features of irony that are active. Here, Verene is helpful: "Hegel shows that consciousness in its attempt to possess the real or being in its purity is caught in the irony of language and thus opened to itself. Language has this divine nature. Hegel uses that same power of the trope of irony to open us, the observers of consciousness, to the folly of sense-certainty[. . . .] The use of this pun, which is not a logical but a tropical device, is the insight upon which the chapter rests" (Verene 30). This may provide a clue to the structure of irony in the text of sense certainty. First, "we" see that the consciousness is infected by this irony and opened to itself. Second, "we" read, and as readers we understand this irony and are ourselves opened up and subject to a similar contamination (infection). It would be simplistic to say that Hegel's "joke" here is simply to implicate "us" in the folly of sense-certainty. It is not a case of getting the joke, but of the joke getting "us." But "it" can't really get to "us" if we have preemptively, as it were, already seized the opportunity of opening ourselves up to it and to its power of language, and thus have ceased to be ourselves and have become one with "it."
Now, I want to discuss de Man's analysis of this final passage on writing in order to take issue with a few of his points and to expand on my own. De man's writing is always dense and difficult to unpack, but in the main it is almost achingly precise:[NOTE 15]
As the only particular event that can be pointed out, writing, unlike speech and cognition, is what takes us back to this ever-recurring natural consciousness. Hegel, who is often said to have "forgotten about writing," is unsurpassed in his ability to remember that one should never forget to forget. To write down this piece of paper (contrary to saying it) is no longer deictic, no longer a gesture of pointing rightly or wrongly, no longer an example or a Beispiel, but the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace. It is, in other words, the determined elimination of determination. ("Hypogram and Inscription" 42-3)
First, I would argue along the lines of Agamben that "writ[ing] down this bit of paper" is still a deictic function in that it points to itself, refers to the instance of discourse taking place even when there is no objective referent.[NOTE 16] The last two sentences of the quotation above, which I have italicized, are typical examples of de Man's own strategy of writing Hegel against the grain to make him sound like de Man. For if they are reversed they still mean the same thing (have the same semantic import), but their values will have changed materially in accordance with their syntactical repositionings. Thus: "the inscription of a remembering that leaves a trace. It is, in other words, the indeterminate preservation of indeterminacy." De Man certainly wants to appear more self-consciously ironic than Hegel in that he wants to suggest that we can only mean what we say when we don't really mean what we say. Hegel believes that (a) we can only say what we cannot mean [which is my inversion of "I cannot say what I only mean"] when we mean what we say, and more precisely, (b) we can only ever mean something, regardless of whether we speak it or write it, because the structure of this reversal is built into language which is a universal. The appearance of the opposite of what one says occurs (in)directly in language itself which is a power of mediation and negation. "And because language is the work of thought, nothing can be said in language that is not universal. What I only mean [meine] is mine [mein]; it belongs to me as this particular individual. But if language expresses only what is universal, then I cannot say what I only mean. And what cannot be said -- feeling, sensation -- is not what is most important, most true, but what is most insignificant, most untrue" (Encyclopedia Logic, ¶20). For de Man the surface of rhetoric contaminates the transmission of meaning, so that language immediately and materially mediates what "it" (and the impersonality of this entity is crucially inhuman, because language cannot say "mine") wants to say; whereas for Hegel the mediation is also immediate, but this mediation is itself mediated, so that the rhetorical structure of reversal implies that the reversal can itself be reversed and thus turn into something intelligible.
I want to return to thread of the particular ('Now', 'Here', 'This') in order to situate my argument within the moment in between particularity and the universal. If the particular is not completely eliminated in Hegel, then part of it, its sensuous aspect, must leave traces behind it even after it has been sublated. The question then becomes whether one wants to argue that Hegel's concept of the universal is thus dependent on the particular. One reason that I find Hamacher so useful is that he consistently treats the abstractions of the chapter on sense certainty under the model of writing:
Thus the gesture of pointing, and its underlying semiotic concept which relates both to the Now and to the Here, possesses the structure of writing, and the understanding of the same that of reading. Insofar as the indicated and the designated presents itself through the semiotic gesture as a complex of various Heres and Nows, which permit particular Heres and Nows to appear as their result and thus as immediately universal, then the universal remains dependent upon the retention of the always already eliminated particular, the possibility of truth and semantic sense remains tied to the enduring persistence of the untrue, heterogeneous, sensuous moment. . . . But the Nows can only be synthetically grasped as the one and universal Now only if the conceptual grip which grasps them also grasps their occasional particularity in each case and thus grasps what the universal not yet is, and what the immediate particular already no longer is. (Hamacher 214)
First, Hamacher's insistence that deixis (the gesture of pointing) "possesses the structure of writing" supports my contention above in opposition to de Man. The idea that "the universal remains dependent upon the retention of the always already eliminated particular" is a typical deconstructive tactic which is meant to alert us to what if left over, or left out of Hegel's system. The final section of this citation is where I locate the rhetorical strength of Hamacher's argument. By employing the "no longer . . . not yet" construction he is able to expand upon that space between the particular and the universal. It takes on added importance because it mimes Hegel's own construction of this space in his discussion of the "pure appearance" of art in the introduction to the Aesthetics. Thus, there is a moment after the particular has shed its abstract materiality, but not yet its sensuous aspect and before it has been completely digested, divested of its "concrete" materiality and absorbed into the Concept. Hamacher writes that "the universal truth of the sign is produced through the recession of fleeting particulars" (Hamacher 214). Here "truth" is the product of a process that would abandon any traces of evidence that this process ever occurred. But elsewhere, Hamacher states that this "remnant" is not dissolved: "Yet even in Hegelian speculation -- this remains to be shown -- the remnant, the sign which is not dissolved in being, the remnant and the rest which is silence, is not erased" (Hamacher 133). Something has to give way here. I would suggest that it is indeed very clear that in Hegel's system there is a continual "recession of particulars." But there is also a counter-movement in which these particularities come back, trailing the clouds of their own mortality. In other words, these particular signs of materiality are also signs of mortality. So we are not just dealing with a rhetorical argument about linguistic materiality, but with potential translation (metaphorical process) of the literal body into a spiritual body. Thus, the stakes for Hegel risk nothing less than "the body:"
It is in the medieval crusades that history treads the path which leads back from the false show of sensuous presence towards the truth of self-consciousness. Just as the Christian community thinks to grasp its own actuality in the sensuous This of the Host, so it must also seek the material presence of his spirit in the spatial 'This' of Christ's presence as was, in the Holy land, in the 'footsteps of the saviour,' in Christ's very grave. . . . But just as in the 'eternal history of God' the inversion of the absolute into a bloody corpse finds itself inverted through the resurrection of the spiritual body, so too in the empirical history of the medieval world, which like every other repeats the eternal history once again, the inverted perspective of the sensuous 'This' finds itself inverted into the spiritual 'This' of self-consciousness.
'But it is in the grave that the true point of reversion and inversion lies, it is in the grave that every vanity of the sensuous is destroyed . . . there that ultimate seriousness is found. It is in the negative of the this, of the sensuous, that the reversion is accomplished' (Hamacher 192-3).[NOTE 17]