Tell someone you’re a philosopher, and there’s a good chance they’ll ask you “What’s the meaning of life then?” And you’ll probably have to explain that, well, philosophy isn’t really about that exactly. It’s about language, or concepts, or whatever it is you’ve decided philosophy is about.
But as we enter the realm of “self-consciousness” on our journey through G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, we really are preparing to talk about the meaning of life.
“Consciousness” was the name Hegel gave to a form of mind that seeks certainty. It wants to know that its perceptions of the world match precisely the objects as they are in themselves. But consciousness found it couldn’t attain certainty of the objects around it, and all its perceptions and concepts might just exist in the mind alone, with a great void of understanding “out there” in the world of things beyond our comprehension. The only thing consciousness could be certain of was itself, that it was a self.
“Self-consciousness” is a form of mind that no longer seeks certainty because it has found the only certainty it can find, which is certainty of itself. Now it seeks truth. In previous posts, I’ve used the word “truth” to describe what consciousness seeks when it seeks certainty, but I’ve been using this term in a loose and non-Hegelian way. “Truth,” for Hegel, is not the same thing as certainty.
“Truth” in the sense I’ve been using it so far implies a firm correspondence between the concept in the mind and the thing in itself. My idea is true when it fits the object the idea is about. The idea never quite fitted the object, and so consciousness never arrived at truth, in this ordinary sense.
“Truth” in the sense Hegel uses it we might call “being true to” something; in this case being true to oneself. I am truthful when I know who and what I really am and remain faithful to that truth. Being honest with oneself. Leave it to later readers of Hegel to expand on this concept and come up with the existentialist notion of “authenticity.”
But by saying that “truth” means knowledge of self and faithfulness to this knowledge, isn’t Hegel just talking about another kind of certainty, only directed at the self and action instead of objects and perception? No, because the self is something one cannot really be certain about; I can be certain that I exist, but no more than that. The self is always changing. Certainty wants something fixed and the self can never be that. If you believe you are certain of who you are then you are kidding yourself with a fixed idea that cannot possibly correspond to the mysterious self that you really are. And so the notion of correspondence becomes less useful when talking about the self. Instead, as we’ll see, we’ll talk about what the self wants, what it desires for itself and how it tries to get it. It is through desire that self will change and develop through this part of the Phenomenology.
After the “Self-Consciousness” section of the Phenomenology will come “Reason,” “Spirit,” “Religion,” and “Absolute Knowing,” and so Hegel doesn’t think that the mystery of the self and ever-changingness of life is the last word on the subject. But it’s also important to remember that Hegel is proceeding dialectically, which means that what is left behind as the Phenomenology progresses is also taken up again later, and the mysteries we’re going to delve into here will recur again and again in later sections of the book. In other words: by showing that “self” and “life” are fluid concepts when we think about them abstractly, Hegel is telling us that they remain so on some level, and perhaps it’s here, in these earlier sections of the Phenomenology, that the question of “the meaning of life” is really answered. Certainly later thinkers have thought so, and have variously attacked reason, spirit, religion, and absolute knowing as distractions from the question of who and what we really are.
"Leave it to later readers of Hegel to expand on this concept and come up with the existentialist notion of 'authenticity'." Pray say more on this? Who do you mean?