Immediate Knowledge and Absolute Knowing

Hegel's Concepts of "Sense-Certainty" and "Perception"

“Immediate knowledge” would be when you see something and it is obvious right away what it is; you have everything there in front of you, in other words all the information you need to understand the object is contained right there in the object, or in the vision of the object that flashed into your mind. You are fully in the moment and have absolute knowledge in and of that moment.

What kind of object would give this kind of knowledge? It seems like something rare. A vision of light, a whisper from God. Most things, in order to understand them, we have to look at closely and from different perspectives. Only after at least a moment of study can we be certain of them. (Even in something so small and simple as feeling in your bag for the correct key or recognising your own front door.) Even the most familiar and ordinary objects are not presented to us immediately but in stages.

And yet this reversion to what Hegel calls “sense-certainty” happens all the time: when someone is certain of the way something happened because “I saw it with my own eyes”; when you “just know” that something is true; when something is “just obvious.”

But there’s a logical tension there, when you claim that something “just is” such and such: in this scene there’s not just the object but also you, the observer, who is looking at the object and is so certain of it. The whole truth is there in the object, you say. But you talk as if you were not there also, taking the scene in. The reality is that the truth emerges from a relationship between you and the object. And like most relationships, it builds gradually until you are certain of it. When you claim the object “immediately” gives up its truth, you are denying the work you had already done, consciously or not, over the course of seconds or years, before you were able to glean the truth of the object. You immediately knew the right key, you say, because the routine fumbling for it has become second nature to you and now it takes only a second or two.

It’s like the old philosophical question: if a tree were to fall in the forest and no one were around to hear it ... Certainly it would not be “obvious” that any tree had fallen. You had to have been involved in some way – to be there and seen it, to have heard about it ... – to know that anything had happened at all. The tree contains no certainty of its own. The certainty you talk of is your certainty.

So if for the sake of argument we accept that sense-certainty’s knowledge is “immediate” in some sense, we have to also accept that it is mediated; knowledge is mediated through a knower. So there’s a tension here, if not an outright contradiction: what is immediate is mediated, what is mediated is immediate.

“Perception” is what Hegel calls the kind of knowing that follows after sense-certainty. It accepts what we have learned from sense-certainty – that knowledge is mediated – and takes that as its starting point. The truth is found not in the immediate particular object in front of it but in the “universal” categories that you apply in order to make sense of the object. So we’re dealing here with a kind of “theory of ideas” like that held by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and others.* Briefly: when you perceive things, you don’t perceive the thing directly but the “ideas” of it – its redness, roundness, solidity – and so all “immediate” apprehension of the world is in fact mediated through universals.

The transition from sense-certainty to perception is an important one when you’re trying to understand Hegel, because so much of Hegel’s philosophy revolves around his suspicion of any concept of “immediate knowledge.” All your knowledge is mediated not just through the ideas already present in your mind, but also through the customs and habits of the culture to which you belong, the specifics of the education you’ve had, your relationships with others, and so on. Hegel’s “absolute knowing,” though it sounds like something very decisive and final, really consists in recognising the truth that there is no single and absolute way of expressing the truth, that every statement is dependent on its context for its truth-value, that contexts change and for that reason the truth will always have to be re-evaluated and restated for every new generation.

(*Barry Stroud’s “Hume” has been very useful to me for refreshing my understanding of the theory of ideas and I’ll get into this theory more deeply in a later post.)