To the extent that we think about it at all, we usually understand an object in the wild as existing on its own, independently of experience. Science takes this common understanding a step farther. Since, in a research context, the object under investigation is all that matters, the lived experience and knowledge of the object is, as a contingent factor in the investigation of the object, often dismissed as unimportant, certainly as inessential to the object itself. Things are different in philosophy, which involves a reorientation in how we normally think about the subject-object relationship. Here, as Heidegger puts it in Elucidation of the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
the ‘experience,’ i.e., the letting-itself-show of the object in its objectness, is not a mere looking on and taking up but a ‘contribution.’ Our contribution is the ‘reversal of consciousness.’ By asking transcendentally, i.e., by making it our aim that the objectness of the object show itself, we turn the viewing direction of consciousness, which is normally directed toward objects, around and into the opposite direction, namely toward the consciousness of objects. The object that shows itself in this transcendental perception, namely the former object in the how of its objectness, i.e., objectness itself, is the object that thereby emerges for the first time and that is thus [what Hegel calls] the new object.
(Hegel, p. 91)
Placing the emphasis not on objects but on our consciousness of them constitutes the reversal that makes the phenomenology of objective spirit possible. Heidegger says that the new object is the old object in the “how” of its objecthood. When we turn to Being and Time, we will see how not just objecthood but the worldhood of the world becomes visible through apperception, that is, by taking things together. Grasping things together as a whole, we see that everything is one, one world.
It is through the consciousness of this identity of everything with itself that the Absolute reveals itself not just to us but to itself. Human nature is still nature after all. Through self-consciousness—our self-consciousness, which is also nature’s self-consciousness—the universe posits its own existence, discovering itself as itself insofar as, through us, it understands itself to be itself. To see that the Absolute (which, to simplify things, we will henceforth call “nature” so long as it is understood holistically) works through us merely requires a reorientation in how we think about things, especially a reorientation in how we think about our relationship to the whole. The bifurcation into subject and object can help us see how, through this structure, the universe comes to know itself. At the same time, if we fail to see the structural unity of the bifurcated phenomenon, the split into subject and object can hinder us by hiding this very unity: subject and object appear to be entirely separate things that have no essential relation to one another. If we fail to see the structural unity, the selfsameness of the universe is lost to view, particularly the fact that, through us, nature becomes conscious of its own existence, comes to know itself and even disclose and study itself scientifically. When nature—in the form of human scientists, for instance—studies an object, it is really only studying itself. By investigating the other, i.e. the object, it investigates itself. Its curiosity about the other is a curiosity about itself, etc. Hegel calls it the Absolute because, as we’ll see, the notion or concept is part of this self-understanding. Wholeness, or grasping something in its entirety, must be conceptualized in order for the whole to be posited.
Let’s take a closer look at this notion we call “object.” For “object” is not a thing out there in the wild but a notion: objectness. We cast things as objects. In fact, the notions of “subject” and “object” have not always meant what they mean today. In scholasticism, an objectum is understood specifically as something presented to the mind. “In the pre-Kantian era the meanings of subject and object were broadly the reverse of their modern use. Object(ive) referred primarily to the status of a thing, an event or a process to the extent that it was subjected to an activity, especially cognitive activities. Subject(ive) referred primarily to the status of a concrete individual being on its own” (Machiel Karskens, “The Development of the Opposition Subjective versus Objective in the 18th Century”).
Since in continental philosophy there is a turn away from objects and toward our consciousness of them, the meanings of words and, more to the point, how we conceptualize things become particularly important. The word “object” is compounded from the Latin obicere (ob-, “in the way of” or “towards”) and jacere (-ject, “to throw”). The obverse of a coin or medal is the side bearing the head or principal design, that is, the side turned toward the observer (from the Latin obvertere, turn towards). The object is something presented. The thing is grasped as an object by a being who differentiates itself from it. It is an other to myself. After the reversal, however, where the lived experience of the object becomes the new object, the object is seen as an aspect of myself. In absolute self-consciousness, subject and object coincide. From this philosophical viewpoint, where everything is taken together as one, science is self-comprehension. By consciously understanding an other, nature merely understands itself. Consciousness is self-consciousness.
This framework is, however, quite different in the natural sciences. Hegel therefore differentiates mathematical from philosophical cognition. In the latter, the object includes the movement of thinking, whereas, in the former, the movement of thinking is viewed as extrinsic to the object. We will now quote Hegel directly and at length:
[I]n mathematical cognition, the essentiality of the proof does not have the significance and nature of being a moment of the result itself; when the latter is reached, the demonstration is over and has disappeared. It is, of course, as a result that the theorem is something seen to be true; but this added circumstance has no bearing on its content, but only on its relation to the knowing subject. The movement of mathematical proof does not belong to the object, but rather is an activity external to the matter in hand. Thus the nature of the right-angled triangle does not divide itself into parts in just the way set forth in the construction necessary for the proof of the proposition that expresses its ratio. The way and the means by which the result is brought forth belong entirely to the cognitive process.
(Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 42)
Hegel continues:
In mathematical cognition, insight is an activity external to the thing; it follows that the true thing is altered by it…In the above example the triangle is dismembered, and its parts consigned to other figures, whose origin is allowed by the construction upon the triangle. Only at the end is the triangle we are actually dealing with reinstated. During the procedure it was lost to view, appearing only in fragments belonging to other figures.
(paragraph 43)
In mathematics, as well as the mathematically determined sciences, the movement of thinking is extrinsic to the object. The proof can be disregarded as soon as the result is reached. The object “does not attain to qualitative, immanent motion or self-movement” (paragraph 45). In short, the self is not conceived as being a part of it, and subject and object in no way coincide.
Philosophy, on the other hand, has to do…with a determination in so far as it is essential; its element and content is…the actual, that which posits itself and is alive within itself—existence within its own notion. It is the process which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement constitutes what is positive in it and its truth. This truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the true, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the true is to be regarded as something on the other side, positive and dead…Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of spirit [that is, the thinking of individual philosophers, as well as philosophical movements] do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent. In the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence is preserved as something that recollects itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is just as immediately existence.
(paragraph 47)
History therefore attains an importance within philosophy that it does not have within the mathematically based scientific disciplines. Like mathematical proof, the history of science is external to the object and viewed as inessential, as wholly contingent. In philosophy, however, the historical movement of thinking is itself part of the object. Recall that Hegel defines the actual as “that which posits itself and is alive within itself—existence within its own notion.” By positing itself through us, by grasping itself as a whole, the universe is alive within its own notion of itself.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Hegel rejects mathematical procedure as a way of doing philosophy:
[T]he way of asserting a proposition, adducing reasons for it, and in the same way refuting its opposite by reasons, is not the form in which [philosophical] truth can appear. Truth is its own self-movement, whereas the method just described is the mode of cognition that remains external to its material. Here it is peculiar to mathematics, and must be left to that science, which…has for its principle the relationship of magnitude, a relationship alien to the notion, and for its material dead space and the equally lifeless numerical unit.
(paragraph 48)
Hegel’s rejection of mathematics as a valid way of doing business within philosophy prompted Bertrand Russell and other philosophers in the Anglo-American world to adopt analytical philosophy, which is characterized by an explicitly anti-Hegelian turn to mathematical procedure within philosophy. The transcendental turn is, however, completely misunderstood if we think of it as a turn away from objectivity. The turn includes objective knowledge as well.
[T]he essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that both of these moments, concept and object, being-for-another and being-for-itself, themselves fall within the knowledge which we are investigating, and that consequently we do not need to supply criteria and to apply our mere ideas and thoughts during the investigation; by leaving these aside, we succeed in contemplating the matter as it is in and for itself.
(paragraph 84)
The reversal of consciousness toward itself brings a reference to the old object along with it. But that means that it also brings science along.The transcendental reversal is not a reduction to mere subjectivity in supposed contrast to the objectivity of science but includes everything known by science as well. Objective knowledge is, after all, still knowledge. Indeed, all knowledge, when taken explicitly as knowledge, is covered by the reversal, both in the scientific domain as well as in the humanities. Continental philosophy incorporates even poetry and literature. That is one reason why, through literary theory, continental philosophy has been so influential in language departments around the world.
Hegel sums up the matter this way:
Our object is thus from now on the syllogism which has for its extremes the inner being of things and the understanding, and for its middle term, appearance; but the movement of this syllogism yields the further determination of what the understanding descries in this inner world through the middle term, and the experience from which understanding learns about the close-linked unity of these terms.
Raised above perception, consciousness exhibits itself closed in a unity with the supersensible world through the mediating term of appearance, through which it gazes into this background.
(paragraphs 145 and 165)
In other words, the transcendental turn incorporates the true and the false. In Hegel’s syllogism, the copula (the “is” in “x is y”) is appearance. Only in so far as something appears is anything given, whether accurately or not. Appearance is the tip of the iceberg by which we know that the rest of the iceberg (“the supersensible world”) is there. Thus the supersensible world enters consciousness. (Here Hegel begins to quibble with Kant, but we will forgo that discussion for the nonce.) Phenomenologically the important thing is that, while appearance may deceive us, it is an important aspect of our knowledge of the truth as well. The true and the false, like the good and the bad, are initially given together and, in so far they can be separated at all, must be separated by thought through abstraction or, in the moral domain, through ethical judgment and praxis. Furthermore, the syllogism itself should not be taken as a dead thing but as including the movement of thought as it makes these connections.
THE HIGHEST DISPOSITION 