Here we are transitioning to the “Reason” chapter of the Phenomenology. Hegel here famously says that “Reason is the certainty of being all reality” (Baillie trans., p. 276). This difficult phrase relates to the “living unity” he had contrasted with the self-divided, alternatively serf-like and lord-like attitudes of the Stoic, the Skeptic, and the Unhappy Consciousness. It harkens back to Aristotle’s thesis of the identity of thought and the thing thought, which in Aristotle’s Greek are two different grammatical forms of the same word. Hegel has been one of the few to explore the meaning of this without shackling it to some very non-Aristotelian notion of immediate intellectual intuition, as Plotinus and others did. A lot of work is required to make sense of it.
As with Sense Certainty, the “certainty” here does not imply anything that I would call knowledge. Sense certainty gave us a purely nominalistic “this” that strictly speaking could only be pointed at. An initial condition of Reason’s self-certainty is its abstraction from any specific content or presumed truths. A certainty of Reason can contain no prejudice. It has nothing in common with the arrogance and ownership claims of the lord, though we need to be very careful to be really free of all that. As Hegel might say, the certainty of Reason is “purely negative” and “infinite”. Eventually, through social processes of mutual recognition, it will begin to acquire concrete form again.
For now, the point is that the standpoint of Reason is founded on a kind of nonseparation of self and other. This I think is what Hegel meant earlier in saying “the truth is the whole”. Contrary to the stances of the Stoic, the Skeptic, and the Unhappy Consciousness, “I” cannot be sharply separated from my circumstances and the whole world I inhabit, but rather exist in “living unity” with them.
Harris introduces his comments on this part saying “Between the last sentence of chapter IV and the first sentence of this chapter, an enormous step forward is taken: Self-Consciousness moves from the intellectual Vorstellung [representation] of itself to the pure thought of itself” (Hegel’s Ladder I, p. 447).
Representation and reference presuppose sharp separation between the object and “us”. Reason and inference on the other hand focus on the mediating adverbial relations that give substance and meaning, while cutting across the divide between self and other.
Already with the Unhappy Consciousness, Harris observes “We have seen how this free supersession of its own singular self-will establishes the free self as the universal identity of thought and being; and even the consciousness we are observing knows that it has become united with God, although this happens (for it) only in God’s kingdom of thought, and only by God’s grace” (ibid).
“Since we have now reached the self-conscious identity of the thinking self with God as Universal Reason, we really do have Fichte’s Ego before us (or at least a plausible interpretation of Fichte’s Ego). But we are not yet in Fichte’s world. We are still in the world of the Unhappy Consciousness, the world of Divine Authority. ‘Reason’, as an immediate phenomenon, is the revolutionary critic of that world. It knows that it has within itself the absolute authority of Faith. This is the same sort of immediate certainty that the natural self-consciousness had about the universe of natural life which it had comprehended as Understanding; and it is destined for the same sort of disappointment, though one that is less radical. The singular natural self-consciousness sacrificed itself finally in order to bring God’s Will into the world; singular Reason will perish when it recognizes its identity with the rational will of the human community. At that point the Concept of Spirit will emerge” (p. 449).
Aristotle said that Reason of all things most deserves to be called divine, and Hegel sometimes speaks of “identity” in cases where he also recognizes distinction, as when he speaks of the “identity” of inner and outer, which I have interpreted as a kind of continuity. To my ear it’s still a bit jarring to speak straightforwardly as Harris does here of “identity” of the self with God. The Self that is explicitly one with God in the Upanishads is already a kind of microcosmic divinity, very different from the nascent reflexive mediation that has been been developed at this point in the Phenomenology. Al-Hallaj was stoned to death for the more ambiguous saying “I am the Real”, which seems closer to the “certainty of being all reality”. What I think Hegel is really saying here is that we are “not separated” from that which deserves to be called divine, not that there is no distinction between it and us.
Hegel says, “From the fact that self-consciousness is Reason, its hitherto negative attitude toward otherness turns around into a positive attitude. So far it has been concerned merely with its independence and freedom; it has sought to save and keep itself for itself at the expense of the world or its own actuality…. But qua reason, assured of itself, it is at peace so far as they are concerned” (Baillie trans., p. 272-273).
Harris comments “Reason is ‘all reality’ because it establishes the continuum between the unknown concept and the self-knowing one” ( Hegel’s Ladder I, p. 453).
I actually want to argue that there is nothing intrinsically immodest about identifying with all of reality, which has nothing at all to do with self-will, but rather quite the contrary. Self-will is bound up with narrow identification. Furthermore, even if it is ec-static in the etymological sense of taking us out of our empirical “selves”, identification with the other as Hegel presents it is distinguished above all by a kind of sobriety, rather than any kind of ecstasy of enthusiasm.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 