Hegel’s Sense-Certainty: Paragraph-by-Paragraph Analysis
Overview: Sense-Certainty is the first sub-section of the Consciousness chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In this section, Hegel examines the simplest form of knowing: the claim that we know the world by immediately sensing “what is” in its pure particularity . The dialectic shows that this naïve immediacy undermines itself and reveals a mediated universal. We will go through each paragraph in sequence, explaining Hegel’s argument, highlighting key quotes, and noting the dialectical moves. Commentary from Robert Brandom and Jean Hyppolite is integrated to enrich the analysis. In the end, we’ll see how Sense-Certainty transitions into the next section, Perception, and fits into the Phenomenology’s broader movement.
Paragraph 90: The Claim of Immediate Knowledge
Hegel opens by defining the starting point of the journey: immediate knowledge of the immediate . Sense-certainty claims to simply accept what is given by the senses without any interpretation or concept. In Hegel’s words: “We have, in dealing with it, to proceed in an immediate way, to accept what is given, not altering anything... keeping mere apprehension free from conceptual comprehension ” . Here, consciousness intends to be a passive receiver of pure being. Hyppolite notes that at this starting point, “truth and certainty are immediately equal” – the knowing subject assumes its direct certainty is the truth of the object . In other words, the *subject * and *object * are assumed in perfect unity without any distinction or mediation. This stance represents consciousness’s “desire to escape from mediation”, as philosopher **Jay Bernstein ** puts it: immediacy wishes to avoid the burden of distinguishing true from false and the work of conceptual understanding . Hegel is setting up sense-certainty as the most naïve form of knowing, which he will soon show to be self-undermining.
Paragraph 91: Rich Content vs. Abstract Truth
At first glance, sense-certainty seems to offer a wealth of knowledge. It presents a flood of concrete data – the full abundance of sensations in space and time. Hegel says it “appears to be the richest kind of knowledge… a knowledge of endless wealth” because it omits nothing from the object . This stance also appears to be the “truest, most authentic knowledge” since it takes the object in its entirety without filtering anything out . However, Hegel delivers a paradox: this richness makes sense-certainty in fact “the abstractest and the poorest truth” . All that sense-certainty can truly say about its object is “it is” – sheer being and nothing more . By refusing to introduce any concepts or distinctions, the content is utterly indeterminate. Hegel writes: “It merely says regarding what it knows: it is; and its truth contains solely the being of the fact it knows” . Both the knowing I and the known object are reduced to featureless points: “I, this particular I, am certain of this fact… not because I have developed myself in it… nor because the thing has many qualities… Neither the I nor the thing has here the meaning of a manifold relation… The I does not think; nor does the thing mean what has a multiplicity of qualities. Rather, the thing… is, and it is merely because it is” . Thus, sense-certainty’s “truth” is a bare existence without any further determination. Hyppolite emphasizes that Hegel is unveiling a crucial point: what looks like concrete fullness is in reality an impoverished abstraction. The immediate “This” lacks any articulation – it’s the emptiest certainty. Hegel will soon show that to even identify or communicate this “This,” we unavoidably introduce universals and mediation, contradicting sense-certainty’s premise.
Paragraph 92: The Subject-Object Structure in Sense-Certainty
On closer inspection, sense-certainty isn’t as simple as it pretends. Even the act “I know something” contains a structure: a knowing subject and an object known. Hegel points out that “pure being” “at once breaks up into two ‘thises’” – one is “This as I” and the other “This as object.” . In any instance of sense-experience, there is a “fundamental difference” between the perceiver and the thing perceived. Thus, what seemed a simple immediacy actually contains a duality. Moreover, each side exists through its relation to the other: “neither the one nor the other is merely immediate… but is at the same time mediated: I have the certainty through the other, viz. through the actual fact; and this [object]… exists in that certainty through an other, viz. through the I.” . In other words, the subject’s certainty is mediated by the object , and the object ‘is’ [for consciousness] only in being sensed by the subject. This already hints that immediacy is a bit of an illusion: a relationship underlies the feeling of pure presence. Sense-certainty, however, does not reflect on this; it simply takes the object as “immediate essential reality” and the subject as the inessential side. Hegel hasn’t made an argument yet – he’s observing the structure implicit in sense-experience. Hyppolite remarks that with this step Hegel “breaks with the non-distinguishing perspective of the sensuous soul” – the soul was in a kind of undifferentiated unity with the world, but now in consciousness a distinction appears between subject and object . Sense-certainty is consciousness in its simplest form: the I faces a world, even if it believes this world is just immediately given. The stage is set for a dialectical interrogation of which side – object or subject – truly contains the truth of this experience.
Paragraph 93: Essential vs. Unessential – Sense-Certainty’s Own Distinction
Crucially, Hegel notes that the distinction between object and subject is made by sense-certainty itself, not just by our analysis . Sense-certainty’s “truth” is supposed to reside entirely in the object: the object is taken to **“be, regardless of whether it is known or not… it remains even if not known”*, whereas the knowing I is accidental . Thus sense-certainty as experienced by consciousness treats the object as the **essential reality **, and the subject as a inessential element . Hegel summarizes this naive view: “The object… is the real truth, is the essential reality; it is, quite indifferent to whether it is known or not… while the knowledge [the I] does not exist if the object is not there.” . In short, sense-certainty asserts object = truth, subject = mere appearance. Now Hegel prepares to test this claim. The question he raises is: does the object actually exist in sense-certainty as this pure essence that sense-certainty claims it is? Does the immediate object really have the character that sense-certainty gives it ? He warns that we must answer by looking at sense-certainty on its own terms, not by introducing outside ideas . The dialectical method here means we will hold sense-certainty to its own claims and see if they hold up. Key dialectical insight: We will find that the object as sense-certainty conceives it cannot sustain itself within sense-certainty’s experience. This shift – questioning the supposedly essential object – launches the first movement of the dialectic: we focus on the object to see if it truly fits the bill of an independent particular.
Paragraph 94: Testing the Object’s Being
Hegel now turns directly to the object of sense-certainty to ask whether it truly is the kind of essential particular being that sense-certainty claims. Importantly, Hegel says we will not impose any theory on the object, but consider it “merely as sense-certainty contains it.” We will simply let sense-certainty speak for itself about what the object is – which comes down to answering the question: “What is the This?” . In paragraph 94 , Hegel suggests that sense-certainty can present the This in two forms: **Now ** and **Here ** . These are the purest ways to indicate something in experience. We’re about to witness a kind of thought-experiment or simple demonstration: Hegel will take examples of Now and Here as sense-certainty uses them, and show that the supposed immediate truth of these indexicals undermines itself through a dialectical process. This marks a transition from simply describing sense-certainty’s viewpoint to actively testing its core notion .
Paragraph 95: The “Now” – First Dialectical Demonstration
Hegel begins with time, asking sense-certainty to say what the Now is. Suppose, he says, we answer: “Now is night” . At the moment of utterance, this seems an indisputable immediate fact . To test the truth of this sense-certainty, Hegel proposes a straightforward experiment: “write that truth down” . If Now truly just is night , writing it down should not affect its truth – after all, a truth should remain true and “cannot lose anything by being written down... or preserved.” We record “Now = Night.” Then, Hegel says, “look again at the written truth at this noon-time.” Now, it obviously says “Now is night,” but at the current moment , that statement is false or “stale and out of date.” The very same Now that was night has become not-night. Sense-certainty’s supposed eternal truth has “turned stale.” This simple experiment reveals a contradiction internal to sense-certainty: the content Now has changed even though sense-certainty intended it as an immediate, fixed truth. In effect, “Now” has different contents depending on when it is considered. Key point: The immediate particular “Now” cannot be grasped as a fixed truth, because by the time we point it out or say it, it’s already something else. This is the beginning of the dialectical unraveling – sense-certainty’s own example defeats the claim that the object’s truth is a simple immediacy.
Brandom’s commentary: Philosopher Robert Brandom highlights that Hegel’s little experiment with writing “Now = Night” demonstrates a fundamental point about deictic reference . To have knowledge, even the immediacy of a single Now, we need to be able to refer to it again and compare. Writing it down is a way of “holding it fast” for later. Brandom notes that sense-certainty must implicitly acknowledge this: the very need to preserve the content of an immediate experience introduces a universal element . A “deictic token” like pointing to Now is a one-time event; “to be cognitively significant, what [the indexical] points out… must be repeatably available” . In other words, we can only treat “Now = night” as a candidate for knowledge if we can refer to the same Now later – which requires **mediating it through a universal **. Hegel’s test of writing it down dramatizes this necessity. This is a first hint that immediacy cannot be the whole story: any claim to know even a fleeting Now involves structures beyond pure presence .
Paragraph 96: “Now” as Not-Now – The Result: Universality of Now
Having “fixed” the Now as night and then seeing it turn into day, Hegel draws the lesson. Sense-certainty treated the **Now ** as something that “is”, an immediate positive. Yet our simple test shows that that Now actually “proves to be… something which is not” . In fact, the Now “maintains itself”, but only by ceasing to be night and becoming day – and then by not being day, and so on . The Now endures through negation: it is now no longer night; now not day; now not whatever specific content was before. Hegel says the Now reveals itself as “something that remains and preserves itself” only by excluding each particular content that fails to persist . In simpler terms: what is permanent in the Now is not any particular instant or content, but the concept of Now-ness itself – a universal that can be “indifferent” to being night or day . Hegel writes this crucial line: “A simple entity of this sort, which is by and through negation, which is neither this nor that… and is with equal indifference this as well as that – such a thing we call a Universal. The Universal is therefore in fact the truth of sense-certainty, the true content of sense-experience.” What we truly know in sense-certainty’s experience of the Now is not the particular but the general concept that covers any now.
This is the dialectical negation of the object’s particularity: the object “Now” was supposed to be a unique, utterly singular moment of being, but it “vanishes” in another and what endures is a negative unity – which is precisely a universal. Hyppolite explains that Hegel here shows “the truth of sensuous-certainty” to be universality, even though it meant to grasp pure particularity . By trying to say “Now”, we invariably say something like “now = not that now,” arriving at an abstract concept of time. In philosophical terms, Hegel has refuted naive empiricism’s idea that the content of knowledge can be just discrete sense data . Instead, even the simplest temporal pointing contains a universal category . This will be critical as the dialectic proceeds – sense-certainty’s search for the purely “immediate particular” keeps resulting in something universal and mediated.
Paragraph 97: Language Reveals the Universal
Hegel now makes a powerful observation about language. When we try to express sense-certainty, we inevitably speak in universals. “It is as a universal, too, that we give utterance to sensuous fact. What we say is: ‘This’, i.e. the universal this; or we say: ‘it is’, i.e. being in general.” . Even while sense-certainty’s intention is to refer to a particular this , the moment we put it into words we use general terms like “this,” “now,” “here,” or “being.” We do not actually say what we mean. Hegel writes: “Of course we do not present before our mind... the universal ‘This’ or ‘being in general’, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not actually and absolutely say what in this sense-certainty we really mean.” . This is why “language… is the more truthful” partner in this scenario . Language, by its very nature, “expresses [the] truth” that sense-certainty itself won’t admit: namely, that the content is universal. As Hegel famously puts it: “In language, we ourselves refute directly and at once our own ‘meaning’ ”, since language can only deal in general concepts . It is “not possible at all… to express in words any sensuous existence which we ‘mean’” .
This is a decisive point in the dialectic: the particular intended in sense-certainty is “ineffable” – unsayable – not because it’s a profound mystery, but because as soon as you try to say it, it turns into something universal. Hegel even says what people often call the “unutterable” is actually “nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant [but not actually expressed].” . In other words, if something truly can’t be put in words at all, it has no share in truth or knowledge. Brandom’s analysis: Brandom emphasizes this role of language in showing that sense-certainty’s knowledge claims lack conceptual articulation. The demonstratives “this/now/here” depend on a context and a speaker, yet whenever we try to use them to convey content, we rely on common meanings. The content that gets across is universal. Brandom puts it this way: language has the almost “divine” power of “directly reversing the meaning of what is said” – our intended particularity flips into universality as soon as it’s spoken . For example, one might think one is pointing out a uniquely given moment or object, but what one says ends up conveying a general notion . This means that any attempt to treat pure sense data as knowledge runs into a communication problem: to share or even think it, you must invoke universals. Hegel has now shown this both through the temporal example and the nature of language. Next, he turns to the spatial example to reinforce the point in a parallel way.
Paragraph 98: The “Here” – Same Result as with Now
Hegel now applies a similar dialectic to “Here”, the other form of This. If sense-certainty says “Here is a tree” , we find the same process at work . I turn around , and the statement becomes false: “Here is not a tree, but a house.” . The specific Here has vanished and turned into its opposite . But “Here itself does not disappear”, Hegel notes – “it remains in the disappearance of the house, the tree, etc., and is indifferently house or tree.” . In other words, “Here” as such stays constant; what changes is which particular thing occupies Here. The This = Here thus shows itself again to be “a mediated simplicity, or a universality.” . Just as Now became the universal Now , the Here becomes the universal concept of space/place . The immediate Here that was meant to be utterly singular turns out to be “a simple togetherness of many Heres” – essentially a point in space which contains other points . The upshot is: just like Now, Here can only be understood as a universal. Hegel summarizes: “The Here that is meant would be the point; but it is not. When it is pointed out as something that is, the pointing-out shows itself to be not an immediate knowing of the point, but a movement… into the universal Here, which is a simple plurality of Heres, just as the day is a plurality of Nows.” . We see again that sense-certainty’s attempt to pinpoint the particular yields an indeterminate plurality – a concept that unites many possible instances.
At this juncture, Hegel has demonstrated in two ways that the object of sense-certainty – the supposedly essential This – is not the singular individual it was taken to be, but rather resolves into a universal. The truth of sense-certainty’s object is universal being . For the naive consciousness, this result is perplexing: it thought the truth was the external thing itself, but we have found that the this-thing is essentially general . According to Hegel, “pure being remains, therefore, as the essence of this sense-certainty, since sense-certainty has demonstrated in its own self that the truth of its object is the universal” . But this pure being is now revealed to be “not an immediacy, but… an abstraction, the pure universal” . What sense-certainty meant by “the truly real” has evaporated, leaving behind an “empty, indifferent Now and Here.” . In short, the object-side of sense-certainty has failed to provide the singular truth it promised – instead we got universals. So where does sense-certainty turn next? The dialectic now shifts focus onto the subject, the I, to see if there we can secure the immediacy that slipped through the object’s fingers.
Paragraph 99: The Object’s Unessential, The Universal’s Emergence
Paragraph 99 is a brief recap of the object-side result. Hegel notes that the outcome we’ve reached is the reverse of where we started: originally the object was assumed essential and singular, but now that object “is no longer what the object was supposed to be for sense-certainty.” The object as encountered is not an independent this, but an **abstract universal **. Therefore, what sense-certainty considered “the essential element” has become “unessential.” The certainty now seems to fall on the other side – “in the opposite element, viz. in knowing” . Hegel says: “Its truth lies in the object as my object, or lies in the ‘meaning’ , in what I mean; it is, because I know it.” . This signals a shift: sense-certainty, having been “expelled from the object,” retreats to find certainty in the subjective experience – the me who holds onto the this. The idea will be that maybe it’s my pure seeing, my pure holding of the Now/Here that gives immediacy, rather than the external thing itself. Thus, sense-certainty is not yet defeated; it’s “not yet done away with; it is merely forced back into the I.” . We are about to see sense-certainty take refuge in the feeling that “this is true because I intuit it – it’s immediately true for me.” This marks the second stage of the dialectic: the **subjective side ** will now be examined.
Dialectical transition: We move from Object→Subject. Hegel frames it as examining “what experience shows us about its reality in the ‘I’.” . The next paragraphs will test whether the I, as the seat of immediacy , can succeed where the object failed.
Paragraph 100: – [Transition to the “I”]
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At this point, sense-certainty believes the problem was perhaps looking at the object in itself. Instead, maybe the fact of immediate knowledge is guaranteed by the individual subject’s direct access. The motto becomes: “It is so because I know it .” Now Hegel will investigate this claim: Does locating certainty in the singular ‘I’ avoid the pitfalls we encountered? Or will the I also turn out to harbor universality?
Paragraph 101: The “Now-Here” Held Fast by the I
In this crucial paragraph, Hegel considers the scenario: the truth of sense-certainty is now asserted to lie in “the immediacy of my seeing, hearing, etc.” . In other words, Now is night because I see it; Here is a tree because I perceive it. The I claims to “hold fast” the Now and Here in their singularity . The idea is that while things out there change , my immediate awareness at this moment is self-validating. If I just stick to “Now is day”, that truth is secured for-me.
But Hegel shows this position immediately runs into a problem of competing perspectives. “I, this ‘I’, see the tree and assert: ‘Here is a tree’,” but “another ‘I’ sees the house and maintains: ‘Here is not a tree but a house.’” . Both are claiming truth based on immediate seeing. Both have the same warrant . Yet their truths conflict and indeed “one truth vanishes in the other.” . This is essentially the same inconsistency we saw with now/night vs now/day, but now arising from different subjects perceiving different objects at the “same” Here, or even the same subject at different times. The key point: if sense-certainty’s certainty lies in the individual I’s immediacy, then we have as many certainties as there are I’s , and they contradict each other just like the successive Nows did. My “Here = tree” is nullified by your “Here = not-tree.” Each is absolutely certain , and yet they cancel out. This means that even rooting truth in the I’s immediacy does not avoid the problem of universality and mediation – it just reproduces it in a social or temporal dimension.
Hegel phrases it as: both truths have “the same authentication, viz. the immediacy of seeing… but one truth vanishes in the other.” . Each I can claim an immediate truth, yet there is no way to hold all these immediate truths together without contradiction. Brandom’s commentary: Brandom highlights that this confrontation between two observers each basing claims on direct perception reveals that sense-certainty **“already implicitly acknowledges what it explicitly denies: the presence of a universal element.”* . Why? Because to recognize a conflict is to recognize a rule or universal standard that not all claims can be true simultaneously. Sense-certainty wanted each truth to be utterly singular , but the fact that one immediate certainty “vanishes” in another shows that consciousness is comparing and judging these claims by a common measure . In Hegel’s terms, sense-certainty undergoes an **Experience ** here: it learns that an immediate certainty can be undercut by another immediate certainty of the same kind . This “experience” is richer than mere momentary sensing; it is the process of seeing a content negated by another, which Hegel equates with coming to grasp a universality . Thus the attempt to base truth in the personal I’s sensing fails – it unavoidably raises the issue of how different I’s refer to a shared reality. And to talk about a shared reality, we again need universals and mediation.
Paragraph 102: The “I” as Universal – You Can’t Say Which I
Hegel now drives home the parallel between the I and the Now/Here. Just as “Now” and “Here” turned out to be universals, the I itself – when taken as an object of reference – is not the singular this-I that sense-certainty “means.” “What does not disappear in all this [conflicting perceptions] is the ‘I’ as universal, whose seeing is neither the seeing of the tree nor of this house, but is a simple seeing… indifferent to what happens in it .” . In other words, when we step back, we don’t focus on which particular object is seen; we note that there is an I who sees. And anyone is an I. Sense-certainty wanted to say “I, this particular I, am the one who knows truly.” But Hegel notes: “The ‘I’ is merely universal, like ‘Now’, ‘Here’, or ‘This’ in general; I do indeed mean a single I, but I can no more say what I mean in the case of ‘I’ than I could in the case of ‘Now’ and ‘Here’.” . Whenever I attempt to refer to this very self , I end up saying “I” – which could be any I. “When I say ‘I’, this singular I, I say in general all ‘I’s; everyone is what I say, everyone is ‘I’, this singular I.” . Thus the word I, like this/now/here, is a general term.
We see that sense-certainty cannot even articulate the uniqueness of the subject. Hegel gives a vivid illustration: if science were asked to deduce or explain “this particular I” or “this particular thing,” the request is absurd . One cannot prove or define this — you’d always have to specify which one you mean, and that leads to an infinite regress of pointing or describing, which never captures the pure singular meant. In fact, Hegel challenges: if someone demands that philosophy produce “this specific thing ” or “this particular man”, one must ask in return, which? Merely saying “this thing” says nothing determinate . So, just like Now turned out to mean “any now ” and Here meant “any location”, “I” means “any self/subject.” The pure ego of sense-certainty, conceived as a particular, evaporates upon expression. Hyppolite comments that sense-certainty here discovers “I as universal, whose seeing is neither of the tree nor of this house” – meaning the subject that perceives is a formal unity , not a single isolated atomic soul with a unique truth. Each I is just an instance of the category “I”.
Thus, the second refuge has also failed to preserve the desired singularity. Both the object and the subject, when considered individually, turned out to be instances of universals, not the particular absolute that sense-certainty was after. The dialectical result so far is that neither the object alone nor the subject alone can secure immediacy.
Paragraph 103: The Whole of Sense-Certainty as Immediate Relation
Having learned from experience that immediacy can be found “neither in the object nor in the I,” consciousness makes one last adjustment . Perhaps the immediacy lies not in one or the other taken separately, but in the entire act of sensing – the direct relation of the I and object together, taken as an undivided whole. Paragraph 103 explains: sense-certainty now realizes “its essence is neither in the object nor in the ‘I’… we have to posit the whole of sense-certainty itself as its essence, and no longer only one of its moments.” . So instead of saying “the thing in itself is the truth” or “my pure seeing is the truth,” one might say “the only truth is the immediacy of me-this-object, together, now.” The goal is to have “sense-certainty as a whole [stand] firm within itself as immediacy,” excluding any internal distinction or opposition . This means consciousness deliberately ignores all differences that earlier led to mediation – no longer distinguishing what is essential , refusing to compare one moment to another, refusing to consider other perspectives. It wants to live entirely “in the moment” of a single unexamined encounter.
Hegel describes this mindset: “Thus it is only sense-certainty as a whole which stands firm as immediacy and by so doing excludes from itself all the opposition which has hitherto obtained.” All the troublesome comparisons are to be shut out. The I and the object are now both taken together without any analytic separation. The I is still there and the object is still there, but sense-certainty will treat any consideration of their differences, or any movement of time/space, as irrelevant. This is effectively sense-certainty’s final defense: it says, “Fine, I won’t claim anything general at all; I’ll just point to this immediate content and stick with it, not even putting it into words or relating it to anything else. I will be a pure intuiting of a pure This.” Hegel is setting the stage for a demonstration by pointing – an attempt to convey the This without using universal terms, by sheer ostension in the immediate instant.
Dialectical note: This move corresponds to sense-certainty trying to “withdraw into pure pointing” or what the Tabriz article calls the stage of “the absolute Intuition.” . We had first the object fail, then the subject fail, so now the strategy is to try the immediate unity of both . Hegel will oblige by performing the act of pointing out the Now/Here along with the demonstrator, to see if even this raw immediacy can escape the dialectic.
Paragraph 104: Refusing Mediation – The Stance of Pure Pointing
In paragraph 104, Hegel articulates the stance of this third form of sense-certainty. Now, “This pure immediacy… no longer has any concern with the otherness” that previously bothered us . In other words, the consciousness at this stage will refuse to consider that “Here” could ever become a “not-Here,” or that another I could contradict it, or that time is passing. It will not turn around to see the Here change, nor reflect that later it might not be so, nor consider another person’s view . Hegel says it “makes no distinction of what is essential and what is unessential, between the ‘I’ and the object” – both are just fused in a single act of presentation. Thus no “distinction whatever can penetrate” this stubborn attitude . He describes the behavior: “I, this ‘I’, assert then the ‘Here’ as a tree, and do not turn round so that the Here would become for me not a tree; also, I take no notice of the fact that another ‘I’ sees the Here as not a tree, or that I myself at another time take the Here as not-tree, the Now as not-day.” . The consciousness says, essentially, “I’m just pointing out: Now is day. I don’t care what happens later or what anyone else says. I won’t even compare this Now with any other Now, or this Here with any other Here – I stick absolutely to one immediate perception: e.g. Now is day.” .
At this juncture, sense-certainty refuses to “come forth to us” under any test we might impose . If we try to talk to this consciousness about, say, “but a moment ago it was night,” it won’t listen; if we ourselves are not in the exact same place and moment, our perspective is irrelevant to it. So, as Hegel says, we must “approach it and let ourselves be pointed to the Now it asserts.” . We have to effectively enter its world, align with the same Here and Now, becoming “the same singular ‘I’ which… knows with certainty” . Only by doing so will we be able to inspect the content of this pure immediacy as it is given. Hegel is preparing to perform this pointing alongside the sense-certainty. He emphasizes that if we tried to analyze it after the fact or from a distance, we would destroy its essence . So we must perform the phenomenological experiment in real time: “Let’s see, together, what the Now really is as it is being pointed out.”
This setup underscores Hegel’s dialectical method: he is not simply arguing abstractly; he is reenacting the act of pointing to show that even in the very instant of pure indication, the structure of mediation and universality creeps in. It’s a clever dramatic moment in the text – almost like a dialog where Hegel says, “Go ahead, point out your pure Now to me. Okay, what is it we have now?” The next paragraphs give the answer.
Paragraph 105: Performing the Act of Pointing
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Hegel basically says: since the stubborn sense-certainty won’t turn to meet our questions, “we will approach it and let ourselves point to the Now that is asserted” . We have to “enter the same point of time or space, point them out to ourselves” , making ourselves momentarily that very same “pure I” locked in one Now/Here. Only by doing this can we catch what sense-certainty claims as the truth in the instant. Hegel cautions that if we stand back and reflect , “it would lose its significance entirely; for that would do away with the immediacy essential to it.” . So, bracketing all other concerns, we join in pointing to “Now, here”.
Now the stage is ready: the demonstrative act is happening – consciousness points and says “Now – this Now.” Immediately, Hegel will ask: what is the content of this Now that we are both ostensibly grasping?
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Paragraph 106: The Now Pointed Out – Vanishing Instance vs. Lasting Universal
When we actually point to “Now”, what happens? Hegel describes it: “The Now is pointed to; this Now. Now – it has already ceased to be in the act of pointing to it.” . The instant we indicate Now, it’s gone – it becomes past . The content we attempted to indicate is revealed as transient. Hegel continues: “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.” . In other words, the very essence of Now is to cease to be as soon as it is. The pointing gesture always lags behind the flowing reality. By the time I say “Now!”, that now is already “Now that has been.” The truth of that Now is that it was. Hegel summarizes: “The Now, as it is pointed out to us, is a Now that has been, and this is its truth; it has not the truth of being.” . We wanted being , but we only ever get a Now that was. And “what essentially has been is not [i.e. no longer is]; it is not, and it was with being that we were concerned.” . In short, the immediate Now can’t be captured as being – it constantly turns into a ‘has-been’ .
Hegel then spells out the movement behind this: I point out a Now and say “Now is truly it.” But in doing so, I actually posit it as *something that has been * – I implicitly negate that first claim by the act of making it, since the act itself introduces time lapse . Then I might assert the second truth: “Okay, the Now has been .” But what has been, is not, so I negate this second truth as well and return to saying “Now is.” . However – and this is crucial – the “Now” I return to in the end is not a simple immediate, but a reflected universal Now. As Hegel puts it, after this cycle “the first [Now], thus reflected into itself, is not exactly the same as it was to begin with… it is something that is reflected into itself, or a simple entity which, in its otherness, remains what it is: a Now which is an absolute plurality of Nows.” . The final result is that the Now is understood as a unity of many Nows – e.g. “the Now as a simple day which contains within it many Nows – hours; a Now of this sort, an hour, is many minutes; each minute, many Nows, etc.” . This is essentially rederiving the earlier conclusion but with a richer understanding: the “genuine Now” is not a point-like instant but a collection of moments. It’s a concept that integrates what the naive Now splits into “now... now... now.” “The pointing-out of the Now is thus itself the movement which expresses what the Now is in truth, viz. a result, or a plurality of Nows all taken together; and the pointing-out is the experience of learning that Now is a universal.” .
This is a beautifully concise statement: by performing the pointing, consciousness undergoes an experience and learns that the Now it tried to show is not an isolated dot of being, but a universal continuity. In other words, the direct intuition already involved a mediation , and that mediation reveals a universality . The pure intuition was never purely point-like; it inherently had a temporal thickness that made it meaningful. Brandom’s take: Brandom sees in this movement the lesson that even “immediate” demonstrative reference presupposes a temporal and conceptual structure. To say “Now …” one must allow that a moment later one could say “Now” and refer to a different moment – meaning one implicitly acknowledges a general term “Now” spanning both . This shows that a supposedly non-conceptual awareness is, in fact, caught in a web of concepts . In short, sense-certainty’s final stand fails: the instant of pure presence is itself a process that yields a universal.
Paragraph 107: The Dialectic of Pointing – Summarizing the Movement
Paragraph 107 basically did what we just described: enumerating the movement in three moments and concluding that the Now is a “simple plurality of Nows.” It’s worth noting Hegel’s emphasis that neither the Now nor the act of pointing is simple or immediate, but a “movement which contains various moments.” . The outcome is not just given at the start; it is produced by this dialectical movement. The final Now is a “Now that remains self-same in its otherness” – a deeply Hegelian notion of a unity that maintains itself through change . This is the notion of a concrete universal versus an abstract particular. The dialectical pattern here – thesis , antithesis , and synthesis – is a paradigm Hegel will use repeatedly.
In short, after 107, the status of sense-certainty is: it has shown within itself that whether we focus on the object, the subject, or the whole act, the supposed immediate particular always reveals itself as a mediated universal. The truth of sense-certainty is not the singular “This”, but the universal . However, Hegel isn’t done until he reflects on how natural consciousness behaves and ties the lesson back to broader philosophical positions .
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Paragraph 108: The Here Pointed Out – Many Heres = One Space
Hegel quickly runs through the spatial version of the above movement . When I rigidly hold “Here is a tree” and refuse to look around, we “enter the same space” and point to Here. We find that “the Here pointed out… is similarly a this Here which is not a this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and Left.” . The point is: any concrete “Here” has other “Heres” implicit in it . The tree’s Here turns into the house’s Here, just as night turned to day. “The Here, which was supposed to have been pointed out, vanishes in other Heres.” . But again, “what abides is a negative This... a simple complex of many Heres.” . The attempt to isolate a point in space leads to the idea of **space as an integrated whole **. Hegel concludes: “the pointing-out shows itself to be not an immediate knowing of the point, but a movement from the Here that is meant, through many Heres, into the universal Here which is a simple plurality of Heres, just as the day is a plurality of Nows.” . So, both in time and space, sense-certainty’s direct grasp collapses into a mediation that yields universals .
At this stage, the strictly philosophical argument of Sense-Certainty is complete. Hegel has demonstrated that the supposed most fundamental certainty – pure sensible immediacy – is in fact self-negating and gives rise to abstract universals. But Hegel often closes a section by commenting on the “experience” of natural consciousness and connecting to philosophical doctrine. Paragraph 109 and 110 do this: they address how people persist in the stance of sense-certainty despite this dialectical refutation, and how even philosophers mistakenly elevate sense-certainty’s perspective into a theory. Hegel uses somewhat mocking language and even a mythological analogy to drive the lesson home.
Paragraph 109: The “History” of Sense-Certainty and Universal Experience
Hegel now generalizes the results. He notes that the dialectic we traced is nothing but the “simple history” of sense-certainty’s experience . In other words, sense-certainty inherently goes through those movements as it operates, even if it’s not self-aware of it. Thus “sense-certainty itself is nothing else but just this history.” .
Interestingly, Hegel says that “natural consciousness” is constantly learning and forgetting this same lesson . Everyone, as they navigate experience, encounters the fact that immediate perceptions can mislead or change. So it’s “universal experience” that the truth of the senses is not so fixed. Yet, paradoxically, people **“always forget it and start the movement all over again.”* . We habitually treat the next moment or the next perception as if it were absolutely certain, even though a moment later we correct ourselves. Hegel expresses astonishment that despite this ubiquitous experience, some philosophers have declared the reality of sense objects to have absolute truth . He’s likely targeting empiricist or common sense assertions like “sense-data are infallible” or the idea that only the immediately given exists. He says it’s “astonishing when… it is asserted as universal experience and put forward as a philosophical proposition… that the reality or being of external things has absolute truth for consciousness.” . To make such an assertion is, in Hegel’s words, “not to know what one is saying”, since one is actually affirming the opposite of what universal experience shows .
In universal experience, every consciousness “supersedes” the truth of a given This: e.g. “Here is a tree” is later negated by “Here is not a tree.” This happens at every moment. So the true universal experience is that sensory truths are fleeting, not absolute. Hegel says: “Every consciousness itself supersedes such a truth… and proclaims the opposite… And what consciousness will learn from experience in all sense-certainty is, in truth, only what we have seen: the This as a universal, the very opposite of what that assertion affirmed to be universal experience.” . In simpler terms: those who claim “everyone knows our senses give us true beings ” are turning reality upside-down. In fact, everyone’s everyday experience is that the senses give us changing, relative, and general content .
To underscore the point in a vivid way, Hegel invokes an analogy from the “practical sphere” – everyday life and even ancient ritual. He recommends that those who believe in the absolute reality of sense objects should go learn from the “ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus”, specifically the secret of “eating bread and drinking wine.” . This famous tongue-in-cheek passage implies: In the Eleusinian Mysteries , initiates ritually consumed bread and wine, symbolizing the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Hegel’s point: Even without philosophy, people demonstrate that sensuous things are not absolute beings – you can eat them, thus literally negating their independent existence. The truth of a loaf of bread or a grape is that they can be chewed up into nothingness and assimilated. Hegel says the initiate “not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it; in part he brings about the nothingness of such things himself… and in part he sees them reduce themselves to nothingness.” . Even animals, he jokes, are “initiated” into this wisdom: “For they do not stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality… they fall to without ceremony and eat them up.” . All nature “celebrates these open Mysteries” showing that the being of a mere this is not enduring .
This colorful aside reinforces philosophically that immediate sensory being is not ultimate – it is consumed by life and time. In the broader context of Hegel’s thought, it foreshadows how higher levels of consciousness will literally negate and absorb the merely given . But for now, the lesson is clear: Sense-certainty’s truth is universal and mediated, and common experience agrees.
Hyppolite’s context: Hyppolite and other commentators often note that Sense-Certainty can be read as a critique of radical empiricism or naïve realism. Historically, philosophers like Locke, or the skeptics who only trusted immediate appearances, held something akin to sense-certainty’s view. Hegel is showing that this stance refutes itself. Hyppolite suggests Hegel “in the first step fights his most powerful enemy in theory… to break through the immediate” . It’s not just an attack on a specific philosopher, but on the very attitude that there can be knowledge without conceptual mediation. The reference to ancient mysteries humorously shows that this insight is ancient and widespread – so any philosopher who still maintains that “this sensible here-now is absolute truth” is behind even the wisdom of animals.
Paragraph 110: The **“Unutterable” This and the Transition to Perception
Finally, Hegel addresses those theorists who insist on the existence of absolutely singular sense data. He notes a contradiction: “those who put forward such an assertion [of the absolute truth of sense-objects] also themselves say the direct opposite of what they mean.” . That is, they inevitably have to speak in general terms even as they claim the importance of the particular. He imagines the proponent of sense-certainty saying: “We talk of the existence of external objects, defined as actual, absolutely singular, wholly personal, individual things… each unlike anything else; this existence, they say, has absolute certainty and truth.” . They mean something like “this bit of paper here, which I am writing on.” But, Hegel retorts, “what they mean is not what they say.” . If they really wanted to talk about this exact bit of paper, they cannot do so in language. “The sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness . In the actual attempt to say it, it would… crumble away.” . If one tries to give a perfectly precise description of this piece of paper to capture its singularity, one ends up either using universals or pointing , which we’ve seen fails to fix the particular. You could never complete the description without it becoming something that is not uniquely this . One would have to “leave it to others” to continue the description, and ultimately all would “admit to speaking about something which is not [truly there as meant].” . In short, the attempt to express an “absolutely singular” being ends up expressing *nothing *, because it never captures the presumed particular.
Hegel concludes that such talk about “ineffable thises” reveals that “what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant but not actually expressed.” . This sharp statement means: if something supposedly cannot be said or thought, that’s not because it’s a profound truth beyond words – it’s because it’s not a coherent truth at all. The “mere particular” cannot be known; it’s an irrational fiction of the understanding.
Finally, Hegel draws the transition: Those who insist on the singular usually end up speaking in the most abstract generalities. He notes: saying only that something “is an actual, external object, a singular thing” is utterly general – it “expresses its sameness with everything rather than its distinctiveness.” . To say “this is a thing” is to say it’s an instance of the category Thing, like all other things. Even saying “this bit of paper” – since every piece of paper can be called “this bit of paper” by someone – is still general . We always end up in general terms . Thus, sense-certainty’s truth has necessarily shifted to a universal level: we now speak of objects, properties, universals.
Hegel sums up the learning: If I try to “help” language by actually pointing to the object while speaking , “experience teaches me what the truth of sense-certainty in fact is.” . Pointing and naming together show that what I get is a universal . Hegel then explicitly says what the new stance is: “I take it up then as it is in truth, and instead of knowing something immediate I take the truth of it, or perceive it.” . Here Hegel uses the word **“perceive” ** – literally “take as true” – to indicate the next shape of consciousness. In Perception, consciousness accepts that knowledge involves universal features rather than unknowable bare particulars. We leave the pre-conceptual naiveté of sense-certainty and move to a stance that acknowledges the thing with characteristics.
Thus, the section ends with a transition to “Perception”: consciousness will now approach the object as a thing with many properties, an object of perception, where truth involves identifying stable universals . Hegel has shown that immediacy alone yielded only emptiness; the content emerged only through universals. So, going forward, consciousness leans into those universals, trying to make sense of the world in terms of perceived things and their qualities . This sets the stage for the next dialectical development.
Brandom’s and Hyppolite’s concluding insights: Brandom interprets the outcome of Sense-Certainty as Hegel’s proto-inferentialist point that any content we can grasp or share is conceptually articulated. The transition to Perception is basically the admission that we must deal in repeatable, shareable features to have knowledge. Hyppolite situates this historically: having demolished the idea of knowledge as pure sensing , Hegel can now progress to higher categories. Hyppolite notes that for Hegel the Phenomenology is a grand journey where “in the first chapter, truth and certainty were immediately equal” , and by the end of the book “truth = certainty” in a fully reflected way . In Sense-Certainty, that initial immediate unity cracked apart: we saw that what consciousness is certain of was not the same as the truth . This gap drives the rest of the journey. Now, in Perception, consciousness tries to reconcile certainty and truth at a higher level: it is certain that it perceives a real thing, and it will assume the truth lies in the stable thing with properties. As we will see, Perception too will encounter contradictions . But thanks to Sense-Certainty, we have established a fundamental principle: immediacy is never truly immediate – consciousness always finds universals through experience. Immediacy is a moment in the process, not the whole story.
Transition to Perception and the Broader Movement of the Phenomenology
The final sentence of Sense-Certainty explicitly ushers in the next shape: “instead of knowing something immediate, I take the truth of it, or perceive it.” . Perception will examine the understanding of the object as “Thing with properties” – essentially, how consciousness deals with the interplay of universals and particulars in the act of perceiving an object. The lessons of Sense-Certainty directly inform Perception: we now acknowledge that we never grasp a pure particular, only a particular as instantiation of universals . Consciousness in Perception believes the object’s truth is found in these perceived properties and the thing’s unity. But new dialectical problems will arise – e.g. how can one thing have contradictory properties ? Who is responsible for unity – the thing or the perceiver? Those puzzles will lead to the next stage .
In the broader movement of the Phenomenology, Sense-Certainty plays a foundational role: it establishes Hegel’s method of immanent critique . It also introduces the idea that “mediation” is essential to knowledge – an idea that will recur at every level, from consciousness to self-consciousness to reason. The collapse of naive immediacy is the first negation that propels the dialectic forward. As Hyppolite remarks, Sense-Certainty is where “the soul no longer merely senses but is consciousness: it has a sensuous intuition”, i.e. the birth of a subject-object structure . The breakdown of this simplest structure prefigures the more complex breakdowns of later shapes. Historically/philosophically, Hegel has taken on both empiricism and a kind of skepticism . He showed that these positions refute themselves and inadvertently point beyond themselves to a more conceptual grasp of reality.
In summary, Sense-Certainty taught that the immediate “given” is not truly knowable until it is mediated through universals. It led consciousness to shift from the momentary sensation to the perceived thing – a move from sheer being to a richer determination . This progression is the first step in the Phenomenology’s long journey toward Absolute Knowing. Each subsequent step will similarly take a form of knowing, uncover its internal contradictions, and move to a higher, more integrated form. With Sense-Certainty, Hegel has shown the necessity of conceptual thought even at the ground floor of cognition – a point that thinkers like Brandom celebrate as Hegel’s anticipation of a thoroughly conceptual, inferential theory of knowledge . Now, in Perception, the adventure continues: consciousness will try to make sense of a world of things, carrying forward the insight that it must use universals, even as it still separates those universals onto things rather than its own activity. The dialectic thus marches on, driven by the tension between how things appear to a form of consciousness and what, through experience, they turn out to be. Hegel has taken us from the emptiest certainty to the threshold of a richer truth , inching closer to the idea that subject and object must co-constitute truth – a theme that will only be fully resolved at the end of the Phenomenology, after passing through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and absolute knowing.
