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3 Reason in the World  Part A. Theoretical Reason We began the Phenomenology with a consciousness whose object kept eluding it in “Sense-Certainty” and “Perception.” Then we met a consciousness that posited itself as the inner world behind the elusive flux of appearance in “Understanding.” Then in “Lordship and Bondage” individual consciousness attempted to assert itself as all of reality and sought to prove to itself that it was so, first, and rather unsuccessfully, as a master who simply negated all others and demanded recognition for himself, and then, more successfully but rather humbly, as a slave who controlled the object through work, made it serve human desires, and thus made it an object-of-his-consciousness . Then, in “Unhappy Consciousness,” these two forms of consciousness merged into one and shifted their attention to the religious realm, where we found even God to be a construction and projection of human consciousness . Recognizing all of this will allow us to see how human consciousness, now more effectively than before, attempts to assert itself as all of reality— assert that all of reality is constituted by, and can be known within, self-consciousness . At this point, it is true, consciousness lacks the confidence to make this claim in its own name. It does so only surreptitiously. It claims that all of reality exists within and is constituted by consciousness—not, however, its own consciousness, but God’s. Still, in taking this to be so, human consciousness , which, after all, is also consciousness—indeed, the very consciousness that constructed the divine consciousness, though it hides this fact from itself1—can proceed with the assumption that all of reality is constituted by and within consciousness. And thus it can set out on its quest to show that all of reality can be known by consciousness.  69  Hegel has in mind, I suggest, Kant’s “Transcendental Dialectic” with its emphasis on regulative ideas and ideas of reason. For Kant, after all, we must treat the world as-if it were created and ordered by a divine mind, which means, we have seen, that we must assume that nature forms a connected, consistent, and unified system of rational laws. This, for Kant, is a presupposition necessary for the project of natural science to be possible. For Hegel, however, who rejects an unknown thing-in-itself, there are no as-ifs here. The rational unity of nature, therefore, must actually be known and it must be proven. If the world has been created and ordered by God, then science should be able to show that the natural world can be grasped and known as entirely lawlike and rational. If the world has been created and ordered by absolute reason, then nothing should be lost to reason. This fairly sums up, Hegel thinks, the attitude of theoretical reason as natural science—what it is, what it takes itself to be, and what it attempts to do—an attitude that culminated in Kant but which had been developing in the modern world since the Renaissance, when reason first discovered a “new real world” (PhS, 140/GW, IX, 133) and set out to study it. That attempt is what we follow in part A of chapter V of the Phenomenology. At any rate, individual human consciousness sets out to prove to itself that all can be known. It sifts through all the phenomena of nature and seeks to understand them as constituted by a consciously ordering mind. This is what Hegel means by “reason.” Reason is a synthesis of consciousness and self-consciousness. Consciousness confronted an object—an other-than-consciousness . Self-consciousness confronted itself—the object was merely an object-for-consciousness. In reason we have a solid and real natural object— one created, ordered, and maintained by God. We also have a self-consciousness , for which the object is not other than self-consciousness. It has been constituted by self-consciousness, it is an object-for-self-consciousness, it is within self-consciousness, but it is also a real, solid, God-created object. Reason, thus, “seeks to possess in thinghood the consciousness only of itself” (PhS, 145/GW, IX, 137). Individual consciousness must now set out to actually prove this truth through science. Another way to put all of this is to say that reason seeks itself in the world. Just as for self-consciousness, reason expects to find nothing but itself, that is, nothing but rational order and law. Reason, nevertheless, does confront an other. There...

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