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Hegels account in the Introduction of the way in which phenomenology progresses from one shape of consciousness to another is borne out by his opening examination of sense- certainty. Sense-certainty, according to Hegel, is the simplest and most primitive form of consciousness in that it takes its object to be immediately present to it. Indeed, it declares itself to be aware of nothing but the sheer immediate presence of the object. Since it takes itself to be directly acquainted with the object, it does not see any need to bring the object into focus by describing it, by means of general empirical concepts, as a ‘tree’ or a ‘house*.

It certainly beholds a rich array of objects before it, including trees and houses, and it is interested in the unique singularity and specificity of such objects. All it says and thinks, however, is that its object is thisy here, nowy and it is certain that in being aware of this - without the mediating clutter of concepts - it knows the specificity of the object itself.

Consciousness learns, however, that thinking of its object purely as this does not actu­

ally bring the unique specificity of the object to mind in quite the way it thought it would:

for such pure, immediate certainty is utterly indeterminate. To stare at something and think not ‘I see a tree’ but simply ‘I see thisy herey nowy might seem to put me in direct contact with the thing itself, but in fact it brings nothing determinate to mind. Indeed, it leaves me conscious of nothing but the empty universal form of ‘being this, here, now* that fails utterly to distinguish one thing from anything else.

Hegel thus argues that ‘sense-certainty demonstrates in its own self that the truth of its object is the universal*. This is not merely something that we note about sense-certainty, but something it experiences for itself when it discovers that, wherever it directs its attention, it has the same indeterminate consciousness of a thing’s simply being this, here, now:

Here is, e.g., the tree. If I turn round, this truth has vanished and is converted into its opposite: no tree is here, but a house instead. ‘Here’ itself does not vanish; on the contrary, it abides constant in the vanishing of the house, the tree, etc., and is indifferently house or tree. Again, therefore, the ‘This’

shows itself to be a mediated simplicity, or a universality.31

Hegel points out, however, that consciousness does not now give up on the idea that it is directly acquainted with the singular immediacy of the tree or house before it. Rather, it declares that it can bring such immediacy to mind by focusing not just on this but more specifically on what / mean by this. ‘The force of its truth thus lies now in the “I”, in the immediacy of my seeing, hearingy and so o n ;. . . “Now” is day because I see it; “Here” is a tree for the same reason’.32 Yet consciousness again learns that it does not thereby bring anything particular or determinate to mind. In this case, this is because what I mean by T is itself left indeterminate. I mean this T in particular - the I that I am - but I do nothing to distinguish my ‘I’ from that of anyqpe else. I simply insist that I am conscious of what I mean by this, and I think that that is sufficient to give specificity to myself and the object of my consciousness. As Hegel points out, however, ‘everyone is “I”, this singular “I” ’. By saying merely that I have in mind what I mean by this, therefore, I leave myself with nothing but the empty, universal certainty that is claimed by every T. My bare insistence that I am conscious of what t mean by this thus fails to bring to m ind precisely what I mean.

Again Hegel claims that sense-certainty itself experiences the indeterminacy and empty universality of its object. ‘Sense-certainty thus comes to know by experience that its essence is neither in the object nor in the “I”, and that its immediacy is neither an immediacy of the one nor of the other; for . . . the object and “I” are universals in which that “Now” and

“Here” and “I” which I mean do not have a continuing being, or are not.’33

Yet consciousness still does not give up on the idea that it can be conscious of the sheer immediacy o f the object It seeks to secure such consciousness by deliberately excluding from its perspective any objects other than the one it means to have in view and the view­

point of any T other than its own.

1, 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 T 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. On the contrary, I am a pure [act of] intuiting; I, for my part, stick to the feet that the Now is day, or that the Here is a tree; also I do not compare Here and Now themselves with one another, but stick firmly to one immediate rela­

tion: the Now is day.34

In this way, I endeavour to banish all indeterminacy from my consciousness and guaran­

tee that I am, indeed, conscious of the specific object that I mean, even though I think of it as nothing but this.

Hegel notes, however, that consciousness must now point out to us precisely what it is aware of, since it has retreated into a purely private view of things and so ‘will no longer come forth to us when we direct its attention to a Now that is night, or to an “I” to whom it is night’.35 Indeed, consciousness must also point out to itself what it is aware of. This is because the very act of excluding other objects from its point of view requires it to pick out from a range of such objects the specific one on which it is focusing. As we have seen, sensuous certainty remains indeterminate for itself unless the I specifies for itself that it is conscious of this (not that) and of what it (not another I) has in mind. This means that consciousness can lay claim to knowledge of a specific this only if it brings such a ‘this’

explicitly into view by pointing it out to itself. Hegel argues, however, that in the process of pointing out its object to itself and to us, consciousness learns that its object is not in fact the simple, immediate this that it took it to be, but rather something complex.

This is especially evident in the consciousness of what I take to be before me now, or of what Hegel calls ‘the now’ (das Jetzt). The problem, according to Hegel, is that, in the very act of pointing out the ‘now7 it is certain of, consciousness moves on from that now to another moment, another ‘now! Thus, precisely because it has been pointed out - and the act of pointing out takes time - any such now is necessarily brought to mind at a later now.

This means that it can only be brought to mind as a now that no longer simply is, but that has been.

The Now is pointed to, this now. <Now>; it has already ceased to be in the act of pointing to it. 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. The now, as it is pointed out to us, is Now that has been, and this is its truth; it has not the truth of being.56

This does not mean that consciousness fails to point out the now it has in mind. In the process Hegel is analysing consciousness succeeds in its endeavour: the now is, indeed, pointed out and as a result is now present to consciousness. It is present, however, as a now that has been pointed out. In other words, it is present as a now that necessarily has a past.

In the very act that is meant to secure for consciousness its certainty of the now, the now thus proves not to be the pure immediate presence - the pure and simple now - that con­

sciousness has taken it to be. Rather, the now necessarily shows itself, in the very experi­

ence of it, to be the now-that-has-been or the continuity of present and past moments. As such, the object of sense-certainty proves to be ‘an absolute plurality of Nows’.

Hegel’s argument, by the way, does not presuppose that time is actually divided up into atomic units called ‘nows’ Hegel is doing phenomenology, not philosophy of nature, and is not putting forward any conception of time of his own, and certainly not an atomistic theory of time. His claim is that sense-certainty conceives of its object as the simple imme­

diacy of the now, but that it necessarily goes beyond such simple immediacy in the very act of pointing it out to itself. In the process, sense-certainty itself reveals its object not just to be the pure now, but to be the now-that-has been: for the object can be known in its immediacy only in being pointed out, but as pointed out it necessarily has a past.

In the same vein, sense-certainty’s act of picking out a specific here from other heres shows any such here to be inseparable from those other heres and so itself to be ‘a simple complex of many Heres’. As Hegel explains, ‘the Here pointed out, to which I hold fast, is similarly a this Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, and Above and Below, a Right and a Left. The Above is itself similarly this manifold otherness of above, below, etc.’37

Such a complex continuity of different moments is called by Hegel a ‘universal’. It is, however, a concrete, internally differentiated universal, rather than the empty, abstract uni­

versal that sense-certainty first experienced the this and the I to be. Hegel writes that ‘the dialectic of sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience’, and he notes that such experience is itself nothing but the discovery that the object is more complex than consciousness first thought. ‘The pointing-out of the Now*, he states, is ‘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 universal8

It is evident to us as readers and phenomenologists that the object has proven in the experience of sense-certainty itself to be a wholly new form of object. The object has turned out not just to be the simple immediacy that consciousness first took it to be, but rather to be a complex unity of different moments. Sense-certainty, however, does not itself explic­

itly recognize that an altogether new form of object has thereby emerged in its experience.

It merely learns that its own object proves in the experience of it not to be what it initially took it to be. This, Hegel maintains, is because sense-certainty does not actually ‘take over the truth’ that has been disclosed in its own experience.

As we have seen, sense-certainty’s ‘truth’ is the ‘universal* None the less, Hegel notes, such certainty still ‘wants to apprehend the This’.39 Despite all it has learned about its object, therefore, sense-certainty does not let go of its own conception of the object altogether. It starts out wedded to the idea that its object is pure immediacy, and it experiences this very immediacy as complex and so as not what it initially takes it to be. It does not, however, relinquish its identity as sense-certainty and cease seeking immediate certainty of this, here, now, even though it experiences the impossibility of such simple sensuous certainty. Sense- certainty does not, therefore, grasp the'full implication of its own experience and accept that the object of consciousness has actually been shown to have a new logical form.

The shape of consciousness that does accept this and ‘take over the truth’ revealed by sense-certainty is perception or Wahrnehmung (literally, ‘taking truly’). ‘Perception’, Hegel tells us, thus ‘takes what is present to it as a universal’.40 In Hegel’s account, sense-certainty does not turn itself around and become perception; it is we who make the transition to perception. Nevertheless, this transition is made necessary by the experience of sense-cer­

tainty itself, since perception is simply the shape of consciousness that accepts the truth disclosed by sense-certainty and takes the object as it is actually known by sense-certainty - the lbeing-/or-consciousness of the first in-itself’ - to be the new object of consciousness.

In the transition that we make, consciousness itself thus mutates immanently and logically - through its own experience - into a new shape.