Phenomenology of Spirit

Sensory knowledge is the richest and most trustworthy type of knowledge. The experience of an object through the senses is immediate, and a person’s reaction is immediate as well. However, Hegel suggests that sense-certainty is an impoverished form of truth. There is little to be gathered from this simple connection between internal experience and the external world.

The dialectical process always seeks unity between the “I” and the external object. Sense-certainty is distinguished because it does not yet recognize an “I.” There is no distinction between the self and the external. It is a qualitative experience that cannot be measured. While sensory experience is trustworthy, it provides little information other than the existence of the object. Hegel asserts that it only confirms that something is.

Sensory experience is centered in a succession of “nows.” It cannot consider the future or past. Instead, its experience is a continuation of present moments. When something new is presented, the old disappears, or is negated, but the present moment persists: “‘Here’ itself does not vanish; on the contrary, it abides constant in the vanishing of the house, the tree, etc.” (61). Hegel explains that the human experience of now is illusive and false. As soon as one begins to think about or speak about the now, one is speaking about the past.