The In-Itself-For-Consciousness: The Third Dogma

Abstract

In the Introduction to the section on the Idea Hegel asserts that it possesses the most stubborn opposition.¹ This stubbornness is grounded in the oppositions encountered in both the idea of the true and that of the good, that is, in theoretical and practical philosophy. These oppositions are being eternally created and eternally overcome. Human knowledge is eternally producing and overcoming an opposition between subject and object, concept and content, mind and world. The goal of philosophers from Descartes to McDowell has been to overcome this opposition once and for all. Different strategies have included God, forms of intuition and categories of the understanding, intellectual intuition, knowledge by acquaintance, second nature, coherentism, and so on. These strategies instead of overcoming the opposition have ended up producing either a loss of the world (frictionless spinning in a web of beliefs), a loss of our knowledge of the world (causal interaction without justification), or some type of dogmatism (appeal to God or to intellectual intuition). In the Introduction to the Phenomenology Hegel lays out the problematic of the idea of the true using as guiding thread the opposition between the object in itself and the object for consciousness. The “in-itself” is the content thought, what is real, undisturbed by its being thought, whereas the “for-consciousness” is what is thought about the content, the identification of it as something, determined by a particular scheme.