Phenomenology of Spirit: The Path to the Absolute

Look, what follows is going to be a bit of an exposition on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—and honestly, I probably won't finish this series. In fact, I likely won't be posting on this forum, or even touching the "cyber world" in general, for a while. I've decided to cut out all the noise and distractions to focus entirely on what I'm doing. I’ve already made the call to go totally off the grid—doesn't matter if it takes two, four, or eight months—cutting ties in my personal life too just to clear the deck. My goal is to truly wrap my head around the Phenomenology of Spirit and dive deep into Aristotle’s Organon (specifically those Categories, which are pretty much the core of the whole thing). This is a massive undertaking, so for me, there's no more hanging out or socializing. The only exception is the occasional reach-out for mutual help—mostly because one colleague already managed to pull me back out once—but until I've conquered this, that's it. I'm viewing these posts as just a small way to share bits of the journey, strictly for the sake of helping each other out, though let's be real: I probably won't ever actually meet any of you in person.

Honestly, deciding to skip out on that mindless social scene during your younger years—especially since we're living in this absolute era of nihilism where those connections basically rot away anyway—is actually a solid move. It pulls your spirit away from all that aimless wandering and the sheer triviality of just hanging out for the sake of hanging out. Even a forum like this is just another version of that socializing, if you actually take it seriously. I mean, you don't have to be physically out at a bar with buddies to be "out there"—you can be fully engaged with the world even while you're sitting alone inside. Most of the socializing we see today is just pure nonsense or, at its absolute best, an endless flood of useless facts. Whether it’s politics or whatever else is grabbing everyone's attention, it’s just a massive dump of "Nothingness" designed to clutter our consciousness. And let's face it, only actual struggle can change that. See, the moment you turn off the TV, disconnect from the internet, put down the newspaper, or even just stop obsessing over your watch—that’s a fight. That’s you fighting for something meaningful to actually exist. You can't build anything real if you're constantly jumping from one distraction to the next, just drifting wherever the noise tells you to go. It's about being your own experiment, your own boss—not someone else's test subject or their little subject. One or the other.
With all this endless chatter—and honestly, all this writing about absolutely nothing—we’re losing the one thing that actually matters: the spirit. And that's everything we are. I mean, seriously, who actually wants to lose themselves in all that noise?

To be honest—since this is a forum and there's no point in holding back—my life basically boils down to a single library and a quiet room. Figures like Buddha, Christ, or Moses? They’re just distractions at this point. My days are filled with the usual grind, helping people out when I can, dealing with a pretty chaotic past, and having those occasional chats with people I’ve known since I was a kid. And look, I don't mean that negatively—I'm perfectly civil with them—but I wouldn't call them friends. I don't really have friends. There’s no such thing as "true brotherhood," as Nietzsche would put it—though he wasn't the first to think so; you've got Aristotle before him, and even Plato, who basically questioned the whole concept of friendship or admitted in his Lysidus that he wasn't quite sure what it all meant. For me, it's just a collection of friendly acquaintances. As for romance... well, there have been some lovely little excursions, but nothing more. People—and I'm not just talking about flighty women—might jump to conclusions, but there's no real love there. Just moments.
Alright, let's take a quick detour into some personal nonsense—totally irrelevant, I know—and then get back to the actual point.
I’m hoping this thread sparks enough interest to get some people actually diving in—even if wrestling with Hegel feels like trying to swim through molasses. Honestly, though, if you’ve got even a shred of intellectual curiosity, there’s no point in building an entire worldview on anyone else. If we're talking about the heavy hitters—the actual bedrock of deep philosophy—you’ve got Aristotle, Kant, Hegel (obviously), Plato, Spinoza, Descartes, Nietzsche, and the rest. But when you look at the absolute summit of that mountain? It’s Hegel. If you try to kick off your philosophical journey starting with Schopenhauer, you're basically asking for an existential meltdown. And don't even get me started on starting with Nietzsche. I've seen it happen—some young guy decides Nietzsche is his entry point, and man, he’s headed straight for a crisis. For a guy like that, it might honestly be better to just grab a beer, eat a good meal, work a regular job, and find a wife—just live a normal life like everyone else. It’s much easier than deciding to drown yourself in thought. Unless, of course, he's actively looking to sink the ship. Not everyone survives that kind of wreck, but hey, if he wants to go down with it, that's his call. There’s a difference between someone truly seeking truth and someone who is just... seeking. If you're just "seeking," then your whole existence becomes trapped in that hollow loop of searching without purpose. That isn't how you start out. You don't jump straight into Cicero, Schopenhauer, Camus, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. That’s just not how the game is played. The foundation is Aristotle. Period. Trying to build a philosophy without those fundamentals is like trying to build a house without a blueprint or a solid slab. Instead, people just start throwing bricks and shingles together, using glue instead of cement, hoping it holds. They end up with a little straw shack that blows away the second a decent breeze hits—kind of like that Three Little Pigs situation. It’s not just bad strategy; it’s plain foolish. Look, there are plenty of fools out there—that’s just the way the world works—but if you take things to heart the way Nietzsche did (along with everything else, obviously), you’re going to end up broken. Stick to Aristotle for the foundation. For anything else, you can always find a path through art or religion.

Look, if you’ve actually got an appetite for philosophy—if you’ve actually got that Will to Power—then just know right now: you aren't going to make a living at it. If you want bread, go work at a bakery. If you want actual insight, you head toward philosophy or science—and I don't mean this "modern science" nonsense, for God's sake. Back in the day, even the big names here in the States had a real affinity for philosophy (think Newton or someone of that caliber), but today? They’ve just downgraded themselves into a massive swarm of these various "scientists"—to use Kierkegaard’s term—whose intellect is basically like a monkey counting fruit; they think they understand the tree because they can count a piece of fruit, even though the poor thing doesn't even grasp what a tree is, let alone the soil it grows in. Scientists nowadays just count and calculate; that's it. They don't actually *think*.
The people who have an affinity for wisdom itself—not just this or that little bit of fruit they find hanging on the branches of knowledge—those are the Hegelians, the Aristotelians, the Platonists, and the kind of readers who actually engage with ideas. They aren't just "readers" in the sense of consuming quantity like rabbits; they’re slow, like snails or turtles—actually, way slower than those guys.

Hegel’s thought... man, it’s almost like God Himself is speaking, and He isn't even joking or being sarcastic about it; He's dead serious. Actually, a scholar like Vanja Sutlić said something similar in his lectures on Hegel—I believe his book was published by a major American university press earlier this year. Anyway, Sutlić argues in those lectures that Hegel isn't just a thinker practicing philosophy as a "love of wisdom," but rather—get this—he's dealing with Wisdom itself. We aren't talking about philosophy as a pursuit anymore; we're dealing with the essence of Wisdom. Hegel moved past "philosophy" and arrived at Wisdom itself. He’s no longer striving toward it as a philosopher; he *possesses* it. He has realized it. He’s essentially the messenger for the Absolute. To him, thought is the All-in-All, a single Totality, a Substance.
To be identical to that is what Sutlić calls the "substance-subject." That’s the whole game. And yet, even though that’s everything, and even though artists and religious folks try to reach that point in their own ways, most of the masses—unfortunately—don't bother at all. They just merge with this era of nihilism like a guy merging with a woman; they just stagnate as a bunch of nobodies in nothingness. It's like most people just... exist. There. Just "there." Like this one acquaintance of mine—a sort of depressed entrepreneur type—told me a year or two ago, "I'm just here." He’s just existing without any goal or purpose. He doesn't even read; honestly, it’s probably better for him that he doesn't. A person who just exists like that is living a slow death, acting as if they’re already dead, chasing nothing higher than their own fleeting happiness, interests, or those "clay pots and glass cups" Epictetus talked about. See, Epictetus says true wisdom lies in not getting attached to anything that has the nature of "clay pots and glass cups." But if you actually listened to that advice from Epictetus and followed it logically to its absolute limit, you’d realize that a person shouldn't just avoid attaching themselves to transient things—like friends, a spouse, or a mother—but they shouldn't even attach themselves to *themselves*, or to their house, or their intellect, or whatever else they claim as "mine." Doing so would be like leaving behind one's own identity. It would be like a Zen monk watching a thief steal stuff from his house and thinking, "Shame he didn't take the clothes off my back and the month of sunshine I'm looking at, too." Anything that has that fleeting, fragile nature—that "clay pot and glass cup" quality—Epictetus would call it foolish, almost childish, to get attached to it. So, all a person can do is walk toward the imperishable, toward the Totality and the Whole. And in that climb, they shouldn't cling to the stairs or even the destination, nor to themselves. Instead, they should follow the Spirit. Without staring at themselves, they finish the movement by ascending the steps, because a human being is nothing more than a moment in the service of the Spirit. Anyone who wastes that moment—by wasting other moments—is "outside" that Spirit. They are far from it, as if they were never truly part of it to begin with, merely existing within it as a passing thought.
Living in a state of total madness is basically second nature to most people. It’s like life itself has somehow pushed them away from actually *living*—because, let’s be real, being reckless, chaotic, or just plain delusional is really just a way of distancing oneself from the Whole. It’s an exile. Kind of like how religions talk about being kicked out of Eden, right? So, I guess our whole job is just finding our way back.

The author of 'Science of Logic' (and his other massive works, for that matter) is essentially the Absolute speaking through Hegel. If you actually take the time to wrap your head around his heavy hitters, you have to realize that works like 'Science of Logic' are on another level. It’s like what some scholars say—that it feels as if God Himself sat down to write it; truly, only the Absolute could produce logic this profound.

More coming soon.

Since I already touched on how people tend to misread Hegel in my previous thread, I’m opening this one up to hopefully present his "key" work the right way. My plan is to walk through Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit*—starting from consciousness all the way to absolute knowledge—offering some running commentary along the way. Now, full disclosure: I probably won't wrap the whole thing up in one go here. Let's be real, trying to explain or even just comment on a work like this while keeping Hegel's incredibly specific, almost alien language somewhat digestible is a massive undertaking. So, if my commentary ends up feeling a bit "mechanical" at times, please bear with me—following Hegel is genuinely tough, even for those who know what they're doing. If you actually have the willpower to read this stuff, then welcome to the thread. And look, if I suddenly stop posting here or on this entire philosophy forum, it just means I've gone off to focus entirely on my actual job—which, as much as I enjoy this, requires some serious attention. Lots of it. Before we dive in, I want to start not with the actual introduction, but with a section from Chapter Three regarding the so-called "internality" of things (transcendence, beyond-sensibility, intuition—take your pick). Right after the dialectic of force, Hegel discusses a consciousness that is essentially immersed in transcendence, lives off it, and defends it. I’ll put this here first as a little primer to jumpstart the discussion before we hit the first stage of consciousness: sense certainty, "this," and opinion.

With Hegel, there aren't these "higher" or "lower" types of consciousness that various spiritualists or self-proclaimed experts of all stripes love to babble about. He only identifies three modes, and none of them are "better" or "worse" than the others. There is no such thing as a "higher consciousness" in his system. Honestly, seeing the amount of people online—in these digital spaces where any random guy can hide behind a handle and spew nonsense without any accountability—I can only say, "I'll tolerate the stupidity." You're free to write your nonsense, but I know it's just nonsense. Of course, I'm still me—even if a Buddhist might disagree—(Paul Bailey95), not some faceless "Self," and I don't feel the need to hide behind an anonymous handle like >.
Moving on, someone else on the forum already shared a "critical" take on Hegel which I won't repeat here. However, I will briefly touch upon what Popper and his crowd use as justification for the totalitarian state (as they see it in Hegel). They use this to smear both Hegel and Plato with some pretty nasty labels, arguing that because everything real is also mental, then if a totalitarian state is "real," it must inherently be "rational." It's a wild leap, right?
Anyway.

In the introduction to the *Phenomenology*, Hegel argues that the goal is for a person to understand truth not merely as that Aristotelian substance—something that is one in itself and identical to itself—but to understand that this substance is also the subject. Substance and subject are one and the same. For the subject, the goal is to become like substance: to be identical and equal to itself. For Hegel, substantiality is the immediacy of knowledge itself, but it's also an immediacy that contains its own being for the sake of knowledge. What he's really getting at is that what is substantial to a subject—let's call him Mark—is what is "in himself" and "for himself." As "in himself," Mark is intelligent, but as "for himself," he is *actually* intelligent. To be intelligent "for oneself" means to truly possess that intelligence; being intelligent "in oneself" just means having the potential for it, though it hasn't manifested in reality yet. This means Mark might potentially be smart or potentially a human being, but just because he has the potential doesn't mean he has actually achieved it. You see, a human can potentially be a "Human," but a human is also an animal. It often happens that a person displays more animalistic traits than human ones, because becoming a "Human" is a process you have to work toward, whereas being an animal is just something you're born as. You're born an animal, but you have to move away from that state to become a human. We are all animals by nature, but remaining an animal when you are conceptually a human is a disaster. A human is both human and animal, which means to truly be a human, one must take that humanity seriously for themselves, rather than leaving their humanity as a mere possibility and settling for the animalistic side they share with substance. To be a human is to be a substance-subject—a living substance whose being is the human/subject, which only becomes a real subject if it is also a substance:
a) Motion through which motion sets itself in motion
b) Self-mediation in which substance becomes something else through its own mediation
Since substance is identical to the subject, substance—just like any subject—is a simple negativity that acts as a double opposition, which is itself just a negation of difference and opposition. This is where Hegel argues that this re-establishing equality of substance-as-subject (or the reflection of self into the other) is what’s actually true. It’s the process of becoming oneself, and that becoming is the only thing that is truly real. So—and here’s where we hit that point I mentioned earlier—not everything that feels "real" to a person is actually real according to Hegel. For Hegel, reality is strictly mental; anything non-mental simply doesn't count as real. In his view, reality flows from the mental, not the other way around. All this stuff surrounding us—everything we stumble upon or see, all those "real-world" events—isn't "real" in the philosophical sense. Only the mental is real, which means only the mental is actual. Anything non-mental is essentially unreal or non-existent.

Side note: in philosophy, there’s a massive distinction between history and historiography. History is just what happened, whereas historiography is the essential meaning found within those happenings.
End of side note.

Mental equals real, and that’s the baseline for Hegel. If you flip it and say non-real equals mental, then suddenly everything and anything becomes real. That’s why Hegel doesn't start by saying everything real is mental; he starts by saying everything mental is real. From there, you can infer that everything real is mental—but *only* if it is mental. Anyone who misses this, or tries to breeze through it, or carries some underlying ideology, or hasn't actually sat down to read Hegel and think along with him... well, all those so-called "philosophy buffs" like Paul Bailey95 and his crowd? Honestly, let me be blunt: they are completely unprepared for Hegel and his system. They act like know-it-alls, snatching a single sentence out of context and pretending they "understand" Hegel, when really they’re just intellectual small-timers. Basically, clowns.
Look, beyond that, it also shows a total lack of professionalism and that kind of pseudo-intellectualism that an educated person should never permit themselves. And strictly speaking, it’s pretty amateurish when these people try to "attack" such a massive, absolute system using nothing but mere opinions, lack of critical thought, or grasping at a few sentences that might make sense to them. You can only critique Hegel by engaging with his entire system as a whole, not by being a smart-aleck who picks one or two lines from a tiny subsection and then goes off "Popper-ing" about how Hegel is this or that. For people like that, the rule is: I think, therefore I don't think. That's not how this works. But anyone doing that—especially if they call themselves a "scholar," an "intellectual," or a "respected professor"—reveals exactly how little they see to anyone with actual vision. Seriously, taking a quote out of context to "critique" it is bordering on the level of the *idiotes* from antiquity. In short, it’s a complete waste of time.

So, basically, Hegel lays it out like this, even though some people have been shamelessly attacking him for it:
1. Mental
2. Real
Keep in mind, the mental comes first. Everything else follows from that, so for Hegel, if it isn't in alignment with the mental, it isn't real. Now, if Hegel had set it up like this:
1. Real
2. Mental
Then maybe all that analytical babble would actually make sense. But he doesn't do that.

Anyway, let's finally get into that intro I mentioned (that bit about interiority) next time. After that brief intro, we'll finally dive into consciousness.

There’s a certain merit to this kind of quietist withdrawal from the world, provided you're doing it in the pursuit of actual insight. If you can actually pull it off, that is. People claim Kojève spent three years doing nothing but obsessing over the Phenomenology. Still, I wouldn't exactly call "How to Read Hegel" the definitive survival guide for navigating that specific work. In any case, it’s worth clarifying what the Phenomenology actually does and how it relates to the Science of Logic. Its job is essentially to demonstrate how our common sense—that ordinary, everyday way we perceive life and the world—is fundamentally contradictory and deeply unsatisfying. You could think of the Phenomenology as a sort of "discourse on philosophy." It argues that if we want to reach absolute knowledge, we have to start digging much deeper. The Science of Logic, on the other hand, lays out the actual content of that knowledge. So, those people who insist—and there are plenty of them—that the Phenomenology is Hegel’s most important book (or even the most important philosophical book ever written, or even just the most important book period), have essentially stopped halfway up the mountain. Hegel himself points out that the Phenomenology is like a ladder; once you've reached absolute knowledge, you're free to kick it aside. Schopenhauer said something similar about his own philosophy, which he likely picked up from Hegel. And Wittgenstein said something quite similar regarding his work, a sentiment he almost certainly borrowed from Schopenhauer rather than Hegel, given that Wittgenstein grew up in the intellectual atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna, where Schopenhauer was the height of fashion.
The starting point, however, has to be the idea that "the truth is the whole"—which is just a fancy way of saying we have to postulate the existence of the Absolute. That truth has to be circular; otherwise, it wouldn't be absolute, because it would be pointing to something outside of itself. From there, you get into the relationship between reflection and reason as the bedrock of the speculative mind, leading to the core pillar of the Phenomenology: Hegel’s claim that substance is subject. This means we shouldn't approach an object merely as a substance, but as a subject—something possessing an interiority rather than just being an external "phenomenon" existing "for us." If we don't, we end up stuck with that unsolvable "surplus" problem, much like Kant did, with the whole concept of the thing-in-itself.
Edit: Oh, look at that, my colleague has already touched on some of these points, and I didn't even see his second post until after I finished writing this one. Though, I suppose my interpretation of "what is mental is real..." is a bit different.

This is quite compelling.
The pacing here is excellent; you’ve managed to weave the heavy lifting of Hegelian thought—which might feel daunting at this stage—seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. It makes the material much more accessible, almost like masking bitter medicine with strawberry juice so a child doesn't notice they aren't drinking something sweet. 🙂

Immediately following the dialectic of force, Hegel discusses consciousness, which is essentially situated in the beyond; it lives off the beyond and defends its existence.

I am looking forward to the breakdown of this and the subsequent discussion on consciousness.

In Hegel's framework, there are no higher, lower, or intermediate levels of consciousness as various mystics and amateurs from all walks of life might claim. There are simply three modes, and none of them holds precedence over the others.

🤣
Perhaps some "amateur"—and I use that term affectionately, like finding an old, forgotten trinket in an antique shop that you once held dear—will try to map these "three modes of consciousness" onto their own arbitrary hierarchies of high, middle, and low culture. 😉

What Hegel is getting at here is that the substantiality of a subject—let's take Mark, for instance—is defined by what he is "in himself" and what he is "for himself." As a being in himself, Mark is small, and as a being for himself, he truly is small. To be small "for oneself" means to possess that smallness internally, whereas being small "in oneself" means possessing that quality only as a potentiality, not yet as a reality.

So, "for itself" represents actual possession, while "in itself" remains mere possibility—the conceptualized version of oneself that hasn't been realized yet, and perhaps never will be?

For Hegel, everything we encounter or observe in our surroundings—all those "actual" events—isn't truly real unless it is mental. Only that which is mental is considered real. Consequently, anything non-mental is synonymous with the unreal or the non-existent.

This is spot on. It reinforces my own conviction that only that which possesses true value—everything we see, hear, say, and do that actually matters—is what endures; it is what truly exists. Everything else, the superfluous, the trivial, the unthinking, is essentially a glitch that won't last, a sort of mirage. One could easily draw parallels between this Hegelian truth and various Eastern spiritual texts regarding "maya," or the illusion of the transient world versus the eternal, unchanging, and mental reality that constitutes true existence.
Maybe the serious Hegelian scholars will roll their eyes at these comparisons and decide I've missed the point entirely. But even if my associations have nothing to do with his intended meaning, I believe the very fact that such connections can be made serves as proof of the philosophy's inherent value and truth. After all, only truth can be valuable, and only value can be true.Inspiration. It’s a concept people love to romanticize, usually while sitting in some overpriced coffee shop in Seattle, waiting for a lightning bolt to strike. They talk about it as if it’s this divine, mystical force that descends upon the worthy, rather than what it actually is: a fleeting byproduct of specific circumstances, often fueled by nothing more than caffeine and a temporary lack of distractions. We like to pretend there's some profound, almost spiritual connection between our inner will and the creative spark. We act as though we can summon it through sheer force of personality. But if you look at it through a more grounded lens, inspiration isn't a guest you invite over for dinner; it's more like a stray cat. You can set out the right food and clear a space on the porch, but you can't demand it shows up, and you certainly can't control what it does once it arrives. The reality is much more mundane. Most "inspired" moments are just the result of being bored enough to let your mind wander or being disciplined enough to stay in the chair until the gears finally catch. There is no magic in it—just the intersection of preparation and circumstance. To believe otherwise is to indulge in a very comfortable kind of delusion. To truly stir the soul and push the imagination toward forging deep associations or sparking entirely new ideas, one needs more than just simple inspiration. It requires a certain level of mental friction—a willingness to let disparate concepts collide until they fuse into something coherent. It isn't about waiting for a lightning bolt to strike; it’s about cultivating a headspace where the mind feels permitted to wander through the abstract without the constant tether of practical utility.

The only thing Amanda Jackson5 says that actually confuses me is:

It means we have to approach an object not merely as a substance, but as a subject—as something possessing its own internal reality rather than just being an external phenomenon presented to us. If we fail to do that, we end up stuck with that unsolvable surplus, that unreachable "thing-in-itself" that haunts Kantian thought.

How does one actually approach an object as something possessing an internal essence? To put it more plainly: how do we reach that core and truly feel it? Without a direct experience, that interiority doesn't really exist for us; it remains nothing more than an abstract theory. From my reading of secular literature, I’ve gathered that achieving this requires a specific kind of faculty—one we haven't quite developed yet—which might be called a "body of intuition." Or perhaps it's simply an extraordinarily refined empathy: the capacity to immerse oneself in another's inner world without blurring the lines between their reality and our own. We need the ability to grasp the interiority of a subject that isn't "I," effectively turning the object into something akin to a subject—something as intimately known as ourselves. Without this capacity, I don't see any way to bypass Kant’s "insoluble surplus"—that "thing-in-itself" which remains perpetually out of reach. It is that private dimension we lack the ability to consciously access, at least not in the same way we experience the most intimate parts of our own being.
In other words, I fail to see how philosophy or pure reason could ever actually grasp the internal essence of an object that exists outside the self. How can we claim to reach its true core when what we perceive is likely nothing more than a rationalized "preconception"—a mental construct that bears little to no actual resemblance to the object's true state, its color, its tone, or its fundamental reality?

Please, Daniel, keep going. Don't let any distractions throw you off course or derail your progress—your only real objective here is to finish that sequel on consciousness. 😉Just my latest little outburst. 🙂

Sandra Murphy33 said:This is quite compelling.
The pacing here is excellent; you’ve managed to weave the heavy lifting of Hegelian thought—which might feel daunting at this stage—seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life. It makes the material much more accessible, almost like masking bitter medicine with strawberry juice so a child doesn't notice they aren't drinking something sweet. 🙂

Immediately following the dialectic of force, Hegel discusses consciousness, which is essentially situated in the beyond; it lives off the beyond and defends its existence.

I am looking forward to the breakdown of this and the subsequent discussion on consciousness.

In Hegel's framework, there are no higher, lower, or intermediate levels of consciousness as various mystics and amateurs from all walks of life might claim. There are simply three modes, and none of them holds precedence over the others.

🤣
Perhaps some "amateur"—and I use that term affectionately, like finding an old, forgotten trinket in an antique shop that you once held dear—will try to map these "three modes of consciousness" onto their own arbitrary hierarchies of high, middle, and low culture. 😉

What Hegel is getting at here is that the substantiality of a subject—let's take Mark, for instance—is defined by what he is "in himself" and what he is "for himself." As a being in himself, Mark is small, and as a being for himself, he truly is small. To be small "for oneself" means to possess that smallness internally, whereas being small "in oneself" means possessing that quality only as a potentiality, not yet as a reality.

So, "for itself" represents actual possession, while "in itself" remains mere possibility—the conceptualized version of oneself that hasn't been realized yet, and perhaps never will be?

For Hegel, everything we encounter or observe in our surroundings—all those "actual" events—isn't truly real unless it is mental. Only that which is mental is considered real. Consequently, anything non-mental is synonymous with the unreal or the non-existent.

This is spot on. It reinforces my own conviction that only that which possesses true value—everything we see, hear, say, and do that actually matters—is what endures; it is what truly exists. Everything else, the superfluous, the trivial, the unthinking, is essentially a glitch that won't last, a sort of mirage. One could easily draw parallels between this Hegelian truth and various Eastern spiritual texts regarding "maya," or the illusion of the transient world versus the eternal, unchanging, and mental reality that constitutes true existence.
Maybe the serious Hegelian scholars will roll their eyes at these comparisons and decide I've missed the point entirely. But even if my associations have nothing to do with his intended meaning, I believe the very fact that such connections can be made serves as proof of the philosophy's inherent value and truth. After all, only truth can be valuable, and only value can be true.Inspiration. It’s a concept people love to romanticize, usually while sitting in some overpriced coffee shop in Seattle, waiting for a lightning bolt to strike. They talk about it as if it’s this divine, mystical force that descends upon the worthy, rather than what it actually is: a fleeting byproduct of specific circumstances, often fueled by nothing more than caffeine and a temporary lack of distractions. We like to pretend there's some profound, almost spiritual connection between our inner will and the creative spark. We act as though we can summon it through sheer force of personality. But if you look at it through a more grounded lens, inspiration isn't a guest you invite over for dinner; it's more like a stray cat. You can set out the right food and clear a space on the porch, but you can't demand it shows up, and you certainly can't control what it does once it arrives. The reality is much more mundane. Most "inspired" moments are just the result of being bored enough to let your mind wander or being disciplined enough to stay in the chair until the gears finally catch. There is no magic in it—just the intersection of preparation and circumstance. To believe otherwise is to indulge in a very comfortable kind of delusion. To truly stir the soul and push the imagination toward forging deep associations or sparking entirely new ideas, one needs more than just simple inspiration. It requires a certain level of mental friction—a willingness to let disparate concepts collide until they fuse into something coherent. It isn't about waiting for a lightning bolt to strike; it’s about cultivating a headspace where the mind feels permitted to wander through the abstract without the constant tether of practical utility.

The only thing Amanda Jackson5 says that actually confuses me is:

It means we have to approach an object not merely as a substance, but as a subject—as something possessing its own internal reality rather than just being an external phenomenon presented to us. If we fail to do that, we end up stuck with that unsolvable surplus, that unreachable "thing-in-itself" that haunts Kantian thought.

How does one actually approach an object as something possessing an internal essence? To put it more plainly: how do we reach that core and truly feel it? Without a direct experience, that interiority doesn't really exist for us; it remains nothing more than an abstract theory. From my reading of secular literature, I’ve gathered that achieving this requires a specific kind of faculty—one we haven't quite developed yet—which might be called a "body of intuition." Or perhaps it's simply an extraordinarily refined empathy: the capacity to immerse oneself in another's inner world without blurring the lines between their reality and our own. We need the ability to grasp the interiority of a subject that isn't "I," effectively turning the object into something akin to a subject—something as intimately known as ourselves. Without this capacity, I don't see any way to bypass Kant’s "insoluble surplus"—that "thing-in-itself" which remains perpetually out of reach. It is that private dimension we lack the ability to consciously access, at least not in the same way we experience the most intimate parts of our own being.
In other words, I fail to see how philosophy or pure reason could ever actually grasp the internal essence of an object that exists outside the self. How can we claim to reach its true core when what we perceive is likely nothing more than a rationalized "preconception"—a mental construct that bears little to no actual resemblance to the object's true state, its color, its tone, or its fundamental reality?

Please, Daniel, keep going. Don't let any distractions throw you off course or derail your progress—your only real objective here is to finish that sequel on consciousness. 😉Just my latest little outburst. 🙂

It’s clear you’ve pinpointed exactly where the friction lies, which is great, though I wouldn't say it's strictly a matter of intuition. In the realm of metaphysics, the heavy hitters are always the questions regarding substance and the subject-object relationship. For Aristotle, substance is that which possesses properties but isn't merely a property of something else. However, he didn't quite grasp—unlike Spinoza—that substances like "a human" or "a horse" are actually expressions of the absolute. Essentially, they are substances that cannot be divorced from their particular accidents. Neither a person nor a horse exists in a vacuum; they are determined by everything else in the system. Substance only manifests through its accidents. A substance exists only through the determinations (or "modes," if you prefer Spinoza’s terminology) that it triggers. Now, if any entity, concept, or whole exists outside our subjective perception, then it must possess an interiority; it must be what it is for itself, not just for us. At that point, substance becomes the subject. This is the pivot point between subjective and absolute idealism. That is the core logic behind the idea that "substance is subject." Or, to put it another way, substance is a concept. If reality lacks an inherent conceptual structure and only holds one within our subjective experience, then reality has no true interiority. It would be nothingness. We’d be forced back into dualism or pluralism, which causes everything to collapse—the possibility of knowledge, the absolute, and the very notion of truth itself. Ultimately, what Hegel argues is that the final purpose or meaning of reality is Spirit: "The goal of all true science is simply this: for Spirit to recognize itself in everything, both in heaven and on earth."
See why Kant's unknowable "thing-in-itself" feels like an empty concept? When Hegel writes, "From now on, our object is a syllogism whose extremes are the inner essence of the thing and Understanding, and whose middle term is Appearance," he is setting up Understanding against the thing itself. But the syllogism falls apart there because the thing-in-itself is presented as being distinct from appearance. However, he follows up by saying: "The inner world, or the supersensible beyond, has nonetheless entered into existence; it arises from the world of appearances that mediated it; in other words, appearance is its essence and, indeed, its fulfillment." So, while the syllogism sounds like Kant's position—where Understanding knows the appearance but remains blind to the thing-in-itself—it's different. Once you distinguish the thing-in-itself from appearance, you grant it a form of existence, just as Hegel suggests. The thing-in-itself becomes a negation of appearance, a void. But in Hegel's view, from start to finish, everything exists within the realm of appearance. Things either appear, or they simply aren't.
Edit: or, as one commentator put it pretty succinctly: "This kind of understanding actually alienates us from the true essence of things, essentially turning its back on logic, much like how Kantian philosophy operates."

I think I’m slightly misinterpreting this, so let me write it out immediately to make sure I haven't "missed the mark" 😁
The issue arises when the "thing-in-itself"—that internal essence within a concept or object—is severed from the object's actual appearance (its external look, or how it presents itself to us). If we follow the Kantian insistence that an object's "inner nature" is unknowable to the subject, then that "interiority" isn't just being separated from the subject; it becomes detached from the object itself. If it’s divorced from the object's appearance (what it seems to be to us as subjects), then it exists independently of its own manifestation. In other words, it becomes unreachable not just to the observer, but to the object's own presence?

In short, the logic would be:
The object's appearance is intelligible to the subject.
The object's interiority is unintelligible to the subject.
Therefore, the appearance and the interiority of the object are two distinct things.
If appearance and interiority are separate—given that one can be grasped while the other cannot—how, and by what mechanism, does the object encompass both these distinct aspects? Is there some third value at play... perhaps emergence? 🙂
If emergence is what contains both the appearance and the interiority of the object, to what extent is that emergence itself accessible to the subject?

Essentially, whatever is hidden in a way that defies mediation or division remains forever "torn away" from the shared field. Even if that hidden part possesses some form of potential existence, it is utterly irrelevant to everything else within that field. It lacks any point of contact or influence over the elements of the field. After all, if something cannot be mediated—if it cannot be made clear, accessible, useful, or functional—then it is effectively meaningless. What is the point of its potential truth if it serves no purpose? 😁

(This is the closest I’ve ever come to actually "philosophizing" 😉 ) .....

Note: We’re kicking things off with the inner realm from chapter three to serve as an intro to two and a half parts, rather than doing an introduction first—then we’ll dive straight into consciousness and sensory certainty. That's it.

The Interior, or the Realm of the Interior

1.
So, here’s the deal: the essence of a thing isn't something consciousness hits head-on. Instead, consciousness relates directly to the thing itself—meaning, just as the thing presents itself to consciousness, consciousness takes that presentation in. It’s like consciousness steps into the middle of this tug-of-war between two opposing forces to try and find the actual bedrock (the thing) underneath. On one side you’ve got Reason, on the other you’ve got the Interior, and the middle ground is that connecting force—the very essence of power. But—and Hegel is being very explicit here—that essence is fleeting. Basically, Reason can't actually "see" that core essence because it vanishes; it’s ungraspable precisely because it disappears. This is what we call a "phenomenon." It’s the same vibe as in the first chapter, where Reason looks at an object in its immediate surroundings and claims it exists or is "real," even though that object isn't truly real in that moment because it’s just a passing flash—it lacks staying power, even if Reason perceives a struggle behind it. For Reason, a phenomenon is the essence of a thing that is, in reality, nothingness. Take a house or a building, for example. To Reason looking at it right now, it’s a solid reality—it’s "here and now"—but give it enough time and that house is gone, replaced by a forest. That building isn't just a appearance to Reason; Hegel goes further and calls it a total illusion. A whole, complete illusion. It sounds wild, but this massive collection of appearances is nothing more than a total illusion. This means everything we pick up through our senses, and almost everything Reason deals with (assuming it’s working with phenomena), is just one big facade. And get this: modern science spends all its time dealing with this exact facade—these objects of phenomena that Hegel calls a total illusion. When you factor in Nobel Prizes in modern science, you realize those awards basically go to people who spend their lives studying this very thing: the totality of illusions. You could almost call them Nobel Prizes for Illusions.

When a psychologist does their job, they’re dealing with phenomena—specifically the psychological kind, not, say, geometry. Otherwise, you'd have psychologists studying the lines and planes of schizophrenia. No, they deal with the "essence" of hysteria, the "essence" of schizophrenia, or autism, and so on. In short, they deal with the essence of vanishing phenomena. But for Hegel, an essence that vanishes isn't really an essence at all; it’s non-existence. A tree that’s been cut down isn't "being" anything anymore. This entire "totality of illusion" is exactly what makes up the interior—this play of forces, this internal reflection of the whole. Within this, consciousness uses these objects to establish what its perceptions are like, but these moments lack any real permanence; they’re constantly flipping over into their own opposites. Take the "essence" of the flu: it hits a person, then it’s gone. Or take a sudden burst of rage—like some guy losing his cool at a dive bar—it hits, and then it vanishes into thin air. All this stuff, this whole dance of forces, is negative. But the truth of the negative is actually the positive—the self-existing object. The essence of an object for consciousness is mediated by the movement of the phenomenon, and the essence of perception or sensory objects always carries that negative weight of disappearing. When we perceive a tree, we see the "essence" of it, but that essence is fleeing. The sensory object is always in flux, always disappearing. Consciousness reflects on this disappearing tree or house, but it turns that reflection inward, creating the idea of the "interior" of the object. It tries to separate the reflection of the thing from its own internal reflection, even though it’s really just one single process. To consciousness, the "interior" feels like something external, something different from itself. Yet, within this private interior, consciousness finds a sense of certainty—a way to find its own true moments of being. However, consciousness doesn't actually realize that it contains these moments or this certainty within itself. It doesn't realize it because the "being" of that interior is, to consciousness, just a negative movement. Consciousness is just a vanishing phenomenon. It’s like how youth is a vanishing phenomenon to a grown man; anyone who clings to that fading youth and pretends he’s still a kid is just a screaming monkey or a pathetic fool. Just as youth has no permanent "being" because it's transient, consciousness doesn't have its own independent being. The "interior" is a concept that consciousness hasn't even begun to truly grasp yet.

When you realize youth is slipping through your fingers, consciousness does this absolutely wild thing—it performs what’s basically a "leap of faith." Because we’re aware that everything is fleeting—that nothing actually sticks around and everything, including ourselves, is ultimately transient—consciousness tries to outrun that emptiness. It jumps into this totally foreign, unknown territory where it feels even slightly steady or unshakable, which is what consciousness labels as "the beyond." Here’s how the mechanics work: This "beyond" sets itself up as the absolute opposite of everything we perceive as temporary or hollow. It positions the supersensual realm as the "true" world, while our messy, sensory, vanishing reality is cast as the "untrue" one. Consciousness ends up trapped in this duality between the here-and-now and the beyond, a gap it can't quite bridge. On one side, you have this disappearing physical world; on the other, you have this permanent, perfect, and—for the theologians—totally inscrutable "beyond." It’s protected by its own mystery; you can’t argue with it or attack it because, to the conscious mind, it represents *something* substantial, whereas humans feel like *nothing*—just imperfect, passing shadows. It’s like those mystics talk about God being a "dark cloud"—it just makes the gap between us and the beyond feel impossible to close.

So, we’ve got the "beyond" acting as the self-referential starting point, but—and this is crucial for Hegel—it’s only an incomplete manifestation of the mind. He’s very clear about this: that otherworldly realm is just an unfinished version of mind, not the whole story. But interestingly enough, the truth actually lives within that incomplete stage. If we bring humanity into the mix—all those driven individuals and the masses—this "beyond" isn't worthless. It’s just... well, fundamentally insignificant in the grand scheme. Think of it as a stepping stone toward Spirit. That said, for actual people, that step is massive. When life here becomes too much—when things get bleak, hopeless, or just plain crushing—this "beyond" steps in like a sort of "consciousness trick," easing the despair and giving people just enough faith to keep moving.

If we look at depression as the defining malady of the 21st century, it’s pretty clear that losing touch with the "beyond" is a byproduct of modern earthly despair. No matter how much anyone wants to believe humans can just exist as purely material, living substances, most people simply cannot function without that sense of something greater. For them, the "beyond" is a necessary rung on the ladder to Spirit, and we really have to respect that as a fundamental truth. Keeping this in mind, Hegel suggests our subject is a conclusion sitting between two poles: interiority on one side, reason on the other, with "phenomena" sitting right in the middle, driving the movement that defines reason. It looks like this:

a) Interiority—the realm of the inner self, intuition, and the supersensual stuff.
b) Reason.
c) The middle ground, or "phenomena"—basically the stuff modern science obsesses over.

The phenomena in category (c) provides the data that Reason (b) uses to identify the interiority found in (a), eventually leading to a lived experience of that inner reality.
Let me give you a concrete example. Take Mark—let’s say he’s a deeply devout guy who actually experiences something we’d call "beyond." He has a vision of heaven, presented by an angel in his room. That supersensual, otherworldly moment manifests as a phenomenon in his physical space. Mark is dead certain about what he saw. He tells a priest about the vision; the priest might dismiss it, but he reports it to his superior, and so the story spreads. Years later, Mark is questioned again, and he still insists his vision was real. This means Mark’s Reason (his intellect) accepted that phenomenon as a true part of his consciousness. Eventually, Mark passes away, and his vision undergoes a rigorous test by others using Reason to determine if his experience of the "beyond" was legitimate. Through long deliberations and study, they eventually validate his vision as a genuine encounter with the "beyond"—an interior reality that manifested as a phenomenon, was processed by his Reason, and finally became a confirmed experience. We have to emphasize: without Mark and his consciousness, there is no vision of the beyond; and without people, there wouldn't even be a concept of the "beyond" to begin with.

(More coming next time)

2.

Transcendence exists within consciousness—it’s essentially a specific element or moment of it. Outside of consciousness, there is no such thing as transcendence; it only exists as a feature of our own awareness. Consciousness is this internal space, a pure state of transcendence where the mind doesn't actually find itself, but rather encounters something foreign and alien—the "other." This transcendence is empty; it’s a manifestation of nothingness. When this happens, nothingness reveals itself, and Mark isn't seeing some angel showing him visions of paradise in his living room—he’s seeing the void that shows him nothing. What emerges is nothing, and then it vanishes—whether it's Mark himself or his vision of paradise. Once the vision of paradise fades, it isn't paradise anymore, even if it briefly appeared to be. Still, there is a positive side to this phenomenon, which is simply its universality. It works perfectly for those who live off the idea of transcendence or dwell within it. They defend this transcendence, which—get this—can't even be attacked. Take the concept of God's permanence, for instance. We can't prove permanence, but—and this is what these modern "atheists" fail to grasp—we can't prove non-permanence either. That isn't a logical argument for permanence, obviously, but it’s a nice little comeback for those believing in the transcendent when faced with atheist objections. Not the modern ones, mind you—those guys are more like the ancient 'idiots' from a modern perspective; honestly, they're an embarrassment to actual atheism. They're basically just "functional" atheists.
And why can't transcendence be attacked? Where would you even aim? If you have a bow and arrow, you have a target to hit in the bullseye, but transcendence has no target. It’s impossible because transcendence and the material world don't even play the same game. It suits them that the essence of God refuses to be known, and it truly does—except perhaps as that aforementioned dark cloud. What would be left of transcendence if it were fully understood? It wouldn't be transcendent anymore; it would lose its entire purpose. They even say it themselves:
"The essence of God cannot be known."
Or
"Let go of that which transcends thought."

So, we end up with the idea that faith reaches places where thought simply cannot go. Like, say, grasping the Trinity—which can only be grasped through faith, regardless of the flavor of that faith. Though, if faith explicitly implies that little word "grasping," then maybe it isn't even faith, because what kind of faith is a "grasping" faith? It’s not that the inner nature of things is unknowable, as the defenders of transcendence love to claim; rather, it's that the interior is, in its immediacy, a sort of empty knowledge. Much like how sensory certainty tells us a physical object is right there, this is just a way of saying God exists; people take God for granted the same way they take a chair for granted.

The "inner nature" people defend isn't actually too complex for the mind to handle. Consequently, they defend transcendence against the intellect by claiming the mind is incapable of knowing it, implying the mind itself is somehow limited or flawed. But it’s simpler than that. The interior, or the transcendence, is completely empty, and you can't "know" something that is empty. When they say God's essence or providence is unknowable, they are really just saying: "It's empty." Meaning, there's nothing there. You can't know something that is inherently void. For Hegel, the transcendence of consciousness is something beyond consciousness, which effectively means that what lies beyond is nothing—or more accurately, it's empty. There’s nothing to look for there, just like you wouldn't look for a dresser, a table, or a bed in an empty room. It's a bit naive to go looking for furniture in a vacuum. However, consciousness can be a bit sneaky; it might go to a shopping mall, buy a dresser, a table, and a bed, fill up the room, and then smugly say, "See? The room isn't empty after all." To that, we respond, "Even though you filled the room, it remains empty at its core," and honestly, you might just want to give the person a good smack over the head. But that’s just a metaphor; in reality, the room is empty. The result is the same: whether we call it the inner transcendence of consciousness or just the inner emptiness, we arrive at the same point. Therefore, the only thing left to say is that the phenomenon necessarily linked to the interior—meaning transcendence, intuition, and the like—is the only real object for consciousness. That phenomenon, which sits between reason and this interiority, is the only subject matter. The stuff outside of consciousness that fuels the naive spirituality of yesterday, today, and tomorrow (and indeed, all religions) isn't actually an object of consciousness, because what is "outside" of consciousness doesn't exist. It's empty thought. In short, it's pure nonsense that people love like bees love honey. And anyone who loves that nonsense isn't really engaging with thought, let alone wisdom. They’re like those characters in the old folk tales where a trickster is brought before a king and a panel of sages who accuse him of heresy. After the king hears the sages, he lets the trickster speak, and the trickster asks them one simple question: "What is bread?" After hearing all their lofty, differing answers about what bread is, the trickster tells the king he can't possibly trust these "wise men" when they can't even agree on something as basic as what bread is, and that's how the story ends.

All we’re left with is the phenomenon. But here’s the kicker—that phenomenon itself is basically nothing. So, if we accept the idea that a phenomenon is inherently "untrue" because once it shows up, it vanishes, we run into a funny situation. If we take that fleeting appearance and stuff it full of all those religious visions people live for—you know, where the "beyond" is just dialed up until it becomes a series of appearances—we end up making the internal void feel "full." We fill that emptiness with all sorts of mental projections and hallucinations that consciousness creates for itself. And honestly? Those hallucinations often feel better than the actual empty void inside. It’s easier to deal with a vision than with nothingness. When someone sees a dragon, or Buddha, or a ghost, or Mary, or even a late father—it’s just consciousness projecting stuff. But, if Mark happens to see a snowball flying straight at Mark's face, well, that’s one instance where consciousness isn't hallucinating.

The "internal" is empty by its very nature; it’s devoid of objects. This internal space, which exists beyond or outside of conscious thought, is what Hegel calls the core of *all* spiritual relations—and I mean *all*, not just some. It’s the emptiness behind all conscious distinctions. This brings us to those modern-day Western "gurus" you see everywhere. Even though the internal is essentially an empty void, they love to fill it up to line their own pockets or fill the heads of mindless followers. A guru’s entourage actually reveals how much of a fraud they are; when your followers are just a bunch of fools, it proves you’re a fool too—they’re just your mirror. Like the old saying goes, "birds of a feather flock together." In Hegel’s view, this sacred internal is utterly empty. That emptiness is born directly from the phenomenon.

Back when we were looking at raw force, we had the example of Mark seeing a vision of Mary. That vision comes from a phenomenon, and that phenomenon is the bridge—it’s how the internal gets filled. If Mark didn't exist—or rather, if humans didn't exist—these phenomena wouldn't show up at all. On the flip side, a monkey or a dolphin doesn't see visions of Mary or ghosts; in that sense, animals are actually more "perfect" than we are. All this spiritual stuff religions cling to is just sensory perception rebranded as truth. Hegel argues that this truth consists of being a phenomenon. Period. You can spin it however you want, but all these religious events—like the appearance of Jesus, or God appearing in the form of Jesus—are just phenomena. Now, you’d have to ask a theologian how a God who is supposed to be separate from this transient, trivial world can manifest through something as flimsy as a phenomenon. A God that shows up via a hollow appearance isn't really God. Still, Hegel interpreted Jesus’s incarnation in a totally different way, the only way that fits the Absolute. He saw it as substance-subject: a human who eventually evolves into a god. For traditional Christianity, that’s the ultimate sin—the height of arrogance.

For Hegel, the internal (the supersensible or the "beyond") is simply phenomenon as phenomenon. Meaning, it's empty, nothing, and as fleeting as a girl's youth or her beauty.
In short: the internal as a phenomenon is that emptiness. Don't confuse this—and Hegel is very clear about this—with direct sensory certainty or simple observation. If it were just sensory knowledge, the phenomenon wouldn't be what it is. Instead, the phenomenon is canceled out and relocated into the internal, where it reigns. This also means modern science can't really touch religion, precisely because religion moves the phenomenon into the internal realm as its truth. You can't attack a truth that has moved into the kingdom of the internal. You can't hit a target that isn't there; you can't shoot at emptiness. Of course, the skeptics will argue that the "beyond" isn't a phenomenon, that it sits above it. But Hegel is clear: what people call "above" the phenomenon is just the void itself. These critics insist that God didn't just pop into existence through a hollow phenomenon in a meaningless world, but they miss the point—they don't understand phenomenon as the sensory world. Meanwhile, on the other side, the "beyond" is proclaimed to be above the sensory, but since we can't know anything about it, it is, quite literally, empty. So, all these spiritual seekers are basically chasing a void, distancing themselves further and further from who they actually are.

(To's where I'll leave it for now—more coming next time)

Sandra Murphy33 said:I think I’m slightly misinterpreting this, so let me write it out immediately to make sure I haven't "missed the mark" 😁
The issue arises when the "thing-in-itself"—that internal essence within a concept or object—is severed from the object's actual appearance (its external look, or how it presents itself to us). If we follow the Kantian insistence that an object's "inner nature" is unknowable to the subject, then that "interiority" isn't just being separated from the subject; it becomes detached from the object itself. If it’s divorced from the object's appearance (what it seems to be to us as subjects), then it exists independently of its own manifestation. In other words, it becomes unreachable not just to the observer, but to the object's own presence?

In short, the logic would be:
The object's appearance is intelligible to the subject.
The object's interiority is unintelligible to the subject.
Therefore, the appearance and the interiority of the object are two distinct things.
If appearance and interiority are separate—given that one can be grasped while the other cannot—how, and by what mechanism, does the object encompass both these distinct aspects? Is there some third value at play... perhaps emergence? 🙂
If emergence is what contains both the appearance and the interiority of the object, to what extent is that emergence itself accessible to the subject?

Essentially, whatever is hidden in a way that defies mediation or division remains forever "torn away" from the shared field. Even if that hidden part possesses some form of potential existence, it is utterly irrelevant to everything else within that field. It lacks any point of contact or influence over the elements of the field. After all, if something cannot be mediated—if it cannot be made clear, accessible, useful, or functional—then it is effectively meaningless. What is the point of its potential truth if it serves no purpose? 😁

(This is the closest I’ve ever come to actually "philosophizing" 😉 ) .....

Look, if a person is aware of their own inner workings, then an object's "inside" is basically just another subject's "inside"—because, at the end of the day, we're all just objects to someone else. This hints at the idea that splitting reality into subject vs. object, or inner vs. outer, isn't some absolute truth. It's just relative.

ruggedraven36 said:Look, if a person is aware of their own inner workings, then an object's "inside" is basically just another subject's "inside"—because, at the end of the day, we're all just objects to someone else. This hints at the idea that splitting reality into subject vs. object, or inner vs. outer, isn't some absolute truth. It's just relative.

Are you suggesting that if I am the subject and you are the object—something external to me—and I am conscious of my own inner workings (the source of these sentences), there is no need to question your interiority because it is fundamentally the same as mine? And that the fact different sentences emerge from those different interiors is all just relative and deceptive? Are you implying that my interiority, yours, and everyone else's—our thoughts, feelings, memories, our entire psyche—is essentially identical?

And does this extend to animals and plants as well? That their interiority is identical to ours, that we all share the same psyche, the same internal experiences, and the same conclusions, making any perceived difference purely relative (and perhaps any similarity isn't coincidental at all 😉)?
Is it also relative that my sensation of pain isn't the same as yours, or a dog's, or a chicken's? Is it relative that we won't react to the same stimulus in the exact same way, because ultimately everything is the same since it is established that "all is One"?

danieel —I have to tell you, reading about all this "emptiness" and "nothingness," I felt less like I was reading an interpretation of Hegel and more like I was reading a post from David Miller, who seems to be some kind of "efilist" (whatever that implies) rather than a philosopher 😉
Furthermore, it felt like reading an outdated critique of a religion or theology that has moved on significantly since the very positions mentioned here were first held. Not to mention that it's practically common knowledge now that animals "see" things we can't—that they perceive "spirits" and such... In short, it feels like a collection of many obsolete official doctrines.

(I think I finally understand why some users argued that Hegel might have written his theses and conclusions differently had he lived today. As we see here, most of these conclusions are heavily supported by, derived from, and reliant upon the official religious stances of his era, likely influenced by the scientific reach of that time, the socio-political climate, and so on. Essentially, Hegelian philosophy is tethered to a specific era; to the extent that the period shapes the thought, the thought cannot be considered "eternal.")

Sandra Murphy33 said:Are you suggesting that if I am the subject and you are the object—something external to me—and I am conscious of my own inner workings (the source of these sentences), there is no need to question your interiority because it is fundamentally the same as mine? And that the fact different sentences emerge from those different interiors is all just relative and deceptive? Are you implying that my interiority, yours, and everyone else's—our thoughts, feelings, memories, our entire psyche—is essentially identical?

And does this extend to animals and plants as well? That their interiority is identical to ours, that we all share the same psyche, the same internal experiences, and the same conclusions, making any perceived difference purely relative (and perhaps any similarity isn't coincidental at all 😉)?
Is it also relative that my sensation of pain isn't the same as yours, or a dog's, or a chicken's? Is it relative that we won't react to the same stimulus in the exact same way, because ultimately everything is the same since it is established that "all is One"?

danieel —I have to tell you, reading about all this "emptiness" and "nothingness," I felt less like I was reading an interpretation of Hegel and more like I was reading a post from David Miller, who seems to be some kind of "efilist" (whatever that implies) rather than a philosopher 😉
Furthermore, it felt like reading an outdated critique of a religion or theology that has moved on significantly since the very positions mentioned here were first held. Not to mention that it's practically common knowledge now that animals "see" things we can't—that they perceive "spirits" and such... In short, it feels like a collection of many obsolete official doctrines.

(I think I finally understand why some users argued that Hegel might have written his theses and conclusions differently had he lived today. As we see here, most of these conclusions are heavily supported by, derived from, and reliant upon the official religious stances of his era, likely influenced by the scientific reach of that time, the socio-political climate, and so on. Essentially, Hegelian philosophy is tethered to a specific era; to the extent that the period shapes the thought, the thought cannot be considered "eternal.")

You missed my point entirely. When I said "the object's interiority is the same as the subject's," I wasn't claiming every object has an identical inner life—I meant that the object *has* an interiority of its own; that the object is also a subject. It's a matter of perspective: what's internal to the outsider is external to the insider. If I am a subject to myself but an object to you, then what am I really? Not "what I am to myself" or "what I am to you"—that's just relativity. I mean what am I, fundamentally? Truth has to be something that transcends the subject-object divide without simply collapsing the subject into the object or vice versa.
That last bit you wrote about "everything being one" is something I can get behind, but that doesn't mean everything is equal.

Paul Bailey95 said:Note: We’re kicking things off with the inner realm from chapter three to serve as an intro to two and a half parts, rather than doing an introduction first—then we’ll dive straight into consciousness and sensory certainty. That's it.

The Interior, or the Realm of the Interior

1.
So, here’s the deal: the essence of a thing isn't something consciousness hits head-on. Instead, consciousness relates directly to the thing itself—meaning, just as the thing presents itself to consciousness, consciousness takes that presentation in. It’s like consciousness steps into the middle of this tug-of-war between two opposing forces to try and find the actual bedrock (the thing) underneath. On one side you’ve got Reason, on the other you’ve got the Interior, and the middle ground is that connecting force—the very essence of power. But—and Hegel is being very explicit here—that essence is fleeting. Basically, Reason can't actually "see" that core essence because it vanishes; it’s ungraspable precisely because it disappears. This is what we call a "phenomenon." It’s the same vibe as in the first chapter, where Reason looks at an object in its immediate surroundings and claims it exists or is "real," even though that object isn't truly real in that moment because it’s just a passing flash—it lacks staying power, even if Reason perceives a struggle behind it. For Reason, a phenomenon is the essence of a thing that is, in reality, nothingness. Take a house or a building, for example. To Reason looking at it right now, it’s a solid reality—it’s "here and now"—but give it enough time and that house is gone, replaced by a forest. That building isn't just a appearance to Reason; Hegel goes further and calls it a total illusion. A whole, complete illusion. It sounds wild, but this massive collection of appearances is nothing more than a total illusion. This means everything we pick up through our senses, and almost everything Reason deals with (assuming it’s working with phenomena), is just one big facade. And get this: modern science spends all its time dealing with this exact facade—these objects of phenomena that Hegel calls a total illusion. When you factor in Nobel Prizes in modern science, you realize those awards basically go to people who spend their lives studying this very thing: the totality of illusions. You could almost call them Nobel Prizes for Illusions.

When a psychologist does their job, they’re dealing with phenomena—specifically the psychological kind, not, say, geometry. Otherwise, you'd have psychologists studying the lines and planes of schizophrenia. No, they deal with the "essence" of hysteria, the "essence" of schizophrenia, or autism, and so on. In short, they deal with the essence of vanishing phenomena. But for Hegel, an essence that vanishes isn't really an essence at all; it’s non-existence. A tree that’s been cut down isn't "being" anything anymore. This entire "totality of illusion" is exactly what makes up the interior—this play of forces, this internal reflection of the whole. Within this, consciousness uses these objects to establish what its perceptions are like, but these moments lack any real permanence; they’re constantly flipping over into their own opposites. Take the "essence" of the flu: it hits a person, then it’s gone. Or take a sudden burst of rage—like some guy losing his cool at a dive bar—it hits, and then it vanishes into thin air. All this stuff, this whole dance of forces, is negative. But the truth of the negative is actually the positive—the self-existing object. The essence of an object for consciousness is mediated by the movement of the phenomenon, and the essence of perception or sensory objects always carries that negative weight of disappearing. When we perceive a tree, we see the "essence" of it, but that essence is fleeing. The sensory object is always in flux, always disappearing. Consciousness reflects on this disappearing tree or house, but it turns that reflection inward, creating the idea of the "interior" of the object. It tries to separate the reflection of the thing from its own internal reflection, even though it’s really just one single process. To consciousness, the "interior" feels like something external, something different from itself. Yet, within this private interior, consciousness finds a sense of certainty—a way to find its own true moments of being. However, consciousness doesn't actually realize that it contains these moments or this certainty within itself. It doesn't realize it because the "being" of that interior is, to consciousness, just a negative movement. Consciousness is just a vanishing phenomenon. It’s like how youth is a vanishing phenomenon to a grown man; anyone who clings to that fading youth and pretends he’s still a kid is just a screaming monkey or a pathetic fool. Just as youth has no permanent "being" because it's transient, consciousness doesn't have its own independent being. The "interior" is a concept that consciousness hasn't even begun to truly grasp yet.

When you realize youth is slipping through your fingers, consciousness does this absolutely wild thing—it performs what’s basically a "leap of faith." Because we’re aware that everything is fleeting—that nothing actually sticks around and everything, including ourselves, is ultimately transient—consciousness tries to outrun that emptiness. It jumps into this totally foreign, unknown territory where it feels even slightly steady or unshakable, which is what consciousness labels as "the beyond." Here’s how the mechanics work: This "beyond" sets itself up as the absolute opposite of everything we perceive as temporary or hollow. It positions the supersensual realm as the "true" world, while our messy, sensory, vanishing reality is cast as the "untrue" one. Consciousness ends up trapped in this duality between the here-and-now and the beyond, a gap it can't quite bridge. On one side, you have this disappearing physical world; on the other, you have this permanent, perfect, and—for the theologians—totally inscrutable "beyond." It’s protected by its own mystery; you can’t argue with it or attack it because, to the conscious mind, it represents *something* substantial, whereas humans feel like *nothing*—just imperfect, passing shadows. It’s like those mystics talk about God being a "dark cloud"—it just makes the gap between us and the beyond feel impossible to close.

So, we’ve got the "beyond" acting as the self-referential starting point, but—and this is crucial for Hegel—it’s only an incomplete manifestation of the mind. He’s very clear about this: that otherworldly realm is just an unfinished version of mind, not the whole story. But interestingly enough, the truth actually lives within that incomplete stage. If we bring humanity into the mix—all those driven individuals and the masses—this "beyond" isn't worthless. It’s just... well, fundamentally insignificant in the grand scheme. Think of it as a stepping stone toward Spirit. That said, for actual people, that step is massive. When life here becomes too much—when things get bleak, hopeless, or just plain crushing—this "beyond" steps in like a sort of "consciousness trick," easing the despair and giving people just enough faith to keep moving.

If we look at depression as the defining malady of the 21st century, it’s pretty clear that losing touch with the "beyond" is a byproduct of modern earthly despair. No matter how much anyone wants to believe humans can just exist as purely material, living substances, most people simply cannot function without that sense of something greater. For them, the "beyond" is a necessary rung on the ladder to Spirit, and we really have to respect that as a fundamental truth. Keeping this in mind, Hegel suggests our subject is a conclusion sitting between two poles: interiority on one side, reason on the other, with "phenomena" sitting right in the middle, driving the movement that defines reason. It looks like this:

a) Interiority—the realm of the inner self, intuition, and the supersensual stuff.
b) Reason.
c) The middle ground, or "phenomena"—basically the stuff modern science obsesses over.

The phenomena in category (c) provides the data that Reason (b) uses to identify the interiority found in (a), eventually leading to a lived experience of that inner reality.
Let me give you a concrete example. Take Mark—let’s say he’s a deeply devout guy who actually experiences something we’d call "beyond." He has a vision of heaven, presented by an angel in his room. That supersensual, otherworldly moment manifests as a phenomenon in his physical space. Mark is dead certain about what he saw. He tells a priest about the vision; the priest might dismiss it, but he reports it to his superior, and so the story spreads. Years later, Mark is questioned again, and he still insists his vision was real. This means Mark’s Reason (his intellect) accepted that phenomenon as a true part of his consciousness. Eventually, Mark passes away, and his vision undergoes a rigorous test by others using Reason to determine if his experience of the "beyond" was legitimate. Through long deliberations and study, they eventually validate his vision as a genuine encounter with the "beyond"—an interior reality that manifested as a phenomenon, was processed by his Reason, and finally became a confirmed experience. We have to emphasize: without Mark and his consciousness, there is no vision of the beyond; and without people, there wouldn't even be a concept of the "beyond" to begin with.

(More coming next time)

Nobels of Illusion 😁
The core of this passage is the idea that something which will vanish tomorrow doesn't truly exist today, because it lacks permanence ("a being that vanishes is not being, it is non-being"). In other words, only that which is eternal truly exists, while everything else is part of this "totality of illusion." Everything transient—everything finite—is relative. According to this logic, true being doesn't even exist, because anything ever created is destined to disappear eventually...
This perspective is typically labeled "philosophical" 😉 and the people who view the world this way are called "philosophers" (nothing rattles them, they remain unshakable because they "understand" that "everything is relative," and so on. Though, practically speaking, "if you accept that your physical world is merely an illusion, you won't experience the meaning of the physical world")

This totality of illusion is also what Hegel describes as the interiority—the play of forces, the reflection of the whole within itself. Within this totality, consciousness uses objects to establish what the perceptions of being are like, creating moments without stability or rest that constantly subvert themselves. For instance, consider the "being" of a fever in a person: the fever takes hold, then it passes; or take the "being" of an emotion, like a sudden outburst of rage in a crowded bar...
Through perception, we see the "being" of a tree, yet that "being" fades away; the sensory object is always in flux within the movement of appearance. Therefore, it always carries a negative connotation of vanishing, disappearing, and the like.

By what logic can a "totality of illusion"—the external appearance—be its own "interiority"?
All these "vanishing" appearances—the tree, the house, the fever, the person, etc.—can disappear as individual categories (a specific tree, a specific person), but they will never disappear from the world of ideas, from which they will inevitably "reincarnate." Today's individual will pass away, but tomorrow a new one will emerge; it is the same pattern with the tree, the fever, and so on.

Consciousness emerges from the appearance of a tree or a house, which is constantly vanishing. It reflects upon itself, yet this very act of self-reflection transforms that reflection into the internal essence of the object. This allows consciousness to distinguish the reflection of an object from its own self-reflection, even though they stem from a single reflective process. Consciousness possesses an internal dimension that stands in opposition to itself—something foreign, something distinct—yet within this private interiority, consciousness finds its own certainty. This internal state serves as the metric for truth and provides the moments where consciousness exists for itself. However, consciousness remains unaware of this; it does not realize it possesses such internal moments or certainties, precisely because the "being-for-itself" of that internal realm acts as a negative movement for consciousness.

Trees and houses are always disappearing—but they also constantly reappear...
What is being described here as "self-reflection" is essentially what psychology calls the "internalization" of an external image. We take an external perception and imprint it onto our psyche, allowing us to conjure it up at will later without needing to physically observe it again. The external object or concept now resides within our consciousness—or more accurately, within our "memory." Martinus argues that everything we perceive through our senses and encode into what we eventually call the "mind" isn't actually the creation of new images, but rather the recognition of those same images—concepts already etched into the vast memory we carry with us. I’m not entirely convinced by the claim that "consciousness has an internal something that is different from itself"—if this internal element is produced via consciousness, how can it be considered foreign to it? And what exactly is this "negative movement"?

Upon witnessing the disappearance of youth, consciousness performs something truly extraordinary. Because it is aware of the transience of all phenomena—aware that things are perpetually vanishing and that nothing permanent or lasting can ever be grasped, and indeed aware of the ultimate nothingness of everything, including itself—consciousness performs a sort of "leap of faith." To overcome the vanishing nature of reality, it leaps into a realm that is entirely unknown and alien to it, a realm in which it feels a sense of stability or unshakability, which consciousness labels as the "transcendental."

There is a slight logical inconsistency here, specifically the idea that one movement cannot experience another movement. If everything that is transient is created and exists in a state of continuous motion or change—from birth to disappearance—then a consciousness that perceives and experiences this constant flux cannot itself be purely transient, changing, or finite. The experience of anything requires a point of contrast. Isn't that the case? If we want to experience the passing or existence of something, we can only do so by using something else that is *not* passing or changing. If that "something else" is consciousness, or the ego, then that consciousness—that ego—must be imperishable and eternal, serving as the necessary opposite to the phenomenon it observes. Anyone who can grasp this logically wouldn't need any kind of "leap of faith" 😉

a) The interiority or the realm of the interior (the transcendental, intuition, etc.)
b) Reason
c) The middle ground, or phenomena (the subject of modern science)

I have to admit, I struggle to follow this division. Why is "interiority" defined by things like "intuition," while reason is somehow categorized separately? Is reason meant to be a sensory category? In my view, both reason and intelligence fall under the umbrella of human "interiority." They aren't the same as the raw images flashed onto the "screen of consciousness" when the eye receives light impulses from an external "object," or when the ear picks up sounds, colors, or shapes.

Otherworldliness is emptiness; it is a phenomenon of nothingness. Nothing actually manifests through this appearance, and Mark doesn't see an angel presenting him with a vision of paradise in his room—he sees nothing showing him nothing. What emerges is nothingness, and then it vanishes, whether it be Mark himself or his vision of paradise. Once the vision of paradise appears and subsequently disappears, it is no longer paradise, regardless of how briefly it was revealed.

To put it another way, the "paradise" Mark perceives vanishes just as easily as the chair in his room, the room itself, or Mark himself—as we established at the start of this analysis when noting that every phenomenon is relative because it will "vanish tomorrow." Consequently, it follows that there is essentially no fundamental difference between the tree, the house, Mark, and the angel 😉 (none of them possess an inherent "essence")

The inner essence of things that people defend isn't actually unknowable to the mind. Accordingly, they defend otherworldliness against the intellect by claiming the mind can never and will never be able to grasp it, implying a limitation of the mind or something similar, as if the intellect itself were restricted. The reality is quite simple: the interiority or the "otherworldliness" is entirely empty, and nothing can be known within emptiness. When they claim the divine essence or divine providence is unknowable, they are simply saying: "It is empty."

The truth is that the assertion that "the mind cannot know the otherworld (or the transcendent, the supposedly unknowable)" is incorrect, and I disagree with it. Hegel wrote his works during an era characterized by a harmonious and accepted division between "science" and "faith/religion"—a time when it was taken for granted that only the material could be scientifically understood and proven, while anything "hinted at" by faith was relegated to the realm of the forever unknowable and unprovable, the eternal subject of "faith." Well, we are moving past that today. Science is increasingly finding evidence, or at least logical explanations, for many things that would have fallen under the category of "faith" during the Hegelian era. Therefore, the LOGICAL MIND PROGRESSES—it discovers more and more, no longer confined to perceiving merely current material or external phenomena, but beginning to bring to light what was once considered mere faith and dismissed as "unknowable divine will," sealed away as "unreachable for all eternity."
There is nothing unknowable to the human mind. And there is no end to human knowledge....
Otherwise, everything would perpetually spin in circles and repeat itself endlessly; we would be living in hell. Granted, many people actually believe they are, but until they prove it through experimentation and observation, this theory remains strictly within the domain of pure faith. 😉

To make a point: many great thinkers and scientists born after Hegel have narrowed that gap between "science" and "faith" (a gap which, judging by this interpretation, Hegel's philosophy somehow seals off and declares final, using it as its very foundation). This spans from Einstein, who was the first to establish that "faith without science is blind, and science without faith is lame," down to many modern researchers who unanimously argue that many things previously labeled as "faith" are being proven as scientific truths. Quantum physics and astrophysics, through their discoveries, have confirmed many of the "eternal truths" found in Eastern texts, which during the Hegelian era were dismissed as mere "faith"...

ruggedraven36 said:You missed my point entirely. When I said "the object's interiority is the same as the subject's," I wasn't claiming every object has an identical inner life—I meant that the object *has* an interiority of its own; that the object is also a subject. It's a matter of perspective: what's internal to the outsider is external to the insider. If I am a subject to myself but an object to you, then what am I really? Not "what I am to myself" or "what I am to you"—that's just relativity. I mean what am I, fundamentally? Truth has to be something that transcends the subject-object divide without simply collapsing the subject into the object or vice versa.
That last bit you wrote about "everything being one" is something I can get behind, but that doesn't mean everything is equal.

What are you, truly? 🙂 I don't think philosophy can offer you a definitive answer to that, certainly not through some final, airtight definition. However, if I may point out, the very fact that you function as an object to everyone else while remaining a subject to yourself aligns perfectly with the idea that everything exists only in relation to something else. Nothing stands "in itself" or exists in total isolation from the rest of the universe. In this context, I view "subject" and "object" as purely relational concepts rather than fixed states.

Sandra Murphy33 said:What are you, truly? 🙂 I don't think philosophy can offer you a definitive answer to that, certainly not through some final, airtight definition. However, if I may point out, the very fact that you function as an object to everyone else while remaining a subject to yourself aligns perfectly with the idea that everything exists only in relation to something else. Nothing stands "in itself" or exists in total isolation from the rest of the universe. In this context, I view "subject" and "object" as purely relational concepts rather than fixed states.

I'm with you on that, even if we aren't hunting for some "ultimate definition." I am essentially a relational concept.

ruggedraven36 said:You missed my point entirely. When I said "the object's interiority is the same as the subject's," I wasn't claiming every object has an identical inner life—I meant that the object *has* an interiority of its own; that the object is also a subject. It's a matter of perspective: what's internal to the outsider is external to the insider. If I am a subject to myself but an object to you, then what am I really? Not "what I am to myself" or "what I am to you"—that's just relativity. I mean what am I, fundamentally? Truth has to be something that transcends the subject-object divide without simply collapsing the subject into the object or vice versa.
That last bit you wrote about "everything being one" is something I can get behind, but that doesn't mean everything is equal.

Let me break this down. If we look behind the Appearance of an object—that "external" thing—to find its inner core, then that core is just what the object is to itself. And since that object is a subject to itself (like another person), they become an "object" to us. To my perspective, their entire inner world—their subjectivity—is just more external data. Basically, someone only truly exists as a subject through what they express outwardly—through their Appearance. A subject is only "real" when viewed as an object. At the same time, an object is only "real" insofar as it functions as a subject, otherwise, we wouldn't have any internal way to process another consciousness.

Sandra Murphy33 said:Nobels of Illusion 😁
The core of this passage is the idea that something which will vanish tomorrow doesn't truly exist today, because it lacks permanence ("a being that vanishes is not being, it is non-being"). In other words, only that which is eternal truly exists, while everything else is part of this "totality of illusion." Everything transient—everything finite—is relative. According to this logic, true being doesn't even exist, because anything ever created is destined to disappear eventually...
This perspective is typically labeled "philosophical" 😉 and the people who view the world this way are called "philosophers" (nothing rattles them, they remain unshakable because they "understand" that "everything is relative," and so on. Though, practically speaking, "if you accept that your physical world is merely an illusion, you won't experience the meaning of the physical world")

This totality of illusion is also what Hegel describes as the interiority—the play of forces, the reflection of the whole within itself. Within this totality, consciousness uses objects to establish what the perceptions of being are like, creating moments without stability or rest that constantly subvert themselves. For instance, consider the "being" of a fever in a person: the fever takes hold, then it passes; or take the "being" of an emotion, like a sudden outburst of rage in a crowded bar...
Through perception, we see the "being" of a tree, yet that "being" fades away; the sensory object is always in flux within the movement of appearance. Therefore, it always carries a negative connotation of vanishing, disappearing, and the like.

By what logic can a "totality of illusion"—the external appearance—be its own "interiority"?
All these "vanishing" appearances—the tree, the house, the fever, the person, etc.—can disappear as individual categories (a specific tree, a specific person), but they will never disappear from the world of ideas, from which they will inevitably "reincarnate." Today's individual will pass away, but tomorrow a new one will emerge; it is the same pattern with the tree, the fever, and so on.

Consciousness emerges from the appearance of a tree or a house, which is constantly vanishing. It reflects upon itself, yet this very act of self-reflection transforms that reflection into the internal essence of the object. This allows consciousness to distinguish the reflection of an object from its own self-reflection, even though they stem from a single reflective process. Consciousness possesses an internal dimension that stands in opposition to itself—something foreign, something distinct—yet within this private interiority, consciousness finds its own certainty. This internal state serves as the metric for truth and provides the moments where consciousness exists for itself. However, consciousness remains unaware of this; it does not realize it possesses such internal moments or certainties, precisely because the "being-for-itself" of that internal realm acts as a negative movement for consciousness.

Trees and houses are always disappearing—but they also constantly reappear...
What is being described here as "self-reflection" is essentially what psychology calls the "internalization" of an external image. We take an external perception and imprint it onto our psyche, allowing us to conjure it up at will later without needing to physically observe it again. The external object or concept now resides within our consciousness—or more accurately, within our "memory." Martinus argues that everything we perceive through our senses and encode into what we eventually call the "mind" isn't actually the creation of new images, but rather the recognition of those same images—concepts already etched into the vast memory we carry with us. I’m not entirely convinced by the claim that "consciousness has an internal something that is different from itself"—if this internal element is produced via consciousness, how can it be considered foreign to it? And what exactly is this "negative movement"?

Upon witnessing the disappearance of youth, consciousness performs something truly extraordinary. Because it is aware of the transience of all phenomena—aware that things are perpetually vanishing and that nothing permanent or lasting can ever be grasped, and indeed aware of the ultimate nothingness of everything, including itself—consciousness performs a sort of "leap of faith." To overcome the vanishing nature of reality, it leaps into a realm that is entirely unknown and alien to it, a realm in which it feels a sense of stability or unshakability, which consciousness labels as the "transcendental."

There is a slight logical inconsistency here, specifically the idea that one movement cannot experience another movement. If everything that is transient is created and exists in a state of continuous motion or change—from birth to disappearance—then a consciousness that perceives and experiences this constant flux cannot itself be purely transient, changing, or finite. The experience of anything requires a point of contrast. Isn't that the case? If we want to experience the passing or existence of something, we can only do so by using something else that is *not* passing or changing. If that "something else" is consciousness, or the ego, then that consciousness—that ego—must be imperishable and eternal, serving as the necessary opposite to the phenomenon it observes. Anyone who can grasp this logically wouldn't need any kind of "leap of faith" 😉

a) The interiority or the realm of the interior (the transcendental, intuition, etc.)
b) Reason
c) The middle ground, or phenomena (the subject of modern science)

I have to admit, I struggle to follow this division. Why is "interiority" defined by things like "intuition," while reason is somehow categorized separately? Is reason meant to be a sensory category? In my view, both reason and intelligence fall under the umbrella of human "interiority." They aren't the same as the raw images flashed onto the "screen of consciousness" when the eye receives light impulses from an external "object," or when the ear picks up sounds, colors, or shapes.

Otherworldliness is emptiness; it is a phenomenon of nothingness. Nothing actually manifests through this appearance, and Mark doesn't see an angel presenting him with a vision of paradise in his room—he sees nothing showing him nothing. What emerges is nothingness, and then it vanishes, whether it be Mark himself or his vision of paradise. Once the vision of paradise appears and subsequently disappears, it is no longer paradise, regardless of how briefly it was revealed.

To put it another way, the "paradise" Mark perceives vanishes just as easily as the chair in his room, the room itself, or Mark himself—as we established at the start of this analysis when noting that every phenomenon is relative because it will "vanish tomorrow." Consequently, it follows that there is essentially no fundamental difference between the tree, the house, Mark, and the angel 😉 (none of them possess an inherent "essence")

The inner essence of things that people defend isn't actually unknowable to the mind. Accordingly, they defend otherworldliness against the intellect by claiming the mind can never and will never be able to grasp it, implying a limitation of the mind or something similar, as if the intellect itself were restricted. The reality is quite simple: the interiority or the "otherworldliness" is entirely empty, and nothing can be known within emptiness. When they claim the divine essence or divine providence is unknowable, they are simply saying: "It is empty."

The truth is that the assertion that "the mind cannot know the otherworld (or the transcendent, the supposedly unknowable)" is incorrect, and I disagree with it. Hegel wrote his works during an era characterized by a harmonious and accepted division between "science" and "faith/religion"—a time when it was taken for granted that only the material could be scientifically understood and proven, while anything "hinted at" by faith was relegated to the realm of the forever unknowable and unprovable, the eternal subject of "faith." Well, we are moving past that today. Science is increasingly finding evidence, or at least logical explanations, for many things that would have fallen under the category of "faith" during the Hegelian era. Therefore, the LOGICAL MIND PROGRESSES—it discovers more and more, no longer confined to perceiving merely current material or external phenomena, but beginning to bring to light what was once considered mere faith and dismissed as "unknowable divine will," sealed away as "unreachable for all eternity."
There is nothing unknowable to the human mind. And there is no end to human knowledge....
Otherwise, everything would perpetually spin in circles and repeat itself endlessly; we would be living in hell. Granted, many people actually believe they are, but until they prove it through experimentation and observation, this theory remains strictly within the domain of pure faith. 😉

To make a point: many great thinkers and scientists born after Hegel have narrowed that gap between "science" and "faith" (a gap which, judging by this interpretation, Hegel's philosophy somehow seals off and declares final, using it as its very foundation). This spans from Einstein, who was the first to establish that "faith without science is blind, and science without faith is lame," down to many modern researchers who unanimously argue that many things previously labeled as "faith" are being proven as scientific truths. Quantum physics and astrophysics, through their discoveries, have confirmed many of the "eternal truths" found in Eastern texts, which during the Hegelian era were dismissed as mere "faith"...

I think you might have missed the point entirely. The reason the mind can't grasp some "beyond" is simply because there is no "beyond" to begin with. In one of his letters, Hegel points out that the whole trick is realizing there’s nothing outside or behind things; things are exactly what they appear to be. He even mentions in Phenomenology how the spirit treats objects like a curtain, pulling it back to see what’s hiding behind it, only to find absolutely nothing there. The curtain is the thing itself. Substance is really just a collection of its accidents, and essence isn't some "external" phenomenon.
When we talk about internal versus external, even before Hegel came along, people used "internal" to mean the "beyond"—the stuff beneath the surface that constitutes the essence or the self-subsisting core. "External" was just the trivial stuff. For Hegel, if two things are "external" to one another, they’re basically indifferent or independent—like the shape of an object being separate from its color. Nature is external to the spirit, which makes it external to itself, meaning it occupies space and time. But here’s the kicker: the internal and the external are actually the same thing, unified in a single substance. It’s a mediated unity. Since the internal is identical to the external, it has to express itself. That’s why Hegel argues that it is essential for essence to manifest. You can't have an essence that doesn't show up; if it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist. Just like you can't have something without its Concept. Whatever is mental is real, and vice versa. Reality is essentially self-manifesting. This is precisely how Hegel defines reality (Wirklichkeit)—as the unity of essence and appearance. Or, to put it another way, "since the content and form of reality are entirely identical, ...reality is the fact of its own self-externalization."
Furthermore, because of those inherent contradictions and constant self-negations within nature, everything is perpetually undoing itself (which is what we call "time"). But that doesn't mean things lack "being." It just means our understanding distinguishes between the fleeting, transient stuff (appearance) and the enduring stuff that resists change (substance, essence, and ultimately the Concept—defined as that which remains what it is even while it changes).

Amanda Jackson5 said:I think you might have missed the point entirely. The reason the mind can't grasp some "beyond" is simply because there is no "beyond" to begin with. In one of his letters, Hegel points out that the whole trick is realizing there’s nothing outside or behind things; things are exactly what they appear to be. He even mentions in Phenomenology how the spirit treats objects like a curtain, pulling it back to see what’s hiding behind it, only to find absolutely nothing there. The curtain is the thing itself. Substance is really just a collection of its accidents, and essence isn't some "external" phenomenon.
When we talk about internal versus external, even before Hegel came along, people used "internal" to mean the "beyond"—the stuff beneath the surface that constitutes the essence or the self-subsisting core. "External" was just the trivial stuff. For Hegel, if two things are "external" to one another, they’re basically indifferent or independent—like the shape of an object being separate from its color. Nature is external to the spirit, which makes it external to itself, meaning it occupies space and time. But here’s the kicker: the internal and the external are actually the same thing, unified in a single substance. It’s a mediated unity. Since the internal is identical to the external, it has to express itself. That’s why Hegel argues that it is essential for essence to manifest. You can't have an essence that doesn't show up; if it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist. Just like you can't have something without its Concept. Whatever is mental is real, and vice versa. Reality is essentially self-manifesting. This is precisely how Hegel defines reality (Wirklichkeit)—as the unity of essence and appearance. Or, to put it another way, "since the content and form of reality are entirely identical, ...reality is the fact of its own self-externalization."
Furthermore, because of those inherent contradictions and constant self-negations within nature, everything is perpetually undoing itself (which is what we call "time"). But that doesn't mean things lack "being." It just means our understanding distinguishes between the fleeting, transient stuff (appearance) and the enduring stuff that resists change (substance, essence, and ultimately the Concept—defined as that which remains what it is even while it changes).

What Hegel claims—that "things are exactly what we perceive them to be"—doesn't actually hold up in practice. In reality, things are often the exact opposite of how they appear. Have you ever had that experience where something turns out to be completely different from what you initially thought, or even what you believed for a long time?
It feels as though Hegel is ignoring the dimension of time, the element of constant change. He asserts that "there can be no essence of something that does not appear," but I struggle to understand where this non-existent thing is supposed to be hiding, and to whom it is failing to appear. Is it staying hidden forever? If something doesn't manifest today, tomorrow, or the day after, is that sufficient proof that it will never emerge within time? Furthermore, who is this observer deciding what appears and what stays hidden, and who is qualified to claim their perception is final and absolute?

Furthermore, if I interpret Hegel’s "curtain" as a boundary between what is perceptible and what remains hidden from our senses and reason, the logic still falls apart. In practical life, we are constantly discovering new things, forging new connections between phenomena, and forming new perceptions. It just doesn't ring true to suggest that there is nothing "beyond"—nothing currently obscured or permanently hidden from our intellect—nor does it feel right to claim that the "external" is identical to the "internal." 🤷
I suppose my mind is far too "practical" to wrap itself around Hegel's concepts of the internal, the external, and the beyond. His definitions clearly don't align with my own, and likely don't align with how most people in the US experience reality either.

Sandra Murphy33 said:What Hegel claims—that "things are exactly what we perceive them to be"—doesn't actually hold up in practice. In reality, things are often the exact opposite of how they appear. Have you ever had that experience where something turns out to be completely different from what you initially thought, or even what you believed for a long time?
It feels as though Hegel is ignoring the dimension of time, the element of constant change. He asserts that "there can be no essence of something that does not appear," but I struggle to understand where this non-existent thing is supposed to be hiding, and to whom it is failing to appear. Is it staying hidden forever? If something doesn't manifest today, tomorrow, or the day after, is that sufficient proof that it will never emerge within time? Furthermore, who is this observer deciding what appears and what stays hidden, and who is qualified to claim their perception is final and absolute?

Furthermore, if I interpret Hegel’s "curtain" as a boundary between what is perceptible and what remains hidden from our senses and reason, the logic still falls apart. In practical life, we are constantly discovering new things, forging new connections between phenomena, and forming new perceptions. It just doesn't ring true to suggest that there is nothing "beyond"—nothing currently obscured or permanently hidden from our intellect—nor does it feel right to claim that the "external" is identical to the "internal." 🤷
I suppose my mind is far too "practical" to wrap itself around Hegel's concepts of the internal, the external, and the beyond. His definitions clearly don't align with my own, and likely don't align with how most people in the US experience reality either.

That’s why we really need to nail down our terminology here. Saying we perceive things as they truly are just means that, in a theoretical sense, it's possible for us to do so; it doesn't mean that every single person walking around has an accurate grasp on reality. If someone's perception is skewed, that's a flaw in their own processing, not a flaw in reality itself. Hegel makes a clear distinction between Appearance and Illusion. An Appearance is essentially the full unveiling of essence without any extra layers. Illusion, on the other hand, is that "things are not what they seem" quality—it's more like a faint hint or a shadow of the true essence. However, an Appearance is contingent rather than necessary, so you have to distinguish it from actual reality and the Concept.

0.5

Let’s step away from that empty void of the beyond and the supersensible—that whole hollow, transcendental mess—and get back to Reason and its other internal layers.
See, Reason sits right where the sensory world does, acting as our actual reality, unlike that "beyond" stuff which is basically just an empty shell. This internal realm is general, sure, but it's only about itself—it's unfulfilled. It’s essentially just a play of forces, as Hegel puts it, which we touched on at the start of this chapter. There’s a negative side to this interplay and a positive one. The negative part is that it isn't truly "itself," while the positive part is that it mediates—though, and I really want to stress this, it mediates *outside* of Reason. When I say "outside of Reason," I just mean the mediation happens beyond its direct control; it just sort of happens, much like our example with Mark. He sees an apparition from Mary that convinces him—his own Reason—that what he's seeing is totally rational and comes from Reason itself. And it’s not just Mark seeing the vision; it’s also the guy standing outside looking at a tree and insisting that the tree is definitely there, or that it's daytime just because he perceives it as such. Once you start doing that, you're drifting into mere opinion or optical illusions—you know, those endless ways we misinterpret things by adding or subtracting from the object. Even the people who claim Mark’s vision is a "fact"—well, let's call it faith, whatever kind of fact it might be—it's all empty. Faith is empty because, as we've seen, anything beyond consciousness (the transcendent or supersensible) is hollow. It's not that the mind is too limited or flawed to grasp it; it's simply that the internal essence is actually vacant. And this isn't just true for the "beyond" part of the internal; it applies to other aspects too. It’s not just religion that turns out to be a bit of an illusion; modern science can be a total hall of mirrors too. Still, Hegel argues that religion actually conveys certain truths that the mind can fully grasp, whereas religion itself can't "understand" them since it isn't purely mental. Anyway, back to Reason.

Hegel is saying now that the relationship of Reason to the internal is defined by mediation, and through this process, the internal gets filled out. To put it another way—staying within the realm of the internal—if Mark mediates between his consciousness and what he perceives (whether it's a physical building or some non-material vision), he ends up fulfilling that internal space. For Reason, the only thing that is immediate is the play between these forces I mentioned; everything else is only true if it remains simple. Any movement of force—whether it's showing something or being the thing itself—is only true as long as it stays simple. The second a force reaches for something else via an appearance, it leaves truth behind and falls into untruth. Since we're talking about the internal here, the moment we take a spiritual phenomenon—like a poet calling it "divine inspiration," or someone in religion claiming a vision, prophecy, or a mystical trance—the moment we "take" that as reality, we've already slipped into untruth. Let's say my "I" sees various ghosts and stuff, but my "I" doesn't give a damn about them; in that case, I haven't been fooled. But if another "I" sees the exact same thing and *does* take it seriously, they're already halfway into a lie. And it's not just that individual; they end up deceiving a whole crowd of people, creating this endless loop. It only takes one wrong step to fall into untruth, and usually, it happens right in your own backyard when you least expect it. So, if someone claims to have a "spiritual" experience or a mystical encounter, they really do "see" and "have" it—but only because they've decided to accept it as such. They don't even realize they've tripped. They've moved away from the self, which is almost like saying "he's a faceless man" or "he's not himself." Honestly, it's pretty grim. Think about it: a person who isn't really a person, but just a hollow copy of everyone else—just a nameless, faceless Everyman.

That earlier example involving the play of forces between Mark and Mary’s manifestation hits the nail on the head. What’s actually happening there? It’s about being moved by another—or, if we want to get technical—it's that specific force which moves a second force, which in turn becomes the thing doing the moving. It isn't some external, alien power stepping in from the outside. There aren't two separate forces at play; instead, there's just one overarching substance. Hegel’s take on substance is honestly brilliant and incredibly consistent—the way he structures it is enough to make your head spin. Which is why it’s so tragic—and I say "tragic" without getting all melodramatic like someone going through a messy breakup—when a person—be it a neighbor, an acquaintance, a partner, or just some random guy on the street—finds themselves driven solely by their own internal engine without even realizing they were the ones who pulled the trigger. They think something else moved them, when it was just them all along. Look, we're talking about alienated people here—people who have lost touch with themselves. And let me tell you, those people are everywhere. Most people are totally alienated; they’re basically sleepwalking through life, even when they're wide awake. In Mark seeing Mary’s manifestation, we see the distinct moments of Mark’s consciousness and his alienated consciousness perceiving Mary. But those aren't actually two different things. Consciousness has these determinations that it splits into two seemingly opposing sides. These determinations are the only actual content that shows up in our Mark's consciousness, and then this appearance becomes the universal medium—what Hegel calls negative unity, which is essentially the same thing. In this process of appearing, the "play of forces" stops being what it originally seemed to be; it's no longer "that." Just like when a relationship ends and people say, "It wasn't really like that," the thing that appears here isn't truly what appeared. This doesn't just apply to the inner world—the spiritual or transcendent stuff—but also to the "real" objects and phenomena handled by modern science, where everything is defined by technical movement. And lurking in the background of that movement is the nihilism that only a few people—think Nietzsche, Heidegger, or maybe a philosopher like Miller—actually manage to spot. That's just the short version.

Regarding these determinations and the play of forces, the force itself, through its manifestation, triggers the other side. So, Mark's force triggers Mary’s manifestation, and that manifestation then triggers Mark—who was the original source of the movement to begin with. Ultimately, it's always just Mark's consciousness. These two sides, which look like opposites (Mark and Mary’s manifestation), are actually just a relationship of movement (Mark-Mary) and a relationship of content that seems contradictory. Each side sits in its own shifting "position." Think of it like the seasons: it's a cycle, like spring turning to winter, a single loop rather than two separate circles. It's the same with consciousness—it's one single loop containing all its variations, and outside that loop, there is absolutely nothing, just emptiness. This means that the relationship itself is singular. Our Mark, who is truly witnessing Mary’s manifestation, *is* Mary. Mark is Mary, and Mary is Mark; they are one and the same. People who say, "Wait a second, Hegel is saying Mark is Mary and Mary is Mark, that's a contradiction," clearly don't get it. It's the same relationship...

So, that's the little intro. We're seeing that the "inner realm"—the place for intuition, transcendence, and the beyond—is actually just empty space. Outside of consciousness, there is nothing. Anything that claims to be "above" or "beyond" consciousness—stuff that pretends to be supernatural, a "higher world," something hidden, mystical, or occult—is nothing. Or more accurately, that's all people live for, chasing a void. If someone starts preaching to you about these "other worlds," just wave them off, or honestly, give them a friendly slap to snap them out of it. Or better yet, grab a book by Hegel and give them a light tap on the head with it instead of using a stick like those Zen masters do (though they usually aim for the head a bit more precisely). There is no "other world" outside of consciousness. We need to stop alienating ourselves and just be one. But how to actually pull that off? Well, that's a whole different story.
Next up, we’re diving headfirst into consciousness.

Amanda Jackson5 said:That’s why we really need to nail down our terminology here. Saying we perceive things as they truly are just means that, in a theoretical sense, it's possible for us to do so; it doesn't mean that every single person walking around has an accurate grasp on reality. If someone's perception is skewed, that's a flaw in their own processing, not a flaw in reality itself. Hegel makes a clear distinction between Appearance and Illusion. An Appearance is essentially the full unveiling of essence without any extra layers. Illusion, on the other hand, is that "things are not what they seem" quality—it's more like a faint hint or a shadow of the true essence. However, an Appearance is contingent rather than necessary, so you have to distinguish it from actual reality and the Concept.

".... When a person views the world through a distorted lens, their behavior inevitably becomes flawed. And when behavior is flawed, the consequences are bound to be disastrous. That is how life becomes nothing more than a cycle of disappointment, suffering, and darkness." (M.)