In Logic of Desire, Peter Kalkavage suggests a series of guiding questions for reading the introduction of the Phenomenology:
- What does consciousness [Bewußtsein] mean?
- What does experience [Erfahrung] mean?
- Why does consciousness suffer the violence of refutation at its own hands?
- How can this recurring pattern of violence lead to anything positive?
- What is the logical method that will unmask the shapes of consciousness and bind them together in a continuous whole?
- What makes consciousness tense or desirous–impelled from within to “press forward to true knowledge”?
These questions can be helpfully returned to when the thickets of Hegel begin to thicken, putting the forest back in view before we wade back into the work of navigating the trees.
The introduction opens with a polemic against method, questioning the common sense thought that we would know things if only we could analyze them thoroughly. It turns out that the preoccupation with method, whether we think our reasoning is a medium or an instrument, is not the avoidance of error but the error itself. It is likely that Kant is the target of Hegel’s polemic here, as Kant is concerned to draw a distinction between things as they appear “for us,” and things as they are “in themselves.”
While Kant is not named as a target, natural consciousness is identified by name in §77 as the shape of consciousness that falls into the errors Hegel identifies. Natural consciousness is consciousness as philosophically uneducated, undeveloped. Natural consciousness occupies the realm of the familiar, which is not understood because it is so familiar to us and remains unquestioned.
The fate of natural consciousness is to disappear as soon as genuine knowledge or Science comes on the scene as we see in §76. When Science first appears, it too is merely the semblance or appearance of knowing, and not yet Science in its developed and unfolded truth, as Hegel writes. How does Science leave appearance and truly become knowing? This is the path that the Phenomenology of Spirit is concerned to trace, and for now, we have left off on Hegel’s observation that natural consciousness embarks on a path of doubt, or the path of despair. As will occur with many shapes of consciousness in the book, this path is not the final or complete one, but is one avenue that seems to lead to a dead end: a self-consummating skepticism that is not the project in science (§78).