Sense-Certainty: An Inherent Problem or One of Language?

Last class on the 31^st, we began with a review of sense-certainty and focused on whether we should consider sense-certainty’s frustration merely as a language issue or as an untenable position from the very outset. For awhile, I was firm in the language camp; I thought that sense-certainty was a maintainable form of consciousness if, hypothetically, one never ever wanted to make one’s knowledge communicable through mediation by universals. However, after our discussion, I’d like to change my position. Sense-certainty by its very nature is an untenable state of consciousness and its frustration is inherent and necessitates that it become something else. What follows will reiterate the thoughts said in the discussion and will hopefully illuminate what the problem is exactly and why we should choose one position over the other.

Sense-certainty is that form of consciousness which takes that which is immediately known as the surest form of knowledge. It strictly cannot make any use of universals, for doing so would be to mediate its knowledge; i.e., it takes what is immediately known and then translates it into the language of universal concepts, which would no longer make such knowledge immediate and would contradict the essence of sense-certainty. Thus any violation of immediate knowledge for such a consciousness would force it to reconcile this frustration—usually by becoming a more sophisticated form of consciousness. My instinct was that sense-certainty could remain in this state, where its knowledge is of this, here, and now (but without ever saying those concepts!), so long as it remained in its private world without communicating to others (forcing it to use universals). So long as this, here, and now remain unspoken, primitive immediacies, sense-certainty could maintain itself.

This was my position until we explored more deeply into this relation between consciousness and phenomenal object (if such a term is even applicable to sense-certainty), after which I changed my position to stating that sense-certainty is inherently untenable. If sense-certainty takes in immediate knowledge of the world as immediate, it cannot posit the relation between itself (the “I,” a universal) and its object. Instead, its knowledge is simply of objects as they are, immediately and unconditionally. Anyone familiar with Kant’s insights should be aware that it is problematic whenever the possibility of having immediate, unconditioned knowledge of objects is asserted. Such knowledge amounts to having knowledge of things as they are in themselves, which, according to their definition, is independent of one’s consciousness of it. To say that one is conscious of things as they are in themselves is a manifest contradiction in terms, but this is exactly what sense-certainty does. In not positing a relation between consciousness and object, it has no concept (not surprisingly) of a thing for consciousness, a phenomenal object, which is a necessary assertion for a true understanding of the world. Sense-certainty therefore commits itself by its very nature to an untrue image of the world, one in which a consciousness can know the unknowable. Sense-certainty must become something new.

(Note to Dr. Johnson: I would still like to be considered part of Group 1, so I will be authoring next week as well.)