Notes to: The Great Conversation: Unmasking the Pretensions of Reason (& other chapters)

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

"The Great Conversation," by Norman Melchert (sixth edition)

Chapter fifteen: "Unmasking the Pretensions of Reason" 

• "The eighteenth century is often called the Age of Enlightenment. Those who lived through this period felt that progress was being made almost daily toward overthrowing superstition and arbitrary authority, replacing ignorance with freedom. It is an age of optimism." 
• Immanuel Kant: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another." 
• Immanuel Kant: "If it is now asked, 'Do we presently live in an enlightened age?' the answer is, 'No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.'"
• Isaac Newton: "I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy."
• "We cannot begin with what seems right to us. Hypotheses not arrived at by way of careful analysis of the sensible facts are arbitrary-- no matter how intuitively convincing they may seem."
• "For eighteenth-century thinkers inspired by Newton, this [rationalism] smells too much of arbitrariness. One man's intuitive certainty, they suspect, is another man's absurdity. The only cure is to stick closely to the facts." 
• "The basic strategy in this war [of knowledge] is to show what the human understanding is (and is not) capable of. And this is what a science of human nature should give us."
• "Because all our intellectual endeavors are products of human understanding, an examination of that understanding should illumine them all. Such an inquiry will reveal how the mind works, what materials it has to operate on, and how knowledge in any area at all can be constructed." 
• "Every meaningful term (word), Hume tells us, is associated with an idea. Some terms, however, have no clear idea connected with them. We get used to them and think they mean something, but we are deceived. Hume in fact thinks this happens all too frequently! How can we discover whether a term really means something? Try to trace the associated idea back to an impression. If you can, it is a meaningful word that expresses a real idea. If you try and fail, then all you have are meaningless noises or nonsensical marks on paper."
• Hume: "To me, there appear to be only three principles of connexion among ideas, namely Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect."
• "Our belief that events are related by cause and effect is a completely nonrational belief. We have no good reason to think this. We do believe in causation. We cannot help it. But we believe in it by a kind of natural instinct."
• "Our tendency to form beliefs about the external world is just a fact about us; this is the way human nature works. Hume does not try to explain why human nature functions this way-- it just does. We should not frame hypotheses!"
• "Experience can show us only 'the frequent conjunction of objects, without being ever able to comprehend any thing like connexion between them."
• "Exposure to constant conjunctions builds up an associationistic habit of expecting one event on the appearance of the other." 
• "So far as our experience goes, there are no necessary connections anywhere. But we cannot help applying that notion to observed events, even though nothing in our impressions ever gives us a warrant for doing so." 
• "Remembering that we rely on cause and effect for all our inferences to realities beyond present consciousness, we now see that all such beliefs are simply based on habit. We have no reason for belief in an external world, in the reality of other persons, or even in past events. If knowledge is based on reason, as the philosophical tradition has held, there is precious little we can claim to know!"
• "Plato argues that a person is really an entity distinct from a body, a soul; residence in a body is a temporary state, and the soul survives the body's death. The tradition in the West generally follows him, though there are dissenters. The atomists and Epicureans think of the soul as material and mortal; Aristotle holds (with qualifications) that the soul is a functional aspect of a living body; the skeptics, of course, suspend judgment on the whole question. In modern times, Descartes follows Plato's lead, holding not only that the soul or mind is a distinct substance and immortal, but also that it is better known than any body could be. Hobbes, by contrast, interprets human beings in a thoroughly materialistic way. Locke believes in spiritual substances, though he emphasizes our lack of knowledge concerning their real nature. And, as we have seen, Berkeley argues that spirits and their ideas make up the whole of reality." 
• "What Plato called 'soul' and Descartes the 'mind,' Hume names the 'self.' A self is supposedly a substance or thing, simple (not composed of parts), and invariably the same through time. It is the 'home' for all our mental states and activities, the 'place' where these characteristics are 'located.'..." 
• "The term 'self' is supposed to represent an idea of something that continues unchanged throughout a person's life. Since the idea is supposed to be a simple one, there must be a simple impression that is its 'double.' But there is no such impression, Hume claims, 'constant and invariable' through life. It follows, according to Hume's rule, that we have no such idea! The term is one of those meaningless noises that we suppose (through inattention or confusion) means something, when it really doesn't."
• Hume: "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception." 
• "Again, Hume tries to pay close attention to the phenomena and tries not to frame hypotheses. If we look inside ourselves, do we find an impression of something simple, unchanging, and continuing? He confesses that he can find no such impression, and his suggestion that maybe you can, that maybe you are 'essentially different' in this regard, is surely ironic. His claim is that none of us ever finds more in ourselves than fleeting perceptions-- ideas, sensations, feelings, and emotions." 
• Hume: "I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement... The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at any one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propensity we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos'd." 
• "Like the idea of cause, the idea of the self is a fiction. As selves or minds, we are nothing but a 'bundle' of perceptions. Anything further is sheer, unsupported hypothesis. We have not only no reason to believe in a world of 'external' thing independent of our minds, but also no reason to believe in mind as a thing." 
• "A twentieth-century Humean, Bertrand Russell, puts it this way: The most that Descartes is entitled to claim is that there is thinking going on. To claim that there is a mind or self-- a thing-- doing the thinking is to frame a hypothesis, to go beyond the evidence available[.] If this criticism is correct, it clearly undermines Descartes' dualistic metaphysics, to say nothing of Berkeley's spiritual monism; we cannot know that the mind is a substance distinct from the body because we cannot know that it is a substance at all!" 
• "It is not someone who has attained nirvana, for in reality there is no self to attain anything at all. The idea of a continuing, permanent self that is me is an illusion."
• Hume: "I hope, therefore, to make it appear, that all men have ever agreed in the doctrine both of necessity and of liberty, according to any reasonable sense, which can be put on these terms; and that the whole controversy has hitherto turned merely upon words." 
• "Are human actions caused? If we understand this in what Hume thinks is the only possible way, we are simply asking whether there are regularities detectable in human behavior. And he thinks we all must admit that there are... If all that we can possibly mean by 'caused' is that events are regularly connected, we should all agree that human behavior is caused."
• "Causality on the side of the objects observed is just regularity, and on the side of the observer it is the generation of a habit based on regularities. In neither case, material or intelligent, is there any necessity observed. Human actions are 'caused' in exactly the same sense as events in the material world." 
• Hume: "By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determination of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone, who is not a prisoner and in chains." 
• "It is possible to reconcile our belief in causality with our belief in human freedom. We do not have to choose between them. We can have both modern science and human freedom. Newtonian science and freedom to act would clash if freedom entailed exemption from causality. But causes are simply regularities; and freedom is not an absence of regularity, but the 'hypothetical' power to do something if we choose to do it. It is, in fact, a certain kind of regularity. It is the regularity of having the actions we choose to do follow regularly upon our choosing to do them." 
• "The idea of God, Hume says, does have its origin in impressions. We reflect on ourselves and find impressions of intelligence and a certain degree of goodness-- not perfect intelligence or complete goodness, of course. But we also have, from our impressions, the ideas of more and less. If we combine the idea of more with the ideas of intelligence and goodness, we get the idea of a being more intelligent and good than we are. We can reiterate this operation, over and over again, until we get the idea of a being that is perfectly intelligent and completely good. And this is the idea of God." 
• "If there had ever been suspicions that the universe was not a perfectly ordered, magnificently integrated piece of work, Newton set such suspicions at rest. The image of a great machine, or clockwork, dominates eighteenth-century thought about the nature of the world."
• "No argument from experience ever can establish a certainty. The most that experience can yield is probability (since experience is always limited and cannot testify to what is beyond its limits)." 
• Hume: "Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost; many fruitless trials made; and a slow but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making." 
• "Hume shows us that if we begin from ideas in the mind, there is no way to build that bridge to the world beyond." 

Chapter sixteen: "Rehabilitating Reason (within Strict Limits)"

• "David Hume had published A Treatise of Human Nature at the youthful age of twenty-three, whereas as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) published the first of his major works, The Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781, when he was fifty-seven. He enters the great conversation rather late in life because it has taken him some time to understand the devastating critique of Hume, 'that acute man.'"
• Kant: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance-- meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion." 
• "In a resistance-free environment, everything is equally possible (as long as formal contradiction is avoided), and the conflicts of dogmatic believers (philosophical, religious, or political) are inevitable." 
• "You can see that Hume ends up exactly where Descartes fears to be, with science indistinguishable from a dream. In order to escape this fate, Descartes thinks you need to prove the existence of a nondeceptive God. But by undermining such proofs, Hume finds himself unable to escape from solipsism-- except by joining a game of backgammon and ignoring the problem." 
• "Hume thinks that what we need is a science of human nature. Kant agrees, but he thinks it must be done better than Hume manages to do it. This is the project Kant sets for himself, now that he has awakened from his dogmatic slumber and is no longer, like the dove, trying to fly in empty space." 
• "What if, to be an object at all, a thing has to conform to certain concepts? What if objects couldn't exist-- simply couldn't be in any sense at all-- unless they were related to a rational mind, set in a context of rational concepts and principles?" 
• "The suggestion is that the rational mind has a certain structure, and whatever is knowable by such a mind must necessarily be known in terms of that structure. This structure is not derived from the objects known; it is imposed on them-- but not arbitrarily, because the very idea of an object not so structured makes no sense." 
• "We are not going to develop mathematics, physics, metaphysics, or reality. But in each case we are going to look at the rational foundations on which these disciples rest. What is it, for instance, about human reason that makes it possible to develop mathematics? What structure, capacities, and concepts must reason have for it to be able to do mathematics? These are reflective questions, which together constitute a critique of reason, a critical examination of the way a rational mind works." 
• "A transcendental inquiry reaches back into the activities of the mind and asks how it produces its results." 
• "A judgment is a priori when it can be known to be true without any reference to experience. '7 + 5 = 12' is an example." 
• "A judgment is a posteriori when we must appeal to experience to determine its truth or falsity. For instance, 'John F. Kennedy was assassinated' cannot be known independently of experience."
• "A judgment is analytic when its denial yields a contradiction. Here is an example Kant gives: 'All bodies are extended.' This is analytic because the predicate 'extended' is already included as part of the subject, 'bodies.' To say that there is some body that is not extended is, in effect, to claim there can be some extended thing that is not extended. And that is contradictory. If an analytic judgment is true, it is necessarily true. The opposite of an analytic judgment is not possible." 
• "A judgment is synthetic when it does more than simply explicate or analyze a concept. Here are some examples: 'Every event has a cause,' 'Air has weight,' and 'John F. Kennedy was assassinated.' Consider the first example. The concept having a cause is not part of the concept being an event. This is something Hume teaches us. We can imagine that an event might simply occur without any cause. Even if we don't believe that ever happens, there is no contradiction in supposing it might. The opposite of synthetic judgments is always possible." 
• "Analytic a priori: 'All bodies are extended.' This is analytic, as we have seen, because 'extended' is part of the definition of 'body.' It is a priori because we don't have to examine our experience of bodies to know it is true; all we need is to understand the meanings of the term 'body' and 'extended.'
• "Analytic a posteriori: This class seems empty; if the test for analyticity is examining a judgment's denial for contradiction, it seems clear that we do not also have to examine experience. Every analytic judgment must be a priori.
• Synthetic a posteriori: Here belong most of our judgments about experience, judgments of science and common sense alike, from particular judgments (e.g., 'The water is the tea kettle is boiling') to general laws (e.g., 'Water always boils at 100°C at sea level.')
• Synthetic a priori: This is a puzzling and controversial class of judgments. If we were to know such a judgment as true, we would have to be able to know it quite independently of experience. This means that if such a judgment is true, it is true no matter what our experience shows us. Even if the events of experience were organized in a completely different way, a true judgment of this kind would remain true. And yet it is not true because it is analytic; its denial expresses a logical impossibility." 
• "Kant believes that the solution to the dilemmas of past philosophy lies precisely in the recognition that we are in possession of synthetic a priori judgments." 
• "Kant wants to understand how mathematics, natural science, metaphysics, and morality are possible. In the light of his Copernican revolution, we can see that he is asking how the rational mind structures its objects into the objects of mathematics, natural science, metaphysics, and morality. It must be that implicit in the foundations of all these disciplines are some judgments that do not arise out of experience but prescribe how the objects of experience must be." 
• "Thoughts are made up of concepts united in various ways. But unless those concepts are given a content through some intuition, either pure (as in geometry) or empirical (as in physics), they are 'empty'-- sheer rules that for all we know may apply to nothing. They provide us with no knowledge." 
• "Plato, for example, is convinced that reality is composed of substances (the Forms) that cannot be sensed but are purely intelligible. Descartes asks about the cause of his idea of God. One of the assumptions of traditional metaphysics is that these concepts can take us beyond the sphere of experience." 
• "The categories, Kant claims, cannot be used apart from sensible intuitions to give us knowledge of objects. Why not? Because they are merely 'forms of thought.'"
• Forms of thought are comparable to, say, x to the second power. Until "x" is specified, we cannot say what the figure means at all. 
• "A concept is just a formal rule for structuring some material. The material is supplied by our intuitions. Without the sensible intuitions, there are no objects. But it can seem as though there are. This is the illusion." 
• "Notice how Kant has turned completely upside down Plato's claim that knowledge is restricted to the purely intelligible world of Forms. For Kant, this realm beyond any possible sensory experience cannot be known at all; what we know is the changing world of the senses, about which Plato thinks we can have only opinions." 
• "Sheer extension does not account for resistance, solidity, and impenetrability, he [Leibniz] argued, so there must be some real qualitative thing to be extended. A new concept of substance was needed, and Leibniz offered one: A substance is a being capable of action. this makes reality intrinsically dynamic; the ultimate substances are points of activity (force), each with an inherent tendency toward motion (in his view, rest is just infinitesimally small movement). He called these substances monads. Though each monad is intrinsically simple, each has infinitely many properties-- namely, the ways it is related to each of the infinitely many other monads. So each monad, in a way, mirrors or reflects the entire universe; in certain monads, this reflection is perception and the mind. If you knew any monad completely, you would know everything." 
• "Because each monad mirrors all the others, a change in one would necessitate a change in all the others... There are many possible worlds, many families of possible monads; this actual world is just one of the possibilities. Why is it this world, out of all the many possible worlds, that is the actual one? We can figuratively imagine God-- the one being that is not merely possible, but necessarily existing-- contemplating all the possible worlds and choosing one to actualize. He would clearly choose the 'best' one, the one most like God himself, who is perfectly actual. This would be the universe that combines the most actuality (the richest variety of content) with the greatest simplicity of laws. In that sense, Leibniz believed, we live in the best of all possible worlds." 
• "We human beings, however, are limited to space, time, and sensation. To treat the categories as concepts that can give us knowledge beyond these limitations is to suppose that we have types of intuition that we do not have." 
• "One common form of the illusion is the claim that we can know things as they are, apart from the way they appear to us. This is the illusion of speculative metaphysics. The illusion is reinforced because we do have the concept of things-in-themselves. Kant even gives it a name: Something as it is in itself, independently of the way it reveals itself to us, is called a noumenon. This contrasts with a phenomenon, its appearance to us." 
• "The notion we can get knowledge of things-in-themselves is, Kant says, 'a natural and inevitable illusion'. Something in the very structure of rationality gives us that notion; it has to do with reasoning. The aim of reasoning is to supply 'the reason why' something is true. As we have seen numerous times already, the why question can always be repeated; we can ask for the reason for the reason... As you can see, the quest for reasons will not be satisfied until it finds some condition that doesn't need to be explained by a further condition. Reason is always searching for the unconditioned." 
• "The search is or something intelligible in itself, which explains or makes intelligible all the rest." 
• "We can understand only what lies within the bounds of possible experience. But reason cannot be content with that. If those bounds are reached, reason still wants to ask why. Why is experience as a whole the way it is? Why is there experience at all? But this question can be answered only by transcending those boundaries." 
• "Rational psychology is an attempt to understand the fundamental nature of the self by rational reflection on what the self must be if experience is to be possible. it is a quest for the unconditioned condition on the side of the subject." 
• "What I am in myself is completely unknown to me. For all that rational reflection can tell me, this X that I am may be anything at all. I do not know that I am a substance. The self or soul, then, is merely that unknown X to whom the world appears and by which it is structured into objects." 
• "Consciousness, moreover, is not merely passive reception of data (a la writing on Locke's white paper) but is intensely active. When we perceive, we are aware that we are perceiving-- hence apperceiving." 
• "We cannot decide whether the world had a beginning in time-- whether it is temporally finite or infinite. In fact, he has arguments that seem to show that each alternative is false! When reason runs into such a contradiction-- he calls it an 'antimony'-- this is a sign that reason is overreaching its own powers. In trying to complete the search for the unconditioned, reason frustrates itself. The moral of the story is that the origins of the world in itself are unknowable." 
• "These philosophers [Hobbes and Hume] try to rescue human freedom, however, by offering a hypothetical analysis of what it is to act freely: If you can do what you want to do, then you are free... They believe that this view of freedom is quite compatible with the view that (1) our wants themselves have causes and (2) our wants cause our actions."
• "We can agree [supposes Kant] with Descartes that freedom is exemption from causality. Kant calls it 'the power of beginning a state spontaneously.'"
• "Descartes' exemption fo the will from causal determination is dubious; it seems like special pleading, a stratagem designed simply to preserve something we are loath to give up." 
• "An act can be both free and determined: free in itself (since the category of causality does not reach so far) and yet causal as it appears to us. The notion that an act couldn't possibly be both is simply due to considering the things we experience as things in themselves." 
• "Remember, the will as free is the will considered noumenally, and about the noumenal world we can known nothing at all. Kant does not even claim to have proved that such freedom is possible; the most he will say is that 'causality through freedom is at least not incompatible with nature.' There is no contradiction in thinking of an act as free in itself, but determined as appearance."
• "There is one more pattern of reasoning we simply cannot avoid. It leads to the concept of God. Let us see how Kant understands this. He agrees with Descartes and the tradition that the idea of God is the idea of an all-perfect being, but he has a very interesting analysis of the way reasoning leads us to that idea. Like the ideas of soul and world, the idea of God is not an arbitrary invention. Nor is it something we might or might not invent, as Hume claims. Nor is it, as some in the Enlightenment hold, a priestly or political trick foisted on people to keep them in subjection. For any being that reasons, it is absolutely an unavoidable concept. Reason asks for the reason why and eventually asks, Why is there anything at all? It seems that there must be some being that is the foundation for whatever there is." 
• "It is the Idea of something that cannot just be another phenomenal being; since it is the foundation for the determinate character of all phenomenal things, it must be noumenal-- a thing-in-itself. As we are now abundantly aware, Kant argues that things-in-themselves are unknowable. So the concept of God is just an Idea of Reason." 
• "Every judgment of existence is synthetic. None of them is simply analytic of the concept expressed by the subject of the judgment-- because existence is not a normal predicate and cannot be part of the subject term's definition. And that means that in no case is the denial of a judgment asserting existence a contradiction." 
• Kant: "A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers." 
• "Modern logic agrees with Kant here. The two propositions 'Dogs bark' and 'Dogs exist' may look very much alike, but their logic is very different." 

Chapter seventeen: "Taking History Seriously"

• "Kant accepts the assumptions common to most of the Western philosophical tradition: that there is a truth abut the way things are and that this truth is eternal. He thinks he has found it. Kant's central truths, of course, focus on what it is to be rational. The structures of a rational mind are the same for all rational creatures (and so, of course, for all humans). They are unchanging over time-- the same for ancients and moderns, primitives and enlightened philosophers." 
• "It is true that this control [the French Revolution] turns into the Reign of Terror, that it spawns a series of wars, and that it leads to Napoleon's coup d'etat and his assumption of the title of emperor. But something deep and remarkable has happened, and Europe will never be the same again. Hegel imbibes the sense of history being made, of real change, of the possibility of progress toward a more rational society. And he never loses it." 
• "The word translated as 'Spirit' is the German Geist. Scholars disagree about whether the best English equivalent is 'spirit,' as this translator has it, or 'mind.'"
• "Hegel lives at what is arguably the high point of German culture. Goethe is just twenty years his senior, Schiller ten. Hegel is a close friend of the poet Holderlin. Beethoven is almost his exact contemporary. Novalis, Herder, the Schlegel brothers-- all react against what they feel is the dry and cold rationality of the Enlightenment." 
• "As they [the Romantics] see it, there is no conflict in these Greeks between reason and inclination, science and religion, rationality and feeling. Their morality seems to grow naturally out of their sense of being at home in the world and in their society." 
• "This is what the Romantics hold against Kant: that he divides human beings, so that their reason is eternally at odds with their passions. For Kant, as we have seen, morally right actions cannot be motivated by inclination, passion, or feeling-- not even the feeling of love. The only acts that are morally good, Kant tells us, are done out of that austere motivation of rational respect for the moral law." 
• "Some, including the young Hegel, explore the possibilities for a new folk religion that would express more adequately the ideals they hold dear." 
• "Nothing will satisfy him that leaves conflicts unresolved, that pits one aspect of a human being against another-- or against a neighbor."
• Hegel: "In the case of other instruments, we can try and criticize them in other ways than by setting about the special work for which they are destined. But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it." 
• "If we want to know whether a chisel is an adequate instrument, we can use our sense of touch as a criterion, or we can observe with our eyes how easily it parts the wood. But if we want to know whether our knowledge is an adequate instrument-- whether it gets us the truth-- we have only our own knowledge to depend on." 
• "As long as subject and object are thought to be inherently unrelated, there can be no guarantee that they will correspond, and skepticism always looms large. Descartes and Locke do not defeat it, Hume resigns himself to it, and Kant cultivates the garden of phenomena in the midst of a vast sea of unknowables." 
• "What Hegel proposes to show is that consciousness moves through stages (he sometimes calls them 'moments'), that it does this with a kind of necessity, driven by inadequacies at each stage, and that we can 'watch' as it develops itself from the simplest and most inadequate consciousness to one that is completely adequate to its object." 
• "Phenomenology of mind (spirit) takes consciousness itself as a phenomenon; it tries to set out the logos-- the logic or internal rationale-- of its development."
• "For most of us, knowledge (if we think of it at all) is a certain state of mind that represents or corresponds to some object external to it. I have this idea that my bicycle is in the garage. That is one thing. I also have this bicycle. That is a second thing. These two things, ideas and object, seem quite independent of one another and can vary independently... Notice, though, that every time we are aware of an object, we take it really to be (in itself) what it seems to be (for us). As long as we are satisfied in our contemplation of this object, no dichotomy between what it really is and how it appears to us arises in our consciousness." 
• "How does the idea of the way something is for us ever get distinguished from the idea of what it is in itself? Hegel argues that this can happen because consciousness is conscious not only of the object but also of itself (as related to the object); and it does happen whenever we become aware of of some discrepancy between our 'knowledge' of the object and our 'experience' of the object." 
• "What we work if we just 'watch' consciousness at work is that it reveals-- by itself, and with a certain kind of inevitability-- the discrepancies between its own awareness and its objects. It corrects itself to make its awareness more adequate to the object, but in changing itself, it finds that the object has not stayed put but has changed correspondingly." 
• "In us the world reveals itself to be 'will,' a blind, ceaseless striving, the desire for existence. The whole of the phenomenal world, with all its varied individuals, is but a manifestation in time and space of this will. Beneath the surface appearances of things, we see a never-ending struggle for existence, desire succeeding desire, until life finally ends in death." 
• "Is there any cure for the disease of lie? Schopenhauer holds that art, and music in particular, can provide a temporary release from this cycle of frustration. In the peculiarly disinterested character of aesthetic experience, the clamor of the will is quieted. We are freed for a time from the wheel of suffering and lose ourselves in the contemplation of a beautiful object." 
• "There is no need for philosophers to come up with the criterion of knowledge, Hegel tells us, because the problem of the criterion is in the process of solving itself. Nor should we despair because it seems we cannot compare our thoughts with their objects and test them definitively for their correctness. In examining its own adequacy, consciousness is continually engaged in such comparison and testing; 'all that is left for us to do is simply to look on...'" 
• "Is this development to be thought of as a series of stages within the life of each human consciousness, as it matures toward adequacy, or is it to be regarded as a historical process, through which the human race travels from stages of primitive culture to the most advanced science, religion, and philosophy? The answer is that it is both. And in some sense it is a logical progression as well. Individuals are manifestations of Spirit, but so are civilizations and cultures. And throughout all, Hegel holds, there is present the World Spirit, which develops in individuals and cultures toward self-knowledge, rationality, and freedom." 
• "Consciousness faces a world of objects that is other than itself. Yet, in the stage of understanding, it recognizes that the essence or truth of these objects (as revealed in scientific laws) is its own work. So the other isn't really other after all. And yet it obviously isn't just itself, either. It both is and is not other. What to do? Consciousness tries to resolve this unsatisfactory situation by making the other wholly its own. And isn't that exactly what desire is-- a project to make mine what is not yet mine?"
• "It might help to think of the way a child develops a consciousness of herself. At first no distinction is made between herself and the other. What breaks this seamless unity of the child's world is frustration (unsatisfied desire). She becomes aware of the difference between herself and Mama, herself and the bottle, herself and Teddy. But she is not yet conscious of herself as a self-conscious being. This comes much later, and requires-- as Hegel is among the first to recognize-- another self-conscious being with which to contrast herself."
• "Like everything else in Hegel's world, self-consciousness doesn't appear complete at its first appearance; it develops. What is required for its development is recognition by another self-consciousness. It is this sort of recognition that creates self-conscious beings. I become self-conscious when I am acknowledged as such by another self-conscious being and recognize this acknowledgement. Self-consciousness is a social fact." 
• "Suppose that Jones, who has achieved self-concsciousness, comes to recognize Smith as like himself-- a self-consciousness constituted by desire. This is not a happy recognition. In a certain sense, it means that Jones has 'lost himself,' for he now recognizes himself as an 'other'-- for Smith. Who is her now? He is what Smith takes him to be. He is an object for Smith. Moreover, remember that desire is an attempt to make one's own what is felt to be alien. The ominous aspect of this can be brought out in terms of control. Jones experiences Smith as someone who is trying to control him, define him, make him into what Smith wants him to be."
• Hegel: "They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other." 
• "Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative commands us to treat others as ends, not as means only. What Hegel is identifying here is an unavoidable tendency in self-conscious beings to treat each other precisely as means." 
• "The only proof that I am not just an object for another, but a subject-- a spirit, a being-for-myself, a person-- is my willingness to risk everything worldly to gain such recognition." 
• "Suppose Jones wins the struggle and kills Smith. Has he achieved what he wanted? Not at all. For in eliminating Smith, he deprives himself of precisely that source of recognition that he needs to realize himself as a self-conscious being! He has shattered the mirror in which he might have discovered who he is. In some fashion (either in the course of history or in some dim way within each developing consciousness, or perhaps in both), self-conscious individuals become aware of this self-defeating character of the life-and-death struggle. And the result is a compromise. What happens is this: The stronger makes the weaker into his slave." 
• "Consider the consciousness of the slave. It is a dependent consciousness-- unfree and subject to the will of the master. But such a consciousness is not fit to provide the recognition that the master needs to confirm himself as free and independent. That can only be given by another free and independent individual."
• "He [Karl Marx] accepts Hegel's point that one objectifies oneself in one's labor and goes on to emphasize that if the product of one's labor is not one's own, if it belongs to another, then one becomes alienated from oneself." 
• Epictetus: "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view they take of things." 
• "This reflective self is apparently in complete control of its own happiness because it can always 'negate' or consider as nothing anything that threatens it." 
• "Stoic thought, Hegel tells us, free the Stoic from 'natural existence'; but by the same token, it lets natural existence 'go free.' Consequently, there is a lack of reality in the Stoic's freedom, and his much-prized thinking lacks 'the fullness of life.' That is why Hegel says the Stoic has only the notion (the concept) of freedom, not its 'living reality.' What is still required is that this concept be embedded in the Stoic's life, so that he does not need to abstract himself from it in order to find his happiness." 
• "It is not enough, as with Stoicism, to realize that one could set the value of everything as nothing. This stage must actually be lived through. Such a life is that of the skeptic." 
• "Skeptical self-consciousness is mired deep in self-deception. Priding itself on its freedom, it becomes slave to the customs of the society in which it finds itself, whatever they happen to be. This purely accidental life cannot, Hegel is convinced, be the goal of reason and spirit." 
• "This self-divided consciousness, aware nonetheless that it is one, Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness. On the one side there is the experience of free and rational thinking, of pure universality, which nothing merely contingent or natural can touch. Hegel calls this the Unchangeable. On the other side, consciousness experiences itself as a changeable, unessential, 'self-bewildering and self-perverting' particular individual, subject to the sheerest happenstance of accident. These two sides are 'alien to one another.'"
• "Under psychological pressure to resolve this dilemma, consciousness identifies itself with the changeable and experiences the unchangeable as 'an alien Being,' as not itself." 
• "This, Hegel holds, is what the Christian doctrine of the incarnation really means: Jesus as truly man and truly God manifests the unity of the Spirit. The believer participate in the Unchangeable through devotion, sacrifice, and thanksgiving and hopes for the completion of this process in the life to come." 
• "Whenever we act, we implicitly assume that the world is intelligible, rational, and meaningful. We bank on it. But to do that is to 'make the assertion' that it is not alien to reason-- that the reason in it is the same reason as in us. We are all, he seems to say, practical idealists, whether we admit it or not." 
• "What is rational cannot differ from mind to mind. If it is rational in these circumstances to do just exactly that, then it is rational for me, for you, and for anyone else." 
• "The World Spirit is consciousness and reason manifesting itself in the world. Indeed, Hegel thinks history is a process in which 'God' is coming to comprehend itself through us. In a sense, then, you and I are God-- but potentially, implicitly, and in essence, not yet in actuality."
• "The endpoint of this process, when subject and object correspond perfectly, the stage of perfect self-consciousness, is the stage Hegel calls absolute knowledge."
• "The process of gaining knowledge is not like an infinitely long path we can never hope to traverse. It is more like a loop; it closes and comes back on itself. In absolute knowledge the problem of the criterion will be solved, because all possible grounds for skeptical doubt will have been analyzed and surpassed in the dialectical progression that gets us to that point. Spirit will not just know reality; it will know that it knows. It will be what it knows." 
• "For us there remains opacity and darkness and an alien character to the things of the world. They continue to be experienced as other. But if Hegel is right, this otherness is merely appearance; even now it is in the process of being surpassed. In themselves, things are illuminated by the light of reason and are comprehensible without remainder."