¨In this respect, what one can say to those who make assertions about the truth and reality of sensuous objects is that they should be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, namely, to the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus and that they have yet to learn the mystery of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. This is so because the person who has been initiated into these secrets not merely comes to doubt the being of sensuous things. Rather, he is brought to despair (Verzweiflung) of them; in part he brings about their nothingness, and in part he sees them do it to themselves. Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.¨ Hegel-Phenomenology of Spirit
The act of negation is brought on by the despair of animal life. Animal existence is perpetuated by need, a lack of something. The lack of an object which belongs to consciousness. The being of sense certainty disappears with the separate will of nature. The vicissitudes of change, comprehended by the category of causality in the understanding undergirded by space and time, are what give power to the objects of consciousness. To have power of its own, consciousness must itself identify with sensuous objects. But it cannot be an identical relation.
Need results from the reality of nothingness. Only humans have the fear of death as animal life only fears deprivation of what is.
"The only good things he knows in the universe are food, a female and repose, and the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death, because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions which man gains on leaving the animal condition." Jean Jacques Rousseau
Accordingly only humans or those animals approaching human consciousness have the capacity of self-improvement, which requires foresight. The foresight humans have, which undergirds reason, can be explained in physiological terms. But the impetus to greater intelligence is not a directive of nature. The overwhelming majority of life discovered so far is rather unintelligent or it is of a crude nature serving only survival. To contemplate ones existence is to remove the self from understanding the sensuous objects and their vicissitudes and understand them according to how one understands one self.
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die." Friedrich Nietzsche-On Truth and Lie
We understand things according to our own empty nature, imaging that nature has teleology. That there is a purpose to the course of natural events.
Yes consciousness is empty. When we consider what can be said of sensuous objects that remains essential to them, it is the intuitions of space and time. But this reality is colorless, tasteless, soundless, odorless, and numb. To give content to consciousness is to engage with the sensuous objects
The truth is that the necessity of thought lies only in thought. It is by consciousness' own rules, its own necessity. Continually striving to identity with nature through unity, consciousness does impart necessity through its own actions but only to itself.
This loneliness that accompanies even the achievement of power over nature is where the need of recognition from another self-consciousness derives. Another consciousness makes the order and unity which thought provides to nature, through its relations, objective. We are not alone. Yet the existence of another consciousness limits the power of consciousness into self-consciousness. Moving beyond sense-certainty is self-certainty
Self-conscious self-certainty is also empty. Its needs derive from a lack of connection to nature rather than a lack of power over nature. To say I is I means almost nothing. It is in relation to something else that consciousness has any meaning.
The highest of our needs becomes embodied in social relations emptied of their sensual content, in the form of abstract ideas which retain the force of an alien will. This is the monotheist's God, which gives ethical demands but is not knowable to the senses. It is defined by its abstract power; omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. The Gods of the pagans were closer to humans, but differed in the scope of their powers.
It is fitting that many of the philosophical arguments for God give the necessity of logical reasoning causal powers, which belong to the physical world. If I can conceive of the greatest possible being, then that entails its actual existence outside of thought. Unlike the emptiness of logical abstraction, God gets its appeal because being conscious itself it in some way is not limited by nature the way we are. Being all powerful, God is in the monotheist tradition usually the creator of the entire universe while being so powerful as to exist apart from it. The argument goes that if God made the universe then it follows whatever laws it wants. They need no justification, and the principle of sufficient reason is suspended. Sui Causa, self causation. Self explained. God is the thing in itself of sorts. God has power over nature, consciousness that isn't empty.
We thus see that man did not develop in isolation. Belief in God is a sign of the evolution of self-conscience.
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