Consciousness and Progress

            In class on Tuesday, we established through our discussions of “Sense-Certainty” and “Perception” that the way in which we perceive objects is determined by the subjects. We view things in terms of universals, but because of the makeup of consciousness, we can’t decide whether it is correct to perceive things in terms of “also” or “one.” That we have two competing ways to perceive the same object shows, according to Hegel, that perception is more about the subject than the object. Somewhat obviously, this seems to suggest that all human consciousnesses are the same in this regard; perception necessarily depends on consciousness, which for all people necessarily cannot decide between “also” and one.” Although this suggests sameness of human consciousnesses on the issue of perceiving objects, this opens the door to the idea that all human consciousnesses may share many things in common or have the same basic template.  That all human consciousnesses may share aspects other than perception of objects is further suggested in “Lordship and Bondage” (but I haven’t really looked at that in detail yet).

            In the week before this last class, we discussed progress as it occurs among humanity over time. Reading the blog last week, I thought that the types of progress we were discussing necessitated that progress occur over multiple lifetimes and that one generation kind of picks up where the previous one leaves off. (For, if this weren’t true, when people die, progress would seemingly have to start from scratch instead of continuing. Then, it would seem, real progress would never really occur.) With this in mind, history progresses with each generation or group, thinking about things and reacting to things in a way that grows out of (but is still at least slightly different from) the thought of the previous groups. When it occurred to me that Hegel implies that consciousnesses all have some commonality, I thought of this again. I questioned, what does the nature of progress suggest about inherent similarities between consciousnesses? I came to two different conclusions. In one sense, progress in this manner implies some similarities between all consciousnesses. For, if there were no common ground inherent in all consciousnesses, progress in this regard wouldn’t really be possible because there would be no ground for continuation. I also thought that consciousnesses can’t all be the same in manner completely, because if everyone was born with the same potential for development of consciousness, there would be no progress because the way of looking at things would never change. I recognize that these claims are debatable, and that there are many ways they could be argued against, and I’m not entirely sure whether I stand by them, but they’re interesting to think about. So in the end, I question, do consciousnesses share certain bases, but do these bases correspond to and change with progress in the world?