Philosopher Peter Singer said of Hegel’s notion of sense-certainty, “Sense-certainty makes no attempt to order or classify the raw information obtained by the senses. Thus when this form of consciousness has in front of it what we would describe as a ripe tomato, it cannot describe its experience as a tomato, for that would be to classify what it sees. It cannot even describe the experience as one of seeing something round and red, for these terms too presuppose some form of classification. Sense-certainty is aware only of what is now present to it; as Hegel puts it, it is the certainty of the
Philosopher Peter Singer said of Hegel’s notion of sense-certainty, “Sense-certainty makes no attempt to order or classify the raw information obtained by the senses. Thus when this form of consciousness has in front of it what we would describe as a ripe tomato, it cannot describe its experience as a tomato, for that would be to classify what it sees. It cannot even describe the experience as one of seeing something round and red, for these terms too presuppose some form of classification. Sense-certainty is aware only of what is now present to it; as Hegel puts it, it is the certainty of the ‘this’, or the ‘here’ and ‘now’.” Buddhists are those that, bizarrely, see the process of classifying things (applying judgment, conceptualization to them) as some sort of artificial process that falsifies what is being observed, as opposed to turning it into useful knowledge. The pernicious New Age guru Alan Watts wrote, “What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are ‘coins’ for real things.” Watts is saying that sense-certainty is reality, and anything applied to it is therefore a falsification of reality. Yet sense-certainty is totally devoid of any knowledge, any interpretation, any conceptualization. It f...
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