Is knowledge gained through our conscious understanding of things comprehensive?

Are there objects outside the reach of consciousness and can we ever find a way to understand them?

German philosopher Hegel puts forward a comprehensive account of the science of structures of consciousness in his well renowned Phenomenology of Spirit.

Imagine sitting on a bench in a park. What is the richest knowledge your consciousness holds in the current scenario?

Whatever the answer is, it must preserve every detail of the scenario. Each leaf of trees, each blade of grass must be in it. Nothing is omitted in this richness of knowledge. As mediation omits some details, this is unmediated or immediate knowledge we have of our surroundings.

This according to Hegel is called sense-certainty and it proves itself to be the poorest knowledge after all.

But first, how does consciousness expresses this knowledge?

It’s simple! By using the words ‘this’, ‘now’, ‘here’ or using space and time coordinates.

The answer is not so simple because the ‘this’ can mean anything. It changes depending on where you look.

Say, let us assume that you have an immediate knowledge of the computer screen you are looking at. It seems to be the richest knowledge your conscious mind can have at the present. Consciousness can present this knowledge to itself as ‘this’ so that no detail about it is lost. But the moment you look at your keyboard, the ‘this’ no longer mean what it initially held. Thus, the richest knowledge your conscious mind claimed to have in its immediate sense is not the richest after all.

Similarly with ‘now’ and ‘here’,they do not preserve the particularities of the knowledge you want to gain. They are nothing but universals which may mean anything. They are the empty boxes in which things are put but not the things themselves.

This is the beginning phase of consciousness. It faltered in its conception of knowledge and develops itself into the next stage called Perception allowing mediation.

In Phenomenology of spirit, Hegel takes us to the journey of consciousness which through contradictions and experience in its initial stages, finally reach a stage where knowledge it gains encompasses every phenomenon of human experience i.e. self, religion, social relations etc.!