Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
not that something foreign enters in, but that the mind’s own essence
becomes actualized, or it comes to the knowledge of this last. What has
not yet learned is the soul, the consciousness represented as natural
being. What causes the mind to turn to science is the semblance, and
the confusion caused through it, of the essential nature of mind being
something different, or the negative of itself—a mode of manifestation
which contradicts its real nature, for it has or is the inward
certainty of being all reality. In that it abrogates this semblance
of other-being, it comprehends the objective, _i.e._ gives itself
immediately in it the consciousness of itself, and thus attains to
science. Ideas of individual, temporal, transitory things undoubtedly
come from without, but not the universal thoughts which, as the true,
have their root in the mind and belong to its nature; by this means all
authority is destroyed.
In one sense recollection [Erinnerung] is certainly an unfortunate
expression, in the sense, namely, that an idea is reproduced which
has already existed at another time. But recollection has another
sense, which is given by its etymology, namely that of making oneself
inward, going inward, and this is the profound meaning of the word in
thought. In this sense it may undoubtedly be said that knowledge of
the universal is nothing but a recollection, a going within self, and
that we make that which at first shows itself in external form and
determined as a manifold, into an inward, a universal, because we go
into ourselves and thus bring what is inward in us into consciousness.
With Plato, however, as we cannot deny, the word recollection has
constantly the first and empirical sense. This comes from the fact
that Plato propounds the true Notion that consciousness in itself
is the content of knowledge, partly in the form of popular idea and
in that of myths. Hence here even, the already mentioned (p. 18)
intermingling of idea and Notion commences. In the Meno (p. 82-86
Steph.; p. 350-360 Bekk.) Socrates tries to show, by experiment on a
slave who had received no instruction, that learning is a recollection.
Socrates merely questions him, leaving him to answer in his own way,
without either teaching him or asserting the truth of any fact, and
at length brings him to the enunciation of a geometrical proposition
on the relation which the diagonal of a square bears to its side. The
slave obtains the knowledge out of himself alone, so that it appears as
though he only recollected what he already knew but had forgotten. Now
if Plato here calls this coming forth of knowledge from consciousness a
recollection, it follows that this knowledge has been already in this
consciousness, _i.e._ that the individual consciousness has not only
the content of knowledge implicitly, in accordance with its essential
nature, but has also possessed it as this individual consciousness and
not as universal. But this moment of individuality belongs only to the