THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

5.8) No Discrete Plurality Given Prior to Judgment: Summary of the Defense
Hegel’s account of attention highlights the various complex cognitive activities
implicitly involved in even the most basic forms of awareness. 209 It demonstrates that we
cannot draw a sharp distinction between perception as process of passive reception and
judgment as a process in which we actively engage. In the most explicit judgments, we
are consciously aware of engaging in an activity. However, the activities of judgment
also occur at more implicit levels, where they occur without our awareness that we are
engaging in any activity. This shows that we are not conscious or aware of any discrete
plurality prior to the act of judgment.
Hegel’s account of attention also shows that we cannot even conceive the mind’s
first approach to some pre-judgmental and preconscious strata as the application of
judgment to a discrete plurality. Insofar as it makes sense to speak of reconstructing the
preconscious level where the first acts of judgment occur, we must conceive the first
cognitive act as the division of an undifferentiated unity. Since we can’t conceive an
undifferentiated unity, we can’t truly cognize the first act of division as it is in itself.
Instead, we cognize the first division in relation to a more highly articulated conception
of the unity it divides. In other words, our inability to cognize undifferentiated unity
forces us to misconstrue the first act of analysis as an act that abstracts from an already
209 One might argue that there are still more basic forms of awareness that Hegel has not addressed
– loud bangs, flashes of light, etc. One might insist that basic awareness of such things does not involve the
kind of conceptual activity that Hegel attributes to acts of attention. We don’t focus our attention on these
things, but rather they force themselves upon us. This is tricky issue, though two lines of response remain
open to Hegel. First, he might argue that our awareness of such momentary events is parasitic on the more
robust kinds of awareness he describes in his account of attention. An awareness of such momentary
events depends upon our ability to distinguish them from what came before and what came after. This, in
turn, requires a sense of the structure of time, which in turn requires a sense of persistent objects in space.
Even if this line of argument proves unhelpful, Hegel might also suggest that such fleeting experiences are
not the sort of thing that could ground knowledge (or judgments), and thus it is irrelevant for our discussion
of the basis of judgment.
214