I definitely wasn’t aiming for anything Cartesian in this gloss – my terminology may be a bit weird in these latest posts, as my head is more than halfway in Capital, and so I’m writing these, in part, to work out connections betweeen the two texts – to figure out what Marx is taking from Hegel (and therefore agreeing with and carrying over into his own work), and what he’s spoofing in Hegel (and therefore trying to “criticise”. These are of course somewhat overlapping, as Marx shares with Hegel the concept that you “criticise” something, not in order to toss it out, but in order to establish the conditions of its possibility and therefore render it rationally available. In any event, I’m speaking on a tangent here – I’m not overtly writing on this, and don’t expect readers to get this out of what I’m writing – just explaining why some of what I’m writing may sound a bit odd, in terms of what it emphasises or how it’s phrased.

The issue of error in Hegel – and in Marx – is weird. I was wincing a bit when writing both this and the subsequent post, as I wasn’t spending any time on the issue that there are no “mere” errors – what’s being described isn’t understood as a “mistake” in any conventional sense – this would strike Hegel, I think, as an “abstract negation”. Instead, he positions perception, understanding, etc., as sort of plausible approximations, aiming toward an endpoint that is more adequate, and from the standpoint of which they can be judged as partial – but not exactly as errors. So I think that term, and the similar terms I use in these posts, are right to make you a bit uneasy. I’ve written on this issue in other places, of course, but I don’t carry it through here explicitly.

So, yes, your formulation is good – Hegel would probably say it risks implying something more psychologistic than what he has in mind: in other words, he’d probably worry that both of us are using terms that carry risks of Cartesian misinterpretations. But your formulation has advantages over the ones I used in this post.

Thanks for the link! Naturally, I was hoping that the terrific images (particularly the eerie film-within-a-film of Dorothy watching the bicyclist, which comes closest to Hegel’s logic) would deliver people to the content.

I would put the matter only slightly differently, and I wonder if you agree. It’s not so much that consciousness recovers from the error of thinking certain things are outside of it — though that is true — towards the attainment of a closed, internal self-certainty (e.g. the Cartesian model of the knowable, reflexive “formal reality” of thought). Rather, thought discovers itself as something that unfolds through alienation, that comes to know itself through the immanent production of itself as other, as object.