Houlgate, Stephen. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Layfayette Indiana: Purdue University Press. 2006.
Hegel will not argue that consciousness is simply wrong to think of the world as made up of perceivable things or self-conscious agents or forms of social and historical organization. He will argue that the experience of consciousness shows the world not merely to be determined in these ways. When consciousness realizes this, it ceases to be mere consciousness of a world over against it and becomes the thought of the universal, categorial structure immanent in that world and in thought (148).
Hegel’s analysis continues until consciousness discovers that its understanding of its object does not actually correspond to the stated definition of an object of consciousness at all. An object of consciousness is stated to be something known by, but standing over against, consciousness. Consciousness eventually discovers, however, that it actually understands its object to have one and the same categorial structure as itself and so not simply to stand over against consciousness after all. At that point, consciousness realizes that it is no longer mere consciousness but has become speculative thought, or absolute knowing (150).
This experience is not an historical experience that every individual necessarily makes in his or her own life but the experience that is logically entailed by the structure of ordinary consciousness itself. It is the experience through which ordinary consciousness is taken by its own internal logic from its most primitive shape of sense-certainty through perception, understanding, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion to philosophy or absolute knowing, albeit an experience that concrete historical individuals all too often fail to comprehend (150).
Understanding (Verstand) discovers that the inner character of things is not just force but force governed by law —the same lawfulness that governs understanding itself. Understanding thus finds a dimension of itself in the things it encounters and so becomes self-consciousness (151).
Self-consciousness then discovers that the objects to which it relates are not just law-governed objects in nature but other living, self-conscious beings —self-conscious beings who confirm our own consciousness of ourselves by recognizing us but whose recognition of us we in turn have to recognize. In this way, self-consciousness acquires a sense that an individual’s identity does not belong to that individual alone but is constituted by his or her social interaction with others (151).
The aim of the Phenomenology is to teach ordinary consciousness —and philosophers wedded to the convictions of ordinary consciousness— that being is not simply something objective to which we stand in relation but exhibits one and the same logical form as thought itself and thus can be understood a priori from within thought (146-7).