Hegel showed that epistemological immediacy is an illusory and insufficient starting point for thought.

Evidence

In his first book, Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel right away introduces immediacy as a prevalent error that any rigorous philosophy taking up a critical relation to its own conditions of possibility must preempt. Charting this error, he argues that thinking happens via a first phase of “sense certainty,” in which fundamental objects present themselves to the mind through the senses and the mind enjoys certainty that it knows the objects. Sense certainty is epistemological immediacy: simple data present themselves to perception as a “this-now,” the senses input them, and consciousness immediately integrates the data into concepts of the objects. For Hegel, this immediacy is both insufficient and illusory. Thought worthy of its name reflects upon its apparent immediacy, its apparent seamless extrapolation from phenomenal senses, and the apparent givenness of phenomena. Through this reflection, thought registers its actual mediacy, “the complex process of mediation” by which the apparently given is constructed and the apparent passive reception of the given is active. The mind works with processing tools that are socially and linguistically determined—such as the categories of space and time that underwrite any recognition of “this-now.” Adequate thought must fathom these processes and determinations, focusing on the primacy of relationality—of, in short, mediation. It therefore negates the putative coherence of experience, since neither the subject who experiences nor the object available to experience are self-identical. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘sense certainty’ and ‘immediacy’ as Hegelian errors that mediation-critique corrects.