I. The literature: Two definitions of Immanent CritiqueFootnote ¹

Commentators have long recognized that, if Hegel did not invent the philosophical approach now named Immanent Critique, he nevertheless theorized, practised and even epitomized something of the sort.Footnote ² It seems to me, however, that a basic confusion still surrounds the very idea of Immanent Critique. And this confusion is reflected in the fact that two divergent definitions of this critical method pervade the extensive literature on Hegel, Western Marxism and modern philosophy more generally.Footnote ³ Yet this distinction has not been examined or even noticed, to my knowledge, until now.

More concretely, a review of the literature suggests that criticism—whether philosophical, social or more broadly cultural—may be ‘immanent’ in two distinct respects: when it (1) measures an object against norms, criteria or potentialities that (somehow) ‘belong’ to that object; and when it (2) self-reflexively recognizes an object as (somehow) continuous with its own standpoint, or as that standpoint’s condition of possibility. Both ideals of Immanent Critique are operative in the intellectual tradition that begins with Kant and continues through Hegel to Marx and beyond, and both are singled out—albeit for different reasons—as the radical red thread running through that tradition.

Yet in recent writings on this topic, it is not only possible but commonplace to cite one of these definitions without referring, even tangentially, to the other. In ‘Rethinking Ideology’, for example, Rahel Jaeggi suggests that critique is ‘immanent’ when it ‘takes norms that are inherent to an existing (social) situation as its starting point’ (Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi2009: 75). Similarly, in a recent article by James Gordon Finlayson, ‘Hegel, Adorno, and the Origins of Immanent Critique’, we find a gloss that unambiguously represents only the first definition: ‘What makes a criticism immanent is that the standard of criticism belongs to or inheres in (in a suitably specified sense) the object of criticism’ (Finlayson Reference Finlayson2014: 1144–45). For these authors, the critic simply judges the object (of whatever kind) against standards that inhere in the object—that are ‘immanent’ to it.Footnote ⁴

By contrast, in ‘Ideology Critique from Hegel and Marx to Critical Theory’, Karen Ng alludes to the second, and conspicuously not the first, definition:

Likewise, in ‘Hegel’s Conception of Immanent Critique’, Karin de Boer writes revealingly as follows:

On the basis of these passages, it is clear that Ng and de Boer each associate Immanent Critique in the first instance with a self-reflexive turn. Accordingly, one can say that Kant’s critical program was immanent inasmuch as it mounted a critique of reason by means of reason. In much the same way, it is sometimes argued that Marx sharpened political economy into an analysis of capitalism that can account for its own (material, social and historical) conditions of possibility within capitalism.Footnote ⁶ In their own ways, then, Kantianism and Marxism both attempt methodologically to reflect on themselves, viz. the conditions of their own emergence, operation, applicability and the like. In other words, their standpoints are located or positioned ‘immanently’ within the object of analysis.

Apropos of this last example, finally, Moishe Postone’s influential rereading of Marx’s mature writings, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, contains a striking passage that embraces both definitions of Immanent Critique at once:

We immediately note that this passage leaves the relation between the two types of Immanent Critique obscure. Indeed, on the evidence, for Postone these modes of critique have a merely accidental connection—as though they shared nothing substantial apart from the adjective ‘immanent’.Footnote ⁷

Now, I have dwelt on this preliminary analytic question because Hegel’s 1807 Phänomenologie des Geistes arguably pursues an analysis that is ‘immanent’ in both senses. On the one hand, the object of criticism in this text is in each case measured according to a standard ‘belonging’ to it. On the other hand, Hegel’s reader—the so-called philosophical WeFootnote ⁸—must continuously maintain an idiosyncratic version of ‘reflexive’ circumspection. Most importantly, however, one of the PhG’s unrecognized accomplishments is to exhibit the internal relation between these two principles of Immanent Critique.Footnote ⁹ In other words, Hegel shows his reader that (1) judging an object according to its own norms is a precondition of (2) establishing a properly ‘reflexive’ relation between oneself and this object. This is the major claim I will defend in this article.

II. Hegel’s Phenomenology in overview

Before restricting our focus to the uses of Immanent Critique in the PhG, and in order to better contextualize the specific object of our discussion, let me say something more general about Hegel’s text as a whole. Perhaps the least controversial way of characterizing the PhG is to say that it chronicles the self-transformative development of a reality called Geist (usually translated ‘spirit’). Somewhat more contentiously, we can roughly understand Geist as an ‘idealized human consciousness’, one that Hegel examines—both at individual and collective levels—as it advances through a number of theoretical and practical standpoints called ‘shapes’ (Gestalten).Footnote ¹⁰

Now, for our present purposes, the PhG is remarkable above all for rationally thematizing, criticizing, and subverting these diverse shapes of ‘natural consciousness’ (das natürliche Bewußtsein).Footnote ¹¹ Of course, the exact meaning of this expression has itself attracted considerable attention from commentators.Footnote ¹² For the moment, it is perhaps enough to say that a shape of natural consciousness is something like a fundamental character-type or human attitude that will be familiar to us from human history, our wider culture and everyday life.Footnote ¹³ Further, and crucially, in the PhG every such shape masquerades as the ‘correct’ way of relating to and hence—in a quite expanded sense—‘knowing’ the world of things and persons.Footnote ¹⁴ These attitudes are called natural, on the other hand, because they are unreflective and spontaneous dispositions that always seem to come ‘naturally’, as it were.

Throughout the PhG, then, Hegel’s basic procedure is to fix upon a determinate attitude that will be recognizable to the reader on the basis of certain characterological traits.Footnote ¹⁵ A Stoic consciousness, a Virtuous consciousness, an Enlightened consciousness—these are only a few of the ‘characters’ that emerge in the course of Hegel’s exposition. Yet whether a given shape expresses a basically scientific, literary, romantic, labouring, political or religious orientation—or something else altogether—it will admit of ‘conceptual’ reconstruction in the PhG.Footnote ¹⁶ And once reconstructed in this way, again, the shape in question can be rationally examined, critiqued and finally undermined.Footnote ¹⁷

Keeping this general overview in mind, then, we can now return to our central question and ask: in what respect(s), exactly, is the PhG’s methodological approach to these diverse attitudes an ‘immanent’ one? How, more specifically, does this Hegelian approach evince the two divergent ideals of Immanent Critique?

III. Immanent Critique in the Introduction: definition 1

To see how Immanent Critique is first implicated in the PhG, we need only look to its ‘Introduction’ (Einleitung), particularly §§81–89. For here Hegel explicitly commends to the philosopher-reader—the ‘We’—a posture of ‘pure onlooking’ (das reine Zusehen) (PhG: §85) vis-à-vis the many shapes of natural consciousness. This posture, Hegel famously suggests, enables us to judge every shape solely according to its own internal ‘criterion’ (Maßstab).Footnote ¹⁸ To understand better the significance of this demand, however, it will help to briefly recount Hegel’s context-specific motivations.

Why, then, should Hegel feel compelled to introduce this figure of an internal criterion at all? Most commentators accept that in the PhG, Hegel attempts to demonstrate inter alia that all standpoints rivalling his own—all the deep, principled, broadly ‘cognitive’ attitudes human beings can take towards the world—are somehow mistaken or at least ‘partial’.Footnote ¹⁹ But an obvious problem confronts this project immediately: why should any competing position accept Hegel’s standpoint or ‘criterion’ of truth, when the position under review is defined precisely by a separate and irreconcilable criterion of its own?Footnote ²⁰

With most everyday disputes, we will observe, this ‘dilemma of the criterion’ does not arise.Footnote ²¹ For example: were two parties to disagree about the height of a desk, or the physical characteristics of a recollected person, or the year of a historical event, or even the legality of a contract, the dispute could be easily and conclusively resolved with a mutually endorsed, procedural criterion. In all likelihood, the quarrelling parties would simply agree to hold up a tape measure to the desk; or find an old photograph of the recollected person; or consult an encyclopaedia with a reputation for accuracy; or confer with a trusted lawyer.

Yet things are notoriously different in the PhG. For in this text, Hegel is self-consciously preoccupied with incommensurable standpoints that—in very important respects—do not share basic criteria. In the absence of shared criteria, though, there is no obvious way to adjudicate disputes. What will happen, for example, when two individuals attempt to determine between them what sort of behaviour is admissible, if they differ about the proper criterion of right behaviour generally? To contemplate some pertinent examples drawn directly from Hegel’s text: what if my criterion of sound conduct is whatever happens to deliver pleasure, and yours is whatever harmonizes with your conscience?

This sort of dilemma leads to a deadlock in which I can seemingly only assess the ‘truth’ or ‘rationality’ or ‘goodness’ of another perspective according to my standards, which someone with an opposing perspective may simply refuse to acknowledge. In this kind of scenario, that is, ‘the criterion would lie within us, and that which was supposed to be compared with the criterion … would not necessarily have to recognize the validity of that criterion’ (PhG: §83). For this reason, Hegel continuously suggests that transcendent or ‘external’ criticism is both rhetorically unpersuasive and philosophically unwarranted. That is, judgements on the basis of unacknowledged criteria are uniquely powerless to shake or transform the fundamental beliefs or conduct of an interlocutor: ‘one bare assurance is worth just as much as another’ (§76). A given ‘shape’ will simply refuse to be perturbed by any standard—any ‘bare assurance’—it does not already recognize.

Yet faced with this difficulty, Hegel does not renounce criticism, but claims rather to pursue it immanently—in this case, per the first definition we stipulated above. The following quotations contain the rudiments of his vision for an analysis that overcomes the dilemma of the criterion. He writes, first, that, ‘Consciousness … provides its own criterion [Maßstab], and the investigation will thereby be a comparison of itself with itself’ (PhG: §84), clarifying: ‘in what consciousness declares … to be the true, we have the standard which consciousness itself erects to measure its knowledge’ (§84). Hegel insists, in fact, that the comparison is strictly speaking an activity of consciousness, where the latter ‘examines its own self [sich selbst prüft]’ (§85). For this reason, ‘we do not have to bring standards with us and apply our bright ideas and thoughts during the investigation … [Hence] we succeed in regarding what is at stake as it is in and for itself’ (§84).Footnote ²²

At this point we might have (at least) two questions. First: what exactly could Hegel have in mind with the supposition that each shape of natural consciousness supplies its own ‘criterion’—one that obviates the need to import ‘our bright ideas and thoughts during the investigation’? And second: what might it mean to say that each shape ‘examines itself’ on the basis of that self-avowed criterion? In what follows I will develop a ‘revisionist’ account that addresses these two questions in a simplified way. Ideally, this account will be both comprehensible in its own right and faithful to Hegel’s procedure as it actually unfolds in the body of the text. I hasten to add, however, that my interpretation will deviate at times from the details of Hegel’s own wording in the Introduction.Footnote ²³

IV. On the self-examination of consciousness

Readers of the PhG soon discover that Hegel has various ways of characterizing the ‘self-examination’ of natural consciousness. In my view, though, the characterization most faithful to the PhG’s actual procedure is a recurring formula to the effect that some particular ‘Certainty’ must be tested in order to determine its ‘Truth’.Footnote ²⁴

What Hegel generally means by these ‘technical’ terms can be parsed as follows: every human attitude profiled in the PhG—every shape of natural consciousness—is defined by a specific self-conception, that is, a way of conceiving and valuing itself.Footnote ²⁵ In Hegel’s own words, ‘consciousness is for itself its concept’ (PhG: §80), or is ‘consciousness of itself’ (§85). For example, we will readily appreciate that a ‘master’ defines and esteems himself in a certain way, which can be distinguished from the self-conceptions of an ascetic, a scientist, a hedonist, or a political revolutionary. And Hegel attempts to show his reader how, exactly, each of these character-types, familiar to us both from history and everyday life, idealizes some particular value or ‘concept’: say, ‘independence’, or ‘freedom’, or ‘pleasure’, or the ‘heart’s law’. More to the point, for our present purposes, each of these attitudes possesses a kind of Certainty, or a spontaneous confidence in its own highest value—its ‘essence’, or ‘in-itself’, or ‘truth’, or ‘criterion’.

Yet this initial description is only half the story. We must immediately add, in fact, that every self-conception also implies a corresponding concept of, and mode of relating to, one’s world.Footnote ²⁶ On this Hegelian view, to (1) ascribe a concept to oneself (in the relevant sense) is at the same time to (2) commit to a specific range of behaviour that embodies or expresses that concept. For instance, to value myself as a master—to credibly enjoy a masterly self-conception—is precisely to organize my life practically, in the widest sense, around the ground-norm of ‘independence’. This amendment is important: to be coherent and compelling, a given self-conception must be sincerely lived out. My natural confidence in the tenability of a particular self-conception—my Certainty—can only be validated for me by a practice that (in a way that will vary from case to case) reflects or concretizes that conception.Footnote ²⁷ And this resulting concretization, finally, is what Hegel calls the criterial ‘Truth’ of my ‘Certainty’.

Now, in the PhG, famously, this circumstance is exactly what opens up the possibility of an inversion and disjunction. In fact, with the possible exception of the last shape in Hegel’s book—the endlessly contested standpoint of ‘Absolute Knowing’—every concretization of a determinate concept effectively contradicts that same concept. In practically enacting the professed value of ‘independence’, for example, the master unavoidably incurs forms of dependence that are strictly discordant with its self-conception.Footnote ²⁸ Or again: a life-project patterned on the value of ‘pleasure’ (PhG: §§360–66) founders on the very necessity it summons into reality.

But this means that the ultimate Truth of every Certainty is, as far as natural consciousness can see, its forfeiture. From the perspective of consciousness, in Hegel’s words, ‘the realization of the concept’ (PhG: §78)—on my reading, the materialization via conduct of a particular, ‘natural’ self-conception—‘will count to an even greater degree as the loss of itself’ (§78).Footnote ²⁹

V. On self-examination as Immanent Critique

The immediately preceding discussion should allow us to answer the questions we posed above, and so specify how, exactly, the PhG’s method meets the first definition of Immanent Critique. Our questions, we will recall, were (1) what could it mean to say that natural consciousness provides its own criterion? and (2) how shall we understand the possibility of a ‘self-examination’ on this basis? We can now respond in the following way. Every shape is marked by a self-conception organized around some ultimate value or concept: a Certainty. And this value must be ‘tested’ against the immanent ‘success-criterion’ of a corresponding conduct that practically realizes that value: its Truth.

Hence in the PhG, Immanent Critique (under its first definition) can be adumbrated in these terms: the philosopher-reader observes how each shape of natural consciousness measures its own foundational value against the ‘criterion’ of whichever behaviour-pattern best enacts that value. For we have claimed that every such value, for Hegel, is tied to a quite specific comportment that non-arbitrarily concretizes it. This behaviour is both entailed by, and uniquely suited to vouching for, the value in question. And yet this behaviour is both demanded by, and somehow devastating to, this same value.Footnote ³⁰

VI. Immanent Critique in the Introduction: definition 2

As we have now seen, the figure of Immanent Critique under its first definition can be decisively traced to the Introduction. Our reinterpretation of ‘self-examination’ in the PhG has evoked the generic image of an attitude whose defining ‘concept’ can be measured against a criterial conduct that follows necessarily from—hence is immanent to—that same attitude. And we have intimated that every attempt by natural consciousness practically to realize its deepest value ultimately involves, in Hegel’s words, that value’s contradictory ‘inversion [Umkehrung]’.Footnote ³¹ We will return to this last characteristic of self-examination shortly.

I have also claimed, however, that a version of the second definition of Immanent Critique can be located in the PhG: a criticism that ‘accounts for itself’ vis-à-vis the object criticized, or is properly ‘self-reflexive’ in its operations. Yet this second definition of Immanent Critique is itself somewhat ambiguous and I would like now to distinguish between two interpretive possibilities. In other words, there are two ways in which criticism may broadly demonstrate the putative virtue of self-reflexivity:

1. 1. I may discover or recognize that my standpoint (pre-eminently my norms of judgement) does not ‘transcend’ the object of criticism (paradigmatically my society). On the contrary, I must contend with the fact that this object has constituted my standpoint.Footnote ³²

2. 2. During a critical analysis, I refuse to ‘exempt’ my standpoint from contestation and transformation. My own norms of judgement are exposed to revision in the course of the examination.Footnote ³³

These two types of self-reflexivity—two distinct ways of accounting for one’s own standpoint—are related. But the difference, though subtle, is meaningful: in the first case, (1) I observe that my viewpoint is entangled in the nature of the object; in the second case, (2) I methodically expose my viewpoint to the possibility of alteration in light of the object.

Both modes of maintaining theoretical self-reflexivity are represented in the PhG. To verify their presence and grasp their significance, we may look once again to the Introduction for clues. We are not the first to do so. In Metacritique (1980), Garbis Kortian traces the ancestry of twentieth-century critical theory to not merely the PhG but specifically its Introduction. Yet he does not so much as allude to the trope of ‘internal criteria’ in his reconstruction of Hegel’s methodological standpoint. On the contrary, Kortian remains fixated upon precisely those gestures that imply Hegel’s so-called ‘metacritical’ turn, or ‘what critique becomes when it is made radical’ (1980: 29). Whereas traditional epistemology ‘does not reflect on its relation to the object criticized’, Hegel’s text is exactly one in which ‘critique itself’ will be ‘subjected to critique and share the fate of the object criticized’. In other words, Kortian grounds the Frankfurt School project in just that principle that makes the PhG’s analysis ‘immanent’ according to the second definition.Footnote ³⁴

Exactly which passages from the Introduction Kortian has in mind is difficult to determine, however, since he is largely content to summarize Hegel’s metacritique of Kant’s critical doctrine without quoting directly from the text. For our present purposes, moreover, Hegel’s broadside against Kantian epistemology is less directly illuminating than several other passages in the Introduction that recommend ‘self-reflexivity’ in a more straightforward way. Two groupings of comments, corresponding to both principles of self-reflexivity, are particularly relevant here. We will discuss, first, those remarks that pertain to the We’s imputed capacity for observing ‘determinate negation’ (bestimmte Negation). And second, we will examine the aim of dissolving so-called ‘natural notions’ (natürlichen Vorstellungen). In this way, I will argue, we can begin to establish the exact meaning for Hegel of the second version of Immanent Critique.

VII. Self-reflexivity (1): Learning that one’s ‘concept’ has emerged

For considerations of space, I will not attempt to expound, much less defend, Hegel’s conception of determinate negation—very roughly, his conviction that a particular item (a concept, an attitude, a social order, etc.) is only adequately grasped as the ‘result’ of another item’s dissolution: its inversion.Footnote ³⁵ Yet I must briefly refer to this conception at this point. For on my account, the philosophical We’s attainment of the ‘self-reflexive’ standpoint (in the first sense) is for Hegel premised on its grasp of determinate negation. In short, only by viewing the various shapes of natural consciousness under their genetic aspect is the We ultimately able to ‘account for’ itself. In Hegel’s words, by deliberately tracking the ‘pure emergence [reines Entstehen]’ (PhG: §87) of an attitude’s organizing value from the collapse of another one, the philosophical reader will gradually come to an understanding of her own basic ‘concept(s)’.

Just this insight, Hegel tells us, is proscribed to natural consciousness, which is in principle unable to view values—least of all its own—in this light. On the contrary, as we have already suggested, it is characteristic of natural consciousness that its own deepest value comes spontaneously or naturally—as a kind of given.Footnote ³⁶ So significant for Hegel is this alleged impairment of natural consciousness (relative to the We) that he alludes to it twice in the Introduction. To form a better idea of what self-reflexivity involves in this context, then, let us consider each statement in turn.

First, Hegel contrasts the PhG’s developmental account—the continuous spiritual saga observed by the reader—with the marked failure of natural consciousness to conceive this process at all:

What is notable in this (admittedly difficult) quotation is Hegel’s insistence that, as a rule, natural consciousness is defined by an abstractly ‘negative’ scepticism. In other words, it does not believe that any ‘determinate’ or ‘positive’ result can follow from the breakdown of a standpoint.Footnote ³⁷ This thought already implies that to conceive determinate negation is at once to transcend natural consciousness, or to assume the standpoint of the We. But this implication is confirmed and developed in a second passage, where the same contrast is once more drawn:

What the philosophical observer sees, again, is what natural consciousness is constitutively unable to see: namely, that and how each constitutive value or ‘object’ has emerged.Footnote ³⁸ Hence, in sum, if any single characteristic distinguishes the We from a given shape of natural consciousness, it is this ability to view each fundamental concept genealogically, or as the product of another concept’s self-inverting ‘negation’.

But this entails, finally: whichever concept(s) or value(s) Hegel’s reader happens here and now to affirm will also—at some stage—be viewed under its genetic aspect, or as the ‘result’ of the portrayed ‘detailed history of the cultural development of consciousness’ (PhG: §78). As we will underscore in the next section, Hegel supposes that his reader is devoted to one or more of the ‘natural notions’ (§78) (natürlichen Vorstellungen) embodied by the many shapes of natural consciousness. That is, Hegel anticipates a reader who shares with natural consciousness one or more of the values that must be ‘examined’ in the course of experience.Footnote ³⁹ For just this reason, at a certain point in the text—probably several—this reader will witness the ‘emergence’ of the value or values that constitutes her own self. In this way, Hegel’s reader will self-reflexively account for her own, ‘modern’ standpoint with reference to her object, namely, Geist and its history.Footnote ⁴⁰ The We, in Hegel’s language, eventually discovers that it has effectively deduced its own spiritual structures—its nominal ‘inorganic nature’ (§28)Footnote ⁴¹—with reference to its cultural prehistory.Footnote ⁴²

VIII. Self-reflexivity (2): Shaking one’s ‘natural’ certainties

Let us now turn to the second plank of the We’s properly self-reflexive attitude. As we distinguished it above, this is the demand, not only to (1) observe that and how the We’s values have emerged—so accounting for its standpoint vis-à-vis the observed object—but also to (2) test those values, and so answer for that standpoint. In other words, it is one thing to document ‘for us’ the growth of that ‘inorganic nature’ which we ourselves are. It is quite another to take the measure of ourselves, our own deepest convictions, at the same time.

Now as we’ve seen, the Introduction itself singles out and problematizes the presuppositions of Kant’s critical project. Indeed, the very first sentence identifies the pervasive ‘natural notion’ (natürliche Vorstellung) (PhG: §73) that cognition is a faculty that can be inventoried, understood and validated independently of its use and object.Footnote ⁴³ In this way, Hegel imputes to the Kantian standpoint—hence the PhG’s likely reader in 1807—a tissue of presuppositions demanding attention and examination. In other words, the nominally ‘critical’ standpoint is insufficiently critical, as it ‘presupposes that there is something (namely, a great deal) which is the truth, and it supports its scruples and its deductions on some other basis which is itself in need of examination as to whether it is the truth’ (§74). For this reason, as we have already claimed, one basic premise of the PhG’s presentation is a reader beset by certain natürlichen Vorstellungen—her own concepts or values—that must be tested together with natural consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁴

This means that, in addition to practising the austere models of Immanent Critique that Hegel commends in the Introduction, the empirical reader is ex hypothesi committed to a definite set of presuppositions. This circumstance underpins the widely remarked paradox of the philosophical We. After all, on the evidence, a reader sincerely ensconced in one of the PhG’s many false attitudes (up to and including the Kantian one) would be unable to entertain the We’s standpoint, except in the condescending way of someone who knows better—let alone take seriously any of the claims of natural consciousness. Every reader has his or her own, dogmatic values. But in fact, the spectatorial form of the PhG is explicitly conceived as an ‘educative’ response to exactly this paradox:

This passage confirms our thesis that the reader (the ‘Consciousness, which … gets down to such an examination’) and not only his or her object (viz. natural consciousness), is afflicted with untested presuppositions. But these comments also illuminate a deeper significance of the danger of ‘external’ criticism. Earlier we noted that Immanent Critique (under the first definition) is introduced as a contrivance that circumvents the dilemma of the criterion. ‘Even if an interlocutor fails or refuses to recognize our standard’, Hegel appears to suggest, ‘we may nonetheless show him that he fails to meet his own’. As a result of this ‘innovation’, the reader is told, ‘we do not need to import criteria, or to make use of our own bright ideas [unsere Einfälle und Gedanken]’ (PhG: §84).

Yet the passage above indicates a quite different motivation for this same self-restraint. I suspend my own values during the analysis, not only because any given shape of natural consciousness may disregard my standpoint, hence undercut my rhetorical authority. On the contrary, these very ‘bright ideas’ are natürlichen Vorstellungen with which I, the reader, am ‘still filled out and burdened’ (PhG: §78). In other words, Hegel entices the reader into suspending her bright ideas on a kind of pretext: that in so doing, she will be better positioned to address and criticize the values of her opponent.Footnote ⁴⁵ In fact, this suspension clears the way for her own education—provided, that is, she distances herself from her deepest values long enough to observe them as ingredients in some self-subverting shape in the parade of ‘untrue knowing [unwahre Wissen]’ (§76).Footnote ⁴⁶

My suggestion is that this, finally, is exactly how Hegel urges the We into the second version of self-reflexivity. Not only are the reader’s own values depicted as products of failed self-examinations. These values are also assuredly at stake, wherever they are observed as ‘natural’ components of some reconstructed attitude or another. In other words, the reader ‘accounts’ for her standpoint precisely by seeing it represented as a shape of natural consciousness that examines and inverts itself.

Let us now briefly summarize our reflections on Immanent Critique under its second definition. We have suggested that achieving ‘self-reflexively’ is itself a complex act. For we may perceive, on the one hand, that our own values are drawn from the object; and, on the other, that these same values are corrigible in light of the object. In the PhG, however, this takes the form of (1) acknowledging that and how our present values have sprung from the collapse of earlier ones; and (2) accepting that these same values are dogmatic presuppositions that must be de-familiarized, examined and—as the case may be—inverted.Footnote ⁴⁷