This lopsidedness, which necessarily fails to express life in its "entire fullness"[10] (ST, p. 54), results in the instability of each particular shape of consciousness.
In the case of Perception, the emergent new shape of consciousness, the Understanding, explored in Chapter 3, is a shape identified with the type of scientific cognition that, rather than remaining on the level of the perceived object, posits underlying forces involved in the production of the perceptual episode.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel undertook a genuinely novel approach to the problem of knowledge, tracing the immanent movement of the "shapes of consciousness"—the different historical conceptions of knowledge from "sense certainty" through "perception," "force," "consciousness," "self-consciousness," "reason," "spirit," and finally "absolute knowing".
In this sense, we are witnessing within another mode, the type of progression seen in the movement in Phenomenology from shapes of consciousness to shapes of spirit.
A glance at the table of contents of Science of Logic reveals the same triadic structuring among the categories or thought determinations discussed that has been noted among the shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology.
As such, its structure has been compared to that of a Bildungsroman (educational novel), having an abstractly conceived protagonist the bearer of an evolving series of so-called shapes of consciousness or the inhabitant of a series of successive phenomenal worlds whose progress and set-backs the reader follows and learns from.
Or at least this is how the work sets out: in the later sections the earlier series of shapes of consciousness becomes replaced with what seem more like configurations of human social life, and the work comes to look more like an account of interlinked forms of social existence and thought within which participants in such forms of social life conceive of themselves and the world.
However useful, the large range of interventions proposed on an international level (WHO 2004, 2007, 2008, 2010) must also account for culture (Holdsworth et al. 2007), i.e. 'the shaping of consciousness around food and physical activity' (Lang and Rayner 2007) and the readiness of a population to accept policy initiatives.
The object is an aspect or shape of the consciousness itself.
We don't know him, but he gives us a key to imagine the shape of his consciousness -- the parts that were numbed, the parts that cannot engage the world out of fear of unpredictability and unreliability.
It is in this way that the Phenomenology can change course, the earlier tracking of shapes of individual consciousness and self-consciousness effectively coming to be replaced by the tracking of distinct patterns of mutual recognition between subjects—shapes of spirit that forms the ground for the existence of those individual consciousnesses/self-consciousnesses.
