New Yorkers will have an opportunity to see a wide range of work by a pioneering generation of artists that reflects the shaping of a new national consciousness.
The history of Nazi Germany still matters intensely to today's Germans, therefore, and the often acrid public debates about the Nazi past that have continued almost unabated since the 1960s have played a real part in the shaping of present-day political and moral consciousness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If language shapes consciousness and consciousness determines what we experience as reality, then to toy with words in nonstandard ways might open heretofore closed doors of perception.
