"If the fear of falling into error sets up a
mistrust of science, which in the absence
of such scruples gets on with the work itself
and actually cognizes something, it is hard
to see why we should not turn around
and mistrust this very mistrust.
Should we not be concerned as to whether
this fear of error is not just the error itself?"
Well, if you look at those two sentences
of the Introduction, the ones I didn't read,
you'll see that what they both suggest is a
fear of error. That the problem of knowledge
arises because you have a fear or
an anxiety that you may be erroneous.
And it's that fear itself that generates
the moment of reflective stepping back
that we think of as epistemology.
And the moment of stepping back that
we think of as epistemology then is
the cause of subject-object dualism.
And once you've got subject-object dualism --
that is, once you reflectively placed the object
outside your ken, you ain't gonna get it back.
Does this structure look familiar to anyone?
It's the structure of jealousy.
It's: "How do I know she's being faithful?"
"I don't trust her".
That's it! It's over!
From that moment on, nothing she can do will
be trustworthy because you already decided that
you don't know if she is trustworthy. Right?
So you can lock her in a room and you can
imprison her, and even her fantasies are
going to be disloyal; nothing will work.
So epistemology is a form of
madden jealousy of a certain kind
or the anxiety of the jealous lover.
The fear of error is the error.
You have to see that that's a deep thought
and not a shallow thought.
Because you have to see how that fear or
anxiety can then generate a series of responses.
And that once those responses get going, they
deepen the separation until there's no way back.
And that's part of the story that
Hegel means to be telling here.
And he thinks that, as will come out in a
second, that part of the reason why modern
philosophers could do this and not notice
the kind of trap they were in, is because
they had the view--wholly unjustified--that
the mind was better known than the world,
that you can have non-inferential self-knowledge
of your own mental states, and that therefore,
part of the new individualism, that you could be
in possession of a kind of certainty about yourself
even if you knew nothing about the world.
Now, if you think hard, just
for, say, oh 17 or 18 seconds:
Imagine someone who is absolutely
certain about their own inner states,
but uncertain about the world.
Think about what you're imagining.
This is what we'd usually 
think of as a psychotic break.
But I mean that seriously!
And I want you to think about what it means
to think that we have a whole structure of
philosophy that's premised on that idea:
That the inner is safe and knowable
but everything outside is mad.
And of course, the one person who knew that
something was off with this structure was Hume
in that famous passage where he says,
I am a monster to myself, I think myself mad,
and then has to go play billiards!
But it's a haunting and terrible moment because
he cannot find why there should be this connection
between what he takes to be austere and
rational skepticism, and his monstrosity;
the sense of madness.
He cannot diagnose why he has to literally
put his best certainty about himself out of mind
in order to enter the world.
You have to leave behind your self-certainty
in order to play billiards.
