The “Myth of the Given”: The Hegelian Meditations of Wilfrid Sellars

Abstract

There is a quite outstanding and surprising fact about today's philosophical life in America, namely, the return of Hegelian philosophy to the debates among American philosophers, and even analytic philosophers are taking an active part in that process. Nothing of the kind could be observed at least since the time of the St. Louis and Ohio Hegelians of the nineteenth century. From the beginning of the triumphal march of analytic philosophy through the Anglo-American philosophical world, the philosophy of Hegel seemed to appear to any impartial observer obsolete and abandoned for good.However, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, American authors proclaimed in concert “the revival of Hegelian philosophy” and even “Hegel's Renaissance.”1 The editor of a collection of essays dedicated to the legacy of German idealism, E. Hammer, writes in the preface: Few trends in contemporary philosophy seem stronger and more influential than the resurgence and revival of themes and arguments that owe their origin to thinkers associated with German idealism. Not only has scholarship (particularly in the Anglo-American context) on figures such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel become more sophisticated, prestigious and creative than it has been for a long time, but the innovative uses to which idealist motifs have recently been put have changed the nature of many philosophical debates. Drawing on strong readings and reconceptualizing traditional arguments, philosophers working in fields as different as epistemology, philosophy of language, political theory, ethics and aesthetics have opened new intellectual vistas while reinvigorating others. For central thinkers of our time such as Robert Brandom, Stanley Cavell, Jürgen Habermas, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, and many others, Kant and Hegel are household names whose writings have served as a basis for the development of their own work.2 Such remarks, although they might look somewhat exaggerated, nevertheless reflect the real process occurring in contemporary philosophical thought, which requires consideration.Richard Bernstein, one of the most significant representatives of contemporary American pragmatism, outlines three main factors that, according to him, led gradually to the change in the attitude of American thinkers toward Hegelian philosophy.3 First is a political one—philosophers who were politically active and interested in a “humanistic” Marx in the 1950s and 1960s turned to Hegel as the primary source of Marxist social philosophy. Frederick Beiser also draws our attention to this political factor in his analysis of Hegel scholarship in the United States.4The second circumstance favorable to a Hegel revival is that there was a group of American philosophers who were not satisfied with the limits of analytic philosophy and, while in search of wider horizons, discovered Hegel as a rich source of philosophical material. This group, according to Bernstein, included Charles Taylor, Alisdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, and himself.Alongside Bernstein's analysis we can put the considerations of Richard Rorty, who describes in his writings the “pragmatization” of contemporary analytic philosophy in America, which, among other things, has broadened the cultural and historical horizons of analytic philosophy and involves the Continental tradition, a process hailed and propelled by Rorty himself. The pragmatization of analytic philosophy as represented by Rorty has strongly influenced the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought in America. In Rorty's words, the results of this antireductionist and anti-empiricist polemic “were such that something which seemed much like idealism began to become intellectually respectable.”5 Anjie Gimmler makes an even more accentuated remark and explains the revival in such a way that the ties between Hegel and contemporary American thought begin to look quite solid and historically justified: “Various representatives of neopragmatism refer to Hegel because in Hegel's idealism the central themes of neopragmatism can already be identified as preconfigured, or at least can be traced to their origins.”6 These preliminary remarks make us consider with seriousness the third factor according to Bernstein.The third factor Bernstein mentions is the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Wilfrid Sellars is really the right figure to start the talk about contemporary American Hegelianism. Sellars belongs to that group of thinkers, alongside Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, that played the crucial role in the “pragmatization of analytic philosophy,” accompanied by the severe critique of its basic principles in the form of a critique of its “dogmas.” More than that, if we take the contemporary “Pittsburgh School of Philosophy” (Sellars, Brandom, McDowell)—another name for this group of thinkers is the “Pittsburgh Hegelians”—then we can clearly see that at the root of its origin stands the figure of a professor at Pittsburgh University—Wilfrid Sellars. John McDowell, one of the leading representatives of the Pittsburgh school, is a follower of Sellars. Moreover, Sellars's work obviously influenced Rorty himself and, via Rorty and even directly, the work of another leading thinker of the Pittsburgh school—Robert Brandom. At least these two circumstances lead us to a consideration of Sellars as a key figure in the process of Hegel's revival.Another aspect of Sellars's work should also be mentioned. As many researchers point out, Sellars is renowned for his strong knowledge of the history of philosophy and permanent inclination to use it as a means of handling contemporary issues of philosophy; that side of him distinguishes Sellars among other analytic philosophers who usually pay little attention if at all to past philosophical thought. Also Sellars, unlike many other philosophers from the analytic camp, with all respect to modern science and its authority (“science is the measure of all things”), tries not to isolate science from the rest of human culture. He not only opposes science and other fields of culture, which is a distinguishing feature of analytic philosophy since its birth, but also makes attempts to reconcile the outlooks of both, as can be seen in his article “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” where Sellars not only draws a line between the manifest and the scientific images of humans but expresses the desire to achieve a combined position, synthesizing both images.7And last but not least, it was Sellars who restored the philosophical use of Hegel in the middle of the 1950s and brought his name back to the pages of serious philosophical discussions. As Rorty notes, Sellars was the first leading figure in analytic thought who openly referenced Hegel in his works.8In this respect, Sellars was a salient exception, adds one of his followers today, John McDowell.9 And he was indeed. But because of this we can now firmly put him at the very beginning of the rehabilitation of Hegel (gradual and reserved in many aspects), which has resulted nowadays in that Hegel Renaissance, something a considerable number of commentators proclaim to be the most striking feature of contemporary American thought.In this essay I am going to analyze that part of Sellars's work that contains or, rather, implies the specifically Hegelian material. The analysis will be focused on the most famous of his works—Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956; originally Sellars's lectures delivered at the University of London and published later under the title “The Myth of the Given. Three Lectures on Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”). Sellars himself characterized his work as “incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes.”10It is widely recognized that the most influential part of Sellars's legacy is related to his critique of the “Myth of the Given.” As Sellars points out at the very beginning of his work, the subject matter of the monograph is not just the notion of the given and its critique but, rather, an analysis of the framework rooted in the very body of the Western philosophical tradition from its beginning in antiquity to the present.The notion of the given is closely related to the notion of immediacy. Assuming this, Sellars in his considerations almost equates these terms.Significantly enough, on the very same page where Sellars introduces the notion of immediacy he refers directly to Hegel. It is Hegel's meaning of immediacy that is discussed here, points out Sellars. And we can conclude that in his own approach Sellars leans upon or at least takes into account Hegel's critique of immediacy. Hegel is the “great foe of ‘immediacy’”—that is the way Sellars introduces the German philosopher to the reader.11Even more intriguing and promising appears the author's remark that his work can be viewed as Hegelian meditations.12 However, these are actually the only references to Hegel that we find in Sellars's text. Nowhere else in the book does Sellars give any detailed analysis of Hegel's work or discuss any of Hegel's texts in particular.This obvious fact, however, has not confused or disoriented Sellars scholars, who are unanimous in asserting that the comparison between Hegel and Sellars at this point is more than justified. And even more than that, these researchers point out more precisely that Sellars's critique of the given is developed in parallel with Hegel's critique of consciousness in the first three chapters of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Most probably the first author who drew attention to this aspect of Sellars's work was Richard Bernstein, who in 1971, in his book Praxis and Action, wrote about the three chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology as “perceptive and incisive commentary and critique of a dialectical development in epistemology which has been repeated in contemporary analytic philosophy.”13Bernstein's idea was adopted by Richard Rorty, who makes the direct comparison between the Sellars work and the first chapter of Phenomenology, dedicated to the critique of sinnliche Gewissheit, sense certainty.14 In the contemporary literature on Sellars this proposition can be considered as firmly established. The followers of Sellars and prominent Hegel scholars, such as John McDowell, Robert Brandom, Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin, Tom Rockmore, and Paul Redding, are all in concord about the fact.15Despite this definite indication I have failed to find in the philosophical literature the attempts to compare directly the considerations of Sellars with Hegel's passages in The Phenomenology of Spirit. This will be the task in the present essay.First of all I will try to give an analysis and description of the so-called Myth of the Given or the framework of givenness in Sellars's work. There is no single and embracing account of the Myth of the Given in Sellars's work. The discussions and commentaries are scattered throughout the monograph and give no single clue to its exposition. That is why we have to design our own thread of considerations, which will provide us with the main features of the Myth of the Given, keeping in mind the parallels between Sellars and Hegel.The key notion for Sellars is the notion of immediacy, as we have already seen. Let us take it as our guiding notion too, so much as it is the first point of intercourse between Sellars and Hegel.The framework of givenness is tied predominantly in Sellars to the immediacy of the experience. The Myth of the Given, writes Sellars, implies “the possibility of a direct account of immediate experience.”16 Let us start with the notion of “experience.”It should be remarked first that the notion of experience is originally ambiguous. William James in his own time characterized experience and everything that is connected with it as “double-barrelled” notions.17 The same idea was also used by Dewey in his analysis of experience.18 Indeed, the experience bears the sense of passive suffering, an encounter with some independent instance that turns us to a state of passivity. On the other hand, the experience is what we have, what belongs to us, and what makes us able in some respect. Dewey preferred that last sense of experience. Our act of reflection reveals a picture of consciousness as something originally two-sided when we are trying to give an account of it. In this respect the approach to consciousness presented by the classics of pragmatism exposes the parallel with the phenomenological approach used by Hegel. We can also find this double-barreled description of experience and consciousness in the writings of Hegel: Consciousness is the definite relation of the Ego to an Object. In so far as one regards it from the objective side, it can be said to vary according to the difference of the objects which it has.… At the same time, however, the object is essentially determined (modified) through the mediating relation to Consciousness. Its diversity is, therefore, to be considered as conversely dependent upon the development of Consciousness. Their reciprocity continues through the Phenomenal sphere of Consciousness and leaves the above-mentioned … questions undecided.19 And as we will see, this double-barreled approach is invoked in Sellars's critique of consciousness.When we add “immediate” to the “experience” that does not change the situation of its ambiguity. The immediate experience means that our experience stands in some direct, unmediated relation to the independent instance. At the same time we have experience just because it was given to us by that instance. And because of this, this very experience becomes something independent too. It was given to us, and because of that it is ours. We acquired that experience as the result of our own activity, but at the same time it was given to us in the way of a gift. That last circumstance brings about the experience as something of independent cognitive value, as something not invented by us but acquired.In the second consideration, the immediate character of the experience presupposes the same of the consciousness itself; it also appears as given and immediate, as a given capacity to have the immediate data of experience and to give an immediate account of their presence. The givenness of consciousness reflects the givenness of the data, what is given. The classics of empiricism, says Sellars, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, “take for granted that the human mind has an innate ability to be aware of certain determinate sorts— … simply by virtue of having sensations and images.”20 But it should be noted that in classical empiricism the capacity to have data stands by itself and has nothing in common with the given data, does not mediate their presence, and hence stands in the same immediate relation to them.Thus we have the experience as constituted by two main factors, both of them seem independent of each other, yet in their intercourse the experience is born as something that embraces them both: and here we are at the root of the classical philosophical dilemma of active and passive, of form and content, of the rational capacity to be conscious of, on one side, and the empirical material it has to digest, on the other side. Sellars uses both these features in his characterization of the classical philosophical tradition concerning the Myth of the Given. The capacity itself as well as its material or content are supposed to be in the same measure given or acquired as a gift. The purity and innocence with which we address the sensuous data are reflected in the immediateness and sincerity with which the data address us. Russell, one of the representatives of the classical empirical tradition, gives us in his autobiographical notes a very vivid description of the feelings of a thinker who breaks free from the tenets of Hegelian idealism and as a prodigal son returns to the realistic Eden: “I felt it, in fact, as a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on to a wind-swept headland…. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naïve realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass is really green, in spite of the adverse opinion of all philosophers from Locke onwards. I have not been able to retain this pleasing faith in its pristine vigour, but I have never again shut myself up in a subjective prison.”21First of all, it gives relief because it delivers us from the responsibility (or commitments, as Sellars and after him Brandom would say) for the experience; it appears as given in its content as in its given direct relations to the outer world. We face here the idea of an instance that at the same time belongs to us, to our experience, and yet it exists as an independent instance: it was given to us and yet by someone else who is responsible for that material. That is the idea of “sense-data,” which we find in Russell and many other representatives of classical empiricism. That makes it possible for Sellars to concentrate in his analysis of the given upon the givenness of sense-data in the first place. Of course there is another side of all this connected with the givenness of consciousness and the theme of intellectual intuition, but we have to put it aside for the time being and concentrate as Sellars does on sense-data and their critique.These sense-data are present in our consciousness as special and privileged witnesses. We cannot ignore or doubt them because they witness for themselves and not for another: Their absolutely reliable certainty is granted because they express their own presence; their authority is beyond doubt because we place every authority in the subject matter upon them and consider them as witnesses and as judges at the same time. We act as if under the spell of the irresistible charm of their sincerity and openness and let the sense-data play two roles simultaneously: the role of a witness and the role of a judge in their own case. Our immediate certainty is based on their givenness (to our senses), and their givenness is based on the immediacy of our account of them or our experience. Here we face the ambiguity of experience discussed above and exposed by Hegel, the pragmatists, and now Sellars.The sense-data realize their authority when they claim to be the foundation of our empirical knowledge and at the same time to be independent of any other knowledge. It is posed as granted that sense consciousness deals with its own source—namely, the unsynthesized manifold of sensory intuition, the raw material of our senses—and at the same time is free from intrusion from the side by the activity of understanding or reason, hence independent of notions and concepts.This combined claim forms the very essence of the Myth of the Given. The Myth of the Given, according to Sellars, presupposes the proposition “that empirical knowledge rests on a ‘foundation’ of non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact.”22 The fact of sensuous data being rendered into the fact of possessing empirical knowledge makes the assumption of their independent and given character crucial for the process of constituting our knowledge. It is essential for the Myth of the Given to state that empirical knowledge “stands on its own feet”;23 obviously enough, such feet are sense-data. Or as Sellars puts it in another place, “The authority of Konstatierungen [observational reports] rests on nonverbal episodes of awareness.”24 Besides that, the authority of the sense-data rests on their independence and on their self-sufficiency in respect to the concepts of our mind. This independence from conceptual knowledge is also stressed by Sellars as the distinguishing feature of the Myth of the Given: the “fact is non-inferentially known” and “presupposes no other knowledge.”25 Our sense content does not involve a “process of concept formation.”26Because of this the main target of Sellars's critique will be the independence of our empirical knowledge and the self-reliability of its foundation in sense-data. Sellars draws our attention to the apparent contradiction lying at the bottom of this framework.This traditional account of the foundation of empirical knowledge reveals the inconsistency that lies at the very bottom of it. Sellars writes about the leap that we have to make while moving from the nonverbal and uninferred episodes of consciousness to the verbal performances and observational reports.The Myth of the Given implies three main propositions that work as the mechanism of the myth and maintain its role as the foundation of our empirical knowledge, and as Sellars tries to demonstrate, they cannot be taken as a substantial and consistent theory as a whole but only partially. In each case we can preserve a pair of propositions but not the three of them at once. Some of them have always to be withdrawn to reach consistency. These three propositions are as follows: X senses red sense content s entails x noninferentially knows that s is red. [Let us call it the independence thesis.]The ability to sense sense contents is unacquired. [We can call it the immediacy thesis.]The ability to know facts of the form x is Φ is acquired. [Let us call it the knowledge thesis.]27The three propositions are based on three main notions: the first is the notion of perception and sense-data; the second is the notion of acquiredness/unacquiredness or, which is the same in this context, immediatedness/mediatedness; and the third is the notion of knowledge, meaning conceptual knowledge. The interrelations among these three notions determine the impossibility of their working in accord. Let us look at them more closely with Sellars.We can sacrifice the independence thesis, discard the idea of some independent empirical knowledge, and then combine the remaining two in the way classical metaphysical rationalism did in Leibniz and Wolff. We will treat the sensuous data as just something vague and confused, something in need of conceptual activity to turn into knowledge—the beginning of knowledge necessarily, the point zero of it, but never knowledge as it is and should be, namely, rational activity in concepts by our reason. As a second option, we can give up the knowledge thesis, and then we will have something in the way of classical empiricism, always reducing our rational, conceptual activity to the level of sensuous data. And in the last option, we can sacrifice the immediacy thesis. In that case the notion of mediatedness or acquiredness will serve as a mediating term, connecting our empirical activity with the level of conceptual knowledge. Obviously here the Myth of the Given poses itself as the main obstacle. And therefore thesis B, the immediacy thesis, is the main target of Sellars's critique.Before we proceed, we can note that Sellars's attitudes toward these three propositions are essentially different. His main critical target is of course the thesis of immediacy. As to the material of our senses as independent source, as stated in the independence thesis, Sellars's attitude is more moderate. We do not have to get rid of them or demolish them but only reformulate them in order to free them from the authority of the Myth of the Given. As Sellars stresses in another place: “This story will amount to a sense-datum theory only in a sense which robs this phrase of an entire dimension of its traditional epistemological force.”28As for thesis C, the knowledge thesis, Sellars seems to be most assured about it and apparently apt to use it as the basis for his own approach to the problem. Naturally enough, having in mind to undermine the Myth of the Given lying at the foundation of metaphysical tradition, Sellars needs to achieve some other platform from which to develop his critical attack. What Sellars says later in the text about knowledge reveals that point of departure or his own position in the theory of knowledge.The most often quoted excerpt from the Sellars monograph is really important and is worth not only quoting but a commentary as well. Here it is: “The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.”29This is really one of the most important phrases in Sellars's work because it expresses the standpoint of Sellars himself. Let us note that here Sellars not only distances himself from the traditional approach to empirical knowledge or the framework of givenness but clearly distances himself from the empirical approach as a particular position in the theory of knowledge, in epistemology. He stresses here that even if our knowledge can be empirical, that fact does not mean that this knowledge itself is given to us empirically or that the empirical knowledge is an empirical fact itself in our theory of knowledge. Hence empirical knowledge cannot be viewed as self-sufficient on the fact that it is empirical or on the fact of its presence in our mind. Here Sellars draws a distinction between the empirical content of knowledge and the form of it, which is not necessary empirical and does not have to be empirical. Accordingly, only after making that “epistemic,” as Sellars puts it, statement can we ask a question: In what measure is our empirical knowledge justified, and what is the source and basis of its justification? Here it becomes obvious that Sellars discards the empirical approach in epistemology and makes a step in the opposite direction, in the direction of transcendental idealism or German idealism in general. In order to demonstrate this let us compare Sellars's thesis with Kant's discussion from The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant writes as follows: “For internal experience in general and its possibility, or perception in general, and its relation to other perceptions, unless some particular distinction or determination thereof is empirically given, cannot be regarded as empirical cognition, but as cognition of the empirical, and belongs to the investigation of the possibility of every experience, which is certainly transcendental.”30 The two thinkers meet each other in their mutual approach to the problem of empirical knowledge, which distinguishes between the “empirical description” or “empirical cognition” in Kant and the “cognition of empirical,” which ushers us into the transcendental position in epistemology.This is clearly a Kantianism in Sellars but not, as we will see, the final step by Sellars. As Sellars himself puts it somewhere, where Kant is, Hegel is not far. And Richard Bernstein advises us to look deeper into Sellars's work and discover Hegelian themes in it.31 This Kantianism is only a transitory position in Sellars's thought because his own “psychological nominalism” leads us from transcendental standpoint to a wider position that bases itself upon the linguistic approach to consciousness. It allows Sellars to show consciousness out from its inner individual and subjective area and in the open intersubjective area of language activity. At that point he leaves Kant with his individualistic, transcendental reason for the open space of reasons. As in Hegel we meet with the sociality of reason embodied in language as the Dasein of the Geist, so likewise in Sellars's statement: “All awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities—indeed, all awareness even of particulars—is a linguistic affair.”32 And commentaries on Sellars orientate us too in the Hegelian direction. Brandom writes in his commentary on Sellars's work: “Sellars is proposing a linguistic, social theory of awareness…. in the sense of sapience, not of sentience,” of “conceptual awareness.”33 Rorty again is even more positive in his statement: Sellars offers “us a linguistified version of Hegel, one in which changes in vocabulary and in inferential relationships between sentences constitute the growth of Spirit's self-consciousness.”34 And now we can turn to the comparison between the considerations by Sellars and those by the author of The Phenomenology of Spirit.Sellars begins his analysis of sensuous cognition with an invitation to consider it through three situations as follows: (a)Seeing that x, over there, is red(b)Its looking to one that x, over there, is red(c)Its looking to one as though there were a red object over there.35 Obviously enough these three situations differ from each other in one serious aspect. They all endorse the fact of empirical cognition described in (a) in different measure. The first phrase gives it the full support. The second one, (b), is in doubt about whether there is really a red object. The third one, (c), begins to doubt about whether there is any object at all. Nevertheless, as Sellars points out, all three of them possess the same propositional content, namely, the fact of seeing something red, whatever else it may be.36 What makes a difference among them is the measure of endorsement. Taking all three together we can look at them as the process of self-testing on the side of sensuous consciousness. And here we discover the first parallel with Hegel's analysis of sense certainty in The Phenomenology of Spirit.Hegel begins his critique of sensuous consciousness too with the process of its self-testing in response to the questioning from the phenomenologist. This process of self-testing in Hegel takes the same steps as in Sellars. First, the sensuous consciousness is absolutely sure about its seeing the red object, then it begins to doubt its quality of redness, and then it doubts its being an object, a thing at all. That is how Hegel depicts this process in Phenomenology of Spirit: “It is clear that the dialectic of sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history of its movement or of its experience, and sense-certainty itself is nothing else but just this history. That is why the natural consciousness, too, is always reaching this result, learning from experience what is true in it; but equally it is always forgetting it and starting the movement all over again.”37 We or the sensuous consciousness in company with the phenomenologist start with the reflection on redness (in Sellars's [b], or whiteness in Hegel): At first, then, I become aware of the Thing as a One, and have to hold fast to it in this its true character; if, in the course of perceiving it, something turns up which contradicts it, this is to be recognized as a reflection of mine. Now, there also occur in the perception various properties which seem to be properties of the Thing; but the Thing is a One, and we are conscious that this diversity by which it would cease to be a One falls in us. So in point of fact, the Thing is white only to our eyes, also tart to our tongue, also cubical to our touch, and so on.38After that the reflection goes on, and the consciousness accepts its (some object) being a thing as its (consciousness) own “illusion of perception,” as Hegel calls it, and leaves its previous position. As a result the sensuous thing disappears in Hegel as well as in Sellars's (c)—“Thus the singular being of sense does indeed vanish in the dialectical movement of immediate certainty.”39 But after that the sensuous consciousness can return again to its previous position and claim its truth again. It jumps and flickers, changing one point for another, always ready to sacrifice one of its points just in order to put forward another one instead—“If we look back on what consciousness previously took, and now takes, responsibility for, on what it previously ascribed, and now ascribes, to the Thing, we see that consciousness alternately makes itself, as well as the Thing, into both a pure many-less One, and into an Also that resolves itself into independent ‘matters,’” writes Hegel.40 And this is the main feature of the sensuous consciousness while it is in a process of self-testing according to Hegel: This, course, a perpetual alternation of determining what is true, and then setting aside this determining, constitutes, strictly speaking, the steady everyday life and activity of perceptual consciousness, a consciousness which fancies itself to be moving in the realm of truth. It advances uninterruptedly to the outcome in which all these essential essentialities or determinations are equally set aside; but in each single moment it is conscious only of this one determinateness as the truth, and then in turn of the opposite one. It does indeed suspect their unessentiality, and to save them from the danger threatening them it resorts to the sophistry of asserting to be true what it has itself just declared to be untrue.41Let us turn to Sellars again. In his three theses, (a), (b), and (c), just as in Hegel, the sensuous consciousness is allowed to proceed with its course of self-testing, self-reflection. And the result of it is the same in Hegel and in Sellars. The sensuous consciousness easily changes its mind, while at the same time it is always ready to assert any of its previous truths with the same self-certainty. And here we can discover with Hegel and with Sellars that the sensuous consciousness is not taking seriously at all this process of self-testing but, rather, tends to play with its truths, veiling at the same time and hiding from us its deeper undoubtable truth. That is why Hegel concludes that we should not follow the sensuous consciousness, with its play of truths, but have to overcome it at large and proceed to another form of consciousness that arises at the horizon of perception—to the rational capacity of understanding. We have to defy not just the partial truths of sensuous consciousness but sensuous consciousness as a form in total.Sellars comes to the same conclusion when he asserts, almost in the way of a paradox, “that it is implied by my account that not only the propositional content, but also the descriptive content of these three experiences may be identical.”42 This means that all three theses rotate around one and the same truth of sensuous consciousness, which remains stable, always defending itself with one part of it but never exposing its truth in whole so as not to allow us to criticize it profoundly. Therefore it is not enough to let sensuous consciousness test itself. Only when we take in suspension the whole truth of sensuous consciousness will we be able to put it to serious questioning. Only when we treat the three theses irrespectively of their endorsement as containing one general truth, only then will we discover the core of the Myth of the Given lying at their foundation.Just like Hegel at the end of his chapter on sense certainty,43 Sellars turns to the language argument and seeks a linguistic platform for his position on epistemology. His “psychological nominalism” allows him to move from “looks” and “impressions” and “immediate experiences” and their endorsement to episodes of consciousness as they are taken neutrally or irrespectively of their foundation in the Myth of the Given.At this point there are two ways to treat these neutral episodes, says Sellars. One is to deal with them as theoretical entities. Another one is to treat them as containing impressions and immediate experiences as their components; this last one is the way of the Myth of the Given.44 That means that at this point we are only in the middle of the road with our critique of the Myth of the Given. In order to crush the myth we have to create another myth, proclaims Sellars in an almost Nietzschean manner. From this state of suspension and balance when we face the two alternatives, it is quite clear we have to break the balance and give our preference not to the “Myth of the Given” but to the “Myth of Jones.” But that is another large part of Sellars's work.