ABSTRACT
‘Knowledge’ is sometimes described in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as if it were a philistine. It does not always know what it is doing, or what its experience is, and when it feels threatened or estranged, it may recoil in defensive embarrassment. Early in the book, Hegel describes what he says is ‘usually the first reaction on the part of knowledge to something unfamiliar’:
it [knowledge] resists it [the unfamiliar thing] in order to save its own freedom and its own insight, its own authority, from the alien authority (for this is the guise in which what is newly encountered first appears), and to get rid of the appearance that something has been learned and of the sort of shame this is supposed to involve. 1
