In this chapter we clarify what Hegel finds to be inadequate about the Understanding and how this inadequacy relates to Force as well as to Hegel’s nuanced notion of Infinity. We then explore ways in which Hegel’s reference to the topsy-turvy world has been understood by various commentators. What makes this task concerning the topsy-turvy world particularly interesting is that although the various commentators provide what they find as compelling explanation for what the topsy-turvy world might be directly referencing, no commentator finds the explanations of former commentators irrelevant or mutually exclusive. This is to say that the various commentaries view their comments as supplementary or additive to an overall manifold explanation of what the topsy-turvy world might be in reference to. Some such explanations include the topsy-turvy world to be understood in reference to Plato and the Allegory of the Cave, the doctrines of Christianity, Kant’s phenomena/Noumena distinction, Descartes’ evil genius, and Tieck’s play Die verkehrte Welt. The topsy-turvy world has also been seen as an indirect critique of coherence epistemologies. After exploring these various interpretations of what the topsy-turvy world might be in direct reference to, we show how many of these explanations serves to provide a critique of coherence epistemologies and of multimodal objects.

Before Hegel addresses the phenomenon of deception, which the perceiver is not immune to, he further clarifies three interrelated aspects of the object, which are perhaps best understood as in a process of relation to each other. This relation within the object is between what it is and what it is not. Not grasping the totality of these processes in the object, is not understood by Hegel as deception, but rather it is understood as an inadequacy of perception as a mode of knowing, in which he will later make clear to the reader that the Understanding has greater potentiality for apprehending the internal process/structure of the object more fully. To clarify, Hegel finds that the internal process/structure of the object of perception involves: (1) The universal medium in which the properties of an object are unified but do not come into conflict with each other; (2) The determinate negativity which does not conflict with the properties but excludes other contradictory properties and in the process provides a unity of the various determinate properties; (3) The multifarious properties that arise from the first two processes/structures interacting with each other (these ideas are provided by Hegel in para. 115). The criticism, therefore, that Hegel makes of perception is that it only allows the perceiver to view this aforementioned third moment of the object—as a thing and its properties—and not the former two essential processes/structures of the object, which is what the object is and which is what makes the multimodal perceptional experience possible.

“Multimodal perception experience” is not a phrase which Hegel himself used—I wish he had, but—instead he offered descriptions such as: “All of these many properties [Hegel is referring to his example of salt] are in a single simple ‘Here’, in which, therefore, they interpenetrate; none has a different Here from the others, but each is everywhere, in the same Here in which the others are. And, at the same time, without being separated by different Here, they do not affect each other in this interpenetration.”21 The perceptional experience that is most used by Hegel, which is multimodal in nature is the object, salt. The subject (perceiver) in these examples of Hegel’s experiences the properties of salt (as Hegel describes it) as “white and also tart, also cubical in shape, of a specific gravity,” etc.22—and yet also unified in a single object which is salt. A few phenomenological features of a multimodal object as it is being perceived by a subject, I can only assume, Hegel found fascinating. He also found it necessary to elucidate these features, so that his readers might apprehend the inadequacies of perception as a way of knowing. The first point of fascination is that the object which is experienced by the subject through various sensory modalities, in reality possesses a unity. This is a unity which he will later describe as the object’s Force. Hegel refers to this unity of an object as “a One” and describes the feature of the thing which holds the differentiation of the various properties of the thing together as the thing’s “thinghood.” In this section the “thinghood” corresponds to the first two aforementioned processes/structures which make the multimodal sensory experience possible, but in the following section, Hegel explains that this feature of a thing which holds these various properties together, in the same perceptual experience, without blending or excluding them is understood as “Force,” i.e., an internal force which the thing possesses (and Hegel’s example of the positive and negative distinctions within the unity of electricity is a helpful illustration for grasping antithetical distinction within overarching unity).

Hegel is also aware of the possibility of deception, and even entitles this section “Perception: Or the Thing and Deception” but he finds that the incorrect experience of the object is to be understood as an error in the subject and not in the object’s thinghood or force. It is worth elaborating on this distinction further, given the attention which contemporary philosophies of the senses have paid to phenomena such as multimodal illusions and synesthesia. With regard to deception, Hegel writes, “If consciousness itself did anything in taking what is given, it would by such adding or subtracting alter the truth. Since the object is the True and universal, the self-identical, while consciousness is alterable and unessential, it can happen that consciousness apprehends the object incorrectly and deceives itself.”23 Multimodal illusions such as the sound-induced flash illusion,24 provide the subject with the false perception that a particular sound carries with it a particular image or shape. Synesthesia, on the other hand, blends two modalities of an object such that an object is experienced as possessing an additional property made available to the perceiver in a modality which would not usually be utilized.

An example should clarify any uncertainty the aforementioned statement may have caused. Let us use the example of an apple instead of salt, because we will utilize the color red for this example as well as the shape of the apple. Let us now suppose that when a synesthete perceives an apple (this particular apple being red and sweet and round—or ap...