George Walford – Hegel on the Familiar

What we are “familiar-with” is not intelligently known, just for the reason that it is “familiar.” When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on God, nature, understanding, sensibility etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something significant, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these Secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.

– G.W.F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie. Vol I p.29)

from Ideological Commentary 8, November 1980.