This research investigates the dynamics between knowledge and truth in the three initial chapters Sense certainty, Perception, and Force and understanding, which make up the first part of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In each of these chapters, Hegel develops a formation of consciousness, taking into account the form that consciousness assumes in the dialectical relationship to its object and, also, bearing in mind the different modalities of knowledge and their internal tensions that make possible the transition to next formation. We started this research with an analysis of Cartesian philosophy, since the certainty of the cogito is considered a milestone for modern philosophy in the relationship between subjective knowledge and its first evidence. We will see that, in Descartes, intellectual representations precede sensible ones and the idea of God consists of a certainty that is linked to the exterior by what Hegel takes, in his critical reading of this philosopher, as a representation of the universal. As a transition to Hegelian philosophy, we intend to approach the different conceptions of certainties in some specific philosophers, now in a more comparative perspective that deals with the divisions and identity between the subject and the object in the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Our investigation starts from the hypothesis that certainty is the element in which the knowledge of consciousness and truth coincide and that the formation of understanding is the stage of dynamics from which Hegel seeks to give his own destination for questions related to the interaction between sensitive determinations and thought determinations in the course of consciousness – important questions in the definition of the relations between knowledge and truth that precede the emergence of what Hegel names as Notion.
Palavras-chave: Hegel, dialectic, consciousness, understanding