The Sense-certainty section is designed to get the whole dialectic engine started on the right track from the very beginning, to avoid the dogmatic assumptions of the modern veil-of-perception skeptic. If we may be permitted to stretch the analogy further, the dialectical forerunner of Pyrrhonist skepticism can be seen, even in this early stage, to make up an important part of the “engine” itself: the explosive combustion of fuel, which in itself is a typically destructive force, can be harnessed within a set of cylinders and orchestrated to drive two offset series of pistons, with a resulting mechanical oscillation that can be translated into forward motion.
The ‘negation’, in Hegelian dialectics, is the force analogous to explosive combustion, and the Pyrrhonist’s equipollence method as something like a single volley in a simple two-cylinder engine, a one-two, left-right, a pow-pow pair of explosions that results in one complete revolution of the axle. The Pyrrhonist himself is wholly occupied with the rotational motion, and only concerned that the axle should return to its initial state so that the whole process should be ultimately neutral. From a higher perch, for example to Hegel, each such rotation brings consciousness closer to its last stop at AbsolutesWissenBahnhof, provided of course that the equipollence engine has been properly constructed, and that the tracks upon which it runs have been properly laid down.
