Preface

The complete transformation which philosophical thinking has undergone among us over the last twenty-five years or so, the higher standpoint that the self-consciousness of spirit has attained over itself in this period, has so far had little influence on the shape of logic.

What bore the name of metaphysics before this period has been eradicated, so to speak, stem and stump, and has dropped out of the roster of the sciences. In what quarter do the tones of the erstwhile ontology, of rational psychology, of cosmology, or indeed of the erstwhile natural theology, still get leave, or still have leave, to make themselves audible? Investigations into the soul's immateriality, for instance, or into mechanical causes and final ones: what interest could they still be expected to arouse? the remaining proofs of the existence of God, too, are adduced only historically, or for the purposes of edification and the elevation of the heart. It is a fact that interest has been lost partly in the content, partly in the form of the former metaphysics, partly in both at once. Remarkable as it is when a people finds, say, the science of its own constitutional law, when it finds its convictions, its ethical habits and virtues, become useless to it, at least as remarkable is it when a people loses its metaphysics, when the spirit that occupies itself with its own pure essence has no actual existence in that people any more.

The exoteric doctrine of the Kantian philosophy, — that the understanding may not fly beyond experience, since otherwise the faculty of cognition becomes theoretical reason, which of itself gives birth to nothing but chimeras, has justified from the side of science the renunciation of speculative thinking. This popular doctrine was met halfway by the clamor of modern pedagogy, by the distress of the times which fixes its gaze on immediate need, the clamor, namely, that just as for cognition experience is what comes first, so for competence in public and in private life theoretical insight is even harmful, while practice and practical training generally are the essential thing, the only thing that furthers us. — Since science and common human understanding thus worked into each other's hands to bring about the downfall of metaphysics, there seemed to be staged the odd spectacle of a cultivated people without metaphysics; — like a temple otherwise adorned in every variety but without a holy of holies. — Theology, which in earlier times was the keeper of the speculative mysteries and of a metaphysics that was, to be sure, dependent upon it, had surrendered it in exchange for feelings, for what is practically popular, and for learned history. Corresponding to which change is the fact that elsewhere those solitaries, who were sacrificed by their people and set apart from the world so that the contemplation of the eternal, and life serving it alone, should be present, not for the sake of any use but for the sake of the blessing, — disappeared; a disappearance which, in another connection, may be regarded as essentially the same phenomenon as the one just mentioned. — So that, once these darknesses had been driven off, the colourless occupation of the inwardly turned spirit with itself, existence seemed to have been transformed into the cheerful world of flowers, among which, as everyone knows, there is no black one.

Things have not gone quite so badly for logic as for metaphysics. That through it one learns to think, which formerly counted as its use and thereby as its purpose, — as though one first had to learn to digest and to move about through the study of anatomy and physiology —, this prejudice has long since faded away, and the spirit of practicality no doubt intended no better a fate for it. Notwithstanding this, and probably for the sake of some formal usefulness, logic was still left a rank among the sciences, indeed it was even retained as a subject of public instruction. This better lot, however, concerns only its outer fortune; for its shape and content have remained the same as they were handed down through a long tradition, though in that transmission they had been thinned out and starved more and more; the new spirit that has dawned upon science no less than upon actuality has not yet made itself felt in logic. But it is once and for all in vain, when the substantial form of spirit has reshaped itself, to want to keep the forms of an earlier culture; they are withered leaves, pushed off by the new buds that are already being generated at their roots.

The ignoring of the general change is by now, in the scientific sphere too, beginning to run out. Unnoticed, even the opponents have grown familiar with the other ways of representing things and made them their own, and though they persist in acting coy toward their source and their principles and conduct themselves contradictorily toward them, they have had to put up with the consequences all the same and have not been able to fend off their influence; for their ever more insignificant negative stance they know no other way of gaining a positive importance and a content than by joining in the talk of the new ways of representing things.

From the other side, the time of ferment with which a new creation begins seems to be over. In its first appearance such a creation is apt to behave with fanatical hostility toward the far-flung systematizing of the earlier principle; apt in part also to be fearful, losing itself in the extension of the particular, and in part to shy away from the labor that scientific elaboration requires and, in the need for it, to reach first for an empty formalism. What is demanded now, with so much the more urgency, is that the material be worked up and elaborated. An age, no less than an individual, passes through a phase of formation in which everything turns chiefly on acquiring the principle and holding fast to it in its still undeveloped intensity. What is required at the higher level, however, is that the principle should turn into science.

Whatever may already have been done in other respects for the substance and for the form of science, logical science, which makes up metaphysics proper or pure speculative philosophy, has hitherto still found itself greatly neglected. What I understand more precisely by this science and by its standpoint I have indicated provisionally in the Introduction. Equitable judges will, I hope, take into account that this science had once again to be begun over from scratch, that the subject matter is of the kind it is, and that no preliminary studies lay ready that might have been drawn upon, even though the labor of many years was unable to lend this attempt any higher degree of completeness. — Seen from the vantage point that is essential, what is at stake throughout is a new concept of scientific treatment. Given that philosophy is to be science, it cannot, as I have recalled in another place, take over for this purpose a method on loan from some science ranked beneath it, mathematics for example; just as little may it settle for categorical assurances of an inner intuition, or avail itself of ratiocination proceeding from grounds supplied by external reflection. Rather, it can only be the nature of the content which in scientific cognition moves itself, since at the same time it is this own reflection of the content which first posits and generates its determination itself.

The understanding determines and holds its determinations fast; reason is negative and dialectical, because it resolves the understanding's determinations into nothing; it is positive, because it generates the universal and subsumes the particular under it. Just as the understanding is taken as something separate from reason in general, so too dialectical reason is apt to be taken as something separate from positive reason. But in its truth reason is spirit, which is higher than both, the reason that understands, or the understanding that reasons. It is the negative, that which makes up the quality both of dialectical reason and of the understanding; — it negates the simple, and so posits the determinate difference of the understanding, and it just as much dissolves that difference, and so is dialectical. It does not, however, hold to the nothing of this result, but is therein just as much positive, and has thereby restored the first simple, but as a universal; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal, rather in that determining and in the dissolution of it the particular has already determined itself along with it. This movement of spirit, which in its very simplicity confers determinateness upon itself and, within that determinateness, confers upon itself its own self-sameness, and which accordingly constitutes the immanent unfolding of the concept, is cognition's absolute method and at once the soul immanent in the content itself. — Only on this self-constructing path, I maintain, is philosophy capable of being objective, demonstrated science. — In this manner I have attempted to present consciousness, in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Consciousness is spirit as a concrete object; but its onward movement rests solely, like the development of all natural and spiritual life, on the nature of the pure essentialities that make up the content of logic. Consciousness, as spirit in its appearing, which on its way frees itself from its immediacy and its concretion, becomes pure knowledge, which has those pure essentialities themselves, as they are in and for themselves, as its object. They are the pure thoughts, spirit thinking its own essence. Their self-movement is their spiritual life, and it is that through which science constitutes itself and of which science is the exposition.

The reference of the science that I call the Phenomenology of Spirit to logic is herewith indicated. — As regards the external relation, the first part of the System of Science (Bamberg and Würzburg, at Göbhard's, 1807.), the part that contains the phenomenology, was designated to have a second part follow it, one that was to contain the logic together with philosophy's two real sciences, that of nature and that of spirit, and that would have brought the system of science to its close. But the necessary extent that the logic had to acquire in its own right has led me to let it come out on its own; within an expanded plan it therefore makes up the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Later I shall let the elaboration of philosophy's two real sciences just named follow. — This first volume of the logic, however, contains as its first book the doctrine of being; the second book, the doctrine of essence, as the second section of the first volume, is already in the press; the second volume, on the other hand, will contain the subjective logic, or the doctrine of the concept.

Nuremberg, 22 March 1812.

Introduction

In no science is the need felt more strongly to begin from the subject matter itself, without any preceding reflections, than in the science of logic. In every other science the object it treats and the scientific method are distinguished from each other; and its content, too, does not make an absolute beginning but depends on other concepts and hangs together on all sides with other material. These sciences are therefore granted leave to speak of their ground and its connections, and likewise of method, in lemmatic fashion, to apply without further ado the forms of definition and the like that are presupposed as known and accepted, and to make use of the ordinary manner of argumentation in fixing their general concepts and fundamental determinations.

Logic, by contrast, cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection, or rules and laws of thinking, for they constitute a part of its content and first have to be grounded within it. The concept itself of science as such, and not merely of scientific method, belongs to its content, and indeed constitutes its final result; what it is, therefore, it cannot say in advance, but rather its entire treatise brings forth this knowledge of itself only as its last word and as its completion. Likewise its object, thinking or more precisely conceptual thinking, is essentially dealt with within it; the concept of thinking generates itself in the course of it, and therefore cannot be sent on ahead. What is sent on ahead in this introduction, then, is not meant to establish the concept of logic or to vindicate beforehand and scientifically its content and its method; the intent is rather, by way of a few clarifications and reflections offered in a ratiocinative and historical mode, to bring nearer to representation that vantage point out of which this science has to be viewed.

To accept logic as the science of thinking in general carries with it the understanding that such thinking amounts to the mere form of a cognition, that logic leaves all content out of account, that the so-called second constituent belonging to a cognition, the matter, has to be supplied from some other quarter, and hence that logic, a science from which this matter is utterly independent, can do no more than state the formal conditions of true cognition, while real truth itself it neither contains nor even furnishes the road to, since the very thing that makes truth truth, namely the content, falls outside it.

To begin with, there is already something inept in the claim that logic leaves every content aside, that its teaching covers only the rules of thinking, incapable of going into what gets thought or of heeding how the latter is constituted. For thinking, along with the rules of thinking, is precisely what is meant to be its object, and in that object logic already possesses, without mediation, a content all its own; there too it possesses that second constituent of cognition, a matter whose constitution is very much its concern.

But secondly, the representations on which the concept of logic has rested up to now have in part already perished, and in part it is time that they should vanish altogether, that the standpoint of this science should be grasped at a higher level, and that it should gain a completely altered shape.

Ordinary consciousness takes for granted, once and for all, a separation between the content of cognition and its form, between truth and certainty, and it is on this separation that logic's concept has rested until now. It is presupposed, first, that the material of cognition is present in and for itself as a finished world outside thinking, that thinking for itself is empty, that it comes to that matter externally as a form, fills itself with it, only thereby gains a content and becomes a real cognizing.

These two components then stand toward each other, — (for they are supposed to have the relation of components, and cognition is compounded out of them mechanically or at most chemically —) in the following order of rank: that the object is something complete and finished for itself, something that can entirely dispense with thinking for its actuality, whereas thinking is something deficient which has first to complete itself on some material and, as a pliable indeterminate form, has to make itself adequate to its matter. Truth is the agreement of thinking with the object, and in order to bring this agreement about, — for it is not present in and for itself, — thinking is supposed to yield and accommodate itself to the object.

Third, inasmuch as the diversity of matter and form, of object and thinking, is not left in that misty indeterminacy but is taken more determinately, each is a sphere severed from the other. In its receiving and forming of the material, therefore, thinking does not get beyond itself; its receiving and its accommodating itself to the material remain a modification of itself, and it does not thereby become its own other; moreover, self-conscious determining belongs to it alone in any case; and so, even in its reference to the object, it does not come out of itself over to the object, which remains a thing in itself, simply a beyond of thinking.

What such opinions about how subject and object stand to one another put into words are the determinations of that relation which make up the nature of our everyday consciousness, consciousness as it appears; yet once these preconceptions are transferred to reason, as though the very same relation held good there, as though that relation possessed truth in and for itself, they turn into the errors whose refutation, carried through every region of the spiritual and the natural universe, is philosophy itself, or rather, since they block the doorway into philosophy, errors to be discarded before one enters.

In this respect the older metaphysics had a higher concept of thinking than has become current in more recent times. For it laid down as its basis that what is cognized through thinking of and in things is alone what is genuinely true in them; hence not things in their immediacy, but things first raised into the form of thinking, as things thought. On this metaphysics' reckoning, then, neither thinking nor the determinations of thinking stand foreign to objects; they are rather what those objects essentially are, so that things and the thinking of them, — (as our language, too, expresses a kinship between them, —) tally in and for themselves, thinking in its immanent determinations and the genuine nature of things making up one and the same content.

But once plain common sense had taken possession of philosophy, it pressed its own view: that truth rests upon sensuous reality, that thoughts are merely thoughts, in the sense that substance and reality accrue to them only from sensuous perception, and that reason, so long as it stays in and for itself, brings forth nothing but figments of the brain. In this renunciation by reason of itself the concept of truth has been lost; reason has restricted itself to cognizing only subjective truth, only appearance, only something to which the nature of the subject matter itself does not correspond; knowledge has sunk back into opinion.

But this turn which cognition has taken, and which appears as a loss and a step backwards, has at its basis something deeper, on which the elevation of reason into the higher spirit of modern philosophy rests altogether. For the ground of that representation, now become general, is to be sought in the insight into how the determinations of the understanding necessarily conflict with themselves. — Reflection goes beyond the concrete immediate, and separates it by determining it. But it must just as much go beyond these its separating determinations, and in the first instance relate them. At the standpoint of this relating their conflict comes to the fore. This relating of reflection belongs to reason; the elevation above those determinations, which arrives at the insight into their conflict, is the great negative step toward the true concept of reason. But insight not carried through falls into the misunderstanding that it is reason which lands in contradiction with itself; it fails to recognize that the contradiction is precisely the raising of reason above the limitations of the understanding and the dissolving of them. Instead of taking the last step upward from here, cognition has fled back from the unsatisfactoriness of the determinations of the understanding to sensuous actuality, supposing that in it it has what is firm and self-consistent. But since on the other side this cognition knows itself as cognition only of what appears, its unsatisfactoriness is conceded, yet at the same time it is presupposed that although things in themselves are not correctly cognized, still within the sphere of appearance there is correct cognizing; as though it were, as it were, only the kind of cognized objects that differed, and indeed as though the one kind, namely things in themselves, did not fall within cognition, while the other kind, namely appearances, did. It is as if correct insight were attributed to a man, with the addition that he is nevertheless capable of having insight into nothing true, but only into what is untrue. As preposterous as the latter would be, so preposterous is a true cognition that would not cognize its object such as it is in itself.

The result adduced above from the critique of the forms of the understanding was that these forms have no application to things in themselves. — This can mean nothing else than that these forms are in their own selves something untrue. Yet inasmuch as they are allowed to go on holding good for subjective reason and for experience, the critique has effected no change in them themselves, but leaves them for the subject in the same shape in which they otherwise held good for the object. Should they not suffice for the thing in itself, then the understanding they are said to belong to has all the less reason to tolerate them or make do with them. Determinations of the thing in itself they cannot be; determinations of the understanding they can be still less, given that the understanding ought at any rate to be granted the dignity of a thing in itself. The determinations of the finite and the infinite stand in the same conflict, be it that they are applied to time and space, to the world, or that they are determinations within spirit; just as black and white give a grey whether they are brought together on a wall or while still on the palette; if our representation of the world dissolves once the determinations of the infinite and the finite are transferred onto it, then spirit itself, which contains them both within it, is all the more something contradicting itself, something dissolving itself. — It is not the constitution of the material or of the object, to which they would be applied or in which they would be found, that can make a difference; for the object has the contradiction in it only through and according to those determinations.

That critique has therefore only removed the forms of objective thinking from the thing, but left them in the subject just as it found them. For in doing so it did not consider these forms in and for themselves, according to their own peculiar content, but simply took them over lemmatically from subjective logic; so that there was no question of a derivation of them in their own selves, or of a derivation of the subjective-logical forms, still less of a dialectical consideration of them.

Transcendental idealism, carried through more consistently, recognized the nullity of the spectre of the thing-in-itself still left over by the critical philosophy, that abstract shadow cut off from all content, and had the purpose of destroying it completely. This philosophy also made the beginning of letting reason exhibit its determinations out of itself. But the subjective posture of this attempt did not let it come to completion. Furthermore, along with this posture that beginning toward the development of pure science was abandoned as well.

What is commonly comprehended under logic, however, is considered entirely without regard to metaphysical significance. This science, in the condition in which it still finds itself, has of course no content of the sort that counts as reality and as a genuine subject matter in ordinary consciousness. But it is not for this reason a formal science, lacking truth rich in content. In that material which is missed in it, and to whose lack its unsatisfactoriness is usually ascribed, the domain of truth is in any case not to be sought. Rather, the emptiness of the logical forms lies solely in the manner of considering and treating them. For inasmuch as they fall apart as fixed determinations and are not held together in organic unity, they are dead forms, and do not have dwelling within them the spirit that would constitute the living concrete unity. But with that they lack solid content, a matter that would be substance in its own self. For the content that is missed in the logical forms is nothing other than a firm foundation and concretion of the abstract determinations; and such a substantial essence is customarily sought on the outside. But reason itself is the substantial or the real, which holds all abstract determinations together within itself and is their solid, absolutely concrete unity. One need not, then, go hunting far afield for whatever tends to get called a matter; should logic be devoid of substance, the blame lies not with logic's object but purely with the way that object is grasped.

This vantage point leads me nearer to the view according to which I hold that logic is to be considered, in what respect that view differs from the manner in which this science has been treated hitherto, and to the sole genuine standpoint on which logic is henceforth to be placed for good.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit (Bamberg and Würzburg 1807) I presented consciousness in its forward movement from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object up to absolute knowledge. Every form assumed by the relation of consciousness to the object lies along this road, and what issues from it is the concept of science. This concept therefore requires no justification here (apart from the fact that it emerges within logic itself), because it has received one there; and it is capable of no other justification than just this bringing forth of it by consciousness, for which all its shapes dissolve into this concept as into their truth. — A ratiocinative grounding or clarification of the concept of science can at the very most achieve this much, that the concept be set before representation and a historical familiarity with it be brought about; but a definition of science, or more narrowly of logic, has its proof nowhere but in that necessity with which it comes forth. A definition with which some science makes an absolute beginning can contain nothing other than the determinate, correct expression of what, by general admission and acknowledgment, one represents to oneself as the object and purpose of the science. That one represents precisely this to oneself under it is a historical assurance, in regard to which one can only appeal to this or that recognized view, or, properly speaking, can only plead that one might let this and that pass as recognized. There is no end to it: one adduces from here, another from there, a case and instance according to which something more and other still is to be understood by this or that expression, so that a closer or a more general determination has to be taken up into its definition and the science arranged accordingly. — Furthermore, it depends here on argumentation what all is to be drawn in or excluded and up to what limit and extent; but argumentation itself lies open to the most manifold and most varied opinions, on which in the end arbitrary choice alone can settle a fixed determination. In this procedure of beginning the science with its definition, however, there cannot even be any talk of the necessity of its object, and thereby of itself, being exhibited.

Here, accordingly, the concept of pure science together with its deduction counts as presupposed, to the extent that the Phenomenology of Spirit amounts to precisely that deduction and nothing besides. Every mode of consciousness has its truth in absolute knowledge, since, as the course consciousness ran brought forth, nowhere but in absolute knowledge has the separation of the object from certainty of itself come wholly undone, truth having turned equal to that certainty and that certainty equal to truth.

Pure science thus presupposes liberation from the opposition of consciousness. It contains the thought, insofar as it is just as much the subject matter in its own self, or the subject matter in its own self, insofar as it is just as much pure thought. Or the concept of science is that truth is pure self-consciousness and has the shape of the self, in that what is in itself is the concept, and the concept is what is in itself.

This objective thinking, then, is the content of pure science. So little, therefore, is it formal, so little does it want for the matter that an actual and true cognition demands, that its content is on the contrary the absolutely true and nothing else, or, should one still care to employ the word matter, the genuine matter, — a matter, however, to which form is nothing external, since this matter is rather pure thought and therewith absolute form itself. Logic is accordingly to be grasped as pure reason's system, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth itself, such as it is in and for itself without any covering; one may therefore put it this way, that the portrayal of God is what this content is, God such as he is in his eternal essence, prior to the creation of nature and of a finite spirit.

Anaxagoras is extolled as the one who first pronounced the thought that the nous, thought, is the world's principle, that the world's essence is to be determined as thought. With this he laid the ground for an intellectual view of the world, whose pure shape must be logic. What is at issue in logic is not a thinking about something that would lie at its base for itself outside thinking, not forms that would yield mere marks of truth; rather, the necessary forms and the proper determinations of thinking are the highest truth itself.

But in order at least to take this up into representation, the opinion must be set aside that truth has to be something palpable. One must also give up, for example, the peculiar way of grasping the Platonic ideas that are in God's thinking, namely as though they were, so to speak, existing things, but in another world or region, outside which the world of actuality is to be found, possessing a substantiality distinct from those ideas and real only through this distinctness. The Platonic idea is nothing other than the universal, or more precisely the concept of the object; a something has actuality only in its concept; insofar as it is distinct from its concept, it ceases to be actual and is something null; the side of palpability and of sensuous being-outside-itself belongs to this null side. — From the other side, however, one can appeal to ordinary logic's own representations; for it is assumed that definitions, for example, do not contain determinations that fall only within the cognizing subject, but the determinations of the object, which constitute its most essential, its ownmost nature. Or when other determinations are inferred from determinations already given, it is assumed that what has been inferred is not something external and foreign to the object, but rather belongs to the object itself essentially, that being corresponds to such thinking. — It underlies the use of the forms of concept, judgment, syllogism, definition, division and so forth quite generally that these are not merely forms of self-conscious thinking, but also of objective understanding. — Thinking is an expression that attributes the determination contained in it preeminently to consciousness. But insofar as it is said that understanding, that reason is in the world of objects, that spirit and nature have laws according to which their life and their alterations take place, it is thereby conceded that the determinations of thinking have objective worth and concrete existence just as much.

The critical philosophy did indeed already turn metaphysics into logic, but it, like the later idealism, out of dread before the object, as was already recalled a moment ago, at the same time gave the logical determinations an essentially subjective significance, by which they remained encumbered with the very object they were fleeing, and left over for themselves a thing-in-itself, an infinite impetus, as a beyond. But that liberation from the opposition of consciousness which science must be able to presuppose raises science above this timid, unfinished standpoint, and demands the consideration of the forms of thinking as they are in and for themselves, without any such limitation and deference, the logical, the purely rational.

Kant elsewhere counts logic, namely the aggregate of determinations and propositions that in the ordinary sense goes by the name of logic, fortunate in that so early a completion has fallen to its lot in advance of other sciences; since Aristotle, he says, it has taken no step backward, but no step forward either, the latter because to all appearances it seems to be closed and complete. — If logic has undergone no change since Aristotle, — as indeed, in fact, the changes consist almost entirely in nothing but omissions — then what should rather be inferred from this is that it stands all the more in need of a total reworking; for two thousand years of continued labour by spirit must have procured for it a higher consciousness of its thinking and of its pure essentiality within itself. Compare the shapes to which the spirit of the world and the spirit of science have raised themselves in every kind of real and ideal consciousness with the shape that logic, spirit's own consciousness of its pure essence, currently wears, and the difference proves too great for even the most superficial consideration to miss at once that this latter consciousness is utterly inadequate to those earlier elevations and unworthy of them.

The need for a reshaping of logic has in fact long been felt. In the form and the content in which it presents itself in the textbooks, it has, one may say, fallen into contempt. It is still dragged along more from a feeling that a logic of some kind cannot be done without, and from a still persisting habituation to the tradition of its importance, than from any conviction that that ordinary content and the occupation with those empty forms have value and use.

The expansions given to it for a time by psychological, pedagogical and even physiological material have since been fairly generally acknowledged to be disfigurements. In and for itself a large part of these psychological, pedagogical, physiological observations, laws and rules must appear very stale and trivial, whether they stand in logic or wherever else. Above all, such rules as, for example, that one should think through and examine what one reads in books or hears spoken; that if one does not see clearly one should come to the aid of one's eyes with spectacles — rules which the textbooks of so-called applied logic gave, and indeed in all seriousness divided into paragraphs, so that one might attain truth, — must strike everyone as superfluous, except at most the writer or the teacher who is at a loss how to pad out by something or other the otherwise too short and lifeless content of logic ¹.

As for this content itself, the ground has already been given above for why it is so devoid of spirit. Its determinations hold good unbudged in their fixity, and are brought into merely external reference with one another. Since with judgments and syllogisms the operations are chiefly traced back to, and founded upon, the quantitative side of the determinations, everything comes to rest upon an external difference, upon mere comparison, and becomes a wholly analytic procedure and a conceptless calculating. The derivation of the so-called rules and laws, above all of inferring, is not much better than a fingering of little sticks of unequal length in order to sort and join them according to their size, — than the children's pastime of picking out from pictures cut up in various ways the pieces that fit. — Hence this thinking has not unjustly been equated with reckoning, and reckoning in turn with this thinking. In arithmetic numbers are taken as the conceptless, which apart from its equality or inequality, that is, apart from its wholly external ratio, has no significance; which is a thought neither in its own self nor in its reference. When it is worked out in a mechanical way that three-quarters multiplied by two-thirds makes one-half, this operation contains roughly as much and as little thought as the calculation whether this or that kind of syllogism can occur in a given figure.

Besides the fact that logic has to receive spirit into its dead content, its method must be the one through which alone it is capable of being pure science. In the condition in which it finds itself, hardly an inkling of scientific method is to be discerned. It has roughly the form of an empirical science. Empirical sciences have found, for what they are supposed to be, their own peculiar method of defining and classifying their material as well as this can be done. Pure mathematics likewise has its method, one fitted to its abstract objects and to the quantitative determination that is the sole respect under which it regards them. What is essential on the score of this method, and generally on the subordinate rank of the scientific character attainable in mathematics, I said in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit; the method will nevertheless come up for closer consideration inside logic itself. Spinoza, Wolff and others let themselves be seduced into applying it to philosophy as well, and into making the external course of conceptless quantity into the course of the concept, which is in and for itself contradictory. Philosophy has hitherto not yet found its method; it looked with envy at the systematic edifice of mathematics and borrowed the method from it, as was said, or made do with the method of sciences that are only mixtures of given material, empirical propositions and thoughts, — or helped itself out by the crude discarding of all method. The closer account of what alone can serve as the true method of philosophical science belongs to the treatment of logic itself; for the method is consciousness of the form taken by its inner self-movement. In the Phenomenology of Spirit I set out an example of this method on a more concrete object, on consciousness. There are here shapes of consciousness, each of which in its realization at the same time dissolves itself, has its own negation for its result, — and has thereby passed over into a higher shape. The one thing needed in order to gain scientific advance is the recognition of the logical proposition that the negative is just as much positive, or that what contradicts itself does not dissolve into a zero, into abstract nothing, but essentially into nothing more than the negation of its particular content, or that a negation of this kind is not negation of everything but the negation of the determinate subject matter that is dissolving itself, and hence is determinate negation; that therefore the result essentially harbours that from which it results; — which is strictly speaking a tautology, for otherwise it would be an immediate and not a result. Inasmuch as what results, the negation, is determinate negation, it has a content. What it amounts to is a new concept, though a higher and richer concept than the preceding one; for it has become richer by that concept's negation or opposite; it therefore contains it, but also more than it, and is the unity of it and of its opposite. — In this way the system of concepts too now has to form itself, — and to complete itself in an unstoppable, pure course that takes in nothing from outside.

I recognize that the method I have followed in this system of logic, — or rather that this system follows in its own self, — is capable of much further perfecting; but I know at the same time that it is the only true one. And this is readily evident from the fact that it is nothing distinct from its object and content; — for it is the content within itself, the dialectic which it has in its own self, that moves it forward. It is clear that no expositions can count as scientific which do not go the course of this method and are not in keeping with its simple rhythm, for it is the course of the subject matter itself.

In conformity with this method I would recall that the divisions and headings of the books, sections and chapters which occur in the following treatise of logic itself, together with any statements attached to them, have been made to serve a preliminary survey and are properly speaking only of historical worth. Neither the content nor the body of the science itself includes them; they are assemblages put together by external reflection, a reflection that has already traversed the whole of the execution and therefore announces the sequence of its moments in advance, before they are yet brought on by the subject matter itself.

In the other sciences such advance determinations and divisions are likewise nothing other; there it merely runs assertorically, even in logic for example, „logic has two main parts, the doctrine of elements and methodology,“ and then under the doctrine of elements there stands without further ado the heading: laws of thinking; — then first chapter: on concepts. First section: on the clarity of concepts and so forth. — But these determinations and divisions, arrived at with no deduction and no justification at all, make up the framework and the whole coherence of such sciences. Such a logic itself declares that concepts and truths have to be derived from principles; yet in what it names method, deriving is not so much as distantly contemplated. The order consists, say, in putting like things together, in sending the simpler ahead of the composite, and in other external considerations. But as regards an inner, necessary connectedness, the divisional determinations stand side by side in no other manner than in a register, and the whole transition consists in its now saying: Second chapter; — or we come now to judgments, and the like.

Thus the headings and divisions occurring in this system too have no other significance than that of a table of contents. Apart from that, however, the necessity of the connectedness and the immanent emergence of the differences must be present, which falls within the treatment of the subject matter itself and within the concept's own further determining.

But that through which the concept leads itself further is the negative which it has within its own self; this constitutes the genuinely dialectical. Dialectic, which has hitherto been regarded as a separate part of logic and, with respect to its purpose and standpoint, one may say, entirely misconstrued, thereby acquires an altogether different position. — Platonic dialectic too, even in the Parmenides, and elsewhere in any case still more directly, has in part only the intention of dissolving and refuting restricted assertions through themselves, and in part simply the nothing for its result. Dialectic commonly appeared as an external and negative doing that does not belong to the subject matter itself, and that has its ground in mere vanity, as a subjective craving to set what is firm and true into wavering and to dissolve it, or that at least leads to nothing but the vanity of the object treated dialectically.

Kant placed dialectic higher, — and this aspect belongs among the greatest of his merits, — in that he took from it the semblance of arbitrariness which it had according to the ordinary representation, and exhibited it as a necessary doing of reason. Since it passed for nothing but the art of conjuring up deceptions and producing illusions, it was simply presupposed that it plays a false game and that its whole force rests solely on its concealing the fraud; that its results are merely got by trickery and are a subjective shine. Kant's dialectical expositions in the antinomies of pure reason certainly deserve no great praise when they are examined more closely, as will be done at greater length with several of them in the course of this treatise; but the general idea that he laid down as basis and thereby made prevail is the objectivity of shine and the necessity of the contradiction that belongs to the nature of the determinations of thinking: in the first instance, namely, insofar as these determinations are applied by reason to things in themselves; but precisely what they are in reason and in regard to what is in itself, that is their nature. This result, grasped in its positive side, is nothing other than the inner negativity of those determinations, or their self-moving soul, the principle of all natural and spiritual liveliness as such. But as soon as one halts at the negative side of the dialectical alone, the result is only the familiar claim that reason is incapable of cognizing the infinite; — an odd result, given that the infinite is what is rational, to say that reason is not capable of cognizing the rational.

In this dialectical element, as it is taken here, and hence in the grasping of the opposed in its unity, or of the positive in the negative, consists the speculative. It is the most important aspect, but for a power of thinking still unpractised and unfree the most difficult. If such a power is still engaged in tearing itself loose from sensuously concrete representing and from argumentation, it has first to practise itself in abstract thinking, to hold concepts fast in their determinateness and to learn to cognize from them. An exposition of logic for this purpose would have to keep, in its method, to the division spoken of above and, with respect to the closer content itself, to the determinations that emerge for the individual concepts, without entering into the dialectical. In outward shape it would come to resemble the ordinary presentation of this science, while in content it would differ greatly from it, and it would still serve to practise abstract if not speculative thinking, a purpose which the logic made popular by psychological and anthropological ingredients cannot even fulfil. To spirit it would give the picture of a whole ordered methodically, even though the soul of the edifice, the method, which has its life in the dialectical, would not itself show up in it.

With respect to the formation of the individual and its relation to logic, I note finally that logic presents itself, as grammar does, under two distinct aspects, with two distinct values. To whoever first steps up to it and to the sciences at large it is one thing, and to whoever comes back to it from them, another. Whoever begins to get acquainted with grammar finds in its determinations and laws dry abstractions, contingent rules, in general an isolated multitude of determinations which display only the value and the significance of what lies in their immediate sense; cognition at first cognizes in them nothing but them. To one who, by contrast, has command of a language and knows other languages in comparison with it, to him alone can the spirit and the formation of a people show itself expressed in the grammar of its language. Those very rules and forms now have a filled-out, rich, living value. And finally, through the grammar, he can cognize the expression of spirit as such, logic. Just so, whoever steps up to science finds in logic at first an isolated system of abstractions which, restricted to itself, does not reach over the other bodies of knowledge and sciences. Rather, held up against the riches of one's representation of the world, against the content of the other sciences that appears real, and compared with absolute science's promise to unveil the essence of these riches, the inner nature of spirit and of world, this science in its abstract shape, in the simplicity of its pure determinations, has rather the look of delivering anything sooner than this promise, and of standing devoid of substance over against those riches. The first acquaintance with logic restricts its significance to itself alone; its content counts only as an isolated occupation with the determinations of thinking, alongside which the other scientific occupations are a material and content of their own, upon which the logical has only a formal influence, and indeed one that comes about more of itself, and for which the scientific shape and the study of it can at a pinch be done without. The other sciences have on the whole thrown off the regular method of being a sequence of definitions, axioms, theorems and their proofs and so forth; the inborn form of thinking, so-called natural logic, makes itself felt in them on its own account, and gets along without any special cognition directed at it. Above all, however, the material and content of these sciences holds itself distinct from the logical and entirely independent of it, and is more appealing to sense, representation, and practical interest of every kind.

So logic must indeed first be learned as something that one understands and sees into well enough, but in which scope, depth and further significance are at first missed. Only out of a deeper knowledge of the other sciences does the logical rise up for subjective spirit as something not merely abstractly universal but as the universal that embraces the wealth of the particular within itself; — just as the same moral maxim, in the sense a youth gives it who understands it quite correctly, does not possess the significance and the scope that it has in the spirit of a man experienced in life, for whom the whole force of what is contained in it thereby finds expression. Thus the logical first receives the appreciation of its worth when it has become the result of the experience of the sciences; out of that it presents itself to spirit as universal truth, not as a particular piece of knowledge alongside other material and realities, but as the essence of all this other content.

Granted that at the outset of study the logical is not there for spirit with this conscious force, spirit nonetheless receives through it the inward force by which it is guided into all truth. The system of logic is the realm of shades, the world of simple essentialities, set free from every sensuous concretion. The study of this science, the sojourn and the labour in this realm of shadows, is the absolute cultivation and discipline of consciousness. In it consciousness carries on a business remote from sensuous purposes, from feelings, from the merely supposed world of representation. Considered from its negative side, this business consists in keeping at a distance the contingency of argumentative thinking and the arbitrariness of letting these or the opposite grounds occur to one and pass as valid.

Above all, however, thought thereby gains self-subsistence and independence from the concrete. It becomes at home in the abstract and in advancing through concepts without sensuous substrates, and thereby becomes the unconscious force for taking up the remaining manifoldness of bodies of knowledge and sciences into the rational form, for grasping and holding fast what is essential in them, for stripping off the external and in this way drawing the logical out of them, — or, what is the same, for filling the abstract foundation of the logical acquired beforehand through study with the substance of all truth, and for giving it the value of a universal that no longer stands as a particular alongside other particulars but reaches over it and is its essence, the absolutely true.

Logic

On Its General Division

What needed to be said about the concept of this science, and about where its justification falls, has been said in the introduction. From that concept there also follows the provisional general division of the science.

Logic, as the science of pure thinking, or quite generally as the pure science, has for its element that unity of the subjective and the objective which is absolute knowledge, and to which spirit has raised itself as to its absolute truth. The determinations of this absolute element have the sense of being neither merely thoughts nor merely objective determinations, neither empty abstractions and concepts moving about beyond actuality, nor yet essentialities foreign to the I and an objective in-itself, nor again mere external conjunctions and minglings of the two. The element of this science is rather the unity in which being is pure concept in its own self, and only the pure concept is the true being.

Now inasmuch as this unity determines and develops itself, its determinations must have the form of that separation, for the unity is precisely unity of that difference, and its development is the exhibition of what it contains within itself, and so of that difference of being and of thinking. Yet since knowledge consists in this, that the truth of this difference lies in its unification, then, once knowledge develops that difference in and out of its own self by its determining, the difference no longer has the sense it had on its way, or while it was outside its truth; it can rather come forward only as a determination of this unity, as a moment within its own self, and this unity cannot again dissolve itself into it.

Logic can therefore be divided quite generally into the logic of being and of thinking, into objective and subjective logic.

The objective logic would, as regards its content, answer in part to what in Kant ² is tran scendental logic. He marks it off from what he calls general logic, or from what is ordinarily called logic as such, in this way: that the former considers the concepts that refer a priori to objects and thus does not abstract from all content of objective cognition, or that it holds the rules of the pure thinking of an object, and inquires at the same time into the origin of our cognition, insofar as this cognition cannot be ascribed to the objects. — Kant's chief thought is that of vindicating the categories for self-consciousness, as the subjective I itself. For this reason he still speaks, over and above the empirical, the side of feeling and of intuition, expressly of objects, or of something that is not posited and determined by self-consciousness. Were the category the form of absolute thinking, then no thing-in-itself, nothing foreign and external to thinking, could be left over. When other Kantians have expressed the determining of the object by the I in this way, that the I's objectifying is to be regarded as an original and necessary doing of consciousness, so that within this original doing the representation of the I itself is not yet present, — such a representation being only a consciousness of that same consciousness, or itself an objectifying of it, — then this objectifying doing, once freed from the opposition of consciousness, is more precisely what may be taken quite generally as absolute thinking. But this doing should then no longer be called consciousness, for consciousness includes in itself the opposition of the I and of its object, an opposition not at hand in that original doing; and the name consciousness lends it even more of a shine of subjectivity than does the expression thinking, which here is to be understood throughout in an absolute sense, or, if this should supposedly be more intelligible, as infinite thinking.

The objective logic, moreover, comprises within itself not merely the determinations of thought belonging to immediate being, but also those of mediated being, the determinations of reflection proper, or the doctrine of essence; namely insofar as essence is not yet the concept itself, but first makes up the territory of reflection as the movement toward the concept, since, coming as it does out of being, it is still a differentiated being-within-itself.

The objective logic thus takes, quite generally, the place of the former metaphysics. First of all immediately the place of ontology, the first part of that metaphysics, which was to set forth the nature of the Ens in general; — the Ens comprises within itself being as well as essence, a difference for which our language has luckily rescued distinct expressions. — But then the objective logic also comprises within itself the remaining metaphysics, insofar as this contained the pure forms of thought applied to particular substrates drawn in the first place from representation, the soul, the world, God, and these determinations of thinking made up what was essential in the metaphysical manner of consideration. Logic considers these forms free of those substrates, and considers their nature and worth in and for themselves. That metaphysics left this undone and so drew upon itself the just reproach of having used them without critique, without the prior inquiry whether and how they are fit to be determinations of the thing-in-itself, as Kant expresses it, — or rather of the rational. — The objective logic is therefore the genuine critique of these forms, — a critique that considers them not merely under the general form of apriority, over against the aposteriori, but considers them themselves in their own particular content.

The subjective logic is the logic of the concept, — of the essence that has sublated its reference to a being, or to its shine, and that in its determination is no longer external, but is the free, self-subsistent subjective, or rather the subject itself.

But since the subjective carries with it the misunderstanding of something contingent and arbitrary, as of determinations generally belonging to the form of consciousness, no special weight is to be laid here upon the difference between subjective and objective, a difference that will be developed more closely later on within logic itself. — Logic does indeed break up, broadly speaking, into objective and subjective logic. More precisely, however, it has the three parts: I. the logic of being; II. that of essence and III. that of the concept.

Book One. Being

With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made?

From the Phenomenology of Spirit, or the science of consciousness as spirit in its appearing, it is presupposed that pure knowledge issues as consciousness's last, absolute truth. Logic is pure science, pure knowledge in its whole compass and its spread. Pure knowledge is certainty that has become truth, or the certainty that no longer stands over against the object but has made it inward, knows it as its own self, and that on the other side has likewise surrendered the knowing of itself as of something standing over against the objective and being merely the annihilation thereof, has divested itself, and is unity with its own divestment.

Pure knowledge, having collapsed together into this unity, has sublated every reference to an other and mediation as well, and is simple immediacy.

Simple immediacy is itself an expression of reflection, and refers to the difference from what is mediated. In its true expression this simple immediacy is pure being, or being at large; being, nothing else, without any further determination and filling.

This backward glance at the concept of pure knowledge is the ground from which being comes forth in order to constitute the beginning of absolute science.

Or secondly, conversely, the beginning of absolute science must itself be an absolute beginning; it may presuppose nothing. It must therefore be mediated by nothing, nor have a ground; rather it is itself to be the ground of the whole science. It must accordingly be simply an immediate, or rather the immediate itself. Just as it can have no determination over against anything else, so too it can contain none within itself, no content, for anything of that kind would likewise be a distinguishing, and a reference of diverse terms to one another, hence a mediation. The beginning, then, is pure being.

Chiefly in more recent times has it been regarded as a difficulty to find a beginning in philosophy, and the ground of this difficulty, along with the possibility of resolving it, has been discussed in manifold ways. Philosophy's beginning has to be a mediated one or else an immediate one, and there is little trouble in showing that neither of these is open to it; with that, whichever of the two manners of beginning one adopts runs into its refutation.

In the first presentation just given of being as the beginning, the concept of knowledge is presupposed. This beginning is thus not absolute, but comes out of the preceding movement of consciousness. The science of this movement, from which knowledge results, would now have to have the absolute beginning. It makes that beginning with immediate consciousness, with the knowledge that something is. — Being thus makes the beginning here as well, but as the determination of a concrete shape, of consciousness; only pure knowledge, the spirit that has freed itself from its appearance as consciousness, has free, pure being for its beginning too. — But that beginning, immediate consciousness, contains the I as referred to a sheer other, and conversely the object as referred to the I; hence a mediation. — Consciousness does indeed contain the two mediating terms — which are in turn the mediated ones — itself, points therefore not beyond itself, and is enclosed within itself. But since the mediation is reciprocal, each mediating term is also mediated, so that no genuine immediacy is at hand. — But conversely, were such an immediacy at hand, then, not being grounded, it is something arbitrary and contingent.

The insight that what is absolutely true has to be a result, and conversely that any result has for its presupposition a first truth which, however, precisely as first, is on the objective view not necessary and on the subjective side not cognized, — has in more recent times brought forth the thought that philosophy can begin only with a hypothetical and problematic truth, and that philosophizing can therefore at first be nothing but a searching.

On this view, striding forward in philosophy is rather a going backwards and a grounding, through which alone it emerges that what was begun with is not merely something arbitrarily assumed but is in fact partly the true, partly the first truth.

One must concede that it is an essential consideration — one that will emerge more closely within logic itself — that going forward is a return into the ground and to the original, upon which what the beginning was made with depends. — Consciousness is in this way led back, on its road from the immediacy with which it starts, to absolute knowledge as its truth. This last term, the ground, is then also that out of which the first proceeds, the first that came on the scene at the outset as an immediate. — In this way, too, spirit will at the end of the development of pure knowledge divest itself with freedom and release itself into the shape of an immediate consciousness, as the consciousness of a being that stands over against it as an other. What is essential is properly not that a purely immediate be the beginning, but that the whole is a circuit within itself, wherein the first also becomes the last and the last also the first.

Hence it is on the other side just as necessary to regard that into which the movement goes back, as into its ground, as a result. In this respect the first is quite as much the ground, and the last is something derived. For since one sets out from the first and arrives by correct inferences at the last, as at the ground, this last is in fact a result. The advance from what makes the beginning is furthermore only a further determination of it, so that this remains lying at the base of all that follows and does not vanish out of it. The advancing does not consist in an other being derived, or in a transition being made into a genuine other; — and insofar as such passing over does occur, it just as much sublates itself again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is the foundation present and preserving itself throughout all subsequent developments, the concept altogether immanent in its further determinations.

Through this advance, in which the beginning determines itself further, it loses whatever one-sidedness it has in the determinateness of being an immediate, becomes something mediated, and by that very fact turns the line of scientific forward movement into a circle. — At the same time, what makes the beginning, being therein still the undeveloped and contentless, is not yet truly cognized, for such is it at the beginning, that is, still before the science; only the science, and indeed in its entire development, is the completed, content-filled and first truly grounded cognition of it.

But just because the result also constitutes the absolute ground, the progression of this cognition is not something provisional, nor something problematic and hypothetical; it is determined rather by the nature of the matter and of the content itself. Nor is that beginning something arbitrary and merely assumed for the time being, nor something that appears arbitrary and is presupposed as a request, but of which it nevertheless showed in the sequel that one had done right in making it the beginning; — as with geometrical constructions it admittedly emerges only afterwards in the proofs, that one did well to draw just these lines, or even in the proofs themselves, that it was good to begin with the comparison of these lines or angles; taken for itself, in this drawing of lines or comparing, it is not comprehended.

Thus the ground why in pure science the start is made from pure being has been stated above immediately on that science itself. This pure being is the unity into which pure knowledge goes back, or it is also the content of that knowledge. This is the side on which this pure being, this absolutely immediate, is just as much something absolutely mediated. But it is just as essentially the purely immediate; only as such is it therefore to be taken, precisely because it is the beginning; insofar as it were not this pure indeterminateness, insofar as it were further determined, it would be taken as something mediated. It lies in the nature of the beginning itself that it be being, and nothing else. No other preparations are therefore needed in order to get into philosophy, nor further reflections and points of attachment.

From the fact that the beginning is the beginning of philosophy, no closer determination or positive content can now be drawn for it. For philosophy is here at the beginning, where the matter itself is not yet at hand, an empty word, or some assumed, unjustified representation. Pure knowledge gives only this negative determination, that the beginning is to be the abstract, or absolute, beginning. Insofar as pure being is taken as the content of pure knowledge, this knowledge has to step back from its content, to let it have its own way and not determine it further. — Or since pure being must be regarded as the unity into which knowledge, at its highest peak of union with the object, has collapsed, knowledge has vanished into this unity and has left over no difference from it and hence no determination for it.

Nor is there otherwise any something, or any content, at hand that could be used to make the more determinate beginning with. There is nothing at hand but pure being as beginning. In this determination, as beginning, pure immediacy is something more concrete, and what is immediately contained in it can be developed analytically, in order to see where this leads further.

In general the determination of being, hitherto assumed as the beginning, can also be left out entirely; all that is demanded is that a pure beginning be made; nothing is thus at hand but the beginning itself, and it remains to see what it is.

As yet there is nothing, and something is to become. The beginning is not the pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; being too is at the same time already contained in it. Both are held in the beginning, then, being and nothing; the beginning is their unity; — or it is non-being which is at once being, and being which is at once non-being.

Being and nothing are present in the beginning as distinguished; for the beginning gestures beyond itself to something else; — it is a non-being referred to being as to an other; whatever begins is not yet; it is only making its way toward being. At the same time the beginning holds being within it, yet as a being that withdraws from non-being, or sublates non-being as its opposite.

Further, however, what begins already is, yet just as much it also is not yet. Being and non-being are therefore in it in immediate union; or the beginning is their undifferentiated unity.

Analysing the beginning would accordingly furnish the concept of a unity of being with non-being, — or in more reflected form, of a unity of being-distinguished with being-not-distinguished, — or of the identity of identity and non-identity. One might take this concept for the first and purest definition of the absolute; — as indeed it would be, if the form of definitions and the name of the absolute were at issue at all. On this reckoning, with that abstract concept as the first, every subsequent determination and development would amount to nothing but a richer, more determinate definition of the absolute.

Yet this analysis of the beginning presupposes the beginning as familiar; it has our representation of it for its basis. This is an instance of how other sciences proceed. They presuppose their subject matter as familiar, and assume in doing so, as a request, that everyone may find in his representation of it roughly the same determinations that they, by analysis, comparison and other reasoning, gather up from here and there and state about it. What makes the absolute beginning must indeed be something familiar; but if it is something concrete, hence determined within itself in manifold ways, then, in presupposing these its references as something familiar, I give them out as something immediate which they are not. With them, accordingly, the contingency and arbitrariness of analysis and of the various ways of determining sets in. Because the reference has once been conceded as something immediately given, everyone has the right to bring in or leave out the determinations according to what he finds in his immediate, contingent representation.

But insofar as the subject matter, as analysis presupposes it, is something concrete, a synthetic unity, the reference contained in it is a necessary one only insofar as it is not found ready to hand but is brought forth by the moments' own movement of going back into this unity; — a movement that is the opposite of the one mentioned, which is an analytic procedure, and a doing external to the matter itself and falling within the subject.

From this there emerges more closely what was remarked earlier, that what the beginning is to be made with cannot be something concrete, cannot be such as contains a reference within its own self, for such a thing presupposes a movement, a mediating and a crossing over from one term to another within itself, of which the concrete that has become simple would be the result. But the beginning is not to be a result. What makes the beginning, the beginning itself, is therefore to be taken as something non-analysable, in its simple, unfilled immediacy, hence as being, as the wholly empty.

If someone, impatient perhaps with the consideration of the abstract beginning, wanted to say that one should begin not with the beginning but with the matter, then this matter is nothing but that empty being; for what the matter may be is precisely what is to emerge only in the course of the science, what cannot be presupposed as familiar before it.

Whatever other form may be adopted so as to have a beginning other than empty being, such a beginning suffers from the defects adduced. Insofar as one reflects that from the first truth everything that follows must be derived, that the first truth must be the ground of the whole, the demand seems necessary to make the beginning with God, with the absolute, and to comprehend everything out of him. If, instead of laying the representation at the base in the usual way and sending ahead a definition of the absolute conforming to it, — which was spoken of earlier, — the closer determination of this absolute is on the contrary taken from immediate self-consciousness, if it is determined as I, then this is indeed partly an immediate, partly something familiar in a far higher sense than any other representation; for something otherwise familiar does belong to the I, but since it is only a representation, it is still a content distinguished from the I; the I, by contrast, is the simple certainty of itself. But this certainty is at the same time something concrete, or rather the I is what is most concrete; it is the consciousness of itself as an infinitely manifold world. For the I to be the beginning and ground of philosophy, however, the setting apart of the concrete is required, — the absolute act by which the I is purified of itself and enters as absolute I into its consciousness. But this pure I is then not the familiar, ordinary I of our consciousness, to which the science was to be attached immediately and for everyone. That act would properly be nothing other than the elevation to the standpoint of pure knowledge, on which the difference of the subjective and the objective has precisely vanished. But since this elevation is demanded thus immediately, it is a subjective postulate; to prove itself a genuine demand, the advance of the concrete I, or of immediate consciousness, to pure knowledge would have to have been exhibited and set forth on that I, out of a necessity belonging to it. Without such objective movement pure knowledge, the intellectual intuition, shows up as a standpoint adopted at will, or indeed as merely one among the empirical states of consciousness, where all hangs on whether the one person finds it in himself or can produce it, while another cannot. But insofar as this pure I must be essential pure knowledge, while pure knowledge is posited in individual consciousness only through the absolute act of self-elevation and is not immediately at hand in it, precisely that advantage is lost which is supposed to spring from this beginning of philosophy; namely that it is something simply familiar, which everyone finds immediately within himself and to which further reflection could attach itself; that pure I is rather, in its absolute essentiality, something unknown to ordinary consciousness, something that consciousness does not find within itself. There enters accordingly the deception rather that the talk is supposed to be of something familiar, of the I of empirical self-consciousness, whereas in fact the talk is of something remote from this consciousness. The determination of pure knowledge as I carries with it the continuing recollection of the subjective I, whose restrictions are supposed to be forgotten, and keeps present the representation that the propositions and relations which emerge in the further development from the I occur in ordinary consciousness as something at hand within it — since it is surely that of which they are asserted — and can be found within it. This confusion produces, instead of immediate clarity, only an all the more glaring bewilderment and complete disorientation.

Pure knowledge takes from the I its restricted meaning of having its insuperable opposite in an object; for this reason it would be at the very least superfluous to retain this subjective posture and the determination of pure essence as I any further. But this determination not only carries that disturbing ambiguity with it; considered more closely, it also remains an I that is still subjective. The actual development of the science that sets out from the I shows that within it the object has and keeps the perennial determination of an other for the I, and hence that the I one sets out from is not pure knowledge, which has truly overcome the opposition of consciousness, and is thus still within appearance and not the element of being-in-and-for-itself.

But even if the I were in fact pure knowledge, or if intellectual intuition were in fact the beginning, what matters in science is not what is inwardly at hand, but the existence of the inward within knowledge. But whatever of intellectual intuition — or, should its object be called the eternal, the divine, the absolute, — whatever of the eternal or the absolute is there at the beginning of the science, this is nothing other than a first, immediate, simple determination. Whatever richer name be set over against it than mere being expresses, the only thing that can come into consideration is how it enters into knowledge and into the uttering of knowledge. Intellectual intuition is itself the forcible rejection of mediating and of demonstrative, external reflection; but whatever it utters over and above simple immediacy is something concrete, something containing diverse determinations within itself. The uttering and the exposition of such a concrete, however, is a mediating movement that begins from one of the determinations and advances to the other, even if it goes back again to the first; — it is a movement that may at the same time not be arbitrary or assertoric. Hence what is begun from in this exposition is not the concrete itself, but only a simple immediate out of which the movement proceeds.

If then in the expression of the absolute or the eternal or God, if in the intuition or thought of these there lies more than in pure being, then what lies therein is to step forth into knowledge; let what lies therein be as rich as it may, still the determination that steps first into knowledge is something simple; for only in the simple is there no more than the pure beginning; or that determination is only the immediate, for only in the immediate is there not yet a having-advanced from one term to another, hence likewise no more than the beginning. Whatever the richer forms of the absolute or of God are meant to utter or to hold over and above being amounts, at the beginning, to a mere empty word and to being alone; and this simple thing, which carries no meaning beyond that, this emptiness, is thus where philosophy absolutely begins.

So simple is this insight in itself that the beginning, as was recalled, needs neither preparation nor further introduction; and these preliminary ruminations upon it could have had no aim of leading up to it, but rather of clearing preliminariness of every kind out of the way.

General Division of Being

Being is first determined over against an other;

Secondly, it is determined within its own self;

Thirdly, it returns out of the determining into itself, throws away this preliminariness of dividing, and restores itself to the indeterminateness and immediacy wherein it is able to be a beginning.

In its first determination being separates itself off over against essence, as was indicated already.

This division is here, as was recalled in the Introduction about such divisions generally, a preliminary citation; its determinations have first to arise out of the movement of being itself, and to justify themselves therein. About its divergence from the usual enumeration of the categories — quantity, quality, relation and modality, that is — nothing further need be recalled here, since the whole exposition will display what diverges at large from the usual order and meaning of the categories.

Only this much can be remarked more closely, that elsewhere the determination of quantity is listed before quality, — and this — like most such things — without further ground. It has been shown already that the start is taken with being as such, and hence with qualitative being. From the comparison of quality with quantity it readily appears that quality is by nature the first; for quantity is only quality that has become negative. Magnitude is that determinateness which is no longer at one with being but already differentiated from it, quality sublated and turned indifferent. It carries within it the alterability of being, without the matter itself — the being whose determination it is — being altered thereby; whereas the qualitative determinateness is one with its being, does not go out beyond it nor stand within it, but is its immediate limitedness. Quality is therefore, as the immediate determinateness, the first, and the beginning is to be made with it.

Measure is a relation, but not relation at large, rather the determinate relation of quality and quantity to one another. It can also count as a modality, should one wish; since modality is meant to make up no determination of content any longer, but to bear merely on content's reference to thinking, to the subjective. Measure contains the dissolution of the content, its reference to an other; it constitutes the transition into essence.

The third division falls within the section on quality.

First Section. Determinateness

(Quality.)

Being is the immediate that is indeterminate; it stands free of the first determinateness over against essence, and free of the second within its own self. Such being, void of reflection, is what being immediately is in and for itself.

Being indeterminate, it is being without quality; but the character of indeterminateness falls to it only in contrast with what is determinate or qualitative. Determinate being as such therefore confronts being at large; or, with that, its very indeterminateness makes up its quality. It will therefore show itself that the first being, determinate in itself, thus

Secondly is existence, or that it passes over into existence; but that this, as finite being, sublates itself, and into the infinite reference of being to its own self,

Thirdly, into being-for-itself, passes over.

Chapter 1. Being

A. Being

Being, pure being, — without any further determination. Within its indeterminate immediacy it is nothing but self-same, and neither is it unlike an other; it holds no diversity inside itself, nor any facing outward. Should some determination or content be distinguished within it, or should it through such content be posited as distinguished from an other, it would then not be maintained in its purity. It is indeterminateness and emptiness in their purity. — In it there is nothing to intuit, supposing intuiting may be spoken of at this point; or else it is just this pure, empty intuiting itself. There is just as little anything in it to be thought, or it is, in the same way, only this empty thinking. In truth being, the indeterminate immediate, is nothing, and no more and no less than nothing.

B. Nothing

Nothing, the pure nothing; it is simple sameness with itself, an utter emptiness, lack of determination and lack of content; undifferentiatedness inside it. — To the extent that intuiting or thinking may be brought up at this point, whether something or nothing is what gets intuited or thought is taken to make a difference. Intuiting or thinking nothing has a significance, then; nothing is present in our intuiting or thinking; or, better, it is that empty intuiting and thinking itself; and it is the same empty intuiting or thinking as pure being is. — So nothing carries the same determination, or rather the same want of determination, and with that it is out and out the same as what pure being is.

C. Becoming

Unity of Being and Nothing

The pure being and the pure nothing are the same. What the truth is, is neither the being nor the nothing, but rather that the being into nothing, and the nothing into being, — is not passing over, — but has passed over. Yet the truth is equally not their undifferentiatedness; it lies rather in this, that they are absolutely distinguished, while each of them, with the same immediacy, disappears in its opposite. Their truth, then, is this movement in which the one immediately disappears in the other; becoming; a movement wherein both stand distinguished, though through a difference that has dissolved itself just as immediately.

Remark 1

Nothing is what one habitually sets over against something; something, however, is a determinate being, one that marks itself off from other somethings; and so the nothing set over against something, the nothing of some something or other, is a determinate nothing as well. The nothing that must be taken here, however, is the nothing in its indeterminate simplicity; the nothing purely in and for itself. — Non-being contains the reference to being; it is therefore not the pure nothing, but the nothing as it already is within becoming.

The simple thought of pure being was pronounced first by Parmenides, as the absolute and as the sole truth, and in the fragments left to us from him, with the pure exaltation of a thinking that lays hold of itself for the first time in its absolute abstraction: being alone is, and the nothing is not at all. — The profound Heraclitus, in opposition to that simple and one-sided abstraction, held up the higher, total concept of becoming, and said: being is just as little as the nothing is, or again that all things flow, that is, that all is becoming. — The popular sayings, oriental ones especially, that whatever is has within its very birth the germ of its own ceasing-to-be, and that death is inversely the doorway into fresh life, give voice at bottom to this same uniting of being and nothing. Yet these expressions carry a substratum on which the transition takes place; in time being and nothing are held apart from one another, represented as alternating within it, rather than thought in their abstraction, and hence not thought in such a way that in and for themselves they are the same.

Ex nihilo nihil fit — this is one of those propositions to which the metaphysics of former times ascribed great significance. But what is to be seen in it is either only the empty tautology: nothing is nothing; or else, if becoming were supposed to have any real significance there, then, seeing that out of nothing only nothing comes to be, no becoming is in fact at hand in it, for nothing stays nothing. What becoming contains is that nothing shall not stay nothing, but shall pass over into its other, into being. — When the later metaphysics, the Christian above all, threw out the proposition that out of nothing nothing comes, it thereby asserted a transition of nothing into being; however synthetically, or however merely representationally, it took this proposition, even the most imperfect union still holds within it a point at which being and nothing come together and their distinctness vanishes.

If the result, that being and nothing are the same, strikes one as odd or looks paradoxical, no further heed need be paid to it; what deserves astonishment is rather that astonishment itself, which shows itself as something so new in philosophy and forgets that views of a wholly different kind occur in this science than occur in ordinary consciousness and in so-called common human understanding. It would be no hard matter to exhibit this unity of being and nothing in any example one likes, in anything actual or in any thought. But such an empirical elucidation would at the same time be wholly and utterly superfluous. Since this unity now lies at the ground of everything once and for all, and makes up the element of all that follows, becoming itself apart, all further logical determinations — existence, quality, indeed every concept of philosophy — are examples of this unity.

The confusion into which ordinary consciousness throws itself in the face of such a logical proposition has its ground in this, that it brings along with it representations of some concrete something, and loses sight of the fact that nothing of that sort is under discussion, but rather the pure abstractions alone, those of being and of nothing, and that these are what have to be held fast in and for themselves.

Being and non-being are the same; therefore it makes no odds whether I am or fail to be, whether this house stands or does not, whether these hundred thalers belong to my financial estate or not. — This inference, or this application of that proposition, alters its sense completely. What the proposition contains are the pure abstractions of being and nothing; the application, though, turns these into a determinate being and a determinate nothing. But determinate being, as was said, is not what is under discussion here. A determinate being, a finite one, is a being that bears reference to an other; it is a content that stands with other content, with the world entire, in a relation of necessity. With regard to the reciprocally determining interconnection of the whole, metaphysics was able to make the — at bottom tautological — claim that if a single mote of dust were absolutely destroyed, the whole universe would collapse. But take from the determinate content its interconnection with other things, and represent it in isolation, then its necessity is sublated, and it makes no odds whether this isolated thing, this isolated human being, exists or not. Or again, when this whole interconnection is drawn together into one, the determinate existence that refers itself to an other likewise vanishes, for the universe has no further other, and it is no difference whether it is or is not.

Something appears, then, as not indifferent to whether it be or not be, yet not for the sake of the being or the non-being, but for the sake of its determinateness, of its content, which links it up with other things. If the sphere of being is presupposed, and within it a determinate content, some determinate existence or other, is assumed, then this existence, because it is determinate, stands in manifold reference to other content; and for it it is by no means indifferent whether some certain other content with which it stands in reference is or is not; for only by way of such reference is it essentially what it is. The same holds in the case of representing (when we take non-being in the more determinate sense of representing as against actuality), in whose interconnection the being or the absence of a content that stands determinately in reference to another is not indifferent. — For in general the real difference first begins only with determinateness: indeterminate being and nothing do not yet have it upon them, but only the difference that is merely supposed.

This consideration contains the same as what makes up a main moment in the Kantian critique of the ontological proof of the existence of God; more closely, though, that critique is to be considered only at the opposition of concept and concrete existence. — As is well known, in this so-called proof the concept of a being was presupposed to which all realities accrue, hence concrete existence too, which was likewise assumed to be one of the realities. The Kantian critique fastened above all on this, that concrete existence is no property and no real predicate, which is to say, not a concept of anything that could accrue to the concept of a thing. — Kant means by this to say that being is no determination of content. — Hence, he goes on, the possible contains no more than the actual; a hundred actual thalers contain not the least bit more than a hundred possible ones; — namely, the former have no other determination of content than the latter. For this content considered as isolated it is indifferent to be or not to be; there lies in it no difference of being or non-being, this difference does not touch it at all; the hundred thalers do not become fewer if they are not, and not [m]ore if they are. The difference must first come from […]elsewhere. — “On the other hand, Kant recalls, in my financial estate there is more with a hundred actual thalers than with the mere concept of them, or with their possibility. For where actuality is concerned the object is not merely contained analytically within my concept, but accrues to my concept, (that concept being a determination of my state,) synthetically, without these hundred thalers as thought being in the least augmented by this being outside my concept.”

Two sorts of states are here presupposed, to keep to the Kantian expressions, the pure one, which Kant calls the concept, by which representation is to be understood, and another, the financial estate. For the one as for the other a hundred thalers are a further determination of content, or they accrue, as Kant expresses it, synthetically; and I as possessor of a hundred thalers, or as non-possessor of them, or again I as representing a hundred thalers to myself or not representing them, is a different content. On the one hand it makes a difference whether I merely represent these hundred thalers to myself or possess them, whether they are therefore to be found in the one state or in the other, because I have once and for all presupposed these two states as different determinations. On the other hand, taking each of these states by itself, within it they are a particular determination of content, one that enters into reference to something else, and whose vanishing is not a mere non-being but makes up an otherness. It is a deception that we push the difference off merely onto being and non-being, onto whether I have the hundred thalers or do not have them. This deception rests upon the one-sided abstraction which drops the determinate existence that is always at hand in such examples and clings merely to being and non-being. As was recalled just now, it is existence that first is the real difference of being and nothing, a something and an other. — It is this real difference, that of something and an other, which hovers before representation, in place of pure being and pure nothing.

As Kant puts it, through concrete existence something enters the context of experience as a whole; we get by this one more object of perception, yet our concept of the object gains nothing thereby. — This means, as follows from what has been elucidated, in fact this much: through concrete existence, essentially because something is determinate concrete existence, it enters into interconnection with an other, or stands within it, and among other things with something perceiving. — The concept of the hundred thalers, says Kant, is not augmented by perceiving. — The concept here means the hundred thalers as represented in isolation, outside the context of experience and of perceiving. In this isolated fashion they are indeed a determination of content, and a very empirical one at that, but a severed one, without interconnection and without determinateness over against an other; the form of identity with self, of the simple determinateness that refers only to itself, lifts them above the reference to an other and leaves them indifferent as to whether they be perceived or not. But if they are genuinely considered as determinate and as referred to an other, and the form of simple self-reference, which does not belong to such a determinate content, is taken from them, then they are no longer indifferent to existence and non-existence, but have entered the sphere in which the difference of being and non-being holds, not indeed as such, but as the difference of something and an other.

The thinking, or rather the representing, before which only a determinate being, or existence, hovers, into which the real diversity of being and nothing falls, is to be referred back to that beginning of pure science which Parmenides made, who among human beings appears to have been the first to purify and raise his representing, and with it the representing of the time that followed, into the pure thought of being, and thereby to have created the element of science.

But it must be recalled, to return to the main matter, that the expression of the result which issues from the consideration of being and of nothing, through the proposition: being and nothing are one and the same, is imperfect. For the accent is laid preferentially on their being one and the same, and the sense therefore seems to be that the difference is denied, which nevertheless occurs immediately in the proposition itself at the same time; for the proposition enunciates the two determinations, being and nothing, and holds them within it as distinguished. — Nor can it be meant, at the same time, that one should abstract from them and cling only to the unity. Such a sense would give itself out as one-sided, since what is to be abstracted from is nonetheless present in the proposition. — Insofar as the proposition: being and nothing are the same, enunciates the identity of these determinations, but in fact contains them equally as distinguished, it contradicts itself in itself and dissolves. A proposition is therefore posited here which, more closely considered, has the movement of vanishing through itself. With that there happens to it just what is supposed to make up its proper content, namely becoming.

The proposition accordingly contains the result, it is in itself the result itself; but the result is not expressed in it in its truth; it is an external reflection that recognizes the result in it. — The proposition, in the form of a judgment, is in general not immediately suited to express speculative truths. The judgment is an identical reference between subject and predicate; even if the subject has still more determinatenesses than that of the predicate, and to that extent is something other than the predicate, these accrue only as added on, and do not sublate the identical reference of this predicate with its subject, which remains its ground and bearer. But if the content is speculative, then the non-identical element of subject and predicate is likewise an essential moment, and the transition or the vanishing of the first into the other is their reference. That paradoxical and bizarre light in which so much of more recent philosophy shows itself to anyone not conversant with speculative thinking falls in many cases upon the form of the simple judgment, whenever that form is used for expressing speculative results.

The genuine result that has emerged here is becoming, which is not merely the abstract or one-sided unity of being and of nothing. Rather, it consists in this movement: that the pure being is immediate and simple, that for that very reason it is just as much the pure nothing, that the difference of the two is, yet just as much sublates itself and is not. The result therefore asserts the difference of being and of nothing just as much, but as a merely supposed one. — One supposes that being is rather the simply other over against what nothing is, and that nothing is more evident than their absolute difference, and nothing seems easier than to specify it. But one may just as easily convince oneself that this is impossible. For if being and nothing possessed any determinateness whatever by which they were distinguished, then, as was recalled earlier, what they would be is a determinate being and a determinate nothing, not that pure being and pure nothing which they still are here. Their difference is therefore entirely empty, each of the two is in like manner the indeterminate; it consequently does not subsist on them themselves, but only in a third, in supposing. But supposing is a form of the subjective, which does not belong in this series of the exposition. The third, however, in which being and nothing have their subsistence, must occur here too; and it has occurred, it is becoming. In it they are as distinguished ones; becoming is only insofar as they are diverse. This third is an other than they are; — they subsist only in an other, which means equally that they do not subsist for themselves. Becoming is the subsistence of being quite as much as of non-being; or their subsistence is nothing other than their being in one; and it is precisely this subsistence of theirs that just as much sublates their difference.

One is also apt to represent being under the image, say, of light in its purity, as the clearness of undimmed seeing, but nothing as pure night, and to tie their difference to this well-known sensuous diversity. In fact, however, if one represents this seeing to oneself more precisely, it is easily grasped that one sees as much and as little in absolute clarity as in absolute darkness, that the one seeing is quite as much as the other a pure seeing, a seeing of nothing. Light in its purity and darkness in its purity are two vacuities, and these are the same. Only in determinate light — and light is determined by darkness, — hence in dimmed light, and equally only in determinate darkness, — and darkness is determined by light, — in illuminated darkness, can something be distinguished; because only dimmed light and illuminated darkness have the difference upon themselves, and are thereby determinate being, existence.

Remark 2

Parmenides held fast to being, and said of nothing that it is not at all; only being is. That through which this pure being was led onward to becoming was the reflection that it is equal to nothing. Being itself is the indeterminate; it therefore has no reference to anything else; it seems accordingly that from this beginning no further advance can be made, namely out of the beginning itself, without something alien being attached to it from outside. The reflection that being is equal to nothing thus appears as a second, absolute beginning. On the other side, being would not be the absolute beginning if it had a determinateness, for then it would depend on an other and would in truth not be a beginning. But if it is indeterminate and hence a true beginning, then it also has nothing by which it might carry itself over into an other; it is thereby at the same time the end.

That reflection, that being is not equal to itself but rather is utterly unequal to itself, is, considered from the latter side, indeed to that extent a second, new beginning, but at the same time an other beginning, by which the first is sublated. This is, as was already recalled above, the true meaning of advancing in general. In philosophy the advance from that which is a beginning is at the same time the return to its source, to its genuine beginning. Thus in going out beyond the beginning there at the same time begins a new beginning, and the first thereby shows itself as not the genuine one. This side, then, that the reflection which sets being equal to nothing is a new beginning, is conceded, and it is, as is clear, itself necessary. But conversely this new beginning is, just as much as the first, not an absolute one; for it refers to the first. For this reason, however, it must lie in the first itself that an other refers to it; it must therefore be something determinate. — But it is the immediate, that which is still utterly indeterminate. Yet precisely this indeterminateness is what constitutes its determinateness, for indeterminateness is opposed to determinateness; as something opposed it is thus itself the determinate, or the negative, and indeed pure negativity. This indeterminateness or negativity which being has in it itself is what the reflection expresses when it sets being equal to nothing. — Or one may put it thus: because being is that which is without determination, it is not the determination which it is, hence not being but nothing.

In itself, then, that is, in essential reflection, the transition is not immediate; but it is still concealed. Here only its immediacy is present; because being is posited only as immediate, nothing breaks out immediately in it. — A more determinate mediation is the one from which science itself, and its beginning, pure being, has its existence. Knowledge has attained the element of pure thinking by having sublated within itself all the manifoldness of the manifoldly determined consciousness. The whole sphere of knowledge therefore contains as its essential moment absolute abstraction and negativity; being, its beginning, is this pure abstraction itself, or is essentially only as absolute nothing.

This recollection, however, lies behind science, which within itself, namely from essence onward, will exhibit that one-sided immediacy of being as something mediated.

But insofar as that breaking out of nothing, and the consideration of being as to what it is in itself, are spurned, nothing is present but pure being. One holds fast to it as it is beginning and at the same time end, and in its immediate immediacy refuses the reflection that leads it out beyond itself, namely that it is the indeterminate, the empty. Into this pure immediacy nothing seems able to break in.

Since this assertion of reflectionless being holds fast to the merely immediate, to that as which being is posited or as which it is present, one must likewise keep to it and see how this being then is present. Now because being is nothing, this must exhibit itself in its immediacy.

Let us take the assertion of pure being

α) in the form in which it has stepped forth furthest out of supposing, as the proposition: Being is the absolute; then something is asserted of being that is distinguished from it. What is distinguished from it is an other than it; but the other contains the nothing of that whose other it is. What is therefore present in this proposition is not pure being, but being just as much in reference to its nothing. — The absolute is distinguished from it; but in saying that it is the absolute, it is also said that the two are not distinguished. Thus what is present is not pure being but the movement which is becoming.

β) If now pure being means just as much as the absolute, or if it means only one side or part of the absolute and only this side is held fast, then their difference is dropped, the difference which just now clouded the purity of being, and the diversity vanishes as one merely of the word or as a connection with a useless part.

The proposition now runs: Being is being. — Of this identity, which will be spoken of below, this much is immediately clear, that like every tautology it says nothing. What is present, then, is a saying that is a not-saying; here, accordingly, the same movement, becoming, is present, only that in place of being it is a saying that runs through it.

γ) With the tautological predicate dropped, there remains the proposition: Being is. Here again being itself and the being of it are distinguished; through the is something further and hence other than being is meant to be said. But if through the is no otherness, and hence no nothing of pure being, is posited, then this is is likewise to be dropped as useless, and one is to say only: pure being.

δ) Pure being, or rather only being; propositionless, without assertion or predicate. Or the assertion has gone back into supposing. Being is by now only an exclamation which has its meaning solely in the subject. The deeper and richer this inner intuition is, if it is to comprise within itself the holy, the eternal, God and so forth, — the more does this inner thing stand off from that as which it is there, from the enunciated empty being which against that content is nothing; it has, in its meaning and its existence, the difference from itself.

Considered from the other side, this being without reference to meaning, as it immediately is and is to be immediately taken, belongs to a subject; it is something enunciated, has […] empirical existence in general, and thereby belongs to the ground of restrictions and of the negative. — Common sense, when it bristles against the unity of being and nothing and at the same time appeals to what is immediately present, will in this very experience find nothing but determinate being, being with a restriction or negation, — that very unity which it rejects. Thus the assertion of immediate being reduces itself to an empirical concrete existence whose exhibiting it cannot reject, since it is the reflectionless immediacy to which it means to hold.

The same is the case with nothing, only in the opposite way; taken in its immediacy it shows itself as that which is; for by its own nature it is the very same as being. The nothing is thought, is represented; it is spoken of; therefore it is. The nothing has its being in thinking, in representing and so forth. This being, however, is distinguished from it; it is therefore said that nothing indeed is in thinking, in representing, but that on that account it is not the case that it is, that only thinking or representing is this being. In this distinguishing, however, it is just as little to be denied that nothing stands in reference to a being; but in the reference, even though it also contains the difference, a unity of nothing with being is present.

Pure nothing is not yet the negative, the determination of reflection over against the positive; nor yet the restriction; in these determinations it immediately has the meaning of a reference to its other. Rather, nothing is here the pure absence of being, the nihil Privativum, as darkness is the absence of light. If it has now turned out that nothing is the same as being, the counter-claim is held fast that nothing has no being of its own, that it is, as was said, only absence of being, as darkness is only absence of light — a meaning which it has only in the reference to the eye, in comparison with the positive, with light. — But all this means nothing other than that the abstraction of nothing is nothing in and for itself, but only in reference to being, or, what is the same, what has turned out, that its truth is only its unity with being, — that darkness is only something in reference to light, just as conversely being is only something in reference to nothing. Even if the reference is taken superficially and externally, and one stops within it chiefly at the differentiatedness, still the unity of what is referred is essentially contained in it as a moment, and in the fact that each is only something in the reference to its other, precisely the transition of being and of nothing into existence is expressed.

Remark 3

Being is nothing, nothing is being. It has already been remarked that the expression of speculative truth through the form of simple propositions is imperfect. Here the propositions would still have to be added: Being is not nothing, nothing is not being; so that the difference too may be expressed which in those propositions is merely present. — These propositions give completely what is to be said, but not as it is to be gathered together, and is gathered together in becoming.

Into those first propositions other relations of thought can now be brought. They can be enunciated thus:

What is turns therefore into nothing, because being is the nothing.

What is not turns therefore into something, because the nothing is being.

Or immediately:

What is therefore comes to naught, because it is.

What is not therefore becomes something that is, because it is not.

The ground that anything whatever becomes something that is because it is not, and that what is vanishes because it is, appears unsatisfying already for this reason, that it is abstract and empty, whereas by the something a concrete, empirical thing is understood. True as those propositions are, still, as soon as such an existence is spoken of, the ground cannot be merely empty being or non-being or an empty reference of the two to each other, but must have the complete determinateness of the content in order to grasp that content out of it. The relation of ground in general is a further, more perfect determination of the reference of being and of non-being to each other; it cannot be applied to this reference as it stands here, because the reference is rather a unity of pure, determinationless abstractions, and so is essentially not yet a mediation.

If the relation of condition were brought in, the reference of being and non-being would yield the propositions:

Something can pass over into nothing only on the condition that it is;

and into being only on the condition that it is not.

These propositions are empty tautologies; for since a passing over into the opposite is assumed in them, it is certain that, in order for the opposite, being, to be, it is necessary that its opposite, the nothing, be. On the other hand, insofar as the connection of this transition is placed in the relation of condition, their proper unity is sublated; for the condition is indeed something necessary for the conditioned, but is not what posits it; a third must first come in, one which brings the transition about. Through the intrusion of the condition, being and nothing are thus pushed apart, and a third, falling outside them, is demanded for their reference. But becoming is such a unity of them as lies in the nature of each itself; being is in and for itself the nothing, and the nothing in and for itself being.

Remark 4

It emerges from what has gone before what the case is with the ordinary dialectic against becoming, or against beginning and going under, coming-to-be or ceasing-to-be. — Kant's antinomy over whether the world is bounded or unbounded in space and in time comes up for closer examination further on, under the concept of infinity. — That simple and customary dialectic has its basis in clinging to the opposedness of being and of nothing. The proof that no beginning, whether of the world or of a something, is possible runs as follows:

Nothing can begin, neither insofar as something is nor insofar as it is not; for insofar as it is, it is not just then beginning; but insofar as it is not, it does not begin either. — If the world or something were to have begun, it would have begun in nothing, but in nothing, or the nothing, is not a beginning; for beginning includes a being within itself, whereas the nothing contains no being. — For the same reason something also cannot cease. For then being would have to contain the nothing, but being is only being, not the opposite of itself.

Becoming, however, or beginning and ceasing, is precisely this unity of being and nothing, against which this dialectic brings forward nothing except that it assertorically denies the unity and ascribes truth to being and to nothing, each separated from the other. — To ordinary reflecting representation it counts as complete truth that being and nothing are not one; but on the other side it lets beginning and ceasing count as just as genuine determinations; yet in these it does in fact take a unity of being and nothing to be genuine.

Since the absolute severance of being from nothing is presupposed, then — as one so often hears — beginning or becoming is indeed something incomprehensible; for one makes a presupposition which sublates the beginning or the becoming that one nonetheless also concedes.

What has just been cited is the same dialectic which the understanding turns against the concept that higher analysis holds of infinitely small magnitudes. The phrase infinitely small is, for that matter, an awkward one, and the concept receives fuller treatment further on. — Magnitudes of this kind have received the determination of being ones that are in the act of vanishing, neither prior to that vanishing, since at that point they would still be finite magnitudes; — nor subsequent to it, since at that point they would be nothing at all. Against this pure concept the well-known objection has been raised, and endlessly reiterated, that magnitudes of this kind must be either a something or else nothing; that no intermediary state (state is here an inept, barbarous term) exists between being and non-being. — What underlies this too is the assumption that being and nothing stand absolutely apart. The showing has gone the other way, however: that the two coincide in fact, or, to put it in the idiom just used, that there is simply nothing which fails to be a becoming, which fails to be an intermediary state between being and nothing.

Since the reasoning adduced makes the false presupposition of the absolute separatedness of being and non-being, it is also to be called not dialectic but sophistry; for sophistry is a reasoning from a groundless presupposition which one lets count uncritically and without reflection; by dialectic, however, we mean the higher rational movement into which such utterly separate-seeming terms pass over through themselves and therein into one another. It is the dialectical nature of being and nothing themselves that they exhibit their unity, becoming, as their truth.

2. Moments of Becoming

Becoming is the unity of being and nothing; not a unity that abstracts away from the two; rather, being the unity of being and nothing, it is this determinate unity, or the one in which both being and nothing is. But inasmuch as being and nothing, each of them, is in the unity with its other, it is not. They are, then, in this unity, yet as vanishing ones, only as sublated.

They are as not being; or are moments. — To representation they present themselves at first as such that each of them, for itself, separated from the other, is self-subsistent, and they are being and nothing only in this separation. But since both are the same, they sink down from self-subsistence to moments, in that they are at first still regarded in general as distinguished but at the same time as sublated.

Inasmuch as being and nothing are in one, they are distinguished therein; but in such a way that at the same time each, in its differentiatedness, is unity with the other. Becoming therefore contains two such unities; each is unity of being and of nothing; but the one is being as reference to nothing, the other nothing as reference to being: the two determinations are of unequal worth in these unities.

Becoming is in this way in a doubled determination; as beginning from nothing, which refers itself to being, that is, passes over into it, or from being, which passes over into nothing, — coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.

But these directions, differentiated in this way, permeate one another and render one another inert. The first is ceasing-to-be; being makes the transition into nothing, yet nothing is quite as much the reverse of its own self and is rather the transition into being, or coming-to-be. This coming-to-be constitutes the second direction; nothing makes the transition into being, yet being quite as much sublates its own self and is rather the transition into nothing, or ceasing-to-be.

Coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be are therefore not a diverse becoming, but immediately one and the same: nor do they sublate each other reciprocally, the one externally sublating the other; rather each sublates itself in itself, and is in it itself the opposite of itself.

3. Sublation of Becoming

The equilibrium into which coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be settle themselves is at first becoming itself. But this equally collapses together into a tranquil unity. Within it, being and nothing have their standing only as vanishing ones; becoming as such, however, exists solely through the differentiatedness of the two. Their vanishing is therefore the vanishing of becoming, or a vanishing of vanishing itself. Becoming is thus an unsteady restlessness which sinks together into a tranquil result.

The point admits of this formulation as well: what becoming amounts to is being's vanishing into nothing together with nothing's vanishing into being, and altogether the vanishing of being and of nothing; yet it rests all the while upon the difference between them. It therefore contradicts itself within itself, because it unites within itself such as is opposed to itself; a union of this kind, however, destroys itself.

This result is having-vanished, not as nothing; taken so, it would be merely a relapse into one of the determinations already sublated. It is instead that unity of being and nothing which has grown into tranquil simplicity.

In becoming itself, being as well as nothing is, each in like manner rather only as the nothing of its own self. Becoming is the unity as vanishing, or the unity in the determination of nothing. But this nothing is an essential passing over into being, and becoming is therefore a passing over into the unity of being and nothing which is as something that is, or has the shape of the immediate unity of these moments; existence.

Remark

Sublating and the sublated is one of the most important concepts of philosophy, a fundamental determination which recurs absolutely everywhere, whose sense is to be grasped determinately and distinguished above all from nothing. — What sublates itself does not thereby become nothing. Nothing is the immediate; a sublated thing, by contrast, is something mediated, it is that which is not, but as a result which has proceeded out of a being. It therefore has the determination from which it derives still in itself.

To sublate has in the language the doubled sense that it means as much as to store up, to preserve, and as much as to make cease, to put an end to. Storing up already carries the negative in it: a thing gets taken out of its immediacy, and so out of an existence lying open to outward influence, for the sake of preserving it. — What is sublated is accordingly a thing stored up as well, one that has forfeited nothing but its immediacy, and has not on that account vanished.

Take the sublated more precisely: a thing counts here as sublated only to the extent that it has stepped into the unity with what stands opposed to it; under this narrower determination it is something reflected, and the fitting name for it is moment. — As the observation will force itself upon us still more often, that the philosophical technical language uses Latin expressions for reflected determinations.

What narrower sense and expression accrue to being and to nothing, now that they have become moments, must emerge more narrowly when existence is considered, as the unity wherein the two are stored up. Only in being differentiated from one another is being being and nothing nothing; in their truth, though — in their unity — the two have vanished qua these determinations, and are by now something else. Being and nothing are the same; on the very ground of that sameness they no longer count as being and nothing, and carry a diverse determination; within becoming they stood as coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be; within existence, a unity otherwise determined, they are again moments otherwise determined.