I. Sense-Certainty; or the This and Meaning

Whatever knowledge comes first, that is, whatever is our object immediately, can only be a knowledge that is itself immediate: knowledge of the immediate, of what has being. Our own bearing has to be equally immediate or receptive: we are to alter nothing in it as it offers itself, and to keep comprehension away from our apprehending.

The concrete content of sense-certainty immediately makes it look like the richest cognition, indeed like a cognition of infinite wealth — a wealth for which no boundary can be found, whether we go out into the space and time in which it spreads itself, or whether we take a piece from this abundance and go into it by dividing it. Besides this, it appears as the truest, for it has so far discarded nothing of the object, but has it before itself in its full completeness. Yet this certainty in fact puts itself forward as the most abstract and poorest truth. About what it knows, its whole statement runs: it is; the being of the matter is all that its truth holds; consciousness, on its side, figures in this certainty as nothing but a pure I, and I am there as nothing but a pure this one, the object as nothing but a pure this. I, this one, am certain of this matter, and not because I as consciousness developed myself in the process and set thought moving in manifold ways. Nor because the matter of which I am certain would have, in virtue of a host of differing characteristics, a rich relation within itself, or a manifold bearing upon others. Both of those points fall outside the truth of sense-certainty; within it, the significance of a manifold mediation attaches neither to I nor to the matter; to I there attaches no significance of a manifold representing or thinking, nor to the matter any significance of manifold characteristics; the matter simply is, and it is for no other reason than that it is; it is, and precisely this is the essential thing for sensuous knowledge, while its truth is constituted by this pure being, by this simple immediacy. In the same way, certainty taken as immediate relation is pure relation: consciousness is I and nothing further, a pure this one; the singular one knows what is a pure this, or the singular.

Yet a good deal else plays alongside the pure being that makes up this certainty's essence and that it announces as its truth, as we can see if we watch. A sense-certainty that is actual is not this pure immediacy alone, but rather an example of it. Among the countless differences that turn up here we find everywhere the one main disparity: namely that in sense-certainty there drop out of pure being, right away, the two Thises already named, a This one as I and a This as object. Let us reflect on this difference, and what emerges is that the one no more than the other stands in sense-certainty immediately alone: each stands there at the same time as something mediated; I possess the certainty through another, namely the matter, and the matter is in the certainty just as much through another, that is, through I.

This difference between essence and example, between immediacy and mediation, is not one that we alone draw; sense-certainty exhibits it in its own right, and what must be taken up is the difference in the shape it wears there, not in the shape we have just now given it. Within it, one side gets posited as the simple, immediately existing side, that is, as the essence, namely the object; the other side gets posited as the unessential and mediated one, which within it is not in itself but only through another, namely I, a knowledge whose knowing of the object rests solely on the fact that it is, and which is able to be, or equally not to be. The object, for its part, is, the true and the essence; it is, and whether it gets known or not makes no difference; it stays even when it goes unknown; knowledge, on the other hand, is not, unless the object is.

The object, then, calls for examination as to whether it really is, within sense-certainty itself, the essence sense-certainty passes it off as, and whether this concept of it, that of being essence, squares with the way it is on hand there. To that end our task is not to reflect on the object and ponder what it might in truth be, but merely to look at it as sense-certainty has it within itself.

It is therefore itself the one we must question: What is the This? Suppose we take it in the doubled shape that its being wears, as the Now and as the Here; then the dialectic it carries within itself will assume a form no less intelligible than the This itself is. And so, asked what is the Now?, we answer, say: The Now is the night. To put the truth of this sense-certainty to the test, one simple experiment is enough. So we set this truth down in writing; writing a truth out cannot cost it anything, and neither can our storing it away. Looking at the written-down truth again Now, this midday, we will find ourselves obliged to grant that it has gone stale.

The Now that is night gets preserved, that is, gets handled as the thing it was passed off as, as something that has being; and yet what it turns out to be is something without being. The Now itself does maintain itself, yet as one that is not night; equally, over against the day which it now is, it maintains itself as one that is not day either, or as something negative in general. This self-maintaining Now is therefore not an immediate one but a mediated one, for as something that endures and maintains itself it is determined by this, that another, namely day and night, is not. Through all this it remains just as simple as before, Now, and in that simplicity indifferent toward whatever else keeps playing about it; night and day are not what its being consists in, and just as much it is also day and night; this otherness of its own leaves it wholly unaffected. A simple item of that kind, one which is by way of negation, which is not this and not that, a not-this, and which is likewise indifferent as to being this or that, we call a universal; the universal, then, is what in fact holds as the true in sense-certainty.

The sensuous, too, is something we utter as a universal; what we say is This, meaning the universal This; or it is, meaning being in general. Admittedly we do not represent the universal This to ourselves in doing so, or being in general, and yet the universal is what we utter; or rather, we simply do not speak in the way we mean things in this sense-certainty. Language, however, as we see, is the truer of the two; in it we ourselves refute our own opinion straight off, and since the universal is what is true in sense-certainty, and language expresses only this truth, it is not at all possible for us ever to say a sensuous being that we mean.

Matters will stand the same way with the This in its other form, with the Here. The Here is, for example, the tree. I turn myself around, and this truth has vanished, having inverted itself into its opposite: the Here is no tree at all, but rather a house. What does not vanish is the Here itself; rather it is what abides through the vanishing of house, tree, and so on, indifferent as to being house or tree. The This, then, shows itself once more to be mediated simplicity, or universality.

For this sense-certainty, which on its own shows the universal to be its object's truth, what stays behind as its essence is thus pure being, though not immediate being, but rather a being for which negation and mediation are indispensable; hence not the being that we mean by being, but being carrying the determination that it is abstraction, the purely universal; and what alone remains standing over against this empty, indifferent Now and Here is our opinion, for which the true in sense-certainty is not the universal.

Set the relationship in which knowledge and the object first stepped forward beside the relationship the two occupy in this result, and the relationship has inverted itself. What was to have been the essential side, the object, is now the unessential side of sense-certainty, for the universal that it has become is no longer of the kind in which the object was to be essential for that certainty; sense-certainty is instead on hand now in the opposite one, in the knowledge that formerly ranked as the unessential one. Its truth resides in the object taken as my object, that is, in meaning: the object is because I know of it. Sense-certainty has indeed been driven out of the object, yet not thereby sublated, only forced back into the I; what experience has to show about this reality of its own is what we now have to see.

So the force of its truth now rests with the I, with how immediately my seeing, hearing, and the rest go on; what stops the vanishing of the singular Now and Here we mean is that I hold them fast. The Now is day, and this because I see it; the Here a tree, for that same reason. In this relationship, though, sense-certainty undergoes the same dialectic on itself as it did in the earlier one. I, this one, see the tree, and I assert of the tree that it is the Here; but the house is what another I sees, and his assertion is that the Here is no tree but a house. Both truths carry the same credentials, namely the immediacy of seeing, together with the assuredness and assurance of both parties about their knowledge; but the one vanishes in the other.

What survives all this is I as something universal, and its seeing is not the seeing of a tree, nor the seeing of this house, but a simple seeing, one that the negation of this house and the rest has mediated, and in that very mediation just as simple, just as indifferent toward whatever else plays about it, toward the house, toward the tree. I is nothing but a universal, on a par with Now, Here, or This in general; true enough, what I mean is a singular I, but saying what I mean is beyond me with Now and Here, and with I it is no less beyond me. In saying this Here, Now or a singular, what I say is all thises, all Heres, Nows, singulars; and in the same way, in saying I, this singular I, my utterance is quite generally all I's; each one is what I say, namely I, this one, this singular one. Where science has this demand laid before it as the touchstone it could simply never survive, the demand that a so-called this thing or a this human being be deduced, constructed, found à priori, or however one cares to put it, it is only fair that the demand itself say what this thing, or what this I, it means; but that is impossible to say.

What sense-certainty learns by experience, then, is that its essence lies in the object as little as in the I, and that immediacy belongs to the one as little as to the other, since in both of them what I mean amounts rather to something unessential, while object and I alike are universals, and the Now, the Here, the I that I mean keep no subsistence within them, nor are they at all. This brings us to positing sense-certainty in its whole extent as its own essence, rather than merely one moment of it, which is what happened in the two previous cases, where the reality of sense-certainty was supposed to lie first in the object standing opposed to the I, and then in the I itself. It is therefore only the whole of sense-certainty itself that holds fast within itself to immediacy, and thereby shuts out from itself all the opposition that occurred previously.

None of this concerns that pure immediacy any longer: not the Here's otherness as tree, an otherness that goes over into a Here which is not-tree; not the Now's otherness as day, going over into a Now which is night; nor any other I with something else for its object. Its truth keeps itself as a relation that stays equal to itself, one that makes no distinction of essentiality and unessentiality where the I and the object are concerned, and which therefore admits no difference at all into itself. So I, this one, assert the Here as tree, and I do not turn around, which would turn the Here into a not-tree for me; nor do I pay any heed when some other I sees the Here as not-tree, or when I myself, on some other occasion, take the Here for not-tree and the Now for not-day; instead I am pure intuiting; for my own part I stick to it that the Now is day, or else to this, that the Here is tree; and I do not set the Here and the Now side by side with each other either, but hold to one single immediate relation: the Now is day.

Since this certainty now refuses to step forward whenever we point it toward a Now that happens to be night, or toward an I for whom it is night, we go over to it ourselves and have it point out to us the Now that it asserts. We have to let it point the thing out, since what is true in this immediate relation is what is true of this I here, the one who confines himself to a single Now or a single Here. Should we take this truth up only afterwards, or place ourselves at a distance from it, then it would carry no significance whatever, since we would then be sublating an immediacy that belongs to it essentially. We have to step, therefore, into the very same point of time or of space, have the truth pointed out to us, that is, let ourselves be turned into that same this I, the one that does the knowing with certainty. So let us see how the immediate is constituted that gets pointed out to us.

The Now gets pointed out; this Now. Now; by the time it is pointed out it has already stopped being; the Now which is differs from the one pointed out, and we see this to be just what the Now amounts to: in being, to be already no more. As pointed out to us, the Now is something that has been; therein lies its truth; the truth of being is not what it has. Even so, this much holds true, that it has been. Yet whatever has been is indeed no essence at all; it is not, and being was the point at issue.

What we see in this pointing-out is thus nothing but a movement, running its course as follows: 1) I point the Now out; it stands asserted as the true; but I point it out as something that has been, as something sublated, and so I sublate the first truth; and 2) now, as the second truth, my assertion is that it has been, that it stands sublated. 3) But what has been has no being; the second truth, its having-been or its being-sublated, I now sublate in turn, negating thereby the Now's negation, and so coming back to the first assertion: that Now is. The Now, together with the pointing-out of it, is accordingly so constituted that an immediate simple is what neither of them is; each is instead a movement with various moments in it: this gets posited, but what gets posited is rather another, or the this gets sublated; and that otherness, that sublating of the first, is itself sublated once more, whereby a return to the first comes about. But this first, once reflected into itself, is not quite what it was at the outset, namely something immediate; it is precisely what stands reflected into itself, or a simple that stays what it is throughout an otherness: a Now that amounts to absolutely many Nows; and there we have the true Now, the Now as a single day holding many Nows within it, hours; and such a Now, an hour, is likewise so many minutes, and these Nows in turn many more Nows, and so on. — So the pointing-out is itself the movement that expresses what the Now in truth is: a result, that is, a plurality of Nows gathered into one; and the pointing-out is the experiencing of the Now as something universal.

The Here that gets pointed out, the one I hold fast, is in the same way a this Here which in truth turns out to be not this Here, but a front and a back, an above and a below, a right and a left. And the above, taken by itself, is in the same way this manifold otherness within above, below, and so on. The Here that was to be pointed out disappears into other Heres, and these disappear in their turn; what gets pointed out, held fast, and left standing is a negative This, one that only is on condition that the Heres are taken in the way they are meant to be taken, only to sublate themselves in that very taking; it is a simple complexion of many Heres. The point would be the Here that is meant; but the point is not; rather, when it gets pointed out as something with being, the pointing-out proves to be no immediate knowledge at all, but a movement that runs from the meant Here by way of many Heres to the universal Here, and just as the day is one simple plurality of Nows, so this universal Here is one simple plurality of Heres.

Clearly the dialectic of sense-certainty amounts to nothing beyond the simple history of its own movement, its own experience, and sense-certainty itself amounts to nothing beyond just this history. That is also why natural consciousness keeps advancing of its own accord to this result, to what in sense-certainty is the true, and undergoes the experience of it; only it just as constantly forgets it again and starts the movement over from the beginning. It must therefore be a matter for astonishment that, against this experience, the claim is set up, as universal experience, as a philosophical assertion too, and even as a result of skepticism, that external things, in their reality or their being as these, as sensuous things, possess absolute truth for consciousness; an assertion of that kind has no idea what it is saying, no idea that it says the reverse of what it intends. For consciousness, the truth of the sensuous This is supposed to amount to universal experience; but universal experience is rather the opposite; every consciousness itself sublates such a truth again, for instance the Here is a tree or the Now is midday, and pronounces the contrary: the Here is not a tree, it is rather a house; and whatever in this assertion, the one sublating the first, is once again just such an assertion about a sensuous This, that too it goes on sublating in the same way; so that throughout sense-certainty what really gets experienced is nothing but what we have seen, namely this as a universal, the contrary of what that assertion assures us is universal experience. — Given this appeal to universal experience, it may be permissible to anticipate a regard for the practical side. With the practical in view, those who assert that truth and that certainty about the reality of sensuous objects can be told that they belong back in the lowest class of the school of wisdom, the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and of Bacchus, where the secret of eating bread and of drinking wine still awaits their learning; for anyone initiated into those secrets reaches not merely doubt about the being of sensuous things but despair over it, and in dealing with them he partly accomplishes their nullity himself, partly watches it accomplished. The animals are not excluded from this wisdom either; on the contrary, they show themselves initiated into it most deeply of all, for they do not stop short before sensuous things as things that are in themselves; despairing of that reality and wholly certain of its nullity, they help themselves without further ado and devour them; and the whole of nature, along with them, celebrates these revealed mysteries, which teach what the truth of sensuous things is.

Those, however, who set up such an assertion also say, in keeping with the remarks just made, the immediate opposite of what they mean; and this appearance is perhaps the one best able to provoke reflection on the nature of sense-certainty. What they talk about is the existence of external objects, determinable still more precisely as actual things that are absolutely singular, entirely personal, individual, no one of which has anything absolutely like it any longer; and this existence, they hold, carries absolute certainty and truth. What they mean is this piece of paper, the one I am writing this on, or rather have written on already; but what they mean, they do not say. Suppose they really did want to say this piece of paper that they mean, and suppose the wanting to say it were serious: it cannot be done, since the sensuous This that is meant lies beyond the reach of language, and language belongs to consciousness, to what is in itself universal. The paper would therefore molder away under any actual attempt to say it; those who had started its description could not bring it to completion, but would have to hand it over to others, who would in the end have to concede of their own accord that they were speaking of a thing which is not. No doubt, then, what they mean is this piece of paper, which here is quite another one than the paper above; but what they speak of are actual things, external ones or sensuous objects, absolutely singular essences, and so on, which is to say that of these they utter only the universal; and hence whatever gets called the unsayable is nothing else than what is untrue, irrational, merely meant. — Where of something nothing more gets said than this, that it is an actual thing, that it is an external object, then it stands uttered merely as what is most universal of all, and thereby its equality with everything is what gets expressed rather than its differentiatedness. If I say a singular thing, I say it just as much as something wholly universal, for all things are a singular thing; and in the same way this thing is anything one likes. Designated with more precision, as this piece of paper, it makes no difference: all paper, every sheet of it, is a this piece of paper, so that all along I have said nothing but the universal. But suppose I try to come to the aid of speech, which has the divine nature of inverting what is meant on the spot, of turning it into something else, and so of never letting it reach the word at all, by pointing out this piece of paper: then I undergo an experience of what in fact the truth of sense-certainty is; I point the paper out as a Here that is a Here belonging to other Heres, or, taken on its own, a simple togetherness of many Heres, that is, a universal; so I take it up as it truly is, and rather than knowing something immediate, I perceive.

II. Perception; or the Thing, and Deception

Immediate certainty does not take what is true for itself, since the universal is its truth, whereas what it wants to take is the This. Perception, on the other hand, takes what has being for it as something universal. Universality being its principle throughout, the moments that immediately set themselves apart within perception are likewise universal: the I is universal, the object universal. That principle has come about for us, and therefore our taking-in of perception is not, like that of sense-certainty, one that merely appears, but one that is necessary. With this coming-about of the principle the two moments have likewise arisen, the moments that in their appearing merely drop out of it: the one is the movement of pointing-out, the other that same movement but taken as something simple; the first is perceiving, the second the object. The object is, in essence, the same as what the movement is: the movement is the unfolding and differentiating of the moments, the object is their being gathered together. The universal as principle is, for us or in itself, the essence of perception, while over against this abstraction the two distinguished terms, the perceiving and the perceived, are the unessential. In fact, though, both of them are essential, since each is itself the universal, that is, the essence; but because their relation to one another is that of opposites, within that relation only one can hold the rank of the essential, and so the difference between essential and unessential must get distributed across them. The one that is determined as the simple, namely the object, is the essence, indifferent to whether it is perceived or not; perceiving, however, as the movement, is what is unstable, what may be or may not be, and is the unessential.

This object must now be determined more closely, and this determination developed briefly out of the result that has come about; the fuller development does not belong here. Since its principle, the universal, is in its simplicity something mediated, the object must express this at itself as its nature; it thereby shows itself to be the thing that has many properties. It is to perception, and not to immediate certainty, that the wealth of sensuous knowledge belongs, since in immediate certainty that wealth was merely what played alongside; for perception alone has negation, difference, or manifoldness in its essence.

The This is accordingly posited as being not this, or as sublated; and with that it is not nothing but a determinate nothing, that is, a nothing possessed of a content, namely the This. Through this the sensuous is itself still there, yet not as immediate certainty required it to be, namely as the singular that is meant, but as something universal, or as what is going to determine itself as property. Sublating displays here its true doubled meaning, the one we already noticed in the negative: it is at one and the same time a negating and a keeping; the nothing, being the nothing of the This, holds onto immediacy and is sensuous itself, though an immediacy that is universal. — Being, though, is universal because it carries mediation, the negative, at itself; and where it expresses this at its own immediacy, it amounts to a differentiated, determinate property. With that, many such properties are posited at once, each the negative of the others. Since they find expression in the universal's simplicity, these determinatenesses, which properly become properties only once a further determination is added, relate to themselves, stand indifferent toward one another, each by itself, free of the rest. The simple self-equal universality, however, is once more distinguished from these determinatenesses of its own, and free of them; it is the pure self-relating, the medium in which all of these determinatenesses have their place and thus interpenetrate within it as within a simple unity, yet without touching one another; for it is precisely their share in this universality that leaves them indifferent on their own account. — This abstract universal medium, which one may call thinghood at large or the pure essence, is nothing but the Here and the Now as they have turned out to be, namely a simple together of many; yet the many, in their determinateness, are simply universal themselves. This salt is a simple Here, and manifold at once; it is white, also pungent, also cubical in shape, also of a determinate heaviness, and so on. All of these many properties sit in one and the same simple Here, and there they interpenetrate; no one of them occupies a Here of its own apart from the rest, each is instead everywhere present, at the very spot where the others are; and although no distinct Heres divide them, they still leave one another unaffected in this interpenetration; the white neither affects nor alters the cubical, and neither of the two affects the pungent, and so on; rather, each being simply a relating of itself to itself, it lets the others be and reaches them only by way of the indifferent Also. This Also, then, is the pure universal in its own right, the medium, the thinghood that gathers them together in just this way.

In the relationship that has resulted, what has so far been observed and worked out is only the character of positive universality; a further side, though, offers itself, and it too has to be taken in. For if the many determinate properties were flatly indifferent and related to nothing but themselves, they would be nothing determinate; they are determinate only to the extent that they differentiate themselves and relate to others as opposites. Given this opposition, however, the simple unity of the medium they share, a unity no less essential to them than negation is, cannot hold them together; their differentiation, insofar as it is not indifferent but exclusive, negating what is other, therefore falls outside this simple medium; and the medium is on that account not an Also, an indifferent unity, alone, but equally a One, an exclusive unity. — The One is that moment of negation which relates itself to itself in a simple manner and shuts out what is other, and through which thinghood gets determined as thing. At the property, negation stands as determinateness immediately at one with the immediacy of being, and that immediacy, through being united with negation, is universality; as One, on the other hand, negation stands as it is once released from this unity with its opposite, in and for itself.

Taken together in these moments, the thing is completed as what is true in perception, to the extent that developing it here is needed. It is α) indifferent passive universality, the Also belonging to the many properties, or rather to the many matters, β) negation, likewise as something simple, or the One, which shuts out properties that stand opposed, and γ) the many properties in their own right, the relation between the first two moments: negation as it bears upon the indifferent element and spreads itself out there into a multitude of differences; the point of singularity radiating into plurality within the medium of subsistence. Regarded from the side on which these differences fall under the indifferent medium, they are universal themselves, refer to nothing but themselves, and leave one another untouched; regarded from the side on which they fall under the negative unity, they are simultaneously exclusive, and they necessarily hold this opposed relation toward properties kept out of their Also. Sensuous universality, that is, the immediate unity that being forms with the negative, becomes property only on these terms, insofar as the One and pure universality have been developed out of it and marked off from each other and it locks the two of them together; only this relation of sensuous universality to the pure essential moments brings the thing to completion.

Such, then, is how the thing of perception is constituted; and consciousness is determined as something perceiving so long as this thing counts as its object; consciousness has merely to take the object and to relate as pure apprehending; whatever results for it in that way is what is true. Were consciousness itself to do something in this taking, it would alter the truth by any such adding or omitting. Because the object is what is true and universal, self-equal, while consciousness is to itself the changeable and unessential one, consciousness may well come to apprehend the object wrongly and so deceive itself. What perceives has the consciousness of the possibility of deception; for within the universality that is the principle, otherness itself is immediately there for it, though as what is null, as something sublated. Its criterion of truth is therefore self-equality, and its relating consists in apprehending what it takes as self-equal. Since what is diverse is there for it at the same time, its relating amounts to bringing the diverse moments of its apprehending into relation with one another; should an inequality show itself in that comparison, however, what it registers is no untruth on the part of the object, which is self-equal, but an untruth on the part of perceiving.

We must now see what experience consciousness undergoes in the course of its actual perceiving. For us that experience already lies within the development just laid out of the object and of the relating of consciousness toward it, and it will amount to nothing more than an unfolding of the contradictions lodged there. — Whatever object I take in offers itself as purely one; and I likewise become aware at it of the property, which is universal and on that score reaches past singularity. So the initial being of the objective essence, its being as a One, was not the being it truly has; and because the object is what is true, it is into me that the untruth falls, and my apprehending was faulty. What the universality of the property requires is that I take the objective essence rather as a community at large. Going on, I now perceive the property as something determinate, as opposed to what is other and as shutting it out. In fact, then, my apprehending of the objective essence went wrong when I determined it to be a community shared with others, or continuity; what the determinateness of the property requires instead is that I break the continuity apart and posit the essence as an exclusive One. At the One thus broken off I come upon many such properties, which leave one another unaffected and stand indifferent toward each other; so my perceiving of the object went wrong when I apprehended it as something exclusive; the object is rather, having been mere continuity at large before, a universal shared medium now, one in which many properties each exist on their own as sensuous universalities and, being determinate, shut the others out. But with this, what is simple and true in what I perceive turns out not to be a universal medium either, but the singular property standing on its own, which, so taken, is no property at all and no determinate being either, since it now stands neither at a One nor in relation to others. Yet it is a property only at the One, and determinate only in relation to others. Being this pure self-relation and nothing else, it stays merely sensuous being at large, for the character of negativity no longer attaches to it; and consciousness, which now has a sensuous being before it, is nothing but a meaning, that is to say, it has gone right out of perceiving and back into itself. Sensuous being and meaning, however, themselves pass over into perceiving; I am hurled back to where I started and dragged once more into the very same cycle, which sublates itself at every moment and as a whole.

Consciousness therefore has to traverse the cycle once more, yet not in the same manner as on the first pass. For it has had the experience about perceiving that the result of perceiving, and what is true in it, is its own dissolution, or the reflection into itself out of what is true. With this there has become determinate, for consciousness, the essential constitution of its perceiving: not a simple pure apprehending, but rather being, in its apprehending, at the same time reflected out of the true and into itself. This going-back of consciousness into itself, which mixes into pure apprehending immediately — for it has shown itself to be essential to perceiving — alters what is true. Consciousness at the same time recognizes this side as its own and takes it upon itself, whereby it will keep the true object pure. — So now, as happened with sense-certainty, there is present in perceiving the side according to which consciousness is pushed back into itself, but at first not in the sense in which this was the case there, as though the truth of perceiving fell within consciousness; rather, consciousness recognizes that the untruth occurring in perceiving is what falls within it. Through this cognition, however, it is at the same time capable of sublating that untruth; it distinguishes its apprehending of what is true from the untruth of its perceiving, corrects the latter, and insofar as it undertakes this correction itself, truth does indeed fall, as the truth of perceiving, within perceiving. The relating of consciousness that now falls to be considered is accordingly constituted in such a way that consciousness does not perceive alone, but is aware of its own reflection into itself as well, and it detaches that reflection from simple apprehension proper.

So what I first grow aware of is the thing as a One, and this true determination is what I have to hold onto; should anything contradicting it turn up while perceiving runs its course, that is to be recognized as my own reflection. Now diverse properties turn up in perception too, properties that look as though they were the thing's; the thing, however, is One, and about this diversity, which would put an end to its being One, we are conscious that it falls within us. This thing is thus in fact only white when brought before our eye, also pungent for our tongue, also cubical for our touch, and so on. We take the complete diversity of these sides not from the thing but from ourselves; they fall apart for us in this way at our eye, which is entirely distinct from our tongue, and so on. We ourselves, then, are the universal medium in which moments of this kind get set apart and are for themselves. Since it is as our own reflection that we regard the determinateness of being a universal medium, we keep intact the thing's self-equality and truth, its being One.

These diverse sides, however, which consciousness takes upon itself, are each determinate when considered on its own as situated within the universal medium; white exists only in opposition to black, and so forth, while the thing is One precisely by setting itself in opposition to others. It does not, though, shut others out from itself by virtue of being One; for being One is the universal self-relating, and in being One it is on the contrary like all the rest; but rather by virtue of its determinateness. Things themselves, then, are in and for themselves determinate; what they possess are properties that mark them off from others. Because the property is the thing's own property, a determinateness at the thing itself, the thing has several properties. For in the first place the thing is what is true, it is at itself; and whatever is at it is at it as the thing's own essence, not on account of anything else; hence, in the second place, the determinate properties exist not merely for the sake of other things and on their behalf, but at the thing itself; they are determinate properties at it, however, only in being several that mark themselves off from one another; and in the third place, standing in thinghood in this manner, they are in and for themselves and indifferent toward each other. In truth, then, what is white and also cubical, also pungent, and so forth is the thing itself; or the thing is the Also, the universal medium within which the many properties subsist apart from one another without touching or sublating each other; and taken so, it is taken as what is true.

In the course of this perceiving, consciousness is aware simultaneously that it also performs a reflection into itself, and that within perceiving there occurs the moment standing opposed to the Also. This moment, though, is the thing's unity with itself, which shuts difference out of itself. It is this unity, accordingly, that consciousness has to shoulder, since the thing itself amounts to the subsistence belonging to the many diverse and independent properties. So it is said of the thing that it is white, also cubical, and also pungent, and so on. But it is not cubical insofar as it is white, and, insofar as it is at once cubical and white, it is not pungent, and so on. The positing into one of these properties falls to consciousness alone, which for that reason must not let them collapse into a One at the thing. To that end it brings in the Insofar, by which it keeps them apart and preserves the thing as the Also. Strictly speaking, being one is first taken upon itself by consciousness only in that what was called property is represented as free matter. In this way the thing is raised to the genuine Also, in that it turns into a collection of matters and, in place of being One, into a merely enclosing surface.

If we look back on what consciousness took upon itself earlier and takes upon itself now, on what it earlier ascribed to the thing and now ascribes to it, then it turns out that, by turns, it makes both itself and the thing into both, into the pure One without multiplicity as well as into an Also dissolved into self-subsistent matters. Through this comparison, then, consciousness finds that not only does its taking of what is true have at itself the diversity of apprehending and of going back into itself, but rather that what is true itself, the thing, shows itself in this twofold way. So the experience is now on hand that the thing presents itself in a determinate way to the apprehending consciousness, but at the same time stands reflected out of the manner in which it proffers itself and back into itself, or has at its own self a truth that runs counter to that.

Consciousness has thus stepped out of this second way of relating in perceiving as well, namely of taking the thing as what is truly self-equal while taking itself as what is unequal, as what goes back out of equality into itself, and the object is for it now this entire movement, which was formerly parcelled out between object and consciousness. One is what the thing is, reflected into itself; it has being for itself; yet it has being for an other as well; and indeed what it is for itself is other than what it is for another. On this showing the thing has being for itself and also being for another, a doubled diverse being; but it is also One; and being one contradicts this diversity of its own; consciousness would on this showing have to shoulder the positing-into-one once again and hold it off from the thing. So it would have to declare that the thing, insofar as it has being for itself, does not have being for another. Yet being one belongs to the thing itself too, as consciousness has learned by experience; the thing is reflected into itself essentially. The Also, or indifferent difference, thus falls in the thing just as much as being one does; but since the two are diverse, they fall not in the same thing but in diverse things; the contradiction that attaches to the objective essence in general distributes itself between two objects. The thing, then, is indeed self-equal in and for itself; but other things throw this unity of its with itself into disorder; and so the thing's unity is retained, while otherness at the same time lies outside it, as it lies outside consciousness.

Even though the contradiction belonging to the objective essence gets parcelled out in this way among diverse things, difference will come to the isolated singular thing itself all the same. The diverse things are thus posited for themselves; and the conflict falls into them reciprocally, so that each is diverse not from its own self but only from the other. With this, however, each is determined itself as something differentiated and carries the essential difference from the others at it; but not, at the same time, so as to make this an opposition at its own self; on its own account it is rather simple determinateness, which makes up the essential character distinguishing it from others. In fact, indeed, since diversity is at the thing, that diversity is necessarily at it as an actual difference of manifold constitution. But since it is determinateness that makes up the thing's essence, whereby the thing marks itself off from others and has being for itself, this further manifold constitution is the unessential. So the thing does carry the doubled Insofar at it within its unity, though with unequal worth; which is why this being-opposed never becomes the thing's own actual opposition; rather, so far as the thing does enter into opposition by way of its absolute difference, the opposition it has is against another thing outside it. The remaining manifoldness, though, is also necessarily at the thing, so that it cannot be absent from it, but it is unessential to it.

The determinateness that makes up the thing's essential character and sets it apart from all others is now determined thus: through it the thing stands in opposition to others, yet is supposed to maintain itself for itself therein. But a thing, or a One having being for itself, is what it is only so long as it does not stand within this relation to others; for within that relation what gets posited is rather connection with another, and connection with another spells the end of being-for-itself. It is precisely by its absolute character and the opposition this brings that it relates to others, and essentially it is nothing but this relating; the relationship, though, negates its self-subsistence, and so the thing perishes by way of its essential property.

The necessity of the experience for consciousness that the thing perishes precisely through the determinateness which constitutes its essence and its being-for-itself can be considered briefly, according to the simple concept, as follows. What the thing is posited as is being for itself, that is, negation that is absolute over against all otherness, and hence absolute negation relating to nothing but itself; but negation that relates to itself is the sublating of itself, or having its essence in another.

In fact the determination of the object as it has come about contains nothing else; it is supposed to have an essential property that constitutes its simple being-for-itself, yet alongside this simplicity to have diversity at itself as well, a diversity that is supposed to be necessary but not to constitute the essential determinateness. But this is a distinction that lies only in the words; the unessential, which is nevertheless supposed to be necessary at the same time, sublates itself, or is what was just now called the negation of itself.

With this the last Insofar falls away, the one that kept being-for-itself apart from being for another; the object is rather, in one and the same respect, its own opposite: for itself insofar as it is for an other, and for another insofar as it is for itself. The object has being for itself, is reflected into itself, is One; but this being for itself, reflected into itself, One, stands in a single unity with its opposite, being for an other, and is therefore posited only as sublated; or being-for-itself in this sense is every bit as unessential as what was meant to be the unessential all on its own, namely the relationship to another.

With this the object is sublated in its pure determinatenesses, the determinatenesses that were meant to make up its essentiality, just as it became something sublated in its sensuous being. Out of sensuous being the object turns into something universal; but this universal, stemming as it does from the sensuous, is essentially conditioned by the sensuous, and so is not genuinely self-equal universality at all but universality affected by an opposition, and it therefore splits apart, into singularity and universality as its extremes, the properties' One and the free matters' Also. What these pure determinatenesses look like they express is essentiality itself, but they amount only to a being-for-itself saddled with being for an other; since the two of them are essentially in one unity, however, unconditioned absolute universality is now on hand, and it is here that consciousness genuinely steps into the realm of the understanding for the first time.

Sensuous singularity, then, vanishes, to be sure, in immediate certainty's dialectical movement, and turns into universality, but only sensuous universality. Meaning has disappeared, and perceiving takes the object the way it is in itself, that is, as universal at large; singularity accordingly comes forward at the object as true singularity, namely as the being-in-itself belonging to the One, in other words as being reflected into itself. It remains, though, a conditioned being-for-itself, beside which another being-for-itself turns up, the universality opposed to singularity and conditioned by it; but these two extremes, contradicting each other, are not merely side by side, but in one unity, or, what comes to the same, what the two have in common, being-for-itself, is saddled with opposition at large, which is to say that it is at once not a being-for-itself. These moments the sophistry of perceiving tries to rescue from their contradiction, holding them fast through a distinction of respects, through the Also and the Insofar, and finally trying to seize what is true through a distinction between the unessential and an essence set against it. But these makeshifts, far from keeping deception out of apprehending, prove null themselves, and what is true, the truth that this logic of perceiving is meant to win, proves in one and the same respect to be its opposite, and thus to have for its essence a universality without distinction and without determination.

These empty abstractions, of singularity, of the universality set against it, of the essence that is tied to something unessential, of an unessential that is nevertheless necessary at the same time, are the powers whose play the perceiving understanding, often called sound common sense, amounts to; taking itself for solid, real consciousness, in perceiving it is nothing but the play of these abstractions; generally speaking, it is always at its poorest just where it fancies itself richest. Driven about by these null essences, thrown by the one into the arms of the other, and struggling through its sophistry to hold fast and assert now the one and then its very opposite by turns, thereby setting itself against truth, it imagines that philosophy has to do only with things of thought. Philosophy does have to do with them as well, in fact, and cognizes them as the pure essences, as the absolute elements and powers; yet in cognizing them it cognizes them at the same time in their determinateness, and is master over them on that account, whereas that perceiving understanding takes them for what is true and gets sent by them out of one error into another. It never comes to the consciousness that what holds sway within it are simple essentialities of this sort; it takes itself, rather, to be occupied throughout with thoroughly solid stuff and content, much as sense-certainty is unaware that pure being's empty abstraction is its essence; but in fact these essentialities are what it runs along, back and forth, through every bit of stuff and content; they are what holds that stuff together and rules it, and they alone constitute what the sensuous as essence is for consciousness, what determines consciousness's relationships to it, and along which the movement of perceiving and of its truth plays out. This course, a constantly alternating determining of what is true and sublating of that determining, is what actually makes up the daily and constant life and activity of the consciousness that perceives and supposes itself to be moving within truth. In this it presses on unstoppably toward the result, the like sublation of all these essential essentialities or determinations, yet at each individual moment what it is conscious of is only this one determinateness as what is true, and then again the opposite one. It does catch a scent of their unessentiality; to save them from the threatening danger it resorts to sophistry, now asserting to be true what it had itself just been asserting to be not true. This understanding is really being driven by the nature of these untrue essences toward the thoughts of that universality and of singularity, of the Also along with the One, of that essentiality which is necessarily bound up with an unessentiality, and of an unessential that is nevertheless necessary — driven to bring together the thoughts of these unessences and so sublate them; and against just that it braces itself with the props of the Insofar and the various respects, or by taking the one thought upon itself in order to keep the other separate and preserve it as the true one. But the nature of these abstractions brings them together in and for itself; sound common sense is their prey, driven about by them in their whirling circle. In wanting to give them truth by now taking their untruth upon itself, now calling the deception a semblance belonging to unreliable things, and by separating the essential from something that is necessary to them and yet is supposed to be unessential, holding fast to the former as their truth against the latter, it does not preserve their truth for them but rather gives untruth to itself.

III. Force and the Understanding, Appearance and Supersensible World

Sense-certainty's dialectic robbed consciousness of hearing, of sight, and of the rest, and in perceiving it arrived at thoughts, though only in the unconditioned universal does it first gather these thoughts into one. Taken as a quiescent simple essence, this unconditioned would once again amount to nothing but the extreme of being-for-itself that steps off to one side, since the unessential would then confront it; and standing in that relation it would rank as unessential itself, leaving consciousness inside perceiving's deception after all; what has emerged, however, is something that has withdrawn into itself out of precisely such a conditioned being-for-itself. — True object of consciousness though it now is, this unconditioned universal still stands there merely as consciousness's object; of its concept as concept consciousness has as yet taken no hold. The two call for an essential distinction; out of the relation to another the object has, for consciousness, withdrawn into itself, and become thereby concept in itself; yet consciousness is not the concept for its own self, which is why what it fails to find in that reflected object is itself. For us, the coming-to-be of this object out of consciousness's movement took a form in which consciousness is woven into that coming-to-be, so that one and the same reflection, a single reflection, occurs on either side. Since, though, what filled this movement as consciousness's content was the objective essence alone and never consciousness as such, the result has to be posited for consciousness with an objective significance, consciousness meanwhile still drawing back from what has arisen, so that this, in its objectivity, counts for it as the essence.

With this the understanding has of course sublated both untruths, the object's and its own; and what has arisen for it in consequence is the concept of the true; a true that is in itself, one that is not yet concept, or that goes without the being-for-itself belonging to consciousness, and that the understanding, not knowing itself within it, simply allows to proceed. On its own account this true drives its essence forward, so that consciousness plays no part in the free realization of it but watches from outside and apprehends it purely. We therefore have for the time being to step into consciousness's place and to be the concept that develops what is contained in the result; only on this developed object, which offers itself to consciousness as something that is, does consciousness become for itself a comprehending consciousness.

What resulted was the unconditioned universal, to begin with in a negative, abstract sense, inasmuch as consciousness denied its own one-sided concepts and drew away from them, that is, surrendered them. In itself, though, the result carries a positive significance: within it the unity of being-for-itself and of being-for-an-other, the absolute opposition, stands posited straightaway as one and the same essence. To begin with, the point looks as if it bore merely on how the moments stand to one another in respect of form; yet being-for-itself and being-for-another equally make up the content itself, seeing that the opposition, truly taken, admits of no nature besides the one the result brought out, namely that whatever perceiving held to be true as content belongs in fact to form alone and dissolves into the unity of form. At the same time this content is universal; no content whatever could, by virtue of its particular constitution, exempt itself from returning into this unconditioned universality. Such a content would be some determinate way of being for itself and of relating to another. But being for itself and relating to another as such make up its nature and essence, whose truth is to be an unconditioned universal; and the result is universal without qualification.

Since, though, consciousness has this unconditioned universal before it as an object, form and content come apart within it, and under the guise of content the moments wear the very aspect in which they presented themselves at the start: on one side a universal medium of many subsisting matters, on the other a One reflected into itself, where the self-subsistence of those matters is wiped out. The former is the dissolution of the thing's self-subsistence, or the passivity that is a being for another, whereas the latter is being-for-itself. We have to see how these moments present themselves within the unconditioned universality that is their essence. It is clear at once that, precisely because they are only within this universality, they no longer lie apart from one another at all, but are essentially sides that sublate themselves in their own right, so that only their passing over into each other is posited.

One moment, then, makes its appearance as the essence that has stepped aside, as a universal medium, or as that wherein self-subsistent matters subsist. But the self-subsistence of these matters is nothing other than this medium; that is, this universal is through and through the multiplicity of such diverse universals. To say that in its own self the universal stands in undivided unity with this multiplicity means that each of these matters is where the other is, that they run through one another — yet never touch, since conversely the many differentiated items are equally self-subsistent. With this their pure porosity or their being sublated is posited at the same time. This being sublated once more, or the drawing back of such diversity into pure being-for-itself, comes to nothing but the medium, and the medium is what the self-subsistence of the differences amounts to. Or: what is posited as self-subsistent passes over immediately into its unity, and its unity immediately into the unfolding, and this back again into the reduction. This movement, however, is what is called force; the one moment of it, namely force as the spreading out of the self-subsistent matters in their being, is force's expression; force as the having-vanished of those matters is force pressed back into itself out of its expression, or force proper. But, in the first place, force pressed back into itself must come to expression; and in the second, within that expression it is no less force existing within itself than, in this being-within-itself, it is expression. — Since we thus hold both moments in their immediate unity, it is really the understanding, to which the concept of force belongs, that is the concept carrying the differentiated moments as differentiated; for in force itself they are not supposed to be differentiated; the difference is thus only in thought. — Or: in what precedes only the concept of force has so far been posited, not its reality. Force, in truth, is the unconditioned universal, being in its own self exactly what it is for an other; or, put differently, it carries the difference — difference being nothing else than the being for an other — within its own self. If force is to be in its truth, thought must let it go entirely and posit it as the substance of these differences, meaning at the one point, force, as this whole force, abiding essentially in and for itself, and then its differences as substantial, as moments that subsist for themselves. Force as such, or force pressed back into itself, is thus for itself an excluding One, and to it the unfolding of the matters counts as another subsisting essence; so two differentiated self-subsistent sides stand posited. But force is the whole as well, or it abides as what its concept makes it, namely: these differences persist as pure forms, superficial vanishing moments. The differences separating force proper, pressed back into itself, from the unfolding of the self-subsistent matters would at the same time be nothing at all had they no subsistence, just as force would fail to be unless it existed in this opposed manner; but that it exists in this opposed manner says nothing beyond this, that both moments are themselves at once self-subsistent. — This movement, then, in which the two moments continually make themselves self-subsistent and again sublate themselves, is what has to be considered. — Broadly it is evident that this movement is none other than perceiving's own movement, where both sides, the perceiving one and the perceived, are at once one and undifferentiated in the apprehending of the true, while each side is nonetheless reflected into itself, existing for itself. In the present case these two sides are moments of force; they stand within a unity no less than that unity, which shows up as the middle set against the extremes that are for themselves, keeps decomposing into precisely those extremes, which owe their being to nothing else. — The movement that earlier showed itself as the self-annihilation of contradictory concepts accordingly wears the objective form here, being force's movement, and its result is the emergence of the unconditioned universal as something non-objective, or as the inner of things.

Force, as it has been determined, is, insofar as it is represented as force as such or as reflected into itself, the one side of its concept; but it is so as a substantiated extreme, and indeed as the one posited under the determinateness of the One. The subsistence of the unfolded matters is thereby shut out of force, and is other than force. Given the necessity that force itself should be this subsistence, that is, that it should express itself, the way its expression represents itself is that the other in question comes up to it and solicits it. But in fact, since it necessarily expresses itself, it has within its own self what was posited as another essence. What has to be withdrawn is the positing of force as a One and of its essence, expressing itself, as something else that approaches it from outside; force is instead itself the universal medium wherein the moments have their subsistence as matters; or it has expressed itself, and the supposed other, the soliciting one, is rather force itself. So force exists at present as the medium of matters unfolded. But equally essentially it wears the form of the subsisting matters' sublatedness, or it is essentially One; this being-One is thus now, given that force has been posited as the matters' medium, other than force, and force keeps this essence of its own outside itself. But since necessity requires it to be what it has not yet been posited as, this other comes up and solicits it toward reflection into itself, or sublates its expression. In truth, however, force itself is this being-reflected-into-itself, this sublatedness of the expression; being-One disappears just as it showed up, that is, as another; force is that itself, force is force pressed back into itself.

Whatever steps forward as other, soliciting force toward expression as well as toward its return into itself, proves immediately to be force itself; for that other exhibits itself no less as universal medium than as One, each of these shapes stepping forward only ever as a moment that vanishes. So force, in having another for itself and in being for another, has by no means yet stepped outside its concept. But at the same time two forces are present; the concept of both is indeed the same, but it has gone out of its unity into duality. Instead of the opposition remaining throughout essentially only a moment, it seems, through this splitting in two, to have withdrawn into wholly self-subsistent forces beyond the dominion of unity. What this self-subsistence amounts to is to be looked at more closely. To begin with, the second force steps forward as the soliciting one, and, as regards its content, as universal medium, set against the force determined as solicited; but the former, being essentially the alternation of these two moments and being force in its own right, is in fact universal medium only first through being solicited to it, and equally is negative unity, that which solicits force to go back into itself, only in that it is solicited. So this difference too, which obtained between the pair, that one of them should be the soliciting one and the other the solicited, converts into that same mutual exchange of determinatenesses.

So the play of the two forces consists in their being determined in this opposed way, in their being for one another under that determination, and in the absolutely immediate interchange of the determinations — a transition, and only by it do there exist those determinations under which the forces look as though they came forward as self-subsistent. The soliciting one, for example, is posited as universal medium, and against it the solicited one as force pressed back into itself; but the former is universal medium only because the other is force pressed back into itself; or rather the latter is what solicits the former, and only thereby makes it the medium. The former owes its determinateness wholly to the other, and it solicits only to the extent that the other solicits it into soliciting; and just as immediately it loses the determinateness thus conferred on it, since that determinateness crosses over to the other, or rather has crossed over to it already; the alien thing soliciting force steps forward as universal medium, yet only because force has solicited it into this; which means, however, that force posits it so, and is rather itself essentially universal medium; force posits the soliciting one so for the reason that this second determination belongs essentially to it, that is, because it is rather itself this other.

For the sake of rounding out our grasp of this movement's concept, one may point out in addition that the differences themselves turn up within a doubled difference: first as differences of content, the one extreme being force reflected into itself and the other the medium of the matters; second as differences of form, the one soliciting, the other solicited, that one active and this one passive. By the content-difference they are differentiated at all, that is, for us; by the form-difference, though, they are self-subsistent, cutting themselves off from one another in their relation and set in opposition. That in respect of both these sides the extremes are thus nothing in themselves, but that these sides, in which their differentiated essence was supposed to consist, are only vanishing moments, an immediate passing over of each into its opposite, all this comes about for consciousness in the perception of the movement of force. For us, though, as was recalled above, there was this further point: that in themselves the differences, taken as differences of content and of form, vanished, and that where form is concerned the active, soliciting, or being-for-itself coincided in essence with what, where content is concerned, was force pressed back into itself; while the passive, solicited, or being-for-an-other belonging to form coincided with what, on content's side, showed up as the universal medium of the many matters.

What follows from this is that, by doubling into two forces, the concept of force turns actual, and it follows how this comes about. These two forces exist as essences that are for themselves; but their existence is a movement against each other of such a kind that their being is rather a pure being posited through an other, that is, that their being has rather the pure significance of vanishing. They do not stand as extremes that would hold on to something firm on their own account and dispatch merely an external property into the middle and into their mutual contact; on the contrary, whatever they are, they are so exclusively within that middle and that contact. In it there is immediately just as much force's being pressed back into itself, or being-for-itself, as the expression, the soliciting as much as the being solicited; these moments are thus not distributed between two self-subsistent extremes that would offer each other only an opposed tip; rather, their essence is simply this, that each is only through the other and immediately ceases to be what it thus is through the other, in the very act of being it. They therefore in fact have no substances of their own that would bear and sustain them. Rather it is the concept of force that keeps itself intact as the essence within force's own actuality; force as actual lies wholly in the expression alone, which is at once nothing but a self-sublating. Represented as free of its expression and as being for itself, this actual force is force pressed back into itself; but this determinateness is in fact, as has emerged, itself only a moment of the expression. So the truth of force stays nothing more than the thought of force; and with no support to sustain them, its actuality's moments, its substances along with its movement, come crashing together into an undifferentiated unity, a unity that is not force pressed back into itself, that being itself only such a moment, but rather its concept, as concept. Force's realization accordingly amounts at once to a forfeiting of reality; therein force has turned into something wholly other, namely this universality, which the understanding cognizes at the outset, immediately, as force's essence, and which likewise establishes itself as force's essence in the reality force was supposed to have, in the actual substances.

So long as we take the first universal to be the understanding's concept, wherein force has not yet come to be for itself, the second now counts as force's essence in the way that essence displays itself in and for itself. Or, turning it around: should the first universal be taken as the immediate, which was to serve consciousness as an actual object, then this second stands determined as the negative of sensuously objective force; it is force as force, in its genuine essence, exists solely as object of the understanding; the former would be force pressed back into itself, force as substance; whereas this second is the inner of things, taken as inner, and that coincides with the concept as concept.

The true essence of things has by now determined itself so as not to be there immediately for consciousness; consciousness instead relates to the inner by way of mediation and, being understanding, peers through this middle formed by the play of forces into the genuine background of things. That middle which locks together understanding and inner, the two extremes, is force's developed being, and for the understanding this being has by now become a vanishing. It is therefore called appearance; for we call shine that being which immediately in its own self is a non-being. But it is not merely a shine; it is appearance, a whole of shine. It is this whole, taken as whole or as universal, that makes up the inner, the play of forces in its reflection into itself. Within it the essences of perception stand posited for consciousness objectively just as they are in themselves, that is, as moments changing straightaway into their opposite, restless and without being: the One straightaway into the universal, the essential straightaway into the unessential, and the other way round. This play of forces is thus the developed negative, whereas the truth of it lies on the positive side, in the universal, in the object having being in itself. — That this object has being for consciousness comes about by mediation, through the movement of appearance, where the being of perception and whatever is sensuously objective carries a merely negative significance, so that out of it consciousness reflects into itself as into the true, yet, as consciousness, turns this true once more into an objective inner, holding apart the reflection of things from the reflection into its own self; just as the mediating movement remains for it an objective one too. To consciousness, then, this inner is an extreme standing over against it; and it counts as the true for consciousness just because within it, as within the in-itself, consciousness possesses at the same time its own certainty, the moment of its being-for-itself; of this ground, however, consciousness is as yet unaware, since the being-for-itself the inner was to have in its own self could only be the negative movement, and that movement is for consciousness still the objective appearance that vanishes, not yet a being-for-itself of its own; so the inner is indeed concept for consciousness, only the nature of the concept is something consciousness does not yet know.

Within the inner true, that absolutely universal which has been cleansed of the opposition between universal and singular and has come about for the understanding, a supersensible world as the true world first discloses itself over the sensuous world as the world of appearance, the enduring beyond over the vanishing here below; an in-itself that constitutes reason's initial and hence still imperfect appearance, or merely the pure element wherein truth holds its essence.

Our object from here on is accordingly the syllogism whose extremes are the inner of things and the understanding, with appearance serving as its middle; the movement of that syllogism, though, delivers a closer determination both of what the understanding catches sight of within the inner across the middle, and of the experience it undergoes regarding this relation of being joined together.

For consciousness the inner remains a pure beyond, since consciousness has not yet found itself within it; the inner is empty, being nothing but appearance's nothing and, on the positive side, the simple universal. That the inner should be in this way concedes the point at once to whoever claims that things' inner admits of no cognition; the ground for saying so, however, would have to be conceived otherwise. Of this inner, in its immediate state here, we do indeed have no acquaintance, though not because reason sees too little a way, or is confined, or bears whatever other name one likes to give it; of which nothing is known at this stage, our penetration not having gone so deep; but rather on account of the plain nature of the matter itself, namely that in the empty nothing gets cognized, or, put from the opposite side, that the inner has been determined precisely as consciousness's beyond. — Naturally it comes to the same thing whether a blind man is set down amid the riches of the supersensible world, — assuming it has any, whether their content belongs to that world itself or consciousness is that content, — or a sighted man is set down in pure darkness, or, if one prefers, in pure light, assuming the world is only that; in his pure light the sighted man sees as little as in his pure darkness, and precisely as much as the blind man sees amid the profusion of riches that might lie spread before him. If there were nothing more to the inner and to being joined with it through appearance, nothing would be left but to keep to appearance, that is, to take as true something we know is not true; or else, so that there may after all be something in the empty, which has indeed first arisen as an emptiness of objective things, but which, as emptiness in itself, must also be taken for the emptiness of all spiritual relations and of the differences of consciousness as consciousness, — so that there may after all be something in this wholly empty, which is also called the holy, to fill it with reveries, with appearances that consciousness generates for itself; consciousness would have to accept such shabby handling, deserving nothing finer, given that reveries at least outrank its emptiness.

The inner, though, the supersensible beyond, has arisen; it comes out of appearance, which is its mediation; or its essence is appearance, which in fact fills it out. What the supersensible amounts to is the sensuous and perceived posited according to its truth; and the truth of what is sensuous and perceived consists in being appearance. So the supersensible amounts to appearance taken as appearance. — Should one suppose at this point that the supersensible is thus the sensuous world, the world such as it stands for immediate sense-certainty and perception, the understanding of it is inverted; for appearance is rather not the world of sensuous knowledge and perceiving as a world that is, but that same world posited as sublated, that is, in truth as inner. People are in the habit of saying that the supersensible is not appearance; yet what they understand by appearance is not appearance at all, but instead the sensuous world regarded as real actuality in its own right.

Our object, the understanding, stands at precisely this point: the inner has become for it no more than the universal, the as yet unfilled in-itself; the play of forces bears just this negative significance of not being in itself, and only the positive one of being what mediates, though outside the understanding. Its relation to the inner through the mediation, however, is its movement, through which the inner will become filled for it. — The play of forces is what is immediate for it; the true, however, is for it the simple inner; the movement of force is therefore likewise the true only as something simple in general. Regarding this play of forces, however, we have seen it to be so constituted that whichever force gets solicited by another is equally the one soliciting that other, which for its part turns into a soliciting force only in that way. Present here, likewise, is nothing but the immediate switching, the absolute exchange, of that determinateness which constitutes the whole content of whatever steps forward: to be either universal medium or negative unity. In its determinate coming forward it immediately ceases of itself to be what it comes forward as; by its determinate coming forward it solicits the other side, which thereby expresses itself; that is, this other side is immediately now what the first was supposed to be. Both of these sides, the relation of soliciting and the relation of determinate opposed content, are, each on its own, the absolute inversion and exchange. But those two relations are in turn one and the same, and the form-difference, between being solicited and being soliciting, coincides with the content-difference: the solicited as such being the passive medium, while the soliciting one is the active, the negative unity, or the One. With this, any difference at all between the particular forces said to be at work in this movement drops away; for such differences rested on nothing but the ones just named; and the difference between the forces sinks, along with those two, into a single one. Thus force, along with soliciting and being solicited, along with the determinateness of being a subsisting medium and a unity reflected into itself, amounts to nothing when taken singly, nor do these make up a variety of oppositions; what is at hand in this absolute alternation is solely the difference as universal, difference as that into which the many oppositions have reduced themselves. This difference as universal is accordingly what is simple within the play of force itself, and that play's true; it is the law of force.

By relating to what is simple in the inner, that is, in the understanding, appearance in its absolute alternation turns into the simple difference. To begin with, the inner is nothing but the universal in itself; yet this universal, simple in itself, is no less essentially and absolutely the universal difference; for alternation itself is what yields it, or alternation is its essence; and alternation, once posited within the inner in the way it truly is, gets taken up into the inner as a difference no less absolutely universal, tranquil, and self-consistent. Put otherwise: the universal has negation as an essential moment of it, so that negation, or mediation, within the universal counts as universal difference. It is expressed in the law, as the constant image of unsteady appearance. The supersensible world is thus a tranquil realm of laws, beyond the perceived world, to be sure, since the latter exhibits the law only through constant change, yet just as much present in that world and its immediate still likeness.

Granted, this realm of laws constitutes the understanding's truth, a truth whose content lies in the difference the law contains; but the realm is also no more than the understanding's first truth, and it leaves appearance unfilled. The law is present in appearance, but it is not appearance's entire presence; under ever different circumstances it has an ever different actuality. So a side remains over to appearance, for itself, one that does not lie within the inner; in other words, appearance has not truly been posited yet as appearance, as a being-for-itself that is sublated. This defect of the law is bound to come out on the law's own face as well. The lack apparent in it seems to be this: difference itself is present in it, but only as universal, indeterminate difference. But insofar as it is not the law in general but a law, it has determinateness in it; and thus there are indeterminately many laws. Yet such multiplicity is rather a defect in its own right; it runs counter to the understanding's principle, since for the understanding, as consciousness of the simple inner, the true lies in the unity that is universal in itself. So the understanding is obliged rather to make the many laws coincide in one law. Just as, for example, the falling of a stone and the motion of the celestial spheres have had their laws comprehended as one law. With this coinciding, however, determinateness slips away from the laws; law grows steadily shallower, and what gets found is in fact no unity of these determinate laws but a law that drops their determinateness; much as the one law uniting in itself the laws of terrestrial falling bodies and of celestial motion in fact fails to express the two of them. Gathering all laws into universal attraction gives voice to no content beyond the bare concept of law itself, posited therein as something that is. Universal attraction says only this, that everything has a constant difference from something else. The understanding imagines it has hit on a universal law here, one voicing universal actuality as such; what it has hit on, in fact, is merely the concept of law itself, albeit in a manner that also states this much, that all actuality is law-governed in its own self. The expression universal attraction carries great weight, then, insofar as it takes aim at thoughtless representation, to which everything presents itself in contingency's shape and for which determinateness wears the form of sensuous self-subsistence.

Set against the determinate laws, then, stands universal attraction, the pure concept of law. So far as one takes this pure concept for the essence, for the true inner, the determinateness of a determinate law still counts as belonging to appearance, or rather to sensuous being. Yet the pure concept of law reaches past not only that law which is itself a determinate one over against other determinate laws; it reaches beyond law as such. The determinateness in question is really nothing more than a moment that vanishes, one that can no longer figure here as an essentiality; for the law alone is at hand as the true; and yet the concept of law turns against law itself. For within the law difference itself is apprehended immediately and received into the universal, and along with that comes a subsistence belonging to the moments whose relation the law voices, taken as essentialities that are indifferent and in themselves. But those portions of the difference within the law are at once determinate sides themselves; the pure concept of law, as universal attraction, has to be apprehended in its true meaning thus: within it, as within something absolutely simple, the differences that belong to law as such in their turn go back into the inner as into a simple unity; that unity is law's inner necessity.

Law is on hand, then, in two ways at once: once as law whose differences find expression as self-subsistent moments; once in the form of a simple having-gone-back-into-itself, which may once more be named force, though not as force pressed back into itself; force in general instead, force as the concept of force, an abstraction drawing into itself even those differences of attracting and being attracted. Thus simple electricity, for instance, is the force; expressing the difference, however, falls to the law; and the difference in question is electricity positive and negative. With falling motion the force is the simple, namely gravity, whose law runs that the magnitudes of the motion's differentiated moments, the time that has passed and the space covered, relate as root to square. Electricity as such is not difference in itself, nor in its essence the doubled essence made of positive and negative electricity; which is why people habitually say it has the law of being so, indeed that it has the property of so expressing itself. Admittedly that property is the sole and essential one this force has, or is necessary for it. But necessity is here an empty word; force simply must double itself in this way because it must. Certainly, once positive electricity is posited, negative electricity is necessary in itself as well; for the positive exists only by relating to a negative, or the positive constitutes in its own self its difference from itself, and so does the negative. But that electricity as such should divide so is not what is necessary in itself; electricity as simple force stands indifferent to its law, the law of being positive and negative; and naming the one its concept and the other its being, we get a concept indifferent to that being; electricity merely has this property, and this says just that the property is not necessary to it in itself. — The indifference assumes a different shape when one says that being positive and negative goes into the definition of electricity, or that this is quite simply its concept and essence. Its being would then signify its existence at large; yet what such a definition does not contain is the necessity of its existence; either electricity is because one comes across it, in which case it is in no way necessary, or its existence stems from other forces, in which case the necessity attaching to it is external. But in placing necessity in the determinateness of being through another, we fall back into the multiplicity of determinate laws that we have just left in order to consider law as law; only with law as law is its concept as concept, or its necessity, to be compared, a necessity which, however, has so far shown itself in all these forms to be no more than an empty word.

Beyond the way just pointed out, there is still another in which law and force, or concept and being, stand indifferent to one another. In the law of motion, for example, motion must of necessity divide itself into time and space, or again into distance and velocity. Since motion is only the relationship of those moments, motion, the universal, is here indeed divided in its very self; but nothing in these parts, in time and space, or in distance and velocity, expresses this derivation from a One; each stands indifferent to the other, for space gets represented as capable of being without time, time as capable of being without space, and distance at least as capable of being without velocity, — much as their magnitudes too are indifferent toward one another; since they do not relate to one another as positive and negative, they are for that reason not connected by their essence. So the necessity of the division is indeed at hand here, though not a necessity of the parts for one another as such. But just for that reason the first necessity too is itself merely a false necessity held up before us; motion, namely, is not itself represented as something simple or as pure essence, but already as divided; time and space count as its self-subsistent parts, as essences in their very selves, and distance and velocity as ways of being or of being represented, of which the one may well be without the other, so that motion amounts merely to their superficial relation and not to their essence. Taken as simple essence, that is, represented as force, motion is of course gravity, which for its part harbors none of these differences within it at all.

In both cases, then, the difference is not a difference in its very self; either the universal, force, is indifferent toward the division that the law contains, or else it is the parts of the law, the differences, that are indifferent toward one another. Yet the understanding does have the concept of this difference in itself, and has it precisely in this: that the law, for one part of it, is the inner as what has being in itself, while within it the law is at the same time differentiated; and that the difference in question is thereby inner shows itself in the law's being simple force, or being as the concept of that force, hence a difference of the concept. But this inner difference still falls, as yet, only within the understanding; it is not yet posited on the matter itself. What the understanding utters, then, is only its own necessity: a difference it makes only by declaring, in the same breath, that the difference is no difference of the matter itself. Such a necessity, residing as it does merely in the word, thus amounts to a recital of the moments that make up the circle of that necessity; the moments do get distinguished, but their difference is at the same time declared to be no difference of the matter itself, and hence is at once sublated again; this movement goes by the name of explaining. A law is uttered, and from it there is distinguished what is universal in it in itself, its ground, as force; but of this difference it is then said that it is no difference at all, and that the ground has exactly the constitution the law has. The singular event of lightning, for example, is apprehended as something universal, and this universal is uttered as the law of electricity; whereupon the explanation gathers the law together into force, taken as the essence of the law. Force is then given such a constitution that in expressing itself it brings out opposed electricities, which vanish back into one another, that is, force has precisely the constitution that the law has; the two, it is said, are not distinguished in the least. The differences here are the pure universal expression, that is, the law, and pure force; yet the content of both is the same, their constitution the same; difference taken as a difference of content, that is, of the matter, is thus withdrawn once more.

In this tautological movement the understanding, as it turns out, keeps to the tranquil unity that its object has, and the movement belongs only to the understanding, not to the object; it is an explaining that not merely explains nothing, but is so transparent that, in making as if to say something distinct from what has already been stated, it says nothing at all and merely repeats the same thing. On the matter itself this movement brings nothing new into being; it comes into view instead as the understanding's own movement. Within it, however, we now cognize just what the law was found to lack, namely absolute alternation itself; for this movement, considered up close, is immediately its own opposite. For it posits a difference which is not only no difference for us, but which the movement itself sublates as difference. This is the very alternation that exhibited itself as the play of forces; in it lay the difference between soliciting force and solicited, between force expressing itself and force driven back into itself; but these were differences that in truth were none, and for just that reason sublated themselves again immediately. What lies before us is not mere unity, in which case no difference would be posited, but rather this movement, in which a difference is indeed made but, being none, is sublated again. — With explaining, then, the changing and alternating that formerly stood outside the inner and attached only to appearance has forced its way into the supersensible itself; our consciousness, however, has passed over from the inner as its object to the opposite side, into the understanding, and possesses the alternation there.

So understood, this alternation is not yet an alternation of the matter itself; it exhibits itself as pure alternation precisely because the content of the alternation's moments stays the same. But since the concept, being the understanding's own concept, coincides with what the inner of things is, there arises for the understanding this alternation as the law of the inner. The understanding therefore experiences this: that differences come to be which are no differences is a law of appearance itself; or that the like-named repels itself from itself; and likewise that the differences are only such as are in truth none and sublate themselves; or that the unlike-named attracts itself. — A second law, then, whose content stands opposed to what was earlier called law, namely to difference that abides constantly the same; for what this new law expresses is rather the becoming-unequal of what is equal and the becoming-equal of what is unequal. The concept expects of thoughtlessness that it hold the two laws together and become conscious of the opposition between them. — The second is admittedly a law as well, an inner self-equal being, though a self-equality rather of inequality, a constancy of what is inconstant. — In the play of forces it was precisely this law that emerged as just this absolute transition, as pure alternation; the like-named, force, breaks up into an opposition that at first looks like a self-subsistent difference, though it turns out in fact to be none; for what repels itself from itself is the like-named, so that what has been repelled essentially attracts itself, being the same; the difference that was made, since it is no difference, thereby sublates itself once more. With this it exhibits itself as a difference of the matter itself, that is, as absolute difference; and that difference of the matter is accordingly nothing but the like-named which has repelled itself away from itself and so posits an opposition that is none.

By this principle the first supersensible, that tranquil realm of laws, the immediate replica of the world we perceive, gets turned around into its opposite; law as such was what stays equal to itself, and so were its differences; now, however, it is posited that both are rather the opposite of themselves; what is equal to itself repels itself away from itself, while what is unequal to itself is what posits itself as equal to itself. Only with this determination, in fact, is the difference the inner one, difference in its very self, since the equal is unequal to itself and the unequal equal to itself. — This second supersensible world is in this way the inverted world, and since one of its sides is already there in the first supersensible world, it is the inverted counterpart of that first one. With this the inner stands completed as appearance. For that first supersensible world amounted to nothing more than the immediate raising of the world we perceive into the universal element; its necessary counter-image lay in that perceived world, which as yet kept for itself the principle of alternation and of change; the first realm of laws went without this, but receives it as the inverted world.

By the law of this inverted world, then, the like-named of the first world is what is unequal to itself, and the unlike of that world is just as much unequal to itself, or comes to be equal to itself. At determinate moments this turns out as follows: whatever is sweet under the law of the first is sour in this inverted in-itself, and whatever is black in the one is white in the other. Whatever counts as the north pole of a magnet by the law of the former is, within its other supersensible in-itself (in the earth, that is), the south pole; and whatever is the south pole there is the north pole here. So too whatever counts as the oxygen pole in the first law of electricity turns into the hydrogen pole within its other supersensible essence; and conversely, whatever is the hydrogen pole there turns here into the oxygen pole. Within another sphere, revenge upon one's enemy counts, by the immediate law, as the supreme satisfaction of an individuality that has been injured. But this law, the law that toward anyone who does not treat me as a self-essence I show myself as essence and rather sublate him as essence, is inverted by the other world's principle into its opposite: the restoring of myself as the essence by sublating the alien essence becomes self-destruction. Now once this inversion, the one exhibited in the punishment of crime, has been turned into a law, it too is again merely the law of the one world, which has an inverted supersensible world standing over against it, one where whatever is held in contempt in the former comes to honor, and whatever stands in honor there falls into contempt. The punishment that by the law of the first world disgraces and destroys a human being changes, within its inverted world, into a pardon that preserves his essence and brings him into honor.

Seen superficially, this inverted world is opposed to the first in such a way that it has the first outside of itself and thrusts it away as an actuality that is inverted, with the one being appearance and the other the in-itself, the one being what it is for an other, and the other, by contrast, what it is for itself; so that, taking up the earlier examples again, what tastes sweet would properly, or inwardly in the thing, be sour, and what on the actual magnet of appearance is the north pole would, in the inner or essential being, be the south pole, while what presents itself as the oxygen pole on electricity as it appears would be the hydrogen pole on electricity as it does not appear. Or an action that is a crime in appearance ought to be able to be really good in the inner (a bad action could have a good intention), while punishment would be punishment only in appearance and would, in itself, or in some other world, be a boon to the criminal. But oppositions of this kind, between inner and outer, between appearance and the supersensible, as between two sorts of actuality, are no longer to be found here. The repelled differences do not distribute themselves afresh over two such substances as would carry them and grant them a subsistence apart, whereby the understanding would drop back out of the inner into its earlier position. The one side, or substance, would once more be the world of perception, where one of the two laws would carry on its essential business, and facing it an inner world, just such a sensuous world as the first, only in representation; it could not be pointed to as a sensuous world, nor seen, nor heard, nor tasted, and would nonetheless be represented as just such a sensuous world. But in fact, if the one that is posited is something perceived, and its in-itself, as the inversion of it, is likewise something sensuously represented, then the sour that the sweet thing would be in itself is a thing just as actual as the sweet thing, a sour thing; the black that the white would be in itself is actual black; the north pole that the south pole is in itself is the north pole present on that very magnet; and the oxygen pole that the hydrogen pole is in itself is the present oxygen pole of the same pile. Actual crime, however, has its inversion, has its in-itself as possibility, in intention as such, though not in a good one; for an intention has its truth only in the deed itself. Crime according to its content, though, has its reflection into itself, its inversion, in actual punishment; and punishment reconciles the law with the actuality that stands opposed to the law in crime. Actual punishment, finally, carries its inverted actuality within it in this sense, that it is an actualizing of the law by which the activity the law has as punishment sublates itself, so that from an active law it turns back into a tranquil and valid law, and the movement of individuality against the law, and of the law against individuality, has died away.

From the representation of inversion, then, which makes up the essence of the one side of the supersensible world, one must clear away the sensuous representation that fixes the differences in a distinct element of subsistence, and must exhibit and apprehend purely this absolute concept of difference as inner difference, as the repelling of the like-named as like-named from itself, and as the equality of the unequal as unequal. It is pure alternation, or the opposition within itself, the contradiction, that has to be thought. For in a difference that is inner, what is opposed is not merely one of two; — otherwise it would be a being and not something opposed; — rather, it is what is opposed to something that is itself opposed, or the other is itself immediately there within it. True enough, I place the opposite here and over there that other thing whose opposite it is, putting the opposite thus on one side, in and for itself, apart from the other. But precisely on that account, since what I have here is the opposite in and for itself, this opposite is the opposite of its own self, or in fact it holds the other immediately within itself. — The supersensible world, being the inverted one, has thereby reached across the other world and has it within its own self; for itself it is what is inverted, that is, the inversion of its own self; it is at once itself and what is opposed to it in a single unity. Only in this fashion is it the difference that is inner, or difference in its very self, or is it as infinity.

Through infinity we see the law brought to completion as necessity within its own self, and all the moments of appearance taken up into the inner. To say that what is simple in the law is infinity means, in light of what has emerged, α) that it is something self-equal which is nevertheless difference in itself; or that it is a like-named which repels itself away from itself, which splits itself in two. What went by the name of simple force doubles itself, and it is by virtue of its infinity that it is the law. β) What has been split in two, making up the parts represented in the law, presents itself as something that subsists; and taken apart from the concept of inner difference, these parts are space and time, or else distance and velocity, which come on the scene as moments of gravity, indifferent toward one another and toward gravity itself and without necessity for either, just as simple gravity is indifferent toward them, or simple electricity toward the positive and the negative. γ) Through the concept of inner difference, however, this unequal and indifferent stuff, space and time and so forth, is a difference that is no difference, only a difference of the like-named, and unity is its essence; as positive and negative they stand inspirited toward one another, and their being consists rather in this, that they posit themselves as non-being and sublate themselves in the unity. The two distinguished terms both subsist, they are in themselves, they are in themselves as opposites, that is, the opposite of themselves, they have their other within them and are but one unity.

This simple infinity, the absolute concept, may be named life's simple essence, the world's soul, the universal blood, which, omnipresent, is neither dimmed nor broken by any difference, which is rather itself all the differences together with their being sublated, and which therefore pulses within itself without stirring, trembles within itself without being disquieted. It is self-equal, for its differences are tautological, differences that are none. This self-equal essence therefore relates solely to itself; to itself: then what the relation goes out toward is another, and the relating to itself is rather the splitting-in-two, or that very self-equality is inner difference; those thus split in two are accordingly in and for their own selves, each one an opposite — of another: then the other is already uttered in it along with it; or, again, it is the opposite not of an other but only the pure opposite: then it is within its own self the opposite of itself; or it is no opposite whatever, but is purely for itself, a pure essence equal to itself with no difference in it: then we have no need to ask, still less to take the torment of such a question for philosophy's business, or even to hold it unanswerable for philosophy — how difference or otherness arises out of this pure essence, how it comes out of it; for the splitting-in-two has already happened, difference has been excluded from what is self-equal and placed at its side; and so what was meant to be the self-equal is already one of the terms split in two rather than the absolute essence. To say that the self-equal splits itself in two therefore means just as much that it sublates itself as something already split in two, that it sublates itself as otherness. The unity of which it is customarily said that difference can never emerge from it is in truth itself only the one moment of the splitting-in-two; it is the abstraction of simplicity, an abstraction that stands over against difference. But in being the abstraction, in being only one of the opposites, it has thereby already been said of it that it is the splitting-in-two; for if unity is something negative, something opposed, then it is posited precisely as that which has opposition within it. The differences between splitting-in-two and becoming self-equal are for that reason equally nothing but this movement of self-sublating; for since what is self-equal, which is first supposed to split itself in two or turn into its opposite, is an abstraction, is already itself something split in two, its splitting-in-two is a sublating of what it is, and hence the sublating of its being-split-in-two. Becoming self-equal is equally a splitting-in-two; whatever becomes self-equal thereby steps over against the splitting-in-two, that is, it thereby places itself to one side, or rather it becomes something split in two.

Infinity, this absolute unrest belonging to pure self-movement, whereby whatever is determined in any manner whatever, for example as being, is rather the opposite of that determinateness, has admittedly been the soul of everything up to now, but only in the inner has it stepped forth freely on its own. Appearance, or the play of forces, exhibits infinity already, yet infinity first steps forth freely as explaining; and when at last it is an object for consciousness as what it is, then consciousness is self-consciousness. The understanding's explaining at first does no more than describe what self-consciousness is. It sublates those differences that the law contains, differences already made pure yet still indifferent, and posits them within one unity, force. But this becoming-equal is just as immediately a splitting-in-two, for the only way the differences get sublated and the One of force posited is that the understanding makes a new difference, between law and force, which at the same time is none at all; and toward this, that the difference is likewise no difference, the understanding goes on itself to sublate this difference again, letting force be constituted exactly as the law is. — This movement, this necessity, is still, so far, the understanding's own necessity and movement, or as such it is not the understanding's object; what the understanding has for objects within it are positive and negative electricity, distance, velocity, attractive force, and a thousand other things, which make up what the moments of the movement contain. Explaining carries so much self-satisfaction precisely because consciousness in it, if one may put it so, stands in immediate conversation with itself and enjoys only itself, seeming all the while to be busy with something else, whereas in fact it is only busying itself with itself.

Within the opposed law, taken as the inversion of the first, that is, within inner difference, infinity does indeed become an object for the understanding, but the understanding misses infinity as such once again, in that it parcels out difference in itself, the self-repelling of the like-named and the unequals that attract each other, once more between two worlds, between two substantial elements; the movement as experience has it counts for the understanding here as an occurrence, while the like-named and the unequal count as predicates whose essence is a substrate that has being. What is an object for it under a sensuous covering is an object for us in its essential shape, as pure concept. This apprehending of difference such as it in truth is, this apprehending of infinity as such, occurs for us, or in itself. Setting out the concept of infinity is the business of science; consciousness, however, holding that concept as it does immediately, comes forward once again as a form of its own, as a new shape of consciousness which fails to recognize its essence in what went before and takes that essence for something wholly different. — Since this concept of infinity is its object, consciousness is accordingly consciousness of a difference that is just as immediately sublated; it is for its own self, it is the distinguishing of the undistinguished, or self-consciousness. I draw a distinction between myself and myself, and in doing so it is immediately there for me that what has been distinguished is not distinguished. I, as the like-named, repel myself away from myself; but this distinguished term, posited as unequal, is immediately, in the very act of being distinguished, no difference so far as I am concerned. Consciousness of something other, of an object at all, is of course itself necessarily self-consciousness, reflectedness into itself, consciousness of its own self in its otherness. The necessary advance beyond the shapes of consciousness dealt with so far, shapes for which what was true was a thing, something other than themselves, expresses precisely this: that consciousness of the thing is possible only for a self-consciousness, and moreover that self-consciousness is the sole truth of those shapes. But this truth is at hand for us alone, not yet for consciousness. Self-consciousness, though, has so far come to be only for itself, not yet as unity with consciousness as such.

We see that within the inner of appearance the understanding in truth experiences nothing else than appearance itself, though not appearance as it is in the play of forces, but appearance in its absolutely universal moments and in their movement, and that in fact it experiences nothing but itself. Having risen above perception, consciousness presents itself as closed together with the supersensible by way of the middle term of appearance, and through that middle it gazes into this background. The two extremes, the one being the pure inner, the other the inner that gazes into this pure inner, have now coincided, and just as they have vanished as extremes, so too has the middle vanished as anything other than they. The curtain, then, has been pulled away from before the inner, and what is at hand is the inner's gazing into the inner: the gazing of the undistinguished like-named, which repels itself, posits itself as an inner that is distinguished, but for which the undistinguishedness of the two is there just as immediately, self-consciousness. It shows itself that behind the so-called curtain, which is supposed to cover over the inner, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind it, as much in order that seeing may occur as that there may be something behind it which can be seen. Yet it emerges at the same time that one cannot go straight behind it without ceremony; for this knowledge of what the representation of appearance and of its inner has as its truth is itself only the result of a movement full of circumstance, one whereby the modes consciousness takes, namely meaning, perceiving, and understanding, disappear; and it will emerge likewise that cognizing what consciousness knows in the act of knowing itself calls for still further circumstances, the unfolding of which is what follows.

IV. The Truth of Self-Certainty

In the modes of certainty treated up to this point, the true stands over against consciousness as something other than consciousness itself. Yet the concept of this true vanishes in the experience we have of it; just as the object immediately was in itself, namely the being of sense-certainty, the concrete thing of perception, the force of the understanding, so it turns out rather not to be that in truth, for this in-itself shows up instead as a way in which the object merely is for another; the concept of it is sublated on the actual object, or rather the first immediate representation is sublated within the experience, and certainty was lost in truth. Now, however, something has arisen that never came off in those earlier relationships, namely a certainty equal to its own truth, since here certainty has itself as its object, and what is true for consciousness is consciousness itself. Admittedly there is otherness in this too; consciousness does draw a distinction, but it distinguishes something that at the same time is, for it, not distinguished. If we call the movement of knowledge the concept, and call knowledge as motionless unity, or as I, the object, then what we see is that the object answers to the concept, and not merely for us but for knowledge itself. — Or, to put it the other way round: if we call concept what the object is in itself, and call object what it is as object, that is, for an other, then it becomes plain that being-in-itself is one and the same as being for another; for the in-itself just is consciousness; yet it is no less that for which there is another (namely the in-itself); and it holds for consciousness that the object's in-itself and its being for another are the same; I is at once the content of this relation and the relating itself; over against another it is itself, and simultaneously it overreaches this other, which for it is likewise nothing but itself.

With self-consciousness we have thus now entered the realm where truth is at home. We have still to see in what way the shape of self-consciousness first steps forward. Should we set this new shape of knowledge, knowledge of oneself, alongside its predecessor, the knowledge of another, then that predecessor has indeed disappeared; but its moments have equally been kept safe at the same time; and what has been lost lies in this: that here those moments are on hand just as they are in themselves. Meaning's being, the singularity and the opposed universality of perception, together with the understanding's empty inner, count no longer as essences but as moments of self-consciousness, that is, as abstractions or distinctions which, for consciousness itself, are at the same time null, or are no distinctions at all and essences that purely vanish. So it looks as though what has gone missing is only the chief moment itself, namely the simple self-subsistent subsistence for consciousness. In truth, though, self-consciousness is the reflection that comes out of the sensuous and perceived world's being, and essentially it is the return out of otherness. Movement is what it is as self-consciousness; yet in distinguishing from itself only itself as itself, the distinction is for it immediately sublated as an otherness; the distinction is not, and it is merely the tautology, devoid of movement: I am I; insofar as the distinction does not also take on for it the shape of being, it is not self-consciousness. Otherness is thereby there for it as a being, that is, as a distinguished moment; but equally there is for it the unity of itself with this distinction, as a second distinguished moment. Through that first moment self-consciousness is preserved as consciousness, and the sensuous world in its entire extension is retained for it; yet only in so far as it is related to the second moment, namely the unity that self-consciousness has with itself; and that world is accordingly for it a subsistence which is nevertheless mere appearance, or a distinction that has no being in itself. But the essence of this opposition of its appearance to its truth is nothing other than the truth itself, that is, the unity self-consciousness has with itself; this unity must become essential to it; in other words, it is desire in general. As self-consciousness, consciousness now has a doubled object: one of them immediate, the object of sense-certainty and of perceiving, which for it bears, however, the character of the negative; and the second of them, namely itself, which constitutes the true essence and which at first is present only over against the first. In this, self-consciousness presents itself as that movement wherein the opposition just named is sublated and its equality with its own self comes to be for it.

The object that counts as the negative for self-consciousness has, for its part, for us or in itself, likewise withdrawn into itself, just as consciousness has on its side. Through this reflection into itself it has become life. Whatever self-consciousness sets apart from itself as a being carries about it, insofar as it is posited as a being, not merely the mode belonging to sense-certainty and to perception; it is rather a being reflected into itself, and what immediate desire has for its object is something living. For the in-itself, the universal result, that is, of how the understanding stands to the inner of things, consists in distinguishing what admits of no distinction, or in the unity of what has been distinguished. This unity, however, is, as we have seen, just as much its own repelling of itself, and this concept splits in two into the opposition between self-consciousness and life, the former of the two being the unity for which there is the infinite unity of the distinctions; the latter, though, merely is this unity itself, so that it is not simultaneously for its own self. Consciousness, then, is self-subsistent, and its object is in itself self-subsistent to just the same degree. Self-consciousness, which is for itself pure and simple and which stamps its object right away with the character of what is negative, or which to begin with is desire, will therefore undergo rather the experience of that object's self-subsistence.

The determination of life, as it issues from the concept, or from the universal result with which we enter this sphere, suffices to designate life without our having to develop its nature any further from that result; its circle closes itself within the moments that follow. The essence is infinity, taken as the being-sublated of all distinctions, the pure movement rotating on its axis, the repose of itself as an infinity that is absolutely restless; self-subsistence itself, in which the distinctions of the movement are dissolved; time's simple essence, which in this self-equality possesses the solid shape of space. The distinctions are nonetheless present in this simple universal medium just as much as distinctions; for the negative nature of this universal fluidity belongs to it only insofar as it is a sublating of those distinctions; yet it cannot sublate the distinct ones if they have no subsistence. This very fluidity, as self-equal self-subsistence, is itself their subsistence, or their substance, in which they accordingly are as distinct members and as parts that are for themselves. Being no longer carries the meaning of the abstraction of being, nor does their pure essentiality carry that of the abstraction of universality; instead, their being consists in just that simple fluid substance which is pure movement within its own self. But the distinction of these members from one another, as distinction, rests on no determinateness whatever apart from that of the moments of infinity, in other words of pure movement itself.

The self-subsistent members are for themselves; this being-for-itself, however, is quite as immediately their reflection into unity as this unity is the splitting-in-two into self-subsistent shapes. The unity is split in two for the reason that it is unity that is absolutely negative, or infinite; and since it is the subsistence, the distinction too has self-subsistence only in it. The shape's self-subsistence shows itself as a determinate something, for an other, since the shape is something split in two; and to that extent the sublating of the splitting-in-two happens through another. Yet it lies just as much in the shape itself; for that very fluidity is the substance of the self-subsistent shapes; this substance, however, is infinite; and so the shape, in its very subsistence, is itself the splitting-in-two, that is, the sublating of its own being-for-itself.

Distinguishing more closely the moments contained in this, we find that what we have for the first moment is the subsistence of the self-subsistent shapes, or the suppression of that which distinguishing is in itself, namely of not being in itself and of having no subsistence. The second moment, by contrast, subjects that subsistence to the infinity of the distinction. In the first moment there is the subsisting shape; as being-for-itself, or as substance that is infinite in its determinateness, it steps forth against the universal substance, denies this fluidity and its continuity with it, and asserts itself as not dissolved in this universal, but rather as maintaining itself through separation from this inorganic nature of its own and through consuming that nature. Life in the universal fluid medium, a tranquil laying-out of the shapes side by side, becomes by this very fact the movement of those shapes, or life as process. The in-itself is the simple universal fluidity, while the distinction of the shapes is the other. But through this distinction the fluidity itself becomes the other; for it now is for the distinction, which is in and for itself and therefore is the infinite movement by which that tranquil medium is consumed, life as something living. — This inversion, however, is for that very reason once more the invertedness in its own self; the essence is what gets consumed; the individuality that keeps itself in being at the universal's cost, and that confers on itself the feeling of being one with itself, sublates precisely thereby its opposition to the other, by means of which it is for itself; and the unity with itself which it confers on itself is precisely the fluidity of the distinctions, or the universal dissolution. But conversely, the sublating of individual subsistence is equally the producing of it. For since the individual shape's essence, universal life and likewise what is for itself, is in itself simple substance, then in positing the other within itself it sublates this its own simplicity, or its essence; that is, it splits that simplicity in two, and this splitting-in-two of the undifferentiated fluidity is precisely the way individuality is posited. So the simple substance of life is its own splitting-in-two into shapes, and simultaneously the dissolving of these subsisting distinctions; and the dissolution of the splitting-in-two is just as much a splitting-in-two, or an articulating into members. Both sides of the whole movement that were distinguished, namely the forming of shapes laid out tranquilly in the universal medium of self-subsistence, and the process of life, thereby fall into each other; the latter is no less a forming of shapes than it is the sublating of shape ; and the first, the forming of shapes, is no less a sublating than it is the articulating into members. This fluid element is nothing but the abstraction of the essence, or else it is actual solely as shape; and its articulating itself into members is once again a splitting-in-two of what has been articulated, or a dissolving of it. Life is constituted by this entire cycle: not by what is stated first, the immediate continuity and solidity of its essence, nor by the subsisting shape and the discrete that is for itself, nor by their pure process, nor even by the simple gathering-together of these moments, but by the whole that develops itself, dissolves its own development, and in this movement maintains itself simply.

Since the starting point is the first immediate unity, and since the path runs through the moments of shape-formation and process to the unity of both these moments, thereby returning again to the simple substance we began with, this reflected unity differs from the first one. As against that immediate unity, the one stated as a being, this second unity is the universal one, which has all these moments within it as sublated. It is the simple genus, one that within the movement of life itself has no existence for itself as that simple thing; rather, in this result life refers beyond itself to something other than it is, namely to consciousness, for which life is there as this unity, that is, as genus.

That other life, though, namely self-consciousness, for which the genus as such has being and which for its own self is genus, is at first only this simple essence to itself and has pure I for its object; in its experience, which is now to be considered, this abstract object will grow richer for it and will take on the unfolding we have witnessed in life.

This genus, or the simple universal, one for which there are no distinctions, is what the simple I amounts to only in being the negative essence of those moments that are shaped and self-subsistent; and self-consciousness is accordingly certain of itself only by sublating this other, which presents itself to it as self-subsistent life; it is desire. Being certain that this other is null, it posits that nullity for itself as its truth, annihilates the self-subsistent object, and in that way gives itself certainty of itself as a certainty that is true, as one that has come to be for it in an objective manner.

In this satisfaction, however, it comes to experience the self-subsistence of its object. Desire, together with the self-certainty reached in desire's satisfaction, is conditioned by the object, for it comes about by sublating this other; and if such sublating is to be, this other must be. Self-consciousness is thus unable, by its negative relation, to sublate the object; it therefore produces the object again instead, and desire along with it. In fact the essence of desire is something other than self-consciousness; and by way of this experience that very truth has come to be for self-consciousness itself. Yet at the same time it is quite as absolutely for itself, which it is only by sublating the object, and its satisfaction must come to be for it, since it is the truth. Because the object is self-subsistent, then, satisfaction can be reached only if the object itself carries out the negation upon itself; and the object must carry out this negation of itself on itself, for in itself it is what is negative, and it must be for the other that which it is. In being the negation upon its own self, and in being therein at the same time self-subsistent, the object is consciousness. In the case of life, which desire has for its object, the negation falls either upon an other, namely upon desire, or it is there as determinateness over against some other indifferent shape, or as life's inorganic universal nature. But this universal self-subsistent nature, on which the negation obtains absolutely, is the genus as such, that is, as self-consciousness. Only in another self-consciousness does self-consciousness attain its satisfaction.

Only in these three moments is the concept of self-consciousness brought to completion; a) pure undifferentiated I is the first immediate object it has. b) This immediacy, however, is absolute mediation in its own right; it consists only in the sublating of the self-subsistent object, in other words it is desire. The satisfaction that desire gets is indeed self-consciousness reflected into its own self, or certainty that has turned into truth. c) The truth of that certainty, however, is rather the doubled reflection, the redoubling of self-consciousness. It is an object for consciousness which in its own self posits its otherness, or the distinction, as something null, and which is therein self-subsistent. The distinct shape that is merely living does indeed sublate its self-subsistence as well within the process of life itself, but along with its distinction it ceases to be what it is; whereas the object of self-consciousness is just as self-subsistent in this negativity of its own; and thereby it is genus for its own self, universal fluidity within the ownness of its separating off; it is living self-consciousness.

What is present here is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness. Only through this is it in fact what it is; for only herein does its unity with itself in its otherness come to be for it; the I that is the object of its own concept is in fact no object; the object of desire, by contrast, is merely self-subsistent, for it is the universal, indestructible substance, the fluid self-equal essence. Since a self-consciousness is the object, that object is I just as much as it is object. — With this the concept of spirit is already present for us. What comes to be for consciousness from here on is its experience of what spirit is, namely this absolute substance which, in the complete freedom and self-subsistence of its opposite, that is, of distinct self-consciousnesses that are for themselves, constitutes their unity; an I that is We, and a We that is I as well. It is only in self-consciousness, taken as the concept of spirit, that consciousness has its turning point, the point at which it steps out of the colorful semblance of the sensuous here below, and out of the empty night of the supersensible beyond, into the spiritual day of the present.